Eric Wright. Always Give a Penny to a Blind man (1999)

     Eric Wright. Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man (1999) Eric Wright has written a number of well-done and surprisingly amiable crime novels about Charlie Salter of the Toronto Police, which I’ve reviewed in earlier years. I’ve liked them because of the narrator’s voice, which is mildly cynical, humane, and able to convey an interest and liking for the characters. This memoir shows us that Eric Wright’s narrator is Eric Wright himself.
     The reminiscences of his childhood in London, one of ten children of a who earned his living driving a horse-drawn van, and a tailoress (she could produce a suit) who devoted her life to raising her children and ensuring they had a proper start in life, by which she meant that they were well-equipped to rise in the social scale. Eric himself got a scholarship to a grammar school and eventually achieved a degree at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. He never saw his parents again after he emigrated, something he doesn’t go on about (it would not be proper to do so), but which I think affected him strongly.
     At any rate, the book as a whole gives us a picture of man with his share of weaknesses, but one who follows his interest and passions wherever they lead him. He’s the kind of man that one would like to share a pint or two with. He’s a raconteur, the kind that somehow engages you in his experience. The book ends with stories about his first few years in Winnipeg and “up north” in Churchill, where he earned enough to finance his University studies.
     The book for me is a heavy dose of nostalgia. The England he describes is the England I knew myself before I came to Canada: the pre-war values and mores lingered well into the 1960s. I suspect it’s the subterranean layers of Englishness in the Charlie Salter novels that make them attractive to me.
     Good book, worth reading, even as merely a record of a way of life and immigrant experience that no longer exist. ***