Flying Colours: The Toni Onley Story

Chapter 2: The Isle of Man

     I came to Canada from the Isle of Man, a tiny British dependency in the Irish Sea, only 32 1/2 miles long and 11 1/2 miles wide. At the island’s highest point, the top of Mt. Snaefel, 2036 feet high, you could see six kingdoms: the Isle of Man, of course, the kingdom of Wales to the south, England in the east, Scotland to the north and if you looked to the west, Northern Ireland. That was five. They said the sixth kingdom was overhead: “The Kingdom of Heaven.”
     The island had a thousand-year old outdoor parliament, the “Tynwald,” created by Danish invaders with names like Magnus the Barefoot, Sigurd the Stout, and Olaf the Dwarf. They gathered clods of earth from each of the island’s parishes and stacked the turf into four enormous tiers, like a big sod wedding cake and they called the spot "Tynwald Hill." To this day, every July 5th, the Manx Government meets there, albeit ceremonially now, to proclaim the new laws of the community.
     Due to the island’s long history, the past loomed very large in our lives. Our family stories often began with my mother’s side and Grandfather Lord was a tight-fisted Yorkshireman with a walrus moustache who married into a greenhouse business. He thought an enormous, weathered dolmen, a gravestone that had rested on the property since a Bronze Age burial, hindered his threshing crew. He took a team of horses and two or three hired men and hauled it to a corner of the field. That night, a gale smashed the glass panes in the greenhouse and ruined two fields of vegetables. Things kept happening. Two cows were found dead. Miller, the hired hand, fell off a stone hedge and broke his leg. As my grandfather rode past in his carriage, the old lady in the cottage down the road from the farm warned him: "You'll never know any peace on that place of yours, Willie Lord, ‘til you put that stone back." Grandfather Lord quickly had the stone replaced. As far as I know, his luck turned.

     Many years after we’d left the island, I remember talking to my parents about my childhood there. "Oh, boy, do I remember!” My mother recounted the whole story of her labour and how my father couldn't get a cab so she had to walk all the way to the Jane Crookall Maternity Home in the middle of the night and that it was half a mile to get there and she felt certain she would go into labour on the way and then they met the town undertaker carrying a child's coffin on his head that he was delivering to some poor unfortunate family which surely was a terribly bad omen --
     “Toni, let me put the record straight.” My father interrupted. "You were born at three o'clock, Tuesday afternoon, November 20th, 1928 in the town of Douglas on the Isle of Man.” He wagged his finger. “And let me tell you, we wasted our bloody time waiting for you. I stayed up all Monday night. Naturally, so did your mother. When I tried to get your mother to the hospital, the car wouldn't start. We couldn't get a cab so we had to walk there. But it was only three blocks. When we got to the hospital, your mother's labour stopped.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what happened. You must have taken the day off, Toni, because you weren’t born until Tuesday morning.” He crossed his arms. "Hold on a minute.” He turned to my mother. "Flo, what time was Toni born? Was it in the morning or the afternoon?"
     “It was the afternoon, Jim,” she said.
     He shook his head. “It had to be the morning.”
     One remark led to another. My mother retreated into the kitchen. My father followed her. Soon I could hear them squabbling in the other room. At last, my father emerged from the doorway and he dropped into a chair. "Toni, you were born at two-thirty in the afternoon."
     "You're sure about that?"
     "Two-thirty p.m.," he repeated. "You never forget your firstborn. Yes, I remember the day very well.”
     “Tuesday afternoon, I went back to the Maternity Home. Big Ella McClellan -- the Head Nurse told me, ‘Mr. Onley, you have a son. Come and take a look at him.’ There were eight babies in the room. I asked her, ‘Which one is he?’ Instead of telling me, Ella flipped over the name cards on the babies’ cribs and told me to find you. Florence had curly blonde hair so I picked up a fat blonde baby.
     “‘It's amazing,’ said Ella. ‘You fathers never miss. It must be instinct.’ I rushed to Florence’s room. She sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Who’s that?’ I had just given her this Norwegian kid. I hurried back to the nursery. The other nurses were in on the joke and they all laughed at me.
     “Finally, the Head Nurse pointed you out, Toni. I could hardly believe it. You had this tiny, squished-up face, and tapered black sideburns. Ella McClellan said you looked like a bloody Italian. She shook her head. ‘You'll have to call him “Toni.”’ I said, ‘That's all right, it’s my middle name -- James Anthony Onley.”’ She clapped her hands. ‘Right then, it's “Toni Onley.” Now take him to his mother for a feed.’”

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