Lord Beaverbrook Read Online Free

constant threat.) Max decided to run away to Kent County, where his father came to retrieve him, saying all was forgiven. In truth Max had not been the author of such libel, so there was nothing to forgive. (Or at least it hasn’t been proven. I am almost sureMax would have delighted in writing yarns about anyone in town if he could get a laugh and get away with it. He understood how to get under people’s skins, and loved to do it all his life.)
    Still, at fourteen, Max had noticed the world and the world was beginning to notice him. He was going to be a part of it one way or the other. He was seething with the enthusiasm of youth to do something beyond the restrictions of his parents’ house, and to do it well. He resumed his correspondent position for a dollar a column. But this was only one of the many ways he had of making money. The idea of making money was paramount with him from the time he was a boy, so there must have been lots of talk about money at the house. He must have listened to his mother and father talking about scrimping and saving, going without, and priding themselves on this ability. Though the family was not poor, it was not rich either.
    He knew he could do better. This is something else that I believe shaped his personality and his course in the world: the idea that the manse was God-driven, and the outside world—down Pleasant Street and beyond—wasn’t. Once out those doors and down the steps of that manse, he was free to be less than God-driven, because he saw how others were less than God-driven and he could match them, but his dadcould not. He could outsmart and out-scallywag, and outthink any of them. He could and did and would discombobulate them—for his father’s sake. (Well, of course for his own sake, too.) Did it bother his conscience? Yes, all his life! Years later, in England, he bought a racing stable. Realizing how his father would have disapproved of such things, he renamed it Calvin House. (And too, there might have been some mischievousness in doing so.)
    About 1894, he was given a position at Lee Street’s pharmacy on the Town Square in Newcastle, also for one dollar a week. An incident here shows his almost pathological bent for trouble.
    He tended to completely ignore the doctor’s prescriptions and make up his own, trying out different remedies as he went, like a mad little concocter. One day he was caught doing this and the dollar a week was forfeited to his talent for mischief. He was sent home to his parents, and one can imagine the rumours about town.
    (It is amazing that this was the standard by which people were paid—that is, not the currency but the amount. It seems to me that all of Max’s early endeavours resulted in the tribute of one dollar per week. Never in my readings about him did he complain about this amount, so it must have been fair and standard wage. His father, however, did. Parsimony wasperhaps a necessary habit for a minister, but it was awful how he showed it. Once when young Max was living in Halifax, Rev. Aitken sent him a box of books. Reluctant to spend one dollar on the shipping cost, he sent it at the much more reasonable—and slower—rate of thirty-eight cents. He instructed Max to pay the thirty-eight cents.
    IT IS LUCKY he did not die, for it’s likely there were many that wanted to kill him. I’m sure most couldn’t see him succeeding at anything. Max, however, could. He was sure of his genius and probably painfully aware that others did not have it—and, worse, did not recognize it in him. Perhaps they thought he would some day be a schoolteacher, a labourer, or a clerk. These were all activities that would have made him moderately successful in their eyes. Then he wouldn’t have been such a threat.
    But Max was destined for other things. His boyhood was a fermenting ground for rudimentary ideas of business and money-making. And the area was not so primitive as one might think. The Miramichi, among other things, was the