BY SARA KEDDY
Kings County Advertiser/Register
Donald MacKay spent his lifetime recording history, but the hardest thing he’s ever written is his most recent book, Safe Passage: Travels Through the Twentieth Century.
His personal stories of life as a 30-year foreign correspondent from the ending days of the Second World War through to a curry lunch in a Portuguese Goan militants’ jungle camp to the FLQ kidnapping in Quebec also includes stops in France, Morocco, Hungary, China and more: wherever there was news to be filed for a worldwide audience.
He may have seen the Loch Ness monster, fell into a vat of wine, was mistakenly stormed at home by a Scotland Yard manhunt and convinced Prince to continue to pull along the family’s hired Tinker caravan on the back roads of Ireland.
All of this is a far cry from his early years growing up in Windsor, and then Halifax. He spent summers in Grand Pre working with farming families, had free run of the Hants County Exhibition, for which his mother did the accounting; and spent his pocket money on treats from Wilson’s drug store.
At 16 in 1941, now living in Halifax, MacKay coughed up blood: tuberculosis. He spent a year in the Kentville sanatorium while the world went mad.
“When I came back to Halifax, I felt left out. Everyone I knew was gone.”
All his friends had joined the services, now not an option because of his health. He longed for the merchant marine, but settled for self-education: reading, learning to type and taking a correspondence course from two moonlighting New York Times reporters.
At 17, he got a job running a new weekly newspaper in Bridgewater.
“All the competent people had gone to war,” he admits. “Those were easy times to get work. There was no one around.”
He lasted a month, running for news, advertising, accounts and subscription sales. A friend working for Canadian Press in Halifax helped him “fall on his feet” back in the city. He lasted a year, then finally found his way aboard a Norwegian merchant convoy ship. He returned to New York in 1945, came home to Halifax and continued his journalism career, first with British United Press.
“It didn’t pay much, but there was the promise of travel - that’s what I wanted. Europe was starting to establish itself again and, five years later, I got to London.”
This huge city became as much of a home for MacKay as anywhere else in the world over the next three decades.
“Home was where I was, but I really felt homesick for London.”
He took on reporting roles, directed newsrooms, turned foreign outposts on to Western media standards; moving from network to station to country every couple of years.
“Being a Canadian was a real advantage, I think. I felt I had entree into more places.”
He made flying visits home to visit his mother in Halifax, but his family was involved in overseas life, and tied to his peripatetic career.
“A lot of my colleagues are ‘war freaks,’ and they wanted me to go to Saigon with them. I didn’t because the girls were in school.
“There was a lot of heavy drinking overseas, your family life is always in chaos - and I don’t think any of them were any happier than I was.”
In fact, there was a divorce, and a later remarriage. His teenage daughters begrudged leaving cool London in the 1960s for Montreal. In 1970, wrapping up his career in Montreal, MacKay turned to other projects: the start of an 11-book writing legacy that has captured the histories of Canada’s earlier foresters and railways, the Scottish immigrants aboard The Hector and other tales.
The good part for me was being paid to meet people and do things, finding out they are just as normal as other people." - Donald MacKay
Safe Passage, though, is a different story.
“Someone asked me to do a memoir 30 years ago, but I didn’t feel old enough. I had a few diaries, but I had always written about other things.
“This was the toughest.”
Having returned from an Ireland retirement home - to, of all places, Wolfville, where he can look out his window at the Grand Pre landscape and Blomidon in the distance he could see as a child-Mackay thinks his story “gives a sense of the times.
“The world changes so much, and any young person coming up should know it’s different. By writing about those days, maybe we can somehow influence them for good.’
He points to his own teen years in Halifax during the 1940s: no muggings, no murders. Alcohol was a drug, but you couldn’t get a drink.
“I can’t imagine covering what’s happening in the city now. Something has changed - and not for the better. It’s the very quality of life that’s become a problem.”
As for the news business, he watches with an inside eye: “it’s all different now. There are not really any foreign correspondents anymore, they’re all just drop-ins. We’re missing stuff - yes.
“The good part for me was being paid to meet people and do things, finding out they are just as normal as other people. I have no regrets.”
