A typical day in 1972 began like this: It’s 6am and someone is banging on the door of the 60-ft mobile home I live in with my mother and 28-year-old brother. I’m 17 and for the last year, since my dad died of cancer at the age of 59, I’ve been more or less running the family business, a cottage resort and caravan park called Green Acres.
We have seven very rustic cabins (no running water, a central building with toilets and showers) and spaces for about 30 to 40 trailers. We’re on Pigeon Lake, in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario, about 90 minutes north-east of Toronto. We rent boats and outboard motors to fishermen coming not just from that city, but all the way from Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Anyway, as I said, it’s 6am and someone’s banging on the door, hard. I stumble from bed in my underwear and open the back door of the trailer. There’s a man standing there, a rumbling pickup truck with fishing gear a few feet away.
“Oh, did I wake you?” he asks. “You got any boats to rent?”
And so the day would begin.
My daily chores included cutting nearly 10 acres of grass, cleaning toilets, fixing broken pipes (there was always one bursting somewhere), burying deep in the woods the fish guts left behind in a pail after our guests cleaned their catch at a table down by the lake, selling gas, scrubbing out boats littered with seaweed, worms and dirt, ensuring a steady supply of toilet paper in the communal bathrooms.
One day, standing in the shed where we kept a huge freezer to keep our guests’ fish on ice until they were ready to go home, I could hear a woman screaming my name at the top of her lungs. “Linwoood! Linwoood!” I tracked the noise to the ladies room. I ran to the door and called inside. I could see two, thick legs like tree stumps beneath the door of the closest stall.
“Out of paper!” the woman said. “Again!”
I scrambled to find some and slipped it under the door. When she emerged from the building she gave me a kiss and said, “Come by later, we have pie.”
When I wasn’t dealing with camp crises, there were more than enough on the home front.
While 11 years older than I, my brother had not taken the lead in the wake of our father’s death because he was still recovering from a severe mental breakdown. He was on medication to keep the voices at bay, but when he went off them, his delusions made all our lives a real nightmare. His room in the mobile home was right next to mine (either would have made the average prison cell look spacious) and sometimes at three in the morning I could hear him chatting and laughing with people who were not there.
My mother had never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but a team of psychiatrists could have made her a project, given the chance. Raised an only child who was incapable of understanding that there might be any other side to an issue but hers, she held rigid views on alcohol (it was wrong, even a drop, although this stand had nothing to do with religion) and sex (she once told my brother that if he slept with a girl before marriage, “You would be dead to me.”)
Prior to Green Acres, when my father was a commercial artist in the advertising world and had to retreat to his studio for several days to finish projects on deadline, my mother would freeze him out.
“Whenever I needed her support most,” he once told me, “she’d pull the rug out from under me.”
So how did we end up here, running a fishing camp?
We had no history of working in the tourism business. I’d grown up, at least until high school, in the suburbs or Toronto. My father drew those magnificent cars you’d see in national magazine advertisements. Beautiful airbrushed drawings of Fords and Chevrolets and Cadillacs in the pages of Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post. He even had the same agent as Salvador Dali for a time.
But when photography killed illustration in the 1960s, my father became a kind of modern-day blacksmith. He was very good at something no one wanted.
My mother had always dreamed of running a park that catered to travellers with caravans. We’d owned one and every year my dad would hitch it to the car and we’d cover hundreds of miles a day, touring the United States and Canada, sleeping overnight in some caravan park along the way. For a little kid, it was basically eight hours of looking at red vinyl upholstery and window cranks. Occasionally, I’d stand on my seat to watch the world whizz by.
My dad was less certain about my mother’s dream, but when they found this place called Green Acres for sale – even though it catered to cottagers, as well – they bought it.
I was 11 years old.
My first five summers were pretty idyllic. I had chores but no responsibilities. Those hours I spent on the riding mower were devoted to dreaming up short stories. I had a small boat and friends, and as I got older, during the slow season, empty cottages to sneak girls into.
My dad settled into the place, but this was my mother’s dream he was living. “This place,” he once confided to me, “is my last resort.”
And then, in the autumn of 1970, he developed a bad cough.
In March, 1971, he had a cancerous lung removed. He wouldn’t last the year. In his final month, as I sat with him in the hospital, he waved me closer and whispered. “Take care … of things.”
He knew it would have to be me.
So did my mother. The responsibilities conferred on me were immediate, including picking out a casket for my father, a task my mother said she was not up to. While she ran the business end of Green Acres, I did all the real work. I couldn’t do the books, but Mom had no clue how to replace the lubricant in an outboard motor.
For six summers after my father’s death, I ran Green Acres. But I wanted to be a writer, not a fishing camp operator, and for a while I fooled myself into thinking maybe I could, to please my mother, be both. Think up plots in the winter, run the camp in the summer.
But I knew in my heart that would never work. I’d met the girl I wanted to marry, and there was no way we could live at Green Acres under my mother’s thumb. A career as a novelist would be decades away, but a nearby daily newspaper was offering me a reporting job. As good a place to start as any.
Mom did not take the news well.
She liked to leave a map of Canada on the kitchen table. She was, she liked to explain, deciding where she’d go to die once I’d abandoned her. But I stuck to my plan. Got married, joined a newspaper. By hiring a handyman, and then later, remarrying, Mom hung on to Green Acres for another five years. It turned out there were others who possessed the necessary skills to bury fish guts and restock toilet paper.
In 1989, 12 years after I left, my mother died. Our relationship remained strained, and I don’t suppose she ever forgave me. It’s unfortunate it had to be that way. I don’t regret those years I spent at Green Acres. They, more than anything else, shaped me into the person I am now.
But just as it was for my father, Green Acres was, ultimately, my last resort, too.
Linwood Barclay’s 2000 memoir about this period, Last Resort, is available as an ebook. His latest novel, Far From True, is published by Orion, £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
