Voices of the Left Behind. Melynda Jarratt
people who were waiting to welcome their families and friends, I wondered how I would find my father. As I stood there, a well-dressed man came towards me with a big bouquet of roses. It was Louis, my father. He put his arms around me and held me tight. The tears kept streaming down my face. We were both very emotional as we walked down the parking lot to where his car was.
This first visit with my Canadian father was a strange and emotional time. At first he wanted to see me as his “girlfriend” — and, more importantly, wanted other people to believe that this was so. Apart from his ego, he had great difficulty explaining me to friends, and there were quite a few awkward moments.
I could appreciate his discomfort, but I had spent the whole of my childhood in situations where no one wanted to say who I was, and there was no way I was going to put up with that at the age of forty-five.
So, initially, we had conflicts over his feelings towards me, what he wanted from me, and what I felt I could give. But we got along so well and I knew that he loved me and was proud of me.
When he became ill, I nursed him and worried over him. I stayed for a few days with my husband’s relations in Montreal, and this gave me the opportunity to talk to someone from outside the situation. I realized that Louis was terrified of losing me, the way he had lost my mother, his first and only love. This made him demanding and sometimes very difficult. I realized how much I missed him, and when I returned I was more confident and able to laugh at his “grumpy” ways.
I returned to Toronto for three weeks in May and we had a lovely time together. In July, my father came to us — something he had said he would never do. He stayed for ten weeks. He became a part of my family and I was really happy. He was spoiled and did not want to return to Canada.
I had not been prepared for how desolate I felt when he left, and I realized how important it is that we make the most of the time left to us. We made enquiries about him living with us, and it appears that he is not eligible, so we have to fight. He very much wants to come and stay with us. He is a very lonely man; he never married and has no family anymore.
Many young soldiers wanted a relationship with the mothers of their children but it was not meant to be.
I realize now that my father and I have a more intense relationship than most people under normal circumstances, but as long as he is happy and my husband, children and I are happy, then it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the world thinks.
Sometimes I think I am dreaming. That I could have found a father who loves me, hugs me and laughs and cries with me is more than I had ever hoped for.
His Father’s Eyes
by Melynda Jarratt
The most famous Canadian war child is legendary blues-rock guitarist Eric Clapton, whose father was a soldier from Montreal named Edward Fryer.
Clapton was born on March 30, 1945, to Patricia Molly Clapton, a sixteen-year-old English teenager whose brief relationship with the piano-playing soldier from Quebec resulted in pregnancy.
Raised by his grandparents, Eric was nine years old when he found out that his sister Patricia was actually his mother, but all he ever knew about his father was the name Edward Fryer and some rumours that he was involved in banking. He wasn’t even sure of the spelling: was it Fryer or Friar?
Project Roots first became involved in the search for Eric Clapton’s father in September 1997, when Lloyd and Olga Rains were contacted by an English lawyer who asked for information on the Canadian soldier Edward Fryer or Friar. The lawyer would not reveal his client’s name, only that he wanted information on Fryer.
The Rains had never heard of Eric Clapton, so the name Fryer meant nothing to them. They conducted a regular search and sent off the information to the lawyers. Little did they know that at the same they were looking for Canadian veteran Edward Fryer, so too was Michael Woloschuk, a writer for the Ottawa Citizen whose parallel search superseded Project Roots and ended up on the front pages of every major newspaper in the world in March 1998.
In an article in the Citizen on March 26, 1998, Woloschuk explained that he began looking for Edward Fryer in the fall of 1997, urged on by a friend who knew Clapton was planning a North American tour in March to promote his latest album, Pilgrim. Clapton was Woloschuk’s musical hero and, like anybody else who had read the musician’s 1985 biography, he knew that Clapton’s father was a Canadian soldier named Edward Fryer. He knew, too, that Clapton had never been able to find the man.
With the death in 1991 of Clapton’s five-year-old son, Conor, and the success of Pilgrim’s hit single, the sad but hopeful “My Father’s Eyes,” it seemed the right time for Woloschuk to use his journalistic connections to find Edward Fryer. He was right.
Six months later, on the eve of Clapton’s North American tour, the front-page article in the Citizen told the world about Eric Clapton’s father, a talented musician and artist who died of leukemia in a Toronto veteran’s hospital in 1985. Fryer was also a marrying man who left behind a trail of wives and children across Canada and the United States. Three half-brothers and sisters, from British Columbia to Florida, were thrilled to find out about their connection with Eric Clapton.
The story spread rapidly across North America, Britain and Europe. In an interview with the Toronto Sun the next day, Clapton was quoted as being pleased, if not a little irritated, that the family he had sought for so long was discovered by a Canadian newspaper reporter.
“First of all, I was furious that I have to find this stuff out through a newspaper. I think it was very intrusive — but then, newspapers are,” Clapton told the Sun. “Then I thought, this is great. The upside, the positive, is that it supplied me with information I’d never had before.”
According to the article, Fryer was cremated and his ashes were scattered off Florida waters by his last love, Sylvia (Goldie) Nickason, an Ontario woman with whom Fryer spent his last years.
The Rains’ involvement in the search for Edward Fryer had begun inauspiciously enough six months earlier, when they received their first correspondence from the English law firm. As she had done for so many others, Olga wrote back to the lawyer and said they would do a search, and she eventually sent along a list of sixteen addresses for E. Fryer or E. Friar. As is the case with so many other requests from lawyers, once the law firm got the information, Olga never heard from them again — not even to thank her for the list of names.
“It’s typical,” Olga says. “As soon as they get what they want, we never hear from them again, but we get used to it. It’s discouraging sometimes, but you don’t let it bother you. There are too many good people out there who appreciate what we do, and besides, we can always hope that the information we provided helped the war child find his father, and that would mean something good came out of our work even if we never find out about it.”
Months passed, and Olga never gave the request another thought. Other cases came up and she put the letters aside with the intention of recycling them, but somehow the correspondence survived.
In the meantime, unbeknownst to the Rains or to Clapton’s lawyers, Woloschuk was making headway with his own search. Olga says she will “never forget the day” they got the call from Canada saying that there was a big article in the Ottawa Citizen about this famous musician named Eric Clapton and his Canadian father, a veteran named Edward Fryer.
“I knew about Fryer, as we had done the search six months previously, but I said, ‘So who is this Eric Clapton?’ We’re old people; we don’t know anything about rock ’n’ roll music!”
Once they got over the surprise of learning the identity of the anonymous figure to whose lawyer they had provided a list of names and addresses, the Rains wrote the law firm, informing them that, with the Citizen article, the cat was now out of the bag. The Rains said they knew the anonymous client was Eric Clapton, and although they were very happy for him, they had never received as much as