Gilbert Reid

Gilbert Reid, television and radio writer, fluent in French and Italian, worked for 30 years in Europe. His fiction, praised by Joyce Carol Oates and others, covers a vast range - love and war, childhood and decrepitude. Here is his story "I was born in Toronto, Canada, during the Second World War, women in kerchiefs, Rosie the Riveter, rationing, flags, soldiers, big bands, war talk. After the war, we moved, mother, father, and tiny me, to a farm near an itsy-bitsy Ontario village, Kleinburg. I grew up listening to the wind and the lonely sound of transcontinental trains in the far distance, staring at the vast flat western horizon, with the smell of hay, wheat, the rustling of corn, the smell too of manure, of cows, of raw, freshly plowed land, of chickens, pigs, and horses. Age five, I was dragooned with other tiny tots into a dilapidated little red schoolhouse with an outhouse for a toilet - one long board with holes in it as I remember it - one fat disheveled marvel of a schoolmarm reigning over eight snot-rag classes squished into one sweaty semi-heated room. It was glorious! Swimming holes, dogs, endless woods. I went to three different high schools as the city, like a giant amoeba spread its postwar suburban tentacles towards us. At the University of Toronto, I studied economics and political science (wanted to be a politician - was quickly disabused of that idea!). I joined the Canadian foreign service, studied at the London School of Economics - all about the money supply and interest rates and so on - and worked at the Canadian High Commission - our Embassy - in London, before heading off to be a bum - a clochard - in Paris for a year or two, study at Sciences Po, wander the streets, read Proust, Flaubert, Balzac. I worked as an economist at the OECD and suddenly earned lots of money paid to me in fistfuls of French francs. I got drunk with cash. This was Paris in the 1960s, a magical place, like Swinging London across the Channel, with Existentialists, and Beatniks, philosophers, writers, poets and chansonniers lurking everywhere, cigarettes dangling from their lips, and the war hero General Charles de Gaulle ruling over everything from the Élysée Palace like an amused, paternal, lofty father figure. All this came crashing down with the massive student revolt - and then workers' strikes - of May-June 1968. I had decamped to a rustic Jacobean thatch-roofed cottage in a tiny English village - Whittlesford - near Cambridge where I studied English literature - the cottage came equipped with friends, male and female, and a dog called Heidegger. Conveniently, the cottage was situated just a few rustic steps, down a little lane, from a disreputable but chic pub called the Tickell Arms, still a landmark. Then I lived in London for two years, Birkbeck College, pretended to do a Ph.D. - on the French novels of Samuel Beckett - I think I was suicidal to choose such a subject - angst was fashionable. I dropped out and mooched around with my very patient English girlfriend. Then, she saw an ad in the paper - and I headed off for Sicily where I ended up living for 6 years in a half-ruined ancient farmhouse, with a large walled garden on a promontory, overlooking the Strait of Messina and battered by sand-filled winds from the Sahara, and teaching English and literature at the University of Messina. This led to a gig in the film and festival business. So, I worked in Taormina, in Sorrento, in Naples, in Spoleto, and in Cine Città, Rome's glamorous film studio, toiled with stars like Marcello Mastroianni and directors like Sergio Leone. Then, I got a job as Press Officer at the Canadian Embassy, and then, after going private again - in film PR - I set up, with Elena Solari, the Canadian Cultural Center in Rome. For eleven years, that was my gig, then, in 1994, I came back to Canada and began to work for a living, doing radio, TV, and fiction."