The British Invasion

1963. Or how I burned my pink plastic diary

In 1962 my father, a high school music teacher going on 60, became impossible to live with. He was a smoldering ball of rage and resentment, sharing our house but ruining every moment with his dark silences and angry outbursts. We began wishing he would go away and leave us in peace.

While he was away at Thanksgiving on a hunting trip in Ontario, my mother watched a documentary about the Allan Memorial showing how difficult family members could benefit from the wonderful new techniques of a team of psychiatrists led by the world renowned Dr Ewen Cameron. After much prayer and soul searching she signed the paper to have him admitted to the program over Christmas and New Years when school was on holiday.

I was awakened on a Saturday morning to my parents' arguing loudly and then my father went and gathered some clothes from the bedroom closet. I was in shock and crying - he embraced me for the first time I could remember and called out in a distraught voice "I'll never leave you!" Then he left.

My 11 year old twin brother and our mother visited him once in his private room at the hospital. He was detached and not quite there. Our mother said on the way out "he's slowly going to get better."

In January on a Friday he came home, but seemed not to recognize us. He went to his room and slept till Monday when he got dressed, picked up his briefcase and went back to his teaching job. So we believed.  My mother and the doctors did think we should know our dad was a mental patient on sick leave and attending the Day Hospital downtown with other people in Dr Cameron's care.

Over that winter we tried to come together as a family, playing board games in the evening instead of staring at TV, but we could see our dad was  now a different person than the dad we knew. He was vague, forgetful, and sometimes confused. He resumed some old habits - like reading the newspaper in his chair in the living room. Often he sat staring into space. I sometimes wondered how he was getting along in his school teaching. The charade continued.

My mother assured us our dad was gradually improving. We were happy thinking our lives were back to normal when they were not. Now she had a husband who was easier to live with - but could no longer support a family. We were told he would be retiring in June - which was true but in the meantime he was out of work and my mother was forced to lie. During the day when we were at school she talked with the nurses and psychiatrists who told her his memory loss was only temporary and he would gradually turn into the husband and father he was meant to be.

New books appeared on our dining room table: on numerology and handwriting analysis. I read them at night with a flashlight in bed.

One evening he came home from "work" with two new foam rubber pillows, one for my brother and one for me. We were to sleep on them instead of our feather pillows. At bedtime we were to start taking a new tonic in the form of a bitter tasting black syrup.

Inside these pillows were tiny speakers installed by Dr Cameron's technical team. And the bedtime tonic was laced with LSD. At night my brother and I began hallucinating, and I heard a man's voice in my head repeating hundreds of times:

You're no good
You will fail
You will never succeed at anything

Years later I got up the courage to tell my father about this terrifying voice which repeated nightly for weeks that winter of 1963.  And the bizarre hallucinations of my body expanding and contracting while the bedside clocks would start ticking angrily, slowing down and speeding up. He listened and said "Oh. That happens to everybody."

My mother was usually at home alone all day with no one to talk to except her French Canadian cousins who lived in a village. She sometimes phoned Dr Roper, who was Dr Cameron's second in command and had taken over my father's file.

He was an RAF pilot from England, handsome and charming, and had been shot down over Normandy during the war and rescued by French villagers. My mother was Norman French on both sides of her family tree, and she felt a bind with the young psychiatrist who was so much warmer than either her husband or Dr Cameron.

Dr Roper had contacts in London in the music and fashion business, including the young manager of a new band called that was playing in clubs and starting to rival the Beatles. My mother had a flair for clothes and a twelve year old daughter who was tall and pretty - and recently at church an older boy had asked her out, thinking she might be 18.

Suddenly things were starting to look brighter for our family, especially since the band's lead singer was someone we already knew - or rather we had met him at a children's party a few years earlier when he came to Montreal for a special "gifted" program that my brother and I were enrolled in through the Air Force.

In the first week of June while I attended a school track and field meet up north with my Grade 6 class, I ended up in the cargo compartment of an Air Force plane bound for  England. My mother imagined I was headed into a My Fair Lady meeting with the boy we had met years earlier, now a fully grown man and future rock star.

I woke up on a mattress in a filthy flat on a busy street in Chelsea, where there was nowhere to bathe and the sink was full of dishes. The young musicians who lived there had gone out, but their 19 year old manager was there to take me shopping at Mary Quant. My sweaty track clothes were exchanged for a pink baby doll outfit-- it was June 7, the hottest day of 1963, 25° in London and the last day of classes at London School of Economics.

On the King's Road we ran into Mike, whom I hadn't seen in four years. He was amazed at how much I'd grown and covered my face in wet kisses. Then we walked all the way to LSE and into an auditorium where students were handing in their term papers for the semester. Remembering he had somewhere to go, Mike left me with Andrew the Manager--

The next thing I knew I was back in my bed in Montreal two days later. My mother knocked on my bedroom door and when I sleepily opened it she handed me a neatly folded pair of pink baby doll pajamas. "I made these for you," she said mysteriously. I thanked her and tried them on- they fit perfectly but I wondered how she had managed to get her simple sewing machine to finish the seams with fancy chain stitch just like on store-bought clothing.

I didn't have time to question - the angry male voice was back repeating the same message over and over as I tried to sleep. At school tjay week we were writing exams, and the last was Canadian History - the voice kept talking in my head as I answered the essay questions but I still managed to ace the exam and passed Grade Six with flying colors.

Meanwhile at home my father was furious. Where had I been? When he found out I had flown to London to visit a rock and roll band that was launching a record, he hit the roof. By then he had recovered enough of his marbles to put 2+2 together, and he knew there was a lot more going on down at Dr Cameron's Day Hospital than just psychiatry.

Over the winter while playing chess he had looked up from the board and told me "You know they're not doing anything good down at that hospital."

"Oh Dad," I said. "Why do you think that?" I thought he was talking about his time in there as a patient over Christmas.

He snorted. "They tried to put me in group therapy. I didn't tell them anything."

"Oh, Dad. They were just trying to help you."

Now it was June and as school was ending, he came home one day with a boxed set of Verdi's Requiem as his retirement present.

I didn't know he had been down to the Allan talking to Dr Roper. "What are you doing to my daughter?" He was threatening to write a report about all he had seen and heard as a patient, and through his Air Force contacts - my dad had been an RCAF intelligence officer during the war -- of course I didn't know that either. He never told us what he had done in the reserves out in BC, other than entertain the troops by playing piano in a jazz combo.

"You'd better me careful what you say," Dr Cameron snarled at my father. "If you want to get out of here healthy and alive."

My dad wasn't having any more of Cameron's threats. He had seen a copy of the KUBARK manual on psychological torture that Cameron had recently finished and submitted to his CIA superiors - which someone smuggled into the common room, along with the rumours that Cameron's days as director were numbered -- he had gone too far in his Montreal experiments and even the men in Washington were alarmed.

One night I went to sleep with All Kinds of Courage, the book I had won at school for having the highest marks in Grade Six, under my pillow. In the morning I woke to my mother telling me "You'd better get up and pack your swimsuit and warm clothes. We're driving to Alberta and it gets cold at night in those campgrounds."

Our station wagon was in the drive way already half loaded.

"If we don't like Lethbridge we'll just keep driving over the Rockies till we get to Penticton. I hear it's a beautiful town with a nice lake and the dry climate will be good for my arthritis."

Alberta was 3000 miles and a week away to the west. First we had to get through the blackfly forests of Ontario which took two whole days. Then came the prairies, miles of flat nothingness. My brother and I in the back read comics and played I Spy With My Little Eye. My father drove the whole way in near silence. Our car didn't have a radio in those days.

We camped every night, with my mother and I sleeping in the rear of the station wagon, while my dad and brother sleeping in the tent.

Once we got to Lethbridge, everything changed. The Rockies loomed in the distance, but before we knew what was happening, our dad had turned the car around and we were heading back home. Not to Montreal, but to our cottage on the Ottawa River where we spent the rest of the summer of 1963, swimming in the river with our cousins, waterskiing and going boating with our uncles and aunts, sitting around the campfire roasting weiners and marshmallows, learning to sing in four-part harmony-- just like we always did every summer since we could remember.

Meanwhile over in London, my whirlwind visit had left an impression on the singer and his four-man band. Sales of their first single were slow but they were rapidly gaining in clubs where they often provoked hysteria and near rioting.

Had I inspired a couple of new songs in their growing repertoire of covers ? Poison Ivy and Go Home Girl may have referred to me, the 12 year old who had turned up in Mike's bed seemingly out of nowhere, and was gone the next day.

Poison Ivy doesn't grow in England, only in North America.

Poison ivy, poison ivy
Well, late at night when you're sleeping
Poison ivy comes a creeping all around, yeah

She's pretty as a daisy
But look out man she's crazy
She'll really do you in
But if you let her get under your skin



Over in Canada at the river, my favorite band was the Beach Boys and "Surfin USA" played on our cottage radio that summer, along with Skeeter Davis' "The End of the World". As for me, I was sleeping in the new pink baby doll pajamas which seemed to signal the approach of puberty and sneaky thoughts of future romance.

My mother started encouraging me to get to know my cousin Johnny, who lived in Chicago and loved to sing and dance. "He's the kind of boy who could make you happy." He was also smart - witty and charming, a paler version of Fats Domino, but at 16 he weighed 200 lbs and kept on gaining weight as he was addicted to burgers and fried, like many Americans. At the beach one day something came over me as I watched him frolicking in the water like some enormous seal- he loved to swim and dive and water-ski. In the sand I wrote in large capital letters "JOHNNY IS A FAT SLOB." And then I had him come over and read my message in the sand. He burst into tears, and I was stunned- that I had done it, that he had reacted by calling me a "skinny bitch" and a string of other names. I had no idea how to undo the mess I had created in the belief i was just offering him much needed advice. I was paralyzed with guilt and remorse. He never spoke to me again, and two years later he joined the marines and went to Vietnam, came home shell-shocked, haunted by nightmares and kept putting on weight until he died in his 50s weighing 400 lbs -- but by then my parents and most of my aunfs and uncles had also died, a cousin had committed suicide, and there was little left of our large extended family which use to gather by the river to sing-

After writing my message in the sand that day in the summer of 63, I was mortified and went to bed and didn't get up the next morning.

"What's wrong?" My mother had never seen me like this. I couldn't tell her what happened between me as Johnny at the beach - it was too awful to admit even to myself let alone confess to her so I groped for another way to describe my recent encounter with Absolute Negation.

"It feels like my heart has turned to stone," I finally managed. She stared at me as if she didn't recognize these strange words from her daughter's mouth. Then she shook her head.

"I think you have an inferiority complex," she commented. Where had that phrase come from? Was she talking to a psychiatrist?

She asked me to lift up my arm - I knew it was so she could see if I had any hair growing there but my armpits were smooth as a baby's. She seemed impatient all of a sudden. As if I wasn't growing up fast enough for her.

In the fall my brother and I entered Seventh Grade with a brilliant teacher, Mrs Macdonald, who was prone to lecturing with her eyes shut, one skinny hand pressed to her forehead as she revealed dark secrets of the British Crown during history class.

Our dad took a job as a cook in a lumber camp, owned by a friend from his childhood village. By November he was in hospital with acute appendicitis and nearly left us due to toxemia, but he survived and came home. Now my parents spent the days together, rebuilding their marriage out of its ashes.

Meanwhile I had discovered a strange affinity with Joan of Arc and often imagined what it would be like to burn at the stake. I was reading the Diary of Anne Frank and learning about the Holocaust. In my little pink plastic diary, which had a lock and key for privacy, I recorded my dreams and deep thoughts --

In one dream I was paddling downriver in a bathtub and was attacked by Mohawks waving Tomahawks and uttering blood curdling screams- they surrounded me at the top of a tall white tower in the woods and that was how I met my death that time.

Meanwhile over in  England, Mike (now called Mick) had begun composing original songs with his bandmate Keith. One of the first they recorded was Heart of Stone, which made the hit parade reaching #15 in Canada, #8 in the Netherlands, #19 in the US and #39 in Finland.

It features a little girl, walking down the street, all by herself- the singer tries to knock her off her feet -- and ends up telling her to Go Home.

Because she'll never break, never break, never break this Heart of Stone..

which turned out to be true.

I first heard it over the winter, probably in February 1965, two months before Mick showed up at my house.

The Rolling Stones chose Montreal as the launching pad for their first really big North American tour. This is a fact that is not well-known since in later years the Stones began avoiding our city while favoring Toronto for their drug arrests and other party antics.

On the day they arrived in Montreal, a small crowd of excited teenagers met them at the airport. I was not among them. I was home in our suburb of Laval practising Russian phrases in the basement with my new Russian language records which I had received on my 14th birthday a week earlier. I had every intention of mastering the language and going on to train as a spy like Ilya Kuryakin on the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

My girlfriends in first year high school were all crazy about Ilya, and we also were rabid fans of the Rolling Stones, especially Mick Jagger, whom I had glimpsed for the first time back in October singing Time Is On My Side on the Ed Sullivan. We cannibalized one another's teen magazines, shared at lunch hour between lockers, and therefore I knew a lot about Mick's public career as a bad boy, his fights with his girlfriend, his drug arrest and other misdemeanors. I also had seen the blaring headline that went viral in the English media that winter "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?"

I knew what my father's answer would be and it didn't even occur to me that I could ask his permission to go to their concert at Maurice Richard Arena on April 23, the day my mother looked out the kitchen window and said "There's someone here to see you. Go let him in."

The girl who answered the door that day had already had her memory wiped so often by the psychiatrists who secretly controlled our family, it is amazing she still could dream of becoming a spy and moving to Russia.

Certainly when I looked through the plate glass at the young man who had just rung our doorbell, I didn't believe my eyes. Letting him in, watching him examining a couple of antiques in our living room, noticing how shy and polite he seemed. Following him down the stairs into our basement where the piano was.... After that, everything unfolded as in a dream in which you are hurtling towards a precipice and it is inevitable that you will fall over and shatter into a thousand pieces on the rocks below.

What I remember is my mother looking annoyed and saying "You'd attract a lot more flies with honey instead of vinegar" and my answering "But who wants flies??"

I don't remember him leaving. Or what I said to hurt his feelings. All I know is the following Monday back at school I had no memory of his visit and the events that must have ensued to make me forget all about it. It would come back to me 50 years later with crystal clarity in full color and minute detail but I would dismiss it as impossible. Could not have happened. The Stones didn't like Montreal. I never met Mick and how could he have found our house?

Of course now I know it really happened, but it's too late to do anything except tell the story. As often as it takes me to finally get over it.


In April 1965, the psychiatry department at McGill was undergoing radical restructuring. Dr Cameron had left in disgrace in the early part of 1964 taking his patient files with him to Albany where after his death mountain climbing his son destroyed them. Meanwhile the charming Royal Air Force psychiatrist Dr Peter Roper had taken over Cameron's methods of "depatterning" patients-- erasing their memories and personalities, and installing new personalities via repeated commands broadcast straight to the patients' brains.

Soon after Cameron's departure, I asked for and got my first portable typewriter on my 13th birthday and started teaching myself to type via hunt and peck. A while later my father borrowed this typewriter and started writing a book on it, but only the first chapter has survived. It starts off well with a vivid profile of our family DNA as a dynamic fusion of French, Scottish and Mohawk -- but it soon devolves into gobbledygook. Either my dad felt he needed to write in code to evade persecution, or his narrative powers had disintegrated into incoherence.

In the summer of 1964 I burned my pink plastic diary in the wastebasket in my bedroom, after concluding I would never be Anne Frank.

So now a year later, in April 1965, the Rolling Stones had come and gone and I was a whole new person, watching Mick a week later on the Ed Sullivan Show singing "Little Red Rooster" and "Everybody needs Somebody to Love" without so much as an inkling of him having been at our house the week before.

Whatever my mother thought about all this, she never let on. She just took to her bed and overnight became an invalid. Never again did we have heart to heart talks, nor did she bring up the subject of boyfriends. She withdrew into her world of crippling illness and developed the worst case of galloping rheumatoid arthritis the doctors down at that hospital had ever seen.

The Stones released a song, Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadows) with photos of the band dressed up as ladies, with Bill Wyman in a wheelchair - but by then I wasn't paying close attention. I liked their early music, or the prettier songs like Backstreet Girl and She's a Rainbow. And later I loved their dark period of greatness that peaked with Let It Bleed.

Over the next 15 years the doctors slowly finished my mother off with drugs and experimental surgery- cortisone, knee and hip replacements - until she died at age 66 in 1980, looking like a decrepit old woman in her nineties.

In the years after I left home until his death in 1974, my dad looked after her faithfully (if not always cheerfully, after which I became her principal caregiver. Never once did she refer to the events I just described. Only once she vaguely remarked "I always thought you should marry a cowboy" --

Maybe she feared she had ruined our lives by consorting with those British psychiatrists who turned out to be just the next wave of invaders whose goal was conquering Quebec and enslaving us all. Or maybe she forgave them. I don't know. She often said she believed in remembering only the good things in life, and forgetting the bad. She spent the last 5 years of her life as a crippled widow lying in bed watching television. Her favorite show was Welcome Back Kotter, about a high school teacher who returns to the high school he once attended to teach a remedial class of loafers known as the Sweathogs.

I wonder if she connected Kotter with my dad whose teaching career was cut short by "an unfortunate illness" -- according to the 1963 Dunton High School yearbook. Maybe she hoped to make it up to him in heaven someday. A few years after she died I had dream of the two of them, back together and living in a bungalow with white picket fence somewhere in heaven, a colony of recuperation and re education. In the dream they were old, my mother still walked with a cane and my dad's personality was no less critical and cranky, but they seemed happy and in love. My beaming mother confided: "And we've just adopted a baby who was born in 1943."