Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 40, part one: The Soldier Who Came Home Alive.

  The Soldier Who Came Home Alive by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


         On warm summer mornings in the late 1960"s, Lenny Soames would often come to Vancouver's English Bay. He came with his attractive dark haired wife and their baby girl. As the day heated up, Lenny would lie on  a blanket in the sand gazing out to sea. Then when the clock hit midday, he would get up and run for half an hour or so around the sea wall or jog into Stanley Park.
     When his run was finished, he would come back to lie beside his wife and child. "It's a lovely day," this very short, incredibly muscular man would often say.
     His wife Aviva often didn't always agree. Lenny Soames was often out of work and then the whole Soames family would end up at the welfare office.  Mrs. Soames didn't like going down to the welfare office at all. "They ask you all sorts of questions," this 20's something woman would complain. "And then they give you a pittance to live on. Lenny doesn't mind living on welfare but I hate it."
     It keeps us alive," Lenny Soames would say." It'll do until I find a job."
     "You can't keep any job you get,' his wife would say. "That's your trouble." Then the two of them  would end up squabbling. To be fair to Lenny Soames, once his daughter came along, he did stop losing or leaving one job after another. Still, Aviva couldn't forget the times he just got up and quit a job.
      Lenny Soames met Aviva Rapaport on a dance floor in Vancouver.  He was one tough guy who grew up in the streets of Toronto. "A sanctimonious icebox," the visual artist and writer Wyndham Lewis once called Toronto. Others referred to it as "Hogtown'. Regardless of its nicknames, or the slighting references to it, Toronto then and now was and is Canada's largest city. It was where the big banks and large industrial firms had their head offices. For a times it was also home to fanatical Irish Canadian Protestants who loathed Catholics, especially the ones in Quebec.
      "I hated it there," Lenny Soames would say in his later life. His father was a warehouseman who worked hard and drank hard. His mother was a no-nonsense housewife who had four children to look after on her husband's modest wages. The family lived not far from where Morley Callaghan set his Toronto novels. Lenny Soames dropped out of school at the age of 15. "Never did me any good," he said about his school days. Like many others who didn't like the education business, he forgot that it was in schools where teachers  taught him how to read, write and do some mathematics.
     Now he was on the loose, a tough sometimes wild teenager who may have been heading for jail. Yet then up popped the Korean War. It  changed  his life.