Changing My Mind Read online

  My first thought was that he was old, with old skin and old toes, and that I infinitely preferred the good-looking young Yves. This man, though, did have nice legs—they were perfectly toned and muscled. He was clearly an athlete who took care of himself. My mother, who had been watching us on the raft, asked me if I realized who I had been talking to.

  “Oh, Pierre someone or other,” I told her.

  She laughed. “That’s Pierre Trudeau, the justice minister, the black sheep of the Liberal Party.”

  The title didn’t mean much to me. In any case, he was old—and “square,” to use a word then commonly used to describe anyone who was conventional. This blue-eyed man on the raft was forty-eight years old, born in 1919. The Titanic had sunk only seven years before he was born, and the First World War was barely over when he came into the world and let out his first cry. I was nineteen, born in 1948—three years after the Second World War ended. The man on the raft was old enough to be my father, and almost old enough to be my grandfather.

  But I was a born flirt, and we were soon talking—or rather, I talked, and Pierre asked me question after question, drawing me out in Socratic fashion. We talked about Plato and that age-old question of whether life was real or an illusion. He talked about the book he was then reading—Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a classic of the eighteenth century. Pierre was a good listener and easy to talk to. Soon we were going snorkelling together, though in my hippie, youthful fashion, full of the prejudices of the young, I went on finding his shorts and striped T-shirts staid and old-fashioned.

  Pierre, who had been schooled by the Jesuits, was possessed of a rational, well-disciplined mind. Feeling out of touch with young Canadians, he was keen to pick my brains about the student rebellions at Simon Fraser University, and about the drug culture on campus and elsewhere. This holiday was meant as time for him to ponder a critical decision—whether to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Lester B. Pearson was still the prime minister, but he was stepping down and a leadership convention was planned for the following April. The winner of that contest would become the next prime minister.

  Over breakfast one morning at the resort in Tahiti, while Pierre was sitting with friends at the far end of our shared long table, he had apparently said to them, looking discreetly at me, “If I ever marry, she’s the one.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FROM PEASANT DRESS

  TO WEDDING DRESS

  “You can either marry her, or adopt her.”

  JOHN DIEFENBAKER ON HEARING THE AGE OF THE PM’S NEW BRIDE, MARCH 1971

  For an entire generation of youth in the late 1960s and ‘70s, the travel destination of choice was Morocco—the food was cheap, the dope plentiful and the culture exotic, and the beaches and warm sun beckoned.

  Perversity and a desire to irk my father (who was appalled at the idea) simply made Morocco that much more appealing.

  All my father could talk about were the perils of white slavery, poverty and pestilence; he had served in North Africa during the Second World War. All I could think about was the idea of freedom. One of my sisters had gone to Europe and travelled around on a Eurail pass; that didn’t interest me. I have always lived spontaneously, and I was bent on becoming a new person, on reinventing myself. In Morocco, I thought to myself, I will go with the flow.

  My last months at Simon Fraser had been something of an anticlimax. I had taken a semester off to make money, and now my friends were all ahead of me and I felt out of tune with my surroundings. I indulged my new-found passion for the Romantic poets and moved into a dark basement apartment in Burnaby, a Vancouver suburb.

  This was a lonely and frustrating time. I went home every weekend for Sunday dinner but increasingly felt distant from my family. I did graduate, with a decent degree, and like many Canadian middle-class students, I decided to have a holiday after graduation, paying for it by cashing in some shares from a legacy that my grandmother Sinclair had left me.

  I flew to Geneva after Christmas in 1968 and met up with Ross, a friend from school days. We drove his shiny new Ford Cortina through France and Spain and down into Morocco, finally stopping at the coastal city of Agadir. We had found sun and sea and an agreeable hippie commune of sorts, one that shared showers with a tourist camp nearby.

  With the money I had been given, I was one rich hippie and I set myself up grandly—in a little bamboo “house” I built on the beach, complete with charcoal burner, cooking pot, sleeping mat and a tarp to keep out the rain (but it never did rain). Every night, there were campfires on the beach with fellow pilgrims from all over the world, some of whom had brought their guitars. The lucky ones came in VW vans, outfitted with galley kitchens and curtains. At night, we would walk along the beach under the stars, and because there was phosphorus in the sea water, every time we made a footprint in the soft sand it would fill in with water and it, too, would sparkle like stars, as if the stars themselves had dropped from the night sky. It was magical.

  When Ross left a few weeks later, I threw in my lot with the hippies, learned to eat what food there was (clementines and fresh round loaves of bread were fantastically cheap) and abandoned my conventional notions of sexual morality. For the first time in my life, I had a real sense of peace, freedom and tranquility. I was not lonely, at all. And I revelled in the knowledge that no one from my past life had the faintest idea where I was.

  After that I wandered from one hippie commune to another, experimenting and growing up—or so I imagined. I smoked kif, a strong mixture of black tobacco and hashish (the word kif comes from the Arab word for “pleasure”), and ate so little that I became malnourished. But then, so did many of us on the hippie trail. I lost pounds and even my possessions. A series of thefts left me with only a small leather suitcase containing some jeans and shirts, and a Liberty cotton cosmetic bag containing face cream and soap.

  I also carried with me a record player—a cheap, battery-powered model I bought in a souk in Tangier—and eight prized albums, including the Beatles’ White Album and the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed. This made me very popular, since listening to rock music seemed to be our favourite pastime. I spent a while in Essaouira, a small town farther up the coast, where I joined Moroccan women in their hammams—the Middle Eastern version of the steam bath, one that features lots of scrubbing, vigorous massage and splashing on of bowls of hot and cold water. I remember those cleansings as a wonderful cultural experience.

  I found Moroccans kind and generous with their hospitality. I remember hitchhiking near El Jadida, an old fortified town on the coast south of Casablanca. We were approached by a charming young man on a motorcycle who invited us to stay with his family at their farm. This boy had been studying in the United States and knew English, so he was the proud translator for his family. I remember sitting on mats and watching a chicken get decapitated in preparation for the meal. We laughed and told stories and were made to feel welcome. The generosity was so spontaneous, so unorganized—and that was a first for me.

  And in the morning, there was warm bread with fresh butter and yogurt and honey. I learned that Muslim tradition has it that when a stranger comes to your door, you invite him in and offer him hospitality for three days, for this stranger could be the prophet in disguise. However, should the guest behave badly during that time, the host has every right to eject the visitor, so the custom encourages civility all around. I encountered such hospitality in Morocco and never once did I feel threatened.

  Later, in Marrakech, I stayed with another family, and I remember going up on the roof to admire the stars. Up there was this doleful, rather smelly sheep that would be slaughtered next day during the feast of Ramadan. The streets in Marrakech were hard-packed, with little gutters on the side, and they literally ran red with sheep’s blood that day. A minor earthquake added to the drama. I was offered a sheep’s eyeball to eat, and I did eat it, though I wondered if I was being tricked—but no, the custom is meant to honour elders or spec
ial guests.

  In Morocco, there were no taboos. Away from the strictures and machismo of North America, I finally learned to treat men as friends while enjoying making love. I was now living a life my puritan upbringing had never allowed me to imagine possible. After a month in Essaouira, I crossed the mountains and headed inland to Marrakech in an ancient bus, sitting next to a sheep trussed up by its four legs.

  Every word of William Blake seemed to me then the embodiment of perfect wisdom. A mystic and a visionary heavily influenced by the American and French revolutions, a man of extraordinary imagination who said that he both saw and conversed with angels, Blake created his own incredibly complex and elaborate personal mythology. He was the perfect poet for the counterculture revolution. Bob Dylan was influenced by him, as was the poet Allen Ginsberg. I still admire Blake; I have books of his art and have been to the Tate Gallery in London many times to see his engravings. One might argue that the title of one of his epic poems, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, neatly sums up a good portion of my life.

  So Blake was my poet, and Morocco my sacred and magical place. For a while I even thought of buying an apartment in Tangier and staying on indefinitely in Morocco, but my father, in a letter to me, firmly talked me out of it. As for the marijuana, it did something that nothing else had ever done in my life: the drug (a milder version of the stuff now available) stopped my mind racing so fast, it gave me ballast and it allowed me to enjoy what I saw, heard and smelled around me, rather than having my thoughts scattering away in bursts of energy and tension.

  While in Morocco, I met two people who were to have a profound effect on me. They were both artists, one a singer and poet, the other a painter. Both were in their thirties and had seen and read and experienced things that I had never even contemplated.

  The first was Leonard Cohen, whom I met in Essaouira, where he was staying with a French girlfriend named Claire. He was a good-looking man of medium build, with thick, dark hair and a very sonorous, low voice. His second novel, Beautiful Losers, had come out a few years earlier, in 1966.

  Leonard suggested that I visit them in Casablanca, and we spent a few days together in a hotel there, talking, joking, serious one minute, laughing the next. Leonard would take the time to think before he spoke, something I would have done well to emulate. He was poetic and spiritual in a way I found very attractive, and in the gardens of the hotel we talked about everything under the sun while tucking into huge pots of tagine—a delicious, slow-cooked Moroccan stew made with vegetables and fruits and spiced with saffron, ginger, cumin and paprika. We would talk through the night, going down roads of spirituality that I hadn’t imagined existed. At university I had spent hours listening to his music, reading his novels and poetry, and I felt extraordinarily honoured to spend time with him.

  I went on to Tangier, where I rented an apartment in the European quarter and planned to work with a fashion-designer friend for a few months. One morning I felt a stab of pain in my left hand. A young French doctor diagnosed a break in a small bone and put my hand into plaster. Instead of getting better, the pain got worse; throbbing, agonizing pain drove me back to the doctor a few days later. He was not sympathetic, told me to stop fussing and gave me a tranquilizer.

  That night my whole arm grew numb and I wandered out into the streets screaming, almost frantic with pain. A kind Moroccan woman, seeing me, asked me what was wrong. I showed her my arm. Within minutes I was in her car on the way to the hospital, where a surgeon removed the cast and discovered that far from a broken bone, I had developed osteomyelitis—an inflammation of the bone marrow caused by infection. My hand was blue-grey in colour and already looked shrunken. I was put onto morphine and for a few days the surgeon worried that he might have to amputate. I stayed in the hospital for two weeks, slowly getting better, and tended to by extremely gentle Catholic nuns, true sisters of mercy.

  My second new friend was an artist named Ahmed Yacoubi who had a studio in Tangier and was already making a name for himself in New York art galleries. He would later exhibit all over the world; writers such as Paul Bowles befriended him, and William S. Burroughs wrote about him. Bowles and his wife, the playwright Jane Bowles, met Ahmed when he offered his services as a translator. He would draw pictures to explain the meanings of Arabic words, and both writers immediately recognized his pure talent as a painter and helped launch his international career.

  Ahmed’s studio was a wonderful place, full of carpets and cushions, low tables and priceless pieces of Moroccan art. He was a man who loved to cook. Then in his late thirties, Ahmed was gentle and adult, the first man from another culture I really got to know, and I sat for hours listening to him talk—he was also a storyteller and would later be published. I would watch him paint, and I was with him when he did a portrait of me. Ahmed wanted me to stay with him. Instinctively I knew that it couldn’t work, so I moved on again, but I had begun to see the possibility of other ways of thinking and living.

  By this time, I had been in Morocco nearly five months. For a little girl from North Vancouver, Morocco had been a revelation of another world of freedom and choice. But I was growing restless. I was getting sick of the hippie world, and I was beginning to feel buffeted by the amount of drugs that were pressed onto me and by the reliance on them that so many of my new friends seemed to feel. An unpleasant episode with a dealer in cocaine and hash (he was trying to recruit me as a mule to transport drugs across borders) convinced me that it was time to go home. I realized how lucky I was that nothing terrible had happened to me, and I felt that I had grown up. But whatever I was writing in my letters home must have alarmed my mother: she burned them without showing them to anyone.

  What was more, I was longing to see Yves Lewis again. At our last meeting, he had told me to go away, learn about life, become an adult, and that we should then meet again and see where we stood. I now felt worthy of him. But I was in for a nasty shock. I had gone too far in the wrong direction. He wanted me freer; he got me back too free.

  I sought him out in Berkeley, California, where he was teaching. This was July 20, 1969, the time of Apollo 11, the first manned spaceship to land on the moon. Yves and I went to a backyard party at a friend’s house in San Francisco near the campus. We were to a bring a bottle of wine and a poem or song about the moon, and we sang to the moon that magical night.

  The reunion did not go as planned. Yves, who was a hotheaded political animal yet possessed of an almost Zen calm, was contemptuous of my frizzy hair and my granny glasses and the faraway look in my eyes.

  “You used to be such a chick,” he told me. “You’ve become a fat brooding hen”—I was talking about marriage and children. “Come back,” Yves said, “when you’ve learned something real about life.” Crestfallen, confused and totally without a plan for the future, I went back home. But home was definitely not where the heart was.

  I had been welcomed back from Morocco with a splendid prime-rib dinner, one that my mother had gone to great pains to make. I was aghast.

  “You’re not still eating flesh, are you?” was my response. I had become a vegetarian and had turned to brown rice and a macrobiotic diet. As for my father, he held top-dog positions between 1960 and 1973 at Lafarge, a multinational cement company. I held him partially responsible for all the heritage buildings being torn down in Vancouver to make way for concrete towers. You can imagine the pitched battles between the flower child and the cement baron. We fought about politics, values, money, music, greed, plastic, sugar as poison and Coca-Cola as the enemy—everything and anything. I was a hippie who thought hippie thoughts: I had flowers in my hair from an early age.

  I was still in Morocco when my father wrote a letter to Doug Abbott, my godfather and a former finance minister in the same cabinet my father served in, that of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. My father allowed that of the five Sinclair sisters, I was “the best scholar of the lot” (though he added that I was “very leftish”). I’m not sure I agree about the “best scholar” part.
My intelligence is enviable in a way, but it’s flash intelligence. I pick up things quickly (I skipped grade four) and I have a photographic memory, but I can’t or won’t do the grunt work, and the logic wasn’t always there, or the discipline. My sisters would lock themselves away and study; I wouldn’t.

  Even before going to Morocco, I was a pain: I was a perfectionist and a meticulous Virgo who was convinced I knew best—how to make a salad, tell a story, polish a floor. The trip to Morocco had only filled my head with disdain for the world I had left behind. My sisters had all embarked on their career paths, and they laughed at me.

  When I returned from Morocco, there was no place in the house for me, no place in every sense. My father built a lean-to—a bizarre and makeshift addition to this otherwise lovely house. The lean-to’s roof was wavy fibreglass that let in the light but kept out the rain, the kind of roof then fashionable on garden sheds. He hauled in a bed, and this was where I slept for about a month. Finally, wearied by all my challenges, my parents banished me to my grandmother’s house.

  So, one day in August of 1969, I went to see my grandmother on the Sechelt Peninsula, thinking that I would take refuge in her cottage perched on a cliff above the sea overlooking Howe Sound. Hers was indeed a magical place. I had always regarded her little house—with its tarpaper roof and robin’s-egg-blue window frames, its garden of rose bushes, fruit trees and vegetables, and the great forest stretching for miles around—as a safe haven. The place offered a profusion of lilies, nasturtiums and pansies, many grown up from the cuttings she scattered when working on her garden.

  My sisters and I had spent many happy summers there. The nearest store was a mile away down a dirt road, so my grandmother’s garden was very much an edible garden. When the weather was nice, we’d walk to the store along the beach. I remember playing baseball on the road with the neighbours’ kids and listening to an elderly Irishman who lived next door, a kind fellow who always had a bowl of candy and stories to tell.