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monotone, waiting I presume for inspiration to move him later.
    George McCowan should have been Canada’s first truly major director. Expert in almost everything he touched, he could drive the Port Carling road at breakneck speed without ever hitting a bump, parallel park a canoe, and excel academically. A friend once asked him to write his French exam for him. George was a little hesitant as he didn’t take French, but in the end, agreed. He read over the texts the night before the exam, went in the next day, forged the signature, and wrote the exam. All would have been well except that he got such a high mark that suspicions were aroused and he was soon outed. Suspended from university for a year, he went to teach at Pickering College, a prestigious boys’ school north of Toronto. He was weak in only one area of activity. He was not a very good actor. So what did he do? He decided to be an actor. Within a few years, though, he turned to directing, doing a wonderful production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at the Crest, as well as work at Stratford. But soon television took him and he ended a too-brief career directing episodic television and drinking himself to death.
    I could sense my career as a boy actor coming to an end at the first rehearsal for Ten Nights in a Barroom , directed by the soft spoken, gentlemanly Robertson Davies, long before his rise to fame as the author of Fifth Business. When he called for the young boy — I forget the character’s name — he gamely hid his distress as I stood up, and up, and up. Murray had not warned him that I might be a shade taller than he would have preferred. But he remained kindly to me throughout, even when I sang flat in the company song. We would work together again years later when we presented his play A Jig for the Gypsy in Lennoxville.
    Despite all this summer activity these were the dark years of my life in the theatre. After the move to King City — an ambitious moniker for a hamlet with two general stores, a bank, a couple of churches, and a gas station — my father commuted to his law office in Toronto, and I suspect he had the road pretty much to himself. Meanwhile Ashe and I travelled to the Aurora District High School each day, an hour on the bus in each direction. A fish out of water? A square peg trying to fit into a round hole? Whatever, my three years in King/Aurora were disappointing, to put it kindly.
    Schools in Ontario were still municipally rather than provincially funded in those days. We went from the well-supported and high-end Forest Hill education system to a rural high school. My younger brothers even went to a one room elementary school, where, lucky for them, they had an exceptional teacher. Our high school teachers were not exceptional but, in fairness, they had the serious challenges of large classes, mixed abilities, and variably motivated students. Artistic pursuits and philosophical discussions were rare, though there was a good band. Cadets and football moulded the male tribe. I hated cadets, and being two years younger than my classmates I was too light for football. NHL hockey was a common interest, though I was on my own on the school bus defending Maurice Richard against the legion of Gordie Howe fans.
    Not only was the school an artistic wasteland, but I was isolated from the city, always dependent on a driver. We did a couple of one-act plays with the Latin teacher — yes, we took Latin — and I was always asked to read in Shakespeare class, but that was about the sum of my theatrical efforts during those three bleak winters.
    Not that drama was entirely lacking. One day our history teacher asked the class about the Reformation. This was the same teacher who had whacked me on the head earlier in the year when the textbook I had ordered had not yet arrived. (I understand schools now provide textbooks.) Attempting to show up our ignorance of the Reformation he said to the class:
    “If you had been living in the fifteenth