Harry Flemming, the Tattoo, the column, the letter — read on

Harry Flemming was a well-known Nova Scotia journalist who passed away in 2008 at the age of 74. He was pretty universally known as "curmudgeonly" and would probably have been disappointed to have that descriptor omitted in any conversation about him.

Harry Flemming

Harry and I were fellow columnists at The Daily News in Halifax. He affected a cranky conservatism and he really hated my columns, especially my Sunday feminist columns. More than once, he took me on in his own column, so impatient was he that my feminist notions were getting good ink in a daily newspaper.

He was the kind of person who said things like, "I'm all in favour of equality but you're too extreme and you're going too far. You can't expect people to change the way they think and the way they talk just to accommodate you."

Oh but I did expect that. I still do, 30 years later, and although Harry's gone, there are plenty of other people carrying on his grand tradition: the tradition of "believing in equality" while choosing not to do anything that would make it happen.

But the column that made Harry the angriest of all was one I wrote after I had attended The Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo for the first time. I made the mistake of suggesting I would have enjoyed more music, less military. Harry exploded at my ignorance and foolishness. He ridiculed me for wanting to change what is essentially a tribute to the military to some kind of musical comedy. It's a long time ago now and I can't remember all of Harry's tirade but I think it's likely he said something like it was time for me to get back to the quilting bee. It's the kind of thing he would have said.

I'm remembering this today because I've been to several Tattoos since that first one and I went again last week. We went as guests of a friend who had won tickets in a Sky-box. It was great fun and I enjoyed the show. It was noticeably smaller than it used to be — fewer acts, fewer bands — and I think, which I know would be to Harry's chagrin, there was much less military. There used to be several acts that were performed by military personnel and even the music and narration dealt with whatever the military was up to.

The Tattoo is still mostly funded and staffed and provided with volunteers by the military but I found it quite different.

So, wherever you are, Harry, I hope you're resting in peace. And just for old time's sake, here's the column that caused all the kerfuffle in the first place. This column was written in July, 1989:

On Canada Day, I did something I had never done before. It required a great act of courage on my part to do it, just as it does for me now to write about it.

I went to the 1989 Nova Scotia International Tattoo. In many of the circles I move in, this is not considered politically correct.

But I am a girl, after all, who grew up in small town New Brunswick and never missed a parade. I oom-pah right along when I hear the sounds of a big brass band on the radio. I'm a pushover for the big production number in the splashy big musicals; The Music Man, in fact, is one of my all-time favorites.

I am a person who once received as a gift a record album of the greatest compositions of John Philip Sousa. I am the daughter who inherited my mother's Vera Lynn records. And, it goes without saying, my Scottish heart beats faster at the screel of the pipes even though I recognize it as a call to arms; I quite understand why the rulers of England banned their use.

So I thought I might find something to enjoy at the Tattoo and I did. There were a lot of good brass band tunes; many of them weren't warlike – I'm sure there were just as many from Broadway musicals. There was a precision gymnastics team of young girls from Sweden, an hilarious trampoline team from Germany called The Flying Grandpas, and some nice dancing — I loved the Charleston — and singing by a large troupe of dancers and a 150-voice choir. There's also something very exciting about the precision of marching massed bands.

There were also things I didn't like. The performances of the cadets from the Royal Military College and of the Canadian Paratroopers were violent and ugly. And certainly, the silliest statement of the evening was the solemnly intoned: “NATO — 40 years of peace.”

I imagine that statement would be disputed by the people of Viet Nam, Grenada, Libya and Nicaragua, all of whom have had less than pleasant dealings during the past several years with the largest, most powerful member of the NATO alliance. There are many wars being fought around the world right now with lethal weapons that have been sold to them — to both sides — by members of the NATO alliance. (There are companies right here in our province — lured by our provincial government – who are involved in the manufacture of same.) So I think that line could have been dispensed with.

The Canadian Armed Forces, who present and finance the show along with the provincial government, would say at this point that Canada's forces are known around the world as peacekeepers. But peace is much more than the absence of war. Standing — armed — between two warring factions to keep them from shooting each other is not real peace.

Real peace will only come when there is a complete change in the way people in power think, when the very idea of war becomes unthinkable, when the well-being of all people around the world supersedes the greed of the people in the richer nations.

And there's another attitude that has to change. The respected journalist William Broyles Jr., former editor of Newsweek, wrote an article a couple of years ago for Esquire. It was called The Secret Love of a Man's Life: Why Men Love War. In it, Broyles says things like: “War is for men, at some terrible level, the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death." Attitudes like that have to go.

Meanwhile, did I find that the Tattoo glorifies war? Not particularly. I would be more likely to say that it sanitizes the idea of war — just as so many of the classic war movies have done over the years. I found that it over-sentimentalizes the role of the military, over-romanticizes our history, over-simplifies the search for peace. Praying for peace won't work all by itself.

With the amount of money, dedication, hard work and hours and hours of volunteer time that goes into it, I think they could still come up with a pretty good show leaving aside gun runs, bayonet ballets, and military ritual that often takes itself a little too seriously.

I stand by the column today and feel much the same way as I did in 1989.

Not all my interactions with Harry were disagreements. After he died in 2008, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Chronicle Herald. Here it is:

During the time I was editor of Atlantic Insight, there was a provincial election in Nova Scotia one day before our magazine was scheduled to go to press. It would be an Insight cover story and I needed a writer who could provide us with accurate background, interpretation and analysis — within a few hours of the polls closing.

I called Harry Flemming and he agreed, after some sweet persuasion — and after negotiating a somewhat higher fee than I was authorized to pay — to do the story.

He delivered the story — masterfully accomplished on the manual typewriter — by hand the morning following the election. It was lively and interesting and well-written but mostly, it showed a profound understanding of and connection to the political landscape in the province.

And although he was kind of gruff and dismissive about it, it was a very nice thing for Harry to do.

A sidebar: Harry used the word "niggardly" in that story, for which he was pilloried by readers in subsequent issues. In an editor's note, I defended his use of the word — an ancient word of Scandinavian origin, meaning stingy, parsimonious.

Years later, once again under attack, he invoked my name and quoted me in his defence of his use of the word in a newspaper column.

Did I allow myself to feel a little self-satisfied, being used as an authority on language by Harry Flemming?

You bet.