Retrospective Journal

In 2006, Ken wrote a journal for the year 1957, a year that was full of adventures, meetings and hopes for the future. I have put a link to it on the sidebar of the Kootenay Ranger.
 Editor

The Coming of the Dawn circa 1972

You came by and you knew my name
Trees in the forest fell in flame
Time, it stopped, and tides refused to run.
Mountains crumbled into dust
Towers fell in rings of rust
Wine in all my tumblers turned to blood.

Chorus
Don't go out in the dark tonight
Don't go out in the pale moonlight
Talk with me till we see the dawn
All outside is dark and wild
The devil's hunting down a child
Stay here till the rising of the sun.

First I wept then I moaned
A fire was burning in my bones
I wondered if I'd have it to be kind
I saw the tears you tried to hide
I felt the pain you kept inside
I knew I'd have to open up my mind.

Chorus
Don't go out......etc

I heard the wolves howl on your trail
I saw the knives and my blood ran pale
I sharpened up my swords and I threw the gauge
I kissed your eyes with a brother's care
I washed your feet and dried your hair
I barred the door against their howls of rage.

Chorus
Don't go out......etc

So now you're fed and warm with wine
The firelight has eased your mind
You think you'll go into the night again
But don't you hear that howling outside
They'd love to get this tiger's hide
And I'd have to guide you through the wind and the rain.

Chorus
Don't go out......etc

Don't Be Beastly to the British circa 1956

words and music by Tony Gambrill and Ken Lamb

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
They have their troubles you can see;
What with Nasser and Bulganin
And they have another man in
Place of poor old Anthony E.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
There'll always be an England while there's cricket;
Don't remind them of the Mau Mau
Cos they're in the Cyprus row now
And they hope sometime in '59 to lick it.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
They have no petrol for their motor cars;
And Liberace and Monroe
Were in London for a show
Cos Hollywood has all their movie stars.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
Revolution's rife in Singapore;
The natives are demonic
In demanding gin and tonic
Where whiskey and soda did before.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
Aneurin Bevan's up to his old tricks;
The Irish are revolting
And the lion's mane is moulting
While Winnie Churchill goes on laying bricks.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
They're not too sure about their monarchy;
It was peachy at the altar
But the Duke went to Gibraltar
And the Yankee papers shouted "anarchy".

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
There's thirty thousand of them coming here;
And when its 45 below
And we have 10 feet of snow
They'll just have another crumpet with their beer.

Oh, don't be beastly to the British,
A stiff upper lip with see them through;
Billy Grahame will excite them
And eventually invite them
To praise the Lord and praise the dollar too.

A New Book

    Between 1995 and 2003, Ken wrote a book he simply titled Autobiography. I have named it The Inn of the Seventh Mansion, a phrase from his novel Contemplatives. He later returned to autobiography, albeit in fictional form, in the book Not Without The Angels.
    I have added the link to this book onto the Kootenay Ranger.
    MT

On Leaving Law School Sept 1978

Water base paint
A pungent smell on the
                          new walls
Of an old room above
                          ninth avenue.
Fraternity men and other
                           ambitions
Tick toward their degrees
                           and dates
And I throw away - they
                                  say -
The torpor of my case books
Bring on the shrinks!
And I will write a play
And drink martinis
While damn good jazz
                   and somebody else'
Bach records
Belt away at the Puritan
                       devils.

Easing into art.
Nobody that knows me
                    is looking!
The old friends are gone -
And the relatives.
And the new friends
Are already there,
Where the muse haunts
                    the room
And pays the rent.
Something so much fun
Just might be wicked
But let me risk it!
I think I have a right
                 to know
The new creature
                 I'm becoming.

Mr. Cameron's Consevatory Novel Update

      I have, as editor, recently put the  22 chapters of Mr. Cameron's Conservatory in book reading order and have written the following introduction.

The characters and story line in this work reach back to the very beginnings of the author's writings in the fifties and his novel manuscript The Cruise of the Ballerina which underwent numerous rewrites and publisher's rejection slips. He later referred to it as the Yacht Novel. It was in the late seventies that he began his major work Contemplatives.
     His later studies of music instruction for beginners found its way into this unfinished novel which takes up the threads of the Yacht novel, weaves in the characters from Contemplatives, and sets down in fictional form his musical theories for beginners. It recreates, for the reader, the many music lessons and students he loved to teach and inspire over many years. 
 From the author's unpublished autobiography:
    After the initial terror of discovering that I was to be a writer, I who had never reaped much satisfaction from school composition assignments, quite quickly began to acquire a distinct mental pleasure in what I understood was the intellectual and imaginative preparation for the day I settled down to a story or two, and never until the rainy autumn Sunday afternoon that I began the first draught of the Yacht Novel did I have any doubts or complaints about my appointed vocation. Nor did I have any dark moments, as far as I can recall, throughout the year or so it took me to finish it, actually in two spurts many months apart. I knew, mind you, that it was only a draught, and would require much rewriting, although I could never have believed that this retelling and retelling would take half-a-century.

First Impressions of the Sechelt Property

    In the spring of 1950, my father bought a summer home on Sechelt Inlet, three miles from the head of the inlet and located on the eastern side. The house - which it was, rather than a cabin - was one of three built on the shores, on or near a tiny bay. The road came no closer than half a mile from our miniature resort and there were few boats travelling that part of the inlet. so my father's purchase guaranteed what were literally weekend or longer retreats from the often tawdry environment of our city community. As it goes among those not yet fully integrated with the life of grace, I had been able - since a little child - to balance my life quite nicely between solitude and company, but as adolescence came upon me I was attracted to deeper silences, and the possession of the inlet hermitage guaranteed  an atmosphere for them. Only a monastery could have created a more solemn environment, or perhaps a very devout home, and the Spirit took every advantage of the lonesome geography, over the years, that I would allow Him.
    It was the second time that my father had bought property. A year after the war he bought a section of land on a coastal island for the purpose of logging it, but the timber business had not been kind to him. We left the island after a year-and-a-half and within another year or so he had sold that property. When the opportunity of the Sechelt house came up we were all excited, but no-one more so than myself, for in the various times during the first fifteen years of my life when I had lived out of the city I had been nourished by the forest and often longed for a home closer to it. My father's work, however, dictated living in or at least close to the city of Vancouver, so I had to leave my hopes of a less urban environment to my own adulthood, in the meantime taking advantage of any temporary occasions that arose. This is not to say that I ignored the opportunities provided by the city; in fact I took full advantage of anything I found attractive, exercising my intelligence and acquiring experiences to a degree that would not have been possible either on the island or on Sechelt Inlet, but in the midst of my activities: high school, sports, army cadets, scouts, a newspaper route, and frequent regular invasions of the public library, I often felt a distinct and powerful longing for a more solitary relationship with reality, and this although most of my near relatives, with all of whom I was on close terms, lived also in the city, or close to it.
    Some of my desire, of course, was the customary romanticism and outdoor attraction. At about the same time as my father bought the property, perhaps just a month or two before, I suffered my only real temptation to quit school. I was in Grade Ten, and doing well enough academically, undisturbed by any conscious frustrations, yet a book I read about ranching in the Cariboo literally inflamed my imagination with a desire to leave my home and my classroom and set out for a life of cow punching. I can recall having to deal with this desire all day long. Only in the night did it subside, to leave me at peace with my environment. When, six years later, I did travel into the Cariboo to work for a summer in the wilderness I fulfilled every image of my fifteen-year-old vision, but as a result not of a hasty decision to escape my rightful environment too soon, but following the unbroken years of study I had put in at high school and university, and particularly as a result of the months before the foray in the wilderness, when very intensive studies of the social sciences and modern literature had given me a profound sense of my own dignity as a person, my individual skill as a poet, and my right of searching in the best sources available for the concepts of absolute truth.
    There was another experience of that year - the Salvation Army, which is another story, but which I mention here because it is part of the total circumstances of that year. I tried out the Salvation Army Sunday School for three or four weeks, following my appointment as a patrol second of the scout troop. Unfortunately, and to some degree crediting my father's attitude, I chose Sunday school this time not so simply as a year or two before - for my own good simply - but just as much from a feeling that I should set an example to the other members of my patrol. I told my mother this and possibly I told my father. The original inspiration was simple enough - I can distinctly remember its purity - but the question of example was a self-satisfying bit of clutter and I think that my father knew it. Whatever he knew by the time I mentioned that they had asked me to join the band, he was all objections and that was the last excuse I needed to take back my Sunday mornings to myself.
    But as grace builds on nature, Providence got at me another way, and this time through my father, with the purchase of the Sechelt property.