| A Certain Girl |
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A Cold War Childhood
| Author: | Ann Diamond |  |
| Rights sold: | foreign rights available in all languages | |
| Genre: | Novel | |
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| Editor: | Book not published yet | |
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Summary |
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Spring, 1956 On a day in the spring of 1956, my parents dressed my brother and me in brand new outfits, my mother put on makeup and her camel-hair coat, and we all went for a drive in the countryside near Montreal. We took along our puppy, Smokey, wrapped in a blanket in case he peed on the seats of our new car. Not long before, my father had agreed to enroll me in a special program, whose directors were very interested in bright little girls like me. Our country drive took us along winding, tree-lined roads, and I do remember getting out of the car to have our picture taken. In the photographs my father took that day, my brother wears a happy, trusting expression for the camera, whereas I am squinting as if they were dragging me off to the dentist, instead of going on a pleasant drive through the country. I am wearing a matching coat and hat, and holding into my puppy, Smokey, for dear life. I have kept the photos, one showing my mother standing next to the car, holding her hair away from her forehead, because it is blowing in the wind. She is smiling, as if this were a particularly auspicious day in our lives. We look prosperous and successful: a middle class family out for a Sunday drive. The question arises: why are we so dressed up, if we are not visiting someone special? Why are we pausing, in mid-route, to memorialize this occasion? After the smiling, and showing off our new-looking outfits, we must have piled back into the car, and continued to drive down the picturesque road. I remember the tree branches meeting overhead, forming a leafy tunnel beckoning us onward. Am I feeling restless, uneasy? Is that why I memorized that stretch of road? Did I want it not to end, so that we might go on driving, in our nice, slightly formal clothes, in a state of suspended expectation? In the back seat I pray that we never arrive. I drift into a hypnotic state, in which God hears me and floods our car with bright white light and as I start to doze off I feel us being lifted high in the air. And after that I remember nothing more of what happened, or when we turned around, or how we got home. When I bring back this memory, I see the scene as if looking down from above, peering through the roof at the tops of our heads. We're all wearing hats. Why is that? Perhaps people wore them in 1956, for special occasions, or for protection. To prevent their memories from exiting, spiraling upward, into infinity. I still believe it is possible to avoid the traps laid out for us, by ascending. A high school music teacher, 54 years old, and his 44-year-old French Canadian wife, take their twin children, age 5, on a country drive in 1956. The twins look nothing alike. The girl is tall and blonde; the boy smaller, with dark hair and eyes. They are fraternal twins, originating from separate eggs, born five minutes apart. Their grandmother, who is known for having "second sight", believes them to be special. She likes the boy, but not the girl. And someone else is very interested in them. The car turns off the two-lane highway and down a narrow road. At the end of the drive, they pass through a gate, which stands in front of a nondescript white building. My father says, "Well, we're here." My mother seems slightly disoriented, as if she doesn't realize we have arrived. "Are you sure -- " she says, vaguely, and twists around to check her children in the back seat, who are looking out the window. My father checks in the rear-view mirror, to make sure he looks as confident as he is trying to sound. "I told you," says my father. "The people in that building are scientists. Tops in their field." He is convinced he is doing the right thing - for himself, his family, and his country. Still, his throat feels a little tight. My mother says, "Look over there." Another car is parked in this driveway, about 50 feet away. Inside sits a family: father, mother, and three children. Two boys and a girl. All three of the children are blond. "Well, well. I guess we're not the only ones," says my father. For a few moments, no one moves. The two families watch one another, from their cars. My mother is having trouble focusing on these unfamiliar surroundings. The scenery begins to blur as she contemplates the box-like structure half-hidden behind alders and birches. She felt better yesterday, visiting the new bungalow in the housing development. All that was missing was wall-to-wall carpeting, and the down payment. After a pause, my father opens the glove compartment and takes out the camera, for one last picture. He gets out of the car, and opens the backseat door. "Okay, kids. Time to stretch your legs! Leave the dog here. I said, leave him in the car!" Steven sat in the back seat with his brother and sister, directly behind the man he knew as his father. They sat all together in the 1949 black Ford, shipped by boat over the Atlantic from Germany that same year. A young family. Father, mother in the front seat. Three kids in the back. They had just driven from Massachusetts north through the Adirondacks, and across the border into Canada, a full day's drive. They were now about 40 km south of Montreal. The northern landscape seemed bare and sparse compared to what they were used to, but the last stretch of road had been tree-lined. Picturesque. And they were parked on a gravel driveway leading up to the first of two small white one-story buildings, military structures of plywood and aluminum. A little further up the gravel drive, and nearly out of sight behind some trees, was a second building. This one was for electronic warfare experiments but the boy would learn that only later when he was older and they put him in one of those, too. The blue 4-door Ford Zephyr was parked a little ahead of them and had Quebec license plates. The man who had just got out of the driver's side wore a hat - the kind Dick Tracy wore in the comics the boy liked to read in the Sunday paper. The man looked to be in his early 50s - old for a dad with two small kids. His wife, on the passenger side, also seemed older than Steven's parents. Steven watched as, one by one this Canadian family piled out of the car, blinking and shading their eyes from the bright sunlight. The woman was tall and wore a camel hair coat which was unbuttoned. The two children, a boy and a girl, were dressed as if for some special occasion, like a church social. The girl, who was taller than her fraternal twin, had a wide brimmed beret pulled down over her blonde wavy curls. The boy had on a little black cap and a neat jacket, with matching short pants. Steven thought they looked formal, as if trying to make an impression on the men inside the building. He watched as the other father took out an old box camera, aiming it at the boy and girl. In her arms, the girl held a puppy, the same colour as her hair and all wrapped up in a blanket. The wind tore at their clothes, the woman was holding back her long grey hair as she lined up the children, the girl on the left, the boy slightly behind on the right. The father took a few snapshots. Then he reached for the dog but the little girl shook her head and backed away from him. The father pointed to the ground and demanded she put down the puppy. The girl held on tighter, stamped her foot and started to cry. The father gestured at the mother who grabbed the puppy and tried to pry it away from the girl. The girl held on tight, until her hat got knocked off and rolled away down the gravel road like tumbleweed in a cowboy movie. Steven could hear her screaming, "I want my puppy!" as the father wrestled the puppy and the camera back into the car. The mother bent down and picked up the hat and pulled it down over her daughter's hair, now hopelessly tangled. Then they all began walking -- father and son ahead, mother behind with the girl -- heads bowed against the wind as they headed for the front door of the small white building, stuck in the middle of nowhere, on a deserted road some Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1956. Steven watched it all from the back seat window, where his family waited. It seemed his father had enjoyed the little show they had all just witnessed. He even chuckled when the little girl had her dog taken away. They were a family, passing the time before their appointment. It was pleasant to sit inside a nice warm car, out of the cold, Canadian wind, and to know that other families also had their angry, embarrassing moments. It was funny when the girl's hat fell off, but Steven had been secretly hoping she would get to keep the puppy. He'd been rooting for her, even though he'd never seen her before in his life. When the appointed time arrived, and his father opened the car door and ordered them all out, Steven was feeling apprehensive. He made a promise to himself. "I will remember all this. Every detail of everything that happens on this day, and ever after." What happened next? Inside the building, the two families sat down together in the reception area: four parents, and their five kids. The children sat in silence, sizing one another up while our parents exchanged the usual pleasantries. Nice weather, colder here in Canada, lovely scenery on the way up. Where they were from, places they'd been. The younger dad was friendly and gregarious compared to the older man. He spoke with a slight accent. But it was 1956 and nobody minded German accents any more. The war was a long time ago. Then two men in white jackets came out and shook hands with the dads. They greeted the mothers politely and welcomed everyone to the program. They turned to the children and in friendly fashion said, "You're in for quite a day." Steven was an Air Force brat who had grown up on US military bases in Germany. He and his family had just come from overseas to Massachusetts, the site of much classified research that was being done to "beat the Russians." This was his first, but not his last, visit to the base. It was also not the family's only stop on this trip. The following day, they would drive the short distance to a hospital high on a hill in the middle of the city. The doctor they would be seeing there was a world-famous psychiatrist. My parents would have talked about that in the car, as they drove away that day, having left us in the competent hands of the scientists. I can imagine my father turning to my mother. "Interesting fella, back there in the waiting room. Did you notice he had a slight accent?" He was talking about Steven's father, not the men in white jackets. My mother, lost in her own thoughts, answering, "Not really." And my dad pursuing his thought. "Well, it sounded German to me." My mother's own accent was French Canadian, more pronounced when she was upset. "I didn't like him at all." Sensing an argument, my father continued on an optimistic note: "Struck me as an intelligent man, though. Not all Germans are bad." Then, after a pause: "Hey, I wonder if he's not one of those Jewish DPs. They can sometimes sound like Germans." My father was thinking of the man he had met the other day, when we all went to look at our new house in the suburbs. Our soon to be new neighbor, Mr. Adler, had been working in the yard next door, and came over to introduce himself. When he held out his hand, my father had got a glimpse of the number on his wrist. Adler seemed a nervous, irritable person, not at all charming like the fellow back there on that base. As he and my mother drove, my father was deep in thought. There were rumours that he had heard about a doctor in Alberta, who was involved in some kind of Air Force research out there. In the war, his job had been to follow up rumours, after all - rumours of Nazi spies operating secretly on our own soil. That work had brought him to Quebec, back in 1943, and to my mother's door. At the time she'd been renting rooms on a small street near McGill University. Rumours were one thing in war, but this was peacetime. He had heard the Alberta doctor's name was "Armstrong" - and it was said he was an immigrant, and the brains behind the whole program, right across the country. So this was not just some local affair - this was something big, involving national security and some of the brightest minds in science. As he watched the road ahead, my father thought he could see a future, though at the moment it seemed hidden behind a fog. My mother was still lost in her thoughts, mixed with fears and misgivings. She was wondering what her children were doing at that moment, back inside that ugly building. She hoped her children were behaving well, and not getting too over-excited. It was twenty minutes into the first game and the children were seated at their desks. A man in a lab coat stood at the front holding a pack of playing cards in one hand. With the other, he held up one after another, but all the children could see was the back of each card. "What's on the front of this card? Close your eyes and draw what you see." The children all had pencils and pads of paper, and knew they were supposed to draw whatever they thought was on the front of the card. Another scientist walked between the desks, encouraging the children. "Don't think too hard, now! Just close your eyes and draw whatever you see on the front of the card." Twenty minutes into the card game, the girl had not drawn anything. She sat on her chair, hunched over, staring down at her desk. "What's the matter?" asked the white-jacketed man coming up behind her. The little girl kept her head down and peeked at the man's dark trousers out of the corner of her eye. "In this classroom, we don't waste time," said the man. "We do what we're told." "I want my puppy," mumbled the girl, suppressing a sob. The two men looked at each other. The one at the front nodded. His partner grabbed the girl and covered her mouth with his hand. He half-marched, half-dragged her through a door to an adjacent room. When they were alone, he removed his glasses, placed them carefully inside his breast pocket, grabbed her by her unruly hair and began to beat her savagely. After that, and other events that followed, the little girl promised herself she would forget everything that happened in that room, and on that base, and everything connected with those experiments, for as long as she lived. She dissociated herself from everything they did to her that day, and in the course of the next several years. Except for one memory, which she kept safe and intact - and repeated to herself night after night, when she lay in her own bed, listening to her parents arguing or watching TV in the living room. A memory of a place, deep underground, where she had been, with other children, and where things happened that were beyond what a five-year-old could tell. So she never told. And never again did she complain to the men in white jackets about missing her puppy. Later that evening, the parents returned. The man with wire-rimmed glasses welcomed them back politely, and asked them to sit down. My parents sat, still in their coats, as it was springtime and there was a chill in the air. "How did it go?" asks my father. "Extremely well," says the man. "We're very pleased with both of them. Especially your daughter." My mother looks worried. "What about Sandy?" she asks. "Oh, he did very well, too." My parents look at each other, and at their two children, asleep on a nearby couch. "Your daughter, Anne, learns very fast. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of her in future." Later I retained some floating images of that day -- the tree-lined road and the shadows of leaves on our windshield as we drove to the military base, a place we did not really belong, that we might never come back from. But not of driving home that night, curled up in the back seat with my brother, my cheek against the sticky plastic seat covers, while my parents sat in silence up front. At age five, I had a job helping my family and my country. I was also, by then, a veteran of an indescribable underworld. In that world on the base, and in other secret locations, I was part of a secret military experiment, in which groups of children were subjected to a range of tests, both psychological and physical. These tests were designed to measure intelligence, stamina, and other special abilities. Such as extra-sensory perception, or ESP. I had been in the program since the winter of 1954-55, since my bout of pneumonia had landed me in the secret LSD project involving small children at the Allan Memorial, under the supervision of a famous doctor, a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Mason and former head of the New York Psychiatric Institute. From the age of 3, I called him "Dolan." In 1954, at 65 this powerful man was in Montreal, working with Dr. Cameron. From that time one, he seems to have disappeared into the notorious and still highly classified program known as MKULTRA. In the middle of winter at the military base, the scientists would send their child troops out into the snow in light indoor clothing to see how well we did in freezing temperatures, under the influence of certain drugs. Frequently, on these visits, they gave the children chemicals they were testing, and fastened electrodes to their heads. Sometimes they strapped them down to tables or beds and administered electro shock to their bodies. Sometimes the children played with animals, or other children - orphans, usually, acquired from Roman Catholic institutions, or through the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, which cooperated with the secret program by sending kids with behaviour problems for correction by the world-famous psychiatrist and his team of experts. There were many ways to obtain children in those days, and trafficking in them was a highly lucrative business. But no one, officially, knew that, and certainly my parents were unaware that they were exposing us to scientists who worked for secret societies on the fringes of organized crime. And when, later on, they made me or one of the other children kill my puppy, I disconnected from that memory too. I would grow up with a blank where that scene ought to have been. Not once did I ever ask, or even wonder what happened to the cocker spaniel I once loved. At age 6, I asked my parents for a cat, and after that I told everyone, "I only like cats. I don't like dogs." Cats became my idols, almost an obsession. I had to study their history, learn all there was to know about them. But dogs were now the enemy, if they existed at all, that is. Dogs had betrayed me. I never thought about dogs, if I could help it. |
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