Crossing

My father saw me off at Waterloo Station.
I was well equipped to travel on any part of the Empire, for an Englishman. I felt as though I had stepped out of the train door and into the world without a backward glance. To this day I can see him as he turned away, hard felt hat, velveteen collar, disappearing from view.

I had an uneventful voyage on the “Doric”.
When I looked out at the receding light of Southampton, it seemed to disappear as meaninglessly as my childhood. Looking back over the years, it is only certain images that remain fixed: dingy cafés, tiled roads, the acrimony of Gentiles and Jews, the unconvincing concepts of religious doctrines.

Standing on the boat deck as the great ship ploughed through the dark Atlantic, I realised I could learn nothing from any life that had been lived before. I wanted nothing of the threadbare philosophies of the past. Like Cortez, I felt that as long as one journeyed, but never arrived, what did it matter?

I looked at the stars and wanted to paint.

I looked at the dark ocean and wanted to write. With these incoherent conclusions of an immature wisdom, I arrived at Halifax — and decided not to go to my uncle in Sudbury.

I decided that London was the place to work out my salvation.

I was not a colonial.