As
a WW II ambulance driver at Camp Borden, my mother attended an average of six
to eight fatal air crashes per month. She learned what a body looks like after
it passes through a propeller and what it smells like while still smoldering.[i] Dramatic stuff. But whenever asked about her role in the War,
she talked about her time as chauffeur to a famous pilot.
“I
drove Billy Bishop to drink” was her one-line response.[ii]
By
the time Donald Jack wrote his war story, the 1963 Leacock Medal winner Three Cheers for Me, an upbeat mood was
starting to displace the pain of World War II, and veterans like Mom were more
and more prone to focus on funny memories.
The
British born Jack had served in the RAF, moved to Canada, and established
himself in a less demanding situation as a playwright and author.[iii] He could laugh about war more often, but, as
a writer, he also knew that a good story is more than a one-line joke. Three Cheers for Me never shies away
from the trenches, muddy battles, and hairy dog fights.
The
Bandy books, three of which would win the Leacock Medal, are first person
accounts of the life of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy, a sometimes smart, but
luckless, Canadian medical school dropout who headed to the frontlines in 1916
and later fought from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel. The realism of the
stories convinced early readers and reviewers that they were non-fiction
memoirs.
I
found the battles amusing not because of what happens in them, but because of
Donald Jack’s set up outside. When Bandy
was preparing to leave for Europe, his father, a self-righteous minister in the
Ottawa Valley still shaken by the fifty-year-old Origin of Species, described the Great War as a battle “not just against the barbaric legions of
the heathen Hun, but against all revolutionaries, theorists, anarchists, and
Charles Darwin !” He and others saw
the greatest dangers in the temptations of alcohol and dismissed bleak stories
of battle wounds and trench foot. “Plain
carelessness,” one church elder tells Bandy. “No excuse at all. It may be a little damp at the front, but to let your
feet get that way is inexcusable ... (I hear) the generals are thinking of
punishing anyone who so abuses his extremities.”
As
he watches the passing bodies, sits in the mud, and listens to the shells fall,
Bandy reads letters from his mother who hopes that he’s keeping up his piano
lessons while abroad, adding that her son must be having “an interesting time over there, seeing Westminster Abbey and the Tower
of London.” The correspondence from
Canada reaches a crescendo when Bandy starts receiving letters of condolence: “My Dear Bartholomew ... we sympathize with
you in your misfortune ... despite everything we are still your friends”
with no explanation. Eventually, an aunt
tells Bandy that his father was caught in an indiscretion in the cornfield.
Another
force that keeps the story light is the intertwining of a love story based on
narrowed eyes. Bandy has fallen for the
young English woman Katherine Lewis, whose face was characterized by a
squint. At first, Bandy says simply that
“she had a slight squint” and later a
squint to be “self-conscious about.” Then, he notices that “Her squint ... suits her” and eventually confesses that “That faint squint of hers affected me
strongly.” Bandy later thinks there
is “something almost erotic about (her
squint).”[iv]
Through
these techniques, Jack manages the mix of humour and horror pretty well, but
it’s not easy. Even though Three Cheers
for Me ends with a cliff-hanger inference of more to come[v]
and even though Jack would eventually write many more Bandy books,[vi]
a second one did not appear for over a decade.[vii] Despite his abilities and those inclinations to think of
chauffeuring celebrities instead of corpses, it still took a bit of work to
find humour in war.
[ii]
Bishop, a flying ace in WWI, was a senior air force officer who promoted
recruitment during WWII.
[iii]
Jack was not yet a Canadian citizen when he wrote this book. He only came to
Canada in 1951 and worked on survey crews in Alberta and as a bank teller in
Toronto before turning to theatre and writing, which led to a job with Academy
Award-winning Crawley Films in Ottawa. Two years later Crawley fired him. In 1957 Donald Jack’s Breakthrough was the first Canadian TV play to be simultaneously
telecast to the United States. His third play, The Canvas Barricade, produced in 1961, was the first original
Canadian play performed on the main stage of the Stratford Festival.
[iv] Jack’s relationship with his own wife Nancy
likely affected his stories. In 1986,
when she fell ill, Jack returned to
his native England with her. He stopped
writing for many years after her death in
1991. Born on Dec. 6, 1924, Donald
Lamont Jack died in 2003, working on another volume of The Bandy Papers.
(National
Post and Globe and Mail Obits in June
2003).
[v] The book ended suggesting that the future was to bring an “awful new
significance ... to the expression War is Hell.”
[vi]
Jack wrote with military discipline, saying his
dedication came from "reminding
myself of how lucky I am to be able to be the only thing I ever really wanted
to be -- a writer." Jack wrote
40 TV plays, several radio plays, four stage plays, and 35 film scripts.
Leacock medals came for three of the nine volumes of The Bandy Papers
: Three Cheers for Me in 1963, That's
Me in the Middle in 1974 and Me
Bandy, You Cissie in 1980. One of
his two non-fiction books was about the history of medicine, Rogues, Rebels
and Geniuses. The other was the history
of the Toronto radio station CFRB, Sinc, Betty and the Morning Man.