The photo shows Bernice Trollope, her daughter Karen Trollope Kumar and our guide at the old printery on the Niagara River Parkway.
On Friday 13 May, Christina's 25th birthday, I flew Porter Airlines, the one my daughter-in-law Desre says is tops, from Ottawa to Toronto Island Airport. Porter is as good as Desre says it is: how delightful to be pampered again on an airplane! I'd almost forgotten what it feels like. Karen Trollope Kumar met me and drove us both to the Kumar family home in Hamilton. Karen had printed some copies of her memoir, Cloud Messenger, and we spent several hours going over the complete book. I think her memoir of the years that she and Pradeep lived and worked in the Garhwal Himalayas is fascinating and very well written. However, this is a first draft, and inevitably there are a few glitches. I advised her to put the book away for a month at least, then go over it again -- hard advice to follow as I know full well. When I've followed the advice the result has always been an improvement in the quality of the finished product, and I'm sure Karen will discover this too. We didn't spend the whole weekend working on her book. She, her 89-year old mother and I drove to Niagara on the Lake and saw two plays in this year's Shaw Festival. I was sad to see the creeping expansion of NOTL into the surrounding orchards and vineyards; there are new 'developments' (sinister word!) everywhere we looked. But it's still an attractive village and the theatrical company is as good as ever. The Shaw play that we saw was "Heartbreak House" -- one of Shaw's wordy, preachy plays, rather incomprehensible in places, salvaged to some extent by a spectacular set. The other play, by Shaw's contemporary Lennox Robinson, was a very good comedy called "Drama at Inish" and carried me back to my school days when an English teacher who had worked as a stage hand at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, introduced my classmates and me to a whole host of Anglo-Irish poets and playwrights. It was dismally wet and not very warm for which the consolation is that the profusion of flowers, especially the lovely tulips, might flourish longer than they would in the searing heat that Wendy and I have sometimes encountered at NOTL. To escape from the drizzle, we dropped in at the old William Lyon MacKenzie printing works on the Niagara River Parkway, now a small museum. It evokes memories of my favourite Uncle Lester's printery at Orooroo in rural South Australia, where Uncle Lester let me use his linotype machine when I was about 7 or 8 years old, to make a slug of my name so I could stamp it in my books -- some still on my shelves after all these years and multiple moves. The slug is still here somewhere too among a lifetime of pack-rattery. Raman, Karen and Pradeep Kumar's son, is the same age as my grandson Peter; he graduates from McMaster's general arts and sciences program this year and goes straight on to medical school. He is a very impressive young man and provides another reason besides my own grandchildren's future careers, why I'd like to live at least another ten years, so I can see what he decides to do with his life. I briefly saw Sonia Kumar too, and was happy to see how she has improved since I last saw her. She looks comfortable in her own skin; I'm sorry there wasn't a chance to chat to her at greater length. My cleaning lady Sue Ng collected the mail and newspapers while I was away. I was dismayed to find a letter from Canada Revenue Agency demanding a notarized copy of Wendy's death certificate, because I know they already have this -- obviously their left hand knoweth not what their right hand doeth. I suppose in due course all such wrinkles will get sorted out, but it's annoying, even distressing, when this sort of thing happens.
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