Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir by William B. Davis Read Free Book Online

century, you would all have been Catholics. Right?
    (Pause)
    “Anyone here who wouldn’t have been Catholic in the fifteenth century?”
    To be honest, I didn’t remember when the Reformation was, but I still didn’t think I would have been Catholic. I timidly raised my hand.
    “What? You wouldn’t have been Catholic in the fifteenth century?”
    “I don’t think so, sir.”
    “Come up here. Stand here.”
    He demanded I stand beside his desk at the front of the room.
    “You know all Christians in the fifteenth century were Catholic?”
    Lying, I said, “Yes, sir.”
    “And you wouldn’t have been Catholic?”
    “No, sir.”
    Astonished, he replied, “Aren’t you a Christian?”
    “What do you mean by a Christian, sir?”
    Well, that did it. He began to splutter and foam at the mouth.
    “Well . . . well . . . well, someone who follows the teachings of Christ.”
    “I guess you had better count me out.”
    I returned to my seat.
    Well, talk about letting the cat among the pigeons. Many of the female students took pity on me and tried, unsuccessfully, to save my soul. “Don’t you believe in God?” they would ask. I didn’t really know whether I was an agnostic or an atheist in those days, but I did know I wasn’t a Christian. Our English teacher had made it clear that the opposite of a Christian was a pagan, but I didn’t think I was that either. But whatever I was, I was an even stranger presence in the school than I had been before.
    But suppose I had told my half crazed history teacher that I was a Christian. Would anyone ask where my Christian belief came from? Yet from the point of view of science or reason, wouldn’t that be a better question? Surely nonbelief is the default. A religious belief, or myth dare I say, is an add-on, something one learns from one’s elders. I did learn one similar myth as a child and was devastated when I found there really was no Santa Claus. But the myth of a personal god never really took with me. After all, where is the evidence?
    Or maybe, unlike Mulder, I just don’t want to believe.
    We mocked our history teacher and others of his generation. What fools they were! In the arrogance of our childhood it never occurred to us to ask why they were like this. Why was the history teacher marginally insane? The rumour was that he had a plate in his head from the war, but that only added to our sense of his ridiculousness. What he may have been through in that war was not only beyond our comprehension, it wasn’t even something to be wondered about. No one suffered in the war movies or radio plays, which made war seem more like a football game. We never wondered about the women either. Why was Mrs. Cameron, the French teacher, so abrasive and erratic? It never occurred to us to ask what happened to Mr. Cameron. The war years were a secret held close to the chest by those who had been there, a gulf between them and us. Had they been more forthcoming about their experiences, would their descendants have been more reluctant to lead us into war after war?
    I was to catapult out of Aurora High School on the strength of a lie. I was told, and believed, two lies that changed my life. One might even have saved my life.
    I was not much of a student at Aurora High School though I did accidentally stand sixth one year. “Tends to let work slide” was a charitable criticism on many report cards. I did what I had to do, but that was about it. Grades were very different in the fifties than they are now. A first class mark was 75 and over. A B was 66 to 75. If one had an average of 66%, one didn’t have to write the final exam. I was pretty good at getting 67%. Occasionally I would misjudge and have to write a final.
    But I knew this would all have to change when I got to Grade 13, a grade that no longer exists in Ontario and never did exist in the rest of the country. Grade 13 had roughly double the volume of work of the earlier years. One needed nine courses to pass. And the