Despite such a reverberating performance, William Burns was disappointed by the organ. Built in 1888, the Father Willis would have been more highly valued if it were still in its original condition. Alas, in William’s estimation, the organ had been “much fiddled with”; by the time he got to try it, it had been restored and electrified, a process typical of the anti-Victorianism of the 1960s.
Not that Alice could possibly have cared about the
How she envied that choir! There was not only a procession, wherein the choir followed the cross, but the choir sat at the front of the church—in view of everyone—not at the back, unseen, as in Leith. Jack’s mother was particularly miserable when she discovered that she wasn’t the only choirgirl who’d fallen in love with Jack’s father, but she was the only one who was pregnant.
As the new assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s, William Burns was answerable to the senior organist and the priest; that William had knocked up a tattoo artist’s daughter from Leith was a matter that his ambitious parents and the Scottish Episcopal Church didn’t take lightly. Whose decision it was—“to whisk him away to Nova Scotia,” as Jack’s mom put it—would forever remain unclear to Jack, but both the church and William’s parents probably had had a hand in it.
The counterpart of Old St. Paul’s in Halifax, the Anglican Church of Canada, was simply called St. Paul’s. They did not have a Father Willis. The church with the best organ in Halifax was the First Baptist Church on Oxford Street. William Burns must have been told to make up his mind in a hurry. There’s no other explanation for why he chose the denomination over the organ—the music, not the church, was what mattered to him. But the organist at St. Paul’s in Halifax was retiring; the timing was providential.
The swath that William was alleged to have cut in Halifax in all likelihood included a choirgirl or two. (There was also talk of an older woman.) He wore out his welcome with the Anglicans in a hurry; according to Jack’s mother, his father wouldn’t have lasted a day longer with the Baptists.
William’s parents reportedly told Alice that they never sent him money or hid his whereabouts from her. The first claim is conceivably true—William’s parents had little money. But it was harder for Alice to believe that they didn’t conspire to hide him from her. And when William was forced to flee Halifax—not long before Alice’s arrival there—he must have needed money. He’d been tattooed again, as Alice discovered when she first went looking for him—at Charlie Snow’s tattoo shop in Halifax, where the power for the electric machines was supplied by car batteries. And it would be a while before William found a job, and more quickly lost it, in Toronto.
Alice never blamed Old St. Paul’s for whatever role the church may have played in arranging William’s passage to Nova Scotia. It was the parishioners of Old St. Paul’s—and surprisingly
Furthermore, the Anglican Church of Canada looked after her in Halifax, and they did an honest job of it. But first they put her up in the St. Paul’s Parish House, at the corner of Argyle and Prince streets, to await her delivery day. By this time, she was not only pregnant; she was “showing.”
Jack Burns was alleged to have been a difficult birth. “A C-section,” his mom told him around the time of their arrival in the first of those North Sea ports. At four, the boy took this to mean that he was born in the C- section of a hospital in Halifax—a part of the hospital designated for difficult births. It was a little later—probably during, not after, their European travels—that Jack learned what a birth by Cesarean section meant. Only then was it explained to the boy that this was why it was not proper for him to take a bath with his mother, or to see her naked. Alice told Jack that she didn’t want him to see the scar from her C-section.
Thus Jack Burns was born in Halifax, under the care of churchgoers at the
“The church was onto him,” as Alice put it.
In the meantime, after Jack was born in Nova Scotia, his mother went to work for Charlie Snow. Charlie was an Englishman who’d been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy in World War One; he was reputed to have jumped ship in Montreal, where Freddie Baldwin, who was also from England and had fought in the Boer War, taught him how to tattoo.
Both Freddie Baldwin and Charlie Snow had known the Great Omi. People paid to see the Great Omi’s tattooed face; he used to come to Halifax with a circus. When he walked around town, he wore a ski mask. “No one got a free look,” Jack’s mom told him. (This amounted to more nightmare material for the boy; Jack couldn’t stop himself from imagining the terrible tattoos on the Great Omi’s face.)
From Charlie Snow, Alice learned to rinse the tattoo machines with ethyl alcohol; she cleaned the tubes with pipe cleaners, which she’d soaked in the alcohol, and every night she boiled the tubes and needles in a steamer. “The kind meant for cooking clams and lobsters,” Alice said.
Charlie Snow made his own bandages out of linen. “There wasn’t much hepatitis then,” Alice explained.
She told Jack that Freddie Baldwin had given Charlie Snow his most impressive tattoo. Over Charlie’s heart, Sitting Bull sat facing General Custer, who stared straight ahead, unseeing, on the far right of Charlie’s chest. Dead-center on Charlie Snow’s breastbone was a full-sailed ship; a banner, unfurled from Charlie’s clavicle, said HOMEWARD BOUND.
Charlie Snow wouldn’t get home to his final resting place until 1969, when he was eighty. (He died of a bleeding ulcer.) Alice learned a lot from Charlie Snow, but she learned how to do a Japanese carp from Jerry Swallow, whose tattoo name was Sailor Jerry; he’d become Charlie Snow’s apprentice in 1962. Alice liked to say that she and Jerry Swallow “apprenticed together” with Charlie Snow, but of course she’d already been apprenticed to her father at Persevere in the Port of Leith.
Long before she’d docked in Halifax, Jack’s mother knew how to tattoo.
Jack Burns had no memory of his birthplace; until he was four, Toronto was the only town he knew. He was still an infant when his mom caught wind of his father and what he was up to in Toronto, and they followed him there from Halifax. But Jack’s dad had left town ahead of them, which was getting to be a familiar story. By the time the boy could comprehend his father’s absence, William was rumored to be back in Europe, having crossed the Atlantic once again.
For much of his young life, Jack would wonder if the story of his dad’s exploits in Toronto was what first led his mom to St. Hilda’s. Unthinkably, the school had hired William Burns to train the senior choir, which was composed of girls in grades nine through thirteen. William also gave private lessons in piano and organ; these were almost exclusively for the older girls. One can only imagine what Jack, as a teenager, would think of his father’s adventures at an all-girls’ school! (William’s noticeable contribution to the girls’ musical education led St. Hilda’s to make him the principal organist at the daily chapel services as well.)
Not surprisingly, William’s success at St. Hilda’s was short-lived. Although a girl in grade eleven—one of his piano students—was the first to succumb to his charms, it was a grade-thirteen girl whom he got pregnant. He later drove the girl to Buffalo for an illegal abortion. By the time Alice got to town with her illegitimate child in tow, William had fled, and Jack and his mother were once more welcomed by churchgoers.
St. Hilda’s was an Anglican school; the school’s chapel, where many of the St. Hilda’s graduates were later married, was a Toronto bastion of the Anglican Church of Canada. The few scholarships to the school that existed in the 1960s were funded by the Old Girls’ Association, a powerful alumnae organization. Children of the clergy were generally helped first; other decisions regarding who got financial aid were arbitrary. In addition to the Anglicans and the school faculty and administration, the Old Girls quickly heard of Alice and her condition. (Jack, of course, was the condition.) Thus, when Alice told Jack that she was arranging his admittance as one of the few new boys at St. Hilda’s, he assumed that his mom had the Old Girls’ help.
In fact, Alice and Jack had already been lucky; they’d found lodgings in the home of an Old Girl from St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Wicksteed was a warhorse for the alumnae association. Inexplicably, upon her husband’s death, she’d also become a champion of unwed mothers. She not only battled on their behalf—she even took them in.
Mrs. Wicksteed was a widow long past grieving; she lived virtually alone in a stately but not too imposing house at the corner of Spadina and Lowther, where Jack and his mom were given rooms. They were not big and
