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Editor's Note: This letter was sent to the Toronto Globe and Mail's opinion page. It's unclear whether or not it was ever published but it deserves to be published here. Though Glen attacks both the author and the reviewer, the main bile is reserved for M.T. Kelly, who didn't know what the hell he was making generalizations about. I only wish I could also share the text of M.T Kelly's review, which now belongs to the ages. The Globe and Mail June 17, 2002 To The Editor: In his review of James Raffan's "Deep Waters", [June 15, '02] a book about the 1978 canoeing tragedy involving an expedition of St. John's school boys, M.T. Kelly starts out by saying, quite rightly, that 'reading about the deaths of children can be unbearable.' I submit to Raffan and Kelly that this pain is far greater when those children were your own friends and schoolmates, and all the more so when those writing about them are clearly out of order. In the review, Raffan and Kelly come across as one sanctimonious voice, referring to "'Frank Bayfield's' more sinister, deeper agenda for the school" which they seem to feel led directly to the tragedy. The founders of the school were Frank Wiens and Ted Byfield - not this fictional composite named 'Frank Bayfield'. When the person talking is not clear on who he's talking about it, it follows that he's also not clear on what he's talking about. The school is presented as a kind of First World sweat shop because the boys cleaned up after themselves, cooked for themselves, did their own laundry, gutted their own snowshoes, raised their own championship sled dogs, built and maintained their own buildings, etc., and "seemed" to "spend more time going door to door selling honey than they did studying." In fact, we did all this and still got in ten hours of supervised homework a week. The amount of time we spent selling our products was a fraction of the time our contemporaries outside the school spent watching television. [There was no time to watch tv at St. John's I never felt deprived because of it.] The point I want to make is that Kelly / Raffan 'seem' to content themselves with how things appear, while at the same time insinuating that we should content ourselves with their impressions of the situation and save them the trouble of finding out how they really are. I remember in the mid-seventies a Globe and Mail reporter came to St. John's to do a story on the school. He wandered around the dorms asking boys what it was like to be a student there. In our dorm we bragged shamelessly. We were proud thirteen year olds. We told him about paddling 350 lb., 22' freighter canoes and breaking the school record for the historic 1,400 kilometre Grand Portage canoe trip in thirteen days eight hours and how the next year we were beaten by a lousy two hours. We also told him about the 140 kilometre dog run through the bush from Pine Falls to Bisset in two days, and how we ran almost the entire way. He seemed duly impressed. He asked us about corporal punishment and we said 'what about it?' It was always a bigger deal to those outside the school. We dealt with it the way we dealt with everything else. In our dorm there we had a new boy who was not a good fit for St. John's. He ran away while the reporter was there researching his story. He lived in Toronto and when he got back he contacted the newspaper [or they contacted him] and he went on about how awful the school was. When the story finally came out it featured him and his point of view. He didn't even know the school. He'd been there around 8 or 9 weeks and yet he was being given the opportunity to speak for all of us. Ivor, the school dog, was a 'Heinz 57' mutt. He'd far exceeded his life expectancy because he was in such good shape from a lifetime of accompanying teams of boys on their weekly 27 kilometre snowshoe runs. Each team would try to coax toothless old Ivor to choose them until Mrs. Cox, the secretary and de facto mother to us all, put an end to it and eventually took to keeping him in the office with her on Saturday mornings because, while his spirit was still willing, his body was too weak. In this same article I recall geriatric Ivor being referred to as the headmaster's 'threatening guard dog'. Over the years, St. John's School has produced exceptional scholars, Olympic athletes, and captains of industry. That's not to say that there haven't been more than a few failures or that the school was good for everyone. It wasn't. That's also not to say that there weren't times we didn't suffer, sometimes greatly. But I would speculate that the vast majority of boys who stuck it out wouldn't trade their experiences at the school for anything, and I'm one of them. There's a bond most people associated with St. John's Boy's School share. Deep down, it's who we are. When I left the school, I left for good,
although I did go back once as a volunteer on a canoe trip from
Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan to Yellowknife, N.W.T. I'd like
more than anything to go back and do another trip but I doubt
I recognize the place anymore. M.T. Kelly and James Raffan are no exception. When a tragedy of the scale of June 12, 1978 takes place, it's understandable for those so deeply affected to come together for mutual support. Kelly / Raffan take exception to this, comparing St John's to a 'cult', saying that this is "illustrated by the way the parents rallied around the school" after the accident. Reading that reminded me of the earlier Globe and Mail article I just referred to. It is my understanding that the loss of a child is a nearly unbearable experience. Timiskaming doesn't end for the parents who saw the bodies of their children "piled up like cordwood under a tarp." Not for Peter Cain, the former British paratrooper who taught me physics and who was the leader of the ill-fated expedition which came to define his life. Not for Frank Wiens, a man's who's guiding philosophy has had such a positive influence on my own life and the lives of so many other men like me. And not for any of us who lost friends. And now, 25 years later, comes another article in the Globe and Mail - the review of a book by some obscure author who claims to be 'angry' and 'haunted' by the deaths of 13 people who he did not know. He appears to approach his subject with a vigilante mindset, shooting from the lip with such egregious statements as: Timiskaming "was certainly not an accident." M. T. Kelly ends his review by saying that Raffan's book 'allows us to hear those who perished, the smallest and the weakest.' After reading this review, I couldn't help thinking of those who are perishing still - the parents and charges of those children. Kelly and Raffan come across as a couple of obstreperous interlopers who have crashed a funeral and unfortunately the only voices we can hear are theirs. Shame. |