As with the British, my grandparents kept their dogs at home and sent their boys to kennels. Here my grandfather is seeing Dad (14) and Jack (12) off to their boarding school. To reach it they took a paddle wheeler down the Kootenay River to Spokane where they picked up the train to Seattle, and from there a ship or ferry north to Vancouver Island. Like the British public schools on which theirs was modelled, it featured cadet corps and games, predatory prefects, arbitrary punishments, perverted masters, and rampant sexual abuse. I’m quite certain my father was a victim, if not at school then in the boy scouts at home; he categorically refused to allow me as a boy to join the scouts, c. 1931.