Spotlight - "My Journey to St Andrews " the story of Humphrey Gervais.
Photo - Humphrey's mum and dad
I was born in 1946 in Winchester, Hampshire to a very English mother and a very Canadian father. My name, Humphrey Gervais, combines a very English Christian name with a very French surname, so it usually causes confusion on both sides of the Gallic Divide! My roots are equally diverse. My paternal grandparents and my father came from a small Ontario town on Georgian Bay called Waubaushene (probably best known to historians for the massacre of Father de Brébeuf and twenty or so other Jesuits in 1656 by Huron Indians). But today it is a peaceful town where I have many happy memories of fishing for Black Bass by boat in the little bays along the shoreline. On the other side of the world, my maternal grandmother was born in New Zealand. My mother grew up in India. Her father, my grandfather, was a British expat civil servant who worked with the Indian railways and who had his own railway carriage done up as a drawing room for trips around the country.
My mother was part of the British Raj culture, very privileged, uniquely British, and which hardly equipped her for the rather more basic Canadian lifestyle which Destiny had in mind for her.
In 1939 at the outbreak of WWII, my grandmother, my mother and her younger brother sailed from India to England as it was deemed not safe to remain in India. I’m not sure why England was deemed to be safer, and in any event the ship they sailed on was torpedoed and sank on its return to India after depositing them safely on British shores! They moved into ‘The Crest’ at the top of a hill in a little Hampshire village called Droxford, and set about the business of survival in wartime. My grandmother and my mother grew vegetables and kept chickens which no doubt enhanced their diet of ‘meatless’ roasts, chicory ‘coffee’ and mystery cakes. When the air raids came, they sheltered under the dining room table and hoped for the best.
Like everyone in the UK, my mother did her patriotic part and wound up in the ATS (Auxilliary Territorial Service) doing duty in London where she drove an ambulance during the London blitz. It was there that she met my father, a young officer with the Canadian forces. Love ensued - no doubt aided by a generous supply of chocolate, nylon stockings and other goodies - and after the war my parents married. Thereafter followed more than 40 years of wedded bliss only slightly coloured by the fact that my parents couldn’t have come from more different cultures, outlooks, and backgrounds then if you had chosen them scientifically as part of some elaborate experiment on mismatch. I guess love conquers all!
My mother’s first trip to Canada in 1949 was indeed a bridge too far. Her friends couldn’t understand why she was going to ‘the colonies’ with some uncouth Canadian soldier to live in some backwater place where she would undoubtedly have to chop wood and draw water and would probably get eaten by bears. And so not unsurprisingly, within the year, my newborn sister and I found ourselves once again on The Empress of France sailing back to England with our fed-up mother. Her parting words to my father were “You know where you can find us!”
I vaguely remember the next couple of years of life in post-war Britain as a succession of meagre cottages in Liss, Rake, and Petersfield. In a word - damp!
Don’t ask me how but, being a resourceful person, my father managed to convince the powers in the Canadian Army to send him back to England as a liaison officer to the British Army and so we were reunited once again. We moved to a much less damp house in Sunningdale - hooray! Life was good and a television even appeared in our lives.
My father was then posted to Germany as part of the reconstruction effort and we lived in Hanover which is situated in the north. My most vivid memory from this period was spending Christmas at a Leave Centre in Bad Harzburg. It was a fairyland of ice and snow deep in the Harz mountains. From the top of the bobsled track I can remember looking down the other side of the mountain at a single strand of barbed wire fence. On the other side lay East Germany and woe betide any straggler who chanced across that fence. Many years later we took our children to Berlin in the year of its 750th anniversary. We painted graffiti on the Berlin wall and took an escorted tour through Checkpoint Charlie, setting for so many spy novels, and into a world of Trabants and bombed out buildings - as if time had stood still since the end of the war. The wall actually came down a couple of years later and so ended a chapter in history whose effects I chanced to see first at age 6 near its beginning, and then as an adult near its conclusion.
Upon our return to England we lived in Putney for a couple of years and then inevitably my father’s posting came to an end and he was ordered to return to Canada. By this time my mother had apparently come to terms with her future and so in January of 1957 we all set sail again for Canada, this time on the Cunard liner M.V. Britannic. Great trip and this time I was old enough to remember quite a bit of it. As it was winter, the St Lawrence Seaway was frozen and so we made landfall in Halifax, Nova Scotia and had to take a train to Toronto. It wasn’t only the Seaway which was frozen. The train’s departure was severely delayed because it was frozen to the tracks! History does not record what was going through my mother’s mind at the time. Eventually, when the blow torches had done their work, we were able to leave Halifax for the 3 day rail journey to Toronto and onward to Oakville, Ontario my home base for the next 30 years.
Photo - Class of '68
I quickly lost my English accent and blended in as well as I could with my new classmates. Ice hockey, the traditional winter sport for Canadian boys eluded me, but I was of the right stature to play football (the one with the oblong ball) which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also learned to ski which I still enjoy and I developed a passion for sailing. One of the things on my ‘bucket list’ (things to do before I kick the bucket) is to sail single handed across the Atlantic in my own yacht.
From an early age I decided that I wanted to be an engineer and following graduation from high school, I won a place at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario where I studied Electrical Engineering. In my second year at Queen’s I met a young co-ed from Montreal on a blind date. I later found out that she wrote to her mother the next day and announced that she had found the man she wanted to marry!
Photo - The fab couple
As of this year, Kathy and I will have been married for 43 years. We have 3 wonderful children - all married and all with children of their own and living in London, Toronto, and Oliva, Spain respectively. We are grandparents to 7 grandchildren! Our grandson Kieron who is almost 11 is an enthusiastic member of Chrissy’s Childrens’ choir and some of you might recall him singing here once a month.
My only sister who was born during our first venture to the wilds of Canada, and who somehow avoided getting eaten by bears, currently lives with her family in New Jersey.
With my engineering degree, a young wife and our infant son Charles, I looked around for what my parents had always encouraged me to find - a good job with a good company, so that I would be ‘set for life’. Of course nowadays such a utopian strategy simply does not exist, but at the time I decided that the telephone company offered me security and a chance to exercise my love of applied science (and besides, they were hiring!)
Photo - Youngest Grandchild in Spain
I spent 20 years with Bell Canada and moved up the corporate ladder pretty much according to plan. Early in my career I was picked to go and spend 2 years at the world-renowned Bell Labs in Holmdel New Jersey where our second son, Tom, was born. America during the Vietnam war was a fascinating place to be, although perhaps not quite so fascinating if you were unlucky enough to be drafted into service. At the Labs I rubbed shoulders with some of the most gifted scientists in the country. It was after all where the transistor and the laser where invented. We lived only a few miles from the Bell Labs communications centre which controlled the first Telstar satellite. My department provided support and technical assistance to some 22 Bell Operating Companies across the US and because my boss was more at home writing scientific papers then working with actual people, I got to do a lot of traveling and was literally treated like visiting Royalty when I showed up representing absolute technical authority, in the Boardrooms of our Client companies. Heady stuff for a 24 year old!
After 2 years in New Jersey we returned to Canada and my journey up the corporate ladder began in earnest. I became one of the youngest District Managers in the company with engineering responsibility for millions of dollars worth of telephone exchanges across our territory. How my wife coped with my ego and our growing family - by this time our daughter Alix had arrived - I do not know. I certainly had no time for anything or anybody outside of work where I spent long weeks and frequently weekends. I had literally ‘sold my soul to the company stove.’ as the Johnny Cash song recounts.
I was promoted again and fortunately something came along to force me off the hamster wheel in the form of an opportunity to work in Saudi Arabia on a massive telephone expansion project which our company had just won a major piece of. I moved my whole family to Riyadh in 1978 and I spent 8 of the next 10 years mentoring young Saudi engineers on how to set up and run a world class telephone company. Our time in Saudi Arabia was an amazing and enlightening experience for the whole family. Kathy, whose passion is horses, wound up running a riding stable of some 80 horses for a Saudi prince. Our children went to the local expat schools with children from 60 other countries. How mind-expanding! They subsequently attended top boarding schools in Austria and Switzerland, an experience which they definitely would not have had if we had stayed in Canada. As a company we worked hard and we played hard. Every 4 months we were given a week’s R&R (Rest and Recreation) and we took the opportunity to travel widely. In fact the only places we didn’t travel to were South America and Antarctica.
Photo - Looking the part
I guess my Saudi experiences changed my outlook on life permanently, and when I returned to Canada in 1988 I found the corporate life less than satisfying. A friend who I had met while in Saudi invited me to come to London and work with him in a consulting venture that he was setting up in Russia. That sounded good to me and, somewhat impetuously, I resigned from my company in Canada and moved back to England in 1994, thirty-seven years after leaving as a schoolboy.
My time as a consultant had its good and bad bits. On the good side, I travelled widely throughout the countries of the former Soviet Union at a time when they were just beginning to emerge as economies in their own right after 80 years of communist rule. Over a 24 month period I spent time in Moscow, Vladivostok (200 Km north of North Korea!), Siberia, the Balkans, Ukraine, Bulgaria, & Kazakhstan. It was the ‘wild west’, a world dominated by shady dealings, guns, local overlords, and the Russian mafia. I’m probably quite lucky to have come away unscathed!
We enjoyed a champagne lifestyle - polo at Guards, skiing in St Moritz, chartering sailboats in St Tropez, and we lived in a beautiful house in Old Windsor with Elton John and Nick Faldo as neighbours.
On the bad side, my so-called friend turned out to be a serial spender of other people’s money including most of mine. He subsequently declared bankruptcy and so doesn’t have to pay any of it back - whatever happened to debtors’ prisons?! But to finish on a good note, moving back to England was a decision which I have never regretted. And I am a firm believer that if something doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger
With my grand plan of retiring, following a stellar consulting career, in disarray, I looked around for my next adventure and, thanks to a friend, discovered a way to start my own business with next-to-no-investment and an absolutely amazing business model which has generated positive growth and significant incomes for people from all walks of life for the past 31 years. I now build international distribution networks for the world’s premier Aloe Vera company, Forever Living Products. Aloe is exceptionally good for you and the best part of my business is that I am able to help others build their own businesses and show them how to generate their own income streams, which we have now done for many people. It has been six years since Kathy and I started The LifeCare Group www.lifecare.bz. Like any business, you need to commit the time and effort required to be successful, but we decided to put our financial reversal behind us and focus on building our business. We are now one of the top 20 distributors in the UK and we have the 5th biggest business in London. Our business has expanded to 10 foreign countries and keeps growing. We decided to move back to London three years ago and bought our current house on Kinnoul Road two years ago. We certainly could not have done this without Forever!
From Kinnoul Road, it was but a short step to St Andrews Fulham Fields. Although my parents regularly attended church while I was growing up, I didn’t see how God could fit in with my corporate lifestyle. Church was just another element of family life that I abandoned. It was serendipity (or something stronger) that brought me through the doors of St Andrews two years ago. As anyone connected with this church knows, there is something very special about this parish, its parishioners, and its clergy. I was deeply honoured to have been elected to serve on the PCC and I hope to be able to make my contribution to the well-being of the parish in the fullness of time. I’m sure that my great, great grandfather John Chitty Harper would approve. He set sail from England one hundred and sixty-two years ago for New Zealand where he became the first Bishop of Christchurch and his effigy lies prominently in Christchurch Cathedral.
I find it difficult to believe that my journey has been ongoing for 63 years, but if one is supposed to feel ‘old’ at this age - I certainly don’t. It has had its ups and downs, but on balance there is more on the positive side of the ledger. I think the secret is to be in control of one’s own life, drink loads of Aloe Vera, be comfortable in your own skin, be Christian in your attitude to those around you, and listen to what the Universe is telling you.
God Bless.
Humphrey Gervais June 2009