Chapter One
The Early Years, 1896 to 1916

RAIN pelted the thin man as he slogged up the canyon, pulling a heavy canoe on the end of a waterlogged rope. And then it happened. "I fell with an awful crash in amongst these pointed rocks, lay there and groaned for a minute but nothing was damaged. A thing like that could lead to a bad accident".

With months of travel and many tough rapids behind him, Raymond Patterson lay flat on his back in the Third Canyon of the South Nahanni River in Canada's Northwest Territories. The year, 1927; the month, August. For a hundred days he had been on the trail. And now this. Except for Albert Faille, Patterson was the only white man on the South Nahanni. The Minnesota trapper was ahead, somewhere, headed for the Flat River to build a cabin, run a trapline and prospect for gold.

"What in the blazes am I doing here?" Patterson probably wondered. "I could be home in London with Mother or at the bar with friends in Peace River, Alberta. This must be one of the loonier things I've ever done".

But he had his reasons. Life was moving on. Marriage, a family and a settled existence seemed inevitable. The North had beckoned him since childhood and this had seemed like the perfect summer to follow the siren call. Quitting was not on his mind; not yet. Before turning his canoe downstream he had to see the famous Falls of the Nahanni and find the legendary gold. In almost every bay of black sand he saw the alluring yellow twinkle, proof of wealth untold.

Time was the adversary that summer. He would have to turn back by the middle of the month. It would take until winter to return to Edmonton by canoe, on foot, horseback, riverboat and train. Even with the best of luck, he might run into trouble. As it turned out, disaster, disguised as starvation and a timber wolf, almost caught him that fall. His name nearly passed into history as yet another crazy Brit who had pushed his luck too far in the Canadian North.

So what was he doing on the South Nahanni? Perhaps it began in a British nursing home when Dr. Stott pulled his tonsils and told him to take it easy for the summer. Or maybe it was the result of the Great War? Could it have been the view of distant hills from the little attic window in his grandfather's mansion? Or was it those Canadian cousins and a great uncle who convinced him to head for the North? Perhaps the wanderlust was hereditary or maybe it came from surviving to the ripe old age of twenty-nine after most of his boyhood chums had died in the Great War.

PATTERSON'S story began when he came into the world on May 13, 1898, at Darlington, County Durham, in northern England. He was the only child of Henry Foote Patterson and Emily Taylor Coates who were married in 1896.It was a volatile marriage, a partnership of two people that one relative said was like "fire and fire".

Emily was the eldest of seven children. Her father, Thomas Coates, was an engineer. In 1891, he took charge of the Whessoe Foundry Co. Ltd., turning around a declining business and making it a progressive industrial force in the new century. On the home front, the foundry provided ironwork for the London Underground. It also built large steel tanks to hold natural gas and many other vessels used in natural gas processing facilities throughout Europe and as far away as Canada and New Zealand. Later, Coates expanded the business by making oil storage tanks for Standard Oil and Shell Oil facilities around the world. Skilled craftsman that he was, he cared about his product and his employees. He knew workers by name and took a personal interest in their fortune. Thomas passed along the management of Whessoe to his son Alfred, who ran the company until his death in 1924. From her father Emily learned to befriend strangers, but she also inherited a strong family preference for financial security. She could be forceful and opinionated; someone who knew her own mind.

By contrast, Henry Patterson was "a Scot from the valley of the Tweed". He worked for several newspapers during his brief marriage to Emily, serving for a time as editor of a pro-English newspaper in Dublin, Ireland, an occupation guaranteed to create enemies. He once sat atop a printing press with a loaded revolver to ensure the publication of his opinions. For this stunt he was roundly beaten by a mob, the turning point in his career that encouraged him to head to South Africa as a correspondent.

Young Raymond picked up his father's politics by osmosis. Prompted by his father, the two-year-old crashed a party where Mother was serving a tea to Irish friends. "Damn Oom Paul! Damn Oom Paul!" Screaming slogans against the president of South Africa did little to ingratiate Raymond to adults, so the nanny yanked him from the room, his backside smarting.

Raymond's earliest memories of his father relate to his love of distant mountains. Sitting on his shoulders, the little boy peered at the horizon as Henry pointed across Killiney Bay in Ireland to the Wicklow Hills. Even though they were little more than shadowy lumps in the distance, the 2000 foot-high mountains captured the young boy's imagination. In 1901 Raymond's father left to report on the war in South Africa, and except for a brief visit two decades later, the link between father and son was broken for life. Henry Foote Patterson died penniless in South Africa in 1935.

No one knows why the marriage ended. Henry invited his young wife along on the South African adventure, but Emily chose to stay home. As much as she loved her footloose partner, she simply could not give up a stable English life to chase around Africa. Once Henry left, Emily erased his memory: photographs of Henry disappeared and he was never mentioned again. Mother and son moved to the Coates' family home in Darlington. From the upper windows of the ivy covered, red-brick house that seemed a castle to the small boy, Raymond would gaze at the hills to the southwest. No adults shared his attraction for the high country, so he kept his dreams to himself.

His father's absence left a huge hole in his life, one that Raymond's adoring mother filled as best she could. Financially, her family supported the boy's education, while she managed the household for her aging parents, became his only confidant. His long letters home from school and Canada reveal a deep affection for the strong woman who served as the only constant in his life for more than forty years. Her letters to him always began: "My Very Dear Raymond". Through tough times and many adventures she believed in her son, listened to his dreams of a fantastic life and nurtured him constantly.

Amid the bustle of the Coates' household, that included entertaining engineers from around the world, young Raymond made a world of his own. Treats from Canadian relatives and books about the North fostered an appetite for the life of the voyageur, the trapper, the native and the coureur des bois. He once tied tennis racquets to his feet and stomped around the family yards on a thin layer of snow. The ruined racquets, discovered the next spring, pointed directly at Raymond.

Other adventures attracted less adult attention. His bicycle took him many places, but try as he might, he never found the road into the distant hills that beckoned from the upper window. Decades later he wrote: "Which is, perhaps, as it should be, for it still has for me, today, all the charm of the unknown, and it still leads, as it always did, to who knows what hidden pleasance in what lost valley of the hills".

After a few years in a small local school, the time came for further education. As was the English custom at the time, young Patterson went to public school. Ostensibly, one sent one's offspring to these privately funded institutions for an education. Besides academic learning, young boys also received instruction in the ways of society. Because most came from comfortable homes with servants and nannies, public school also provided these youngsters with hard knocks as a preparation for the harsher realities of life.

While Rossall School helped young Patterson become a man, its influence was not entirely positive. Born the same year as Patterson, author C. S. Lewis berated the British public school. He believed it taught youngsters to grasp social status through every possible method: intellectually, socially, through sports and every other conceivable method of deviousness. The intent of this total reordering of life was to make small boys "normal".

Patterson's own experience in the public school system barely surfaces in his books. He only credits it with teaching him how to stay warm in cold weather and almost killing him with a bout of double pneumonia. Rossall, however, taught him much more than he realized at the time. In the spring of 1951, while helping manage the Big Coulee Ranch in the foothills of the Rockies west of Fort Macleod, Alberta, he reflected on his youth while reviewing letters he had written Mother while at Rossall. Patterson edited the letters, which dated from 1911 to 1917, excerpted them, added comments, then self-published seventy-five copies of a booklet he titled "Dear Mother".

One lonely letter home from the early days stated "and I brewed alone". Afternoon tea was a "brew" and with a few treats from his tuck box or the tuck shop, he kept starvation at bay. As an only child, he missed Mother desperately and it took until his second term to begin making friends in his own dormitory, called the Maltese Cross House.

From Darlington a train took him across the Pennines to Rossall, located near Fleetwood, Lancashire, beside the Irish Sea. "It was a lovely journey, and I always enjoyed it, going or coming. You followed the Tees for nearly twenty miles, and then crossed Stainmoor and the headwaters of the Eden, finally coming down to Lancaster, through the great fells, by the valley of the Lune". Travelling by train allowed him the luxury of bringing a healthy stock of food. "I got here alright and nothing in my tuck box was broken". Thus began at least eighteen letters during his Rossall days. Later he recalled: "It was a magnificent tuck box, stoutly built, iron grey, and one of the largest in the House. No space was ever wasted, and the railway's charges for excess baggage were invariably shattering".

That tuck box was an important public school fixture. Although fees were steep, precious little money was spent feeding the growing young men. As a result, they were always hungry, especially after meals that were barely palatable. Virtual starvation set in after the boys refused, en masse, to touch some of the plates set before them. Protein was sometimes unrecognizable. "The meat was the greatest curiosity. I have seen particularly refractory pieces of this material, of a greyish colour, and frequently shot with bright, iridescent hues of blue and green, slowly curling and uncurling themselves as they lay there on the dish, surrounded by a watery mess of vegetables, à l'Anglaise, colourless and sodden. Tortured, reptilian squirmings, ugh!"

Food requests figured prominently in letters to Mother. At times he merely asked for more biscuits, cakes or whatever treats were at hand. Other times he was more creative: "I should think pheasants and sausages will be awfully cheap by next Sunday, don't you?" "I wish I was at home today. But I will eat a jolly big dinner when I do come. Can you send me the cakes you always send me this week as the biscuits have given out at last? I suppose there wouldn't be any mince pies yet that you could put in?"

Strong opinions were not only reserved for food. As long as he lived, Patterson always knew where he stood on a topic. Shortly after arriving at school his political conservatism caused him to state: "In our dormitory 2 chaps snore and 2 are Liberals".

A keen observer, he often described specific fellows. Some became fast friends, older ones he fashioned into role models. Sadly, many of them died in the next few years at battles in the Great War at Gallipoli, Flanders, Suvla Bay, Tiflis, and in many other places in France and in other theatres. "No luck at all", Patterson commented in 1951. A haunting refrain kept appearing in his letters home. Even before the Great War broke out in 1914, his schoolmates were dying in battle. In a letter dated July 5, 1912, he mentions another fellow from the school killed in action. On July 21, another.

During the second year at school he acquired some important skills, such as avoiding needless expenditure of energy. Early each morning the boys ran half a mile. "I used to go as I was in my pyjamas straight out of bed, out to the sea wall and then back to bed again. It saved an awful lot of bother but it has been stopped as, when it had rained in the morning, we used to find our pyjamas still wet at night". Likewise, Patterson and a few others reduced another morning ritual, going to chapel, to its barest essentials. "It was a picturesque sight, the hardier souls from each house going all out, putting on collar and ties as they ran, with Sergeant Shepherd cutting across the line of travel, note book on high. It taught us to sprint and, in its small way, it was adventure".

Whatever else he absorbed in those hallowed halls of learning, Patterson learned the best methods to find and enjoy adventure. It was to stand him in good stead. In later years he sought its rewards everywhere and found them where others encountered only boredom, misery or death. It helped that he often possessed the financial resources to take advantage of opportunities that arose, but the independent spirit of the wanderer and explorer set him apart from many of his generation and financial status.

By 1912, as a fourteen-year-old, Patterson's letters were filled with themes that became common in later years. His extraordinary powers of observation were already at work; school comes alive through his recollections. Once, the Head of the school gave the boys a half-day off to celebrate the arrival of his newborn son. He called it a "Happy Event" but Patterson added: "The extra half was appreciated, but B. E. Craigie voiced boyhood's base ingratitude when he said, 'How much better would have been Twins and a Whole Day'."

Leisure activities were an important part of the curriculum. Besides playing bridge in their rooms, the boys partook in organized sports. For some, Patterson was only an observer. "The boxing was last week. One boy has just come out of the sanatorium. He was knocked out three times, and the last time the other fellow was so exhausted that he fell on top of him". Cricket, however, appealed to the young man and he became a great bowler. His skills as a batsman were also renowned. "I made one of my rare connections with a half volley, and Hunt, on the centre net, stopped it with his skull. I can hear the awful crack now, [1951] and still see that burly figure crumple to the earth". Chasing the ball around the soccer field was not one of Patterson's favourite sports, but in the early years he participated in all aspects of the game. "Feeling between the two Houses ran high over this match, and, in addition to the central combat, a number of subsidiary fights and scufflings broke out amongst the onlookers along the touchlines. The House Brew was a roaring success".

Organized sports aside, his eyes still wandered to the horizon. Three times during his six years at Rossall the weather cleared enough to provide a glimpse of distant mountains on the Isle of Man, seventy miles away. To the young man, trapped in a school yard, they were "an unattainable paradise". For the remainder of his life he retained "a distaste for the lowlands, and a delight in the high alpine places that endures and will never fade".

Patterson's health was not good at school. Although fairly rugged, he caught colds regularly and often found himself in the school sanatorium. "My cough is getting better and that rotten feeling has gone. They are absolute idiots over at the sanatorium, though'they think Corlett and I are shamming, they are so stupid that they can't tell when anything is wrong with you". It is most annoying, when you are ill, to be told you are not by a red-headed lunatic. Cold, cough, sore throat, headache or stomach ache, you get the same medicine for each, and for most other things as well, as Corlett and I have discovered. However, I am better now; how, I don't know, certainly not through the "cure-all" as it is called, the remedy for everything from ear ache to a broken neck".

A letter shortly after his fifteenth birthday described a twenty-mile march called a "field day" in hot weather. Upon arriving at their destination, Patterson threw himself into the river. At a nearby spring he drank until he "nearly burst" and then filled his water bottle with clear, cold water. After gorging on ginger beer from a nearby farm, the boys cooled off by "walking about with wet handkerchiefs on our heads, gasping like fishes".

The same letter mentions another former Rossall student lost in battle. The "field days" were, of course, a euphemism for combat training, an integral part of public school culture. As hostilities increased, marches lengthened and the trench digging became more serious. But luck sometimes smiled on Patterson's house. In late 1913 he wrote: "The field day was pretty decent, they forgot all about us and we lay under a hedge for three hours". His 1951 perspective on this event read, "Some perspiring militarist's brain had gone haywire, and Kingsford's were left to have their sleep in peace".

Not content to hide in the hedge every day, the boys created diversions for themselves. When a big sea washed over the sea wall, the boys got thoroughly drenched playing in the pools. As a result, school officials forbade games by the barrier. "And with that was included the companion sport, rafting about the Sandy Hoy on unfastened agglomerations of driftwood, ships timbers and the like, riding the waves caused by the inrushing sea waters. That was a loss, for we had taken much innocent pleasure in watching Gibson's frantic efforts to hold one of these contraptions together in about five feet of water, and the look on his face as the last two spars parted company and he sank, fully clad, beneath the waves, more than rewarded us for our patience".

During these middle years at Rossall, his personality developed in some unbecoming ways. In addition to requests for food and clothing, obnoxious demands also arose. "Would you put my tweed trousers in the press in what is more or less the right crease?" "Don't forget about any of the things I asked you for and don't send my suit too soon as it will only get in the way. If it comes by next Saturday it will do but not later, perhaps Friday because of the Xmas rush. I am sorry I sent a letter without a stamp but I forgot." Luckily, with time, the take-all attitude moderated.

Patterson was often in trouble. "On Thursday night I got 500 lines from Mr. Kingsford for being caught wrestling in the dormitory." "Being caught" seems to have been the offense, not wrestling. On another occasion he was tardy returning from a brief holiday from the school. "My exeat [leave of absence from school] seemed to unfit me for school. I was late for P.T., got my Latin grammar to say again, and ended up with two hours punishment school for doing an essay while that ass, Mr. Sykes, was talking about Poland. I thought he was such a fool that he couldn't see what I was doing. It seems I was mistaken".

Horsing around is common enough in boarding school but part of the game is to avoid getting caught. "Gibson and I are exiles from the house-room since last Sunday. A. B. K. [Housemaster Kingsford] kicked us out. After chapel we were fighting in there and I put Gibson on the floor and piled some rugs, heavy books, six chairs and a small table on him meaning to leave him there till prep. I was just arranging the last chair when in came A. B. K. and snorted at me, 'Who is under there?' Then he said, 'Get out whoever you are.' Gibson thought he could not be seen so he lay still and tried to look like a pile of furniture, but alas his great beastly feet were sticking out into the fire place and he was caught and I had to undo him in a dead silence and help him up and get out. And we are out still".

By 1915 the dark cloud of war overshadowed schooling. In January, while playing hockey, the boys heard the deep rumble of explosions nearby. "Of course we didn't stop as we could do nothing." It turned out to be German submarines sinking ships on the Irish Sea. The hockey game continued.

The boys increasingly found their non-scholastic hours occupied with preparation for trench warfare. Once Patterson forced his housemates into a hard four mile run, "rather fun especially as they thought they were only going to the End of the Lane". Three days later he wrote that he and another lad skipped out of a run by dodging off into a hay stack and hiding while the others finished the run. Much to their surprise, they found fresh eggs in their hideaway and smuggled them into the house, a rare and expensive treat during the war. In 1951 he mused: "It wasn't that we couldn't run seven miles, it was rather that the feat of 'cutting out,' with the attendant difficulty of getting back to Rossall, especially when hampered by a load of eggs, plus the risk of a monitor's caning, had an irresistible appeal".

He was not always so lucky. Later that year, he was promoted to the rank of corporal. "To celebrate that, we had another awful route march on Tuesday on packed snow and ice, I have never been so tired since I came here." Although all were in good condition, their leader, a man they called Pup, forced the pace while wearing a pair of well nailed mountaineering boots. The boys, meanwhile, struggled to keep up in their smooth bottomed army boots, carrying greatcoats and rifles. "I must say the action of walking tautly braced so far over the ice, sought out coy and hidden muscles which, so far as I was concerned, had hitherto lived in retirement and complete seclusion." Digging trenches added another dimension to the torture. By some stroke of genius, Patterson landed the job of field cook. "Corlett was jealous and said it was wonderful how near I always got to any food".

In March he joined another fellow in a mud bath. Years later he remembered the details: "That was Gibson, and the occasion of this disaster was some manoeuvres in the direction of Larkholme Farm. The performance dragged its incomprehensible way towards a close, and at long last came the order to charge. Glad of any diversion, the two of us tore off with well simulated zeal and, yelling like Apaches, topped a low dike and jumped. The tune changed swiftly when we saw, all too late, what awaited us, bubbling, manurial slime with a fine, healthy green scum overlaying its surface, a specialty of those lowlands of the Fylde".

"The rest of the House Squad, Platoon" had got sedately and soberly off the mark, as was its custom, just fast enough to escape The Pup's eye, and not one jot more, and consequently had a grandstand seat for the show. They started talking about skunks, and begged us to get to leeward of them; they held their noses and made other rude gestures; and the more erudite, who happened to be 'doing' Macbeth that term, fell to misquoting the more apposite sayings from the sleep-walking scene of that play: "All the perfumes of Arabia", they said, and "Out damned spot", and much more of that sort, making a great parade of their poor wit. That little affair took some living down, in more senses than one."

His seventeenth birthday found him digging trenches regularly. "By now the Corps was well in the saddle, and, if I may be permitted to confuse horse and rider, feeling its oats. No longer could we call our souls our own, and every spare moment of the day was devoted to the study of some already obsolete weapon, or to instruction in Boer War tactics".

On the first day of August 1915, the young men were at Barnacre Camp, Garstang. Wrapping blankets over their clothes, they slept as best they could in the open on Beacon Fell, 900 feet above sea level. He later recalled the weather as "beastly cold, and the night was showery into the bargain". We bivouacked in a big upland pasture, and six of us lay down in a row for mutual warmth and protection. I slept: the others, apparently, tossed about restlessly, getting colder and colder, and finally, after a few periods of nightmarish unconsciousness, gave it up as a bad job and wandered around in the grey light of dawn, trying to get a bit of warmth into themselves. As each one departed he chucked his blanket over me and I slept on, warm and comfortable under this extra covering.

"I was finally aroused by the groans and curses of a vast suffering going on all around me, and especially by a strange voice from another House saying 'My God! Don't tell me somebody can still sleep in this devilish place!'

I sat up and looked about for the others. There they were, not far away, in a little hollow and strangely occupied. They had met with a most unusually placid and good-tempered cow and were leaning against her, Powell and Parry on one side, and Goodwin, Howl and Gaulter on the other, warming themselves against her body while the gentle beast relaxed, as all cattle do, in the first rays of the morning sun".

Perhaps as a result of this training, Patterson decided to enlist for the war. Late in 1915 he wrote a very excited and forceful letter home, informing Mother and Uncle of his plans. "I suppose you are aware that I intend to join the army as soon as I am eighteen and I am jolly glad conscription is coming because now you and uncle can't keep me out if you do want to and I am working hard to try and get a scholarship for Oxford so that I can leave and go and if you think you are doing me a kindness you aren't because I'm not going to be laughed at all my life and Roberts is doing just the same, he is going to try soon. All my friends have gone except P, and he ought to, so you must make up your mind to it".

In latter years he explained this outburst of youthful exuberance. With training behind them and daily accounts of the action on the front lines, the fearless young men were determined to get into the trenches before the Great War was over and their chance at glory disappeared.

Onto this headstrong young man the school bestowed a leadership role shortly before his seventeenth birthday. "I am a house monitor, now that Corlett has gone, and have the dormitory that I was in my first term to look after, and fags and all that sort of thing. I think as I am a monitor I had better have my grey suit to go home in, but I will let you know later". A preoccupation with clothing and physical appearance made itself conspicuous in his letters once he achieved status in the house.

Along with duties as a monitor came the opportunity to do unto others as had been done unto him. "I gave four chaps, 100 lines each yesterday for throwing bread about, and I made them do them out of the book that Chamier gave me my first lines from." C. K. Chamier, Head of the House when Patterson arrived in 1911, was killed in action in France on April 24th, 1914.

As commodities in England grew scarce, authorities began rationing water. For their part, school officials removed the handles from the shower spindles. First among equals, Patterson used pliers as a handle and continued showering as before. Creative he might have been, but all such things are eventually revealed. A few weeks later his letter home complained: "Now when they have come to put handles on again they found the thread of the screws worn away and so we were found out and nine of us have to pay for new spindles and have been stopped pocket money, brewing, the tuck shop and the house room for today (Saturday) so I think I had better keep the War Loan interest. I am writing letters as I have nothing else to do with all this [time]. What it comes to is that the nine cleanest boys in the house have been punished for washing. (I was one of them.)" By 1951 his attitude toward the incident had changed and he added: "Punished for washing? or for being completely irresponsible?"

Undoubtedly, Housemaster A. B. Kingsford of the Maltese Cross House doled out suitable punishment to the nine young men, including the newly appointed house monitor. In the years to come Patterson continued in positions of responsibility even though he often found himself in the wrong. Kingsford was the same man who looked in on him in his first days at school and found him brewing alone. With a smile and a word of encouragement, he helped young Raymond through a lonely moment. As a result, Patterson dedicated the edited version of his letters home to Kingsford in 1951.

Without a father, young Patterson took a liking to Kingsford and told Mother he didn't "intend to do anything mad beyond what is prompted by a natural disposition to kick up a row or tumult, and hideous luck in smashing things which A. B. K. must have got used to by now". Patterson was nearly caught several times. In November, 1915, "Mr. Kingsford came upstairs about eleven p.m. when I was still fully dressed, and I had to rush into bed as I was and with my boots on while a loyal dormitory snored loudly". Patterson was not only quick, he had trained his unruly house to protect his skin.

The war continued to affect their lives. They perused the morning papers daily, often finding there the name of a friend or of someone we had known. With the typical bravado of youth, Patterson counselled Mother to ignore the bombing raids that the Zeppelins mounted over her house and stay in her warm bed rather than shiver in the cellar.

In a way, life was just an adventure for the boys. In June 1916, four of them were nearly swept out to sea. "About midnight on Friday night I and three others got out of our bedroom window in the sick house and tore down the seafront and over the links and race course in pyjamas. We took a boat out on the Esk by moonlight, and came back at two a.m. with a couple of policeman after us, running heavily, I have never enjoyed myself so much".

The rest of the story came out in 1951. "The boat episode on the Esk very nearly gave us more than we bargained for: either the river was still in semi-flood, or else a strong ebb tide was running, I forget which, and for a time we seemed to be headed for the open waters of the Firth of Forth and, for all we knew, the North Sea".

"But we made it back upstream by rowing like galley slaves and making use of the shore eddies, and it was then, as we urged the bateau towards the boathouse with an old French Canadian voyageur song that I had picked up, J'ai du bon tabac dans ma tabatière, that we attracted the attention of two solid Caledonian coppers. I suppose that in the flush of victory we were kicking up rather a row!"

"We disposed of them by making a feint landing, then landed and ran for it. Lumbering along in their heavy boots they never had a chance against four boys in perfect condition and burdened only with pyjamas, sweaters and gym shoes. Silently we drew ahead and vanished into the shadow of the trees."

That fall Patterson returned to school with a minor cold. During a house run, he took the boys along the ocean. Hijinks followed and they returned soaking wet. In 1951 he recalled that "“taking the House into the sea in the last days of a very cold September did not prove to be, oddly enough, the completest cure for a cold".

It was not as though he went swimming intentionally in the cold Atlantic that blustery day. Patterson was in the habit of taking the House for a run and bringing along hockey sticks and a ball to use on the frozen ponds. Inevitably someone knocked the ball into the surf and the boys followed, thrashing their sticks, missing the ball and soaking each other. Some food treat was the reward for the one who proved lucky enough to actually bash the ball out of the surf.

Upon returning to school, Patterson found his shirt-sleeves frozen solid. With a stiff upper lip, he refused to admit that his cold was getting worse until Kingsford ordered him to sit by the fire. There, he shivered under a mountain of blankets. When he refused tea, Kingsford became alarmed and dispatched him to the sanatorium. And none too soon. Patterson developed double pneumonia and pleurisy. As his temperature soared past 106° Fahrenheit, a host of new friends and strange apparitions entered his room and did acrobatic tricks beside his bed, culminating in a fantastic disappearing act through the ceiling. Mother arrived to console her delirious son. At his bedside stood oxygen cylinders. When all treatments failed, the whole school took the unprecedented measure of praying for Patterson in Chapel. (Four years later, he used the story of this experience to win a tall tales contest and convince his fellow contestant to pay for tea.) Because of, or perhaps in the face of this last remedy, the thin young man survived.

He returned from death's door a changed person. While bedridden, Patterson read every Jack London book Mother could find. "They fascinated me, those stories of the North, and I made up my mind that I, too, would hunt and drive my dogs in that blank space on the map, the Yukon-Mackenzie Divide".

The pneumonia excused Patterson from participation in sports. "This was probably just as well, as I only had a month remaining in which to set my brain in some sort of order for my scholarship exam at Oxford. But it was a peculiar kind of existence, in the school, but hardly of it, and free from so many of its rules that one hardly felt like bothering to keep the rest of them".

C. S. Lewis also sat the Oxford entrance exam that December 1916 in the Hall of Oriel. Hundreds of hopefuls swarmed into the university town, shivering as they considered the consequences of failure. Low temperatures added to that chill. The young men, huddled in greatcoats, mufflers and gloves, wrote until their arms ached, then returned home to await the results.

Patterson's force-fed brain rose to the challenge. The exams went well enough, though they were harder than he expected. He didn't hold out much hope for a scholarship. To relieve the tension, he visited a Canadian aunt and uncle in London. Vast quantities of food and two theatre tickets each day distracted him from the inevitable consequences of the Oxford test results. Luck visited him again, though, and a telegram brought good news of acceptance into St. John's College at Oxford and an 'exhibition', a junior prize of sixty pounds. Suddenly, Patterson was a scholar with a bright future.

After Christmas holidays he returned to a most unusual term at Rossall, almost a respite between storms. Sitting in front of a blazing fire, Patterson and his chums wiled away the hours with quiet games of chess. Academically he did "more or less the same work as last term so I see no need for me to overwork myself". Decades later he reminisced, "My particular case was aggravated by the fact that nobody really cared what I did, or did not, do. I had won my exhibition at St. John's, and that was that as far as Rossall was concerned. All I had to do was to make complete my recovery from pneumonia, and await my summons to a cadet unit, so I see no need to overwork myself".

During that last term he took on a position as an editor of the school newspaper. "I have to write the editorial for The Rossallian and do the school news, and I also go to Fleetwood fairly often to see the printers, of the three Editors I have the best job".

Part of his personal preparations for the army involved picking a skill to hone. He became a bombing specialist since it seemed a safe occupation. In retrospect, he said it also "relieved the monotony of corps work and provided me with a military use for my one accomplishment, heaving things where they belonged".

A stunt just before his nineteenth birthday landed him in virtual house arrest. "The four of us are gated and can't go to the tuck as, on Sunday, we hired an awful old growler and drove round and round the square in it, and then up to Big School door just before roll call. Half the school was there, yelling with laughter and cheering,the cabby of course couldn't see anything particularly comic in his old horse and hearse, he went wild with fury and swiped around with his whip. The Head had me up. I pointed out that there was nothing in the rule book against taking a cab to roll call and he said it was difficult to make rules that would cover all emergencies, there was also no rule in it against murdering your form master, but one shouldn't do so simply on that account".

Such was the unprecedented nature of the event that it became part of the school mythology. "This effort was known, I was told, for some years after we had all departed, as 'The Cab Turn,' and no doubt lost nothing in the telling. We had found the old cabby washing down his dreadful vehicle in some yard or other near Cleveleys, and were so fascinated by the tatterdemalion aspect of the pair of them that we promptly hired them both."

"The Head undoubtedly had reason on his side, and even he, he admitted to me, had watched from behind his curtains and laughed. Otherwise, official Rossall made no comment: after all, they would be rid of us in a month's time forever. Only Mr. Gibson (housemaster of Pelican) over a friendly coffee and biscuit, said his little say: 'If you had arrived in a taxi, it would have been merely vulgar. But to find a thing like that, and then to conceive the idea of driving up to roll call in it, that is Great Art!'"

By April Patterson was gone from Rossall and in training for the artillery. "I said goodbye to Mr. Kingsford and to some of the other masters, and was not very sorry to leave, as I was getting a bit tired of it all. I got the history prize as I promised you, but only got second prize this year in the cricket ball with a throw of 92 yards. I won it last year with a much longer throw, must be still feeling that go of double pneumonia. On the whole, it has been a good six years".

Patterson always remembered Rossall fondly. He later claimed it had provided "an education that enabled us to appreciate beauty in nature, and in man-made things. These things we carried away, each according to his nature and individual tastes, together with a memory of certain masters who showed us the way to live like men, and in the forefront of these I, for my own part, would place A. B. K."

Learning to be a man was important to Patterson. Without a father to act as a guide or a foil, he looked to his grandfather, his uncle and the older boys and the masters at Rossall. His grandfather and uncle taught him to value craftsmanship. The system at Rossall taught him to survive institutional life and instilled in him many British middle-class values and a loyalty to the Empire. His instructors honed his intellect and spurred him on to higher learning by preparing him for the Oxford exams.

As a result, by 1918 Patterson was beginning to meld these disparate influences into a unique identity. Passing the entrance examination for Oxford before setting off to war assured Mother he would find a proper place in British society when or if he returned from battle. His career as an artillery officer would allow him to share his quixotic father's wanderlust, this inherited trait conveniently disguised as patriotism. Going overseas would also give him a chance to become an adventurer and a man of mystery like his father. Only time would tell if he would be able to balance his parents' competing expectations and create a place for himself in a changing world.