Cy's problem

For  some 11 years my cousin Cy Fox and I worked opposite each other in Fleet Street when he was with Reuters and I at The Daily Telegraph. We did not know each other though I had come across a volume of short stories by the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. A note on the back declared that it was co-edited by CJ Fox, a London-based Canadian journalist. My mother was from Canada; but my desultory inquiries were unsuccessful. It was years later while I was writing an obituary of a Protestant architect in Dublin whose talent had not been widely recognised that Ted Bishop, the Telegraph's air obituarist, mentione his friend Fox who came from St John's, New Brunswick, or was it St John, Newfoundland? If it was St John's, Newfoundland, I said, he might be a relation; and when I rang the said Fox he launched within a couple of minutes into an account of the sectarian divisions which still existed on "John Bull's Other Ireland". At our meeting in the Kings and Keys he turned out a burly figure in a white trench mac carrying a family tree on which we both appeared. We were both hacks, fond of beer, admirers of Lewis with a lively interest in politics and literature. He was welcomed in our family where his habit of suddenly saying "bop" astonished the children, and I met with similar warmth on two visits to "to the Rock".

Cy had the old reporter's problem: he spent so much time on the road that he could not settle down. He retired to Newfoundland but was soon back in England living in depressed Sydenham while sworn off the drink for medical reasons. Crossing the Atlantic again he found Toronto had swapped Presbyterianism for political correctness. He next went to Vancouver Island where he donated his Lewis papers to the University of Victoria. But the city was too sleepy so he returned to Toronto and finally Newfoundland which he had never forgiven for joining Canada in 1949. "Cy's problem," said the historian Peter Neary, "is that he has been a man without a country." ■