Non-typical memoir, non-typical family

My Turquoise Years: A Memoir (Twentieth Anniversary Edition)
by M.A.C. Farrant

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2024
$21.95 / 9781772016369

Reviewed by Valerie Green

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My Turquoise Years is the 20^th Anniversary reprint edition of M.A.C. Farrant’s original memoir with five additional stories added, plus an introduction by Lynne Van Luven and a new preface.

This is not a typical memoir because it covers only a small segment of Farrant’s life— her teenage years—described as “her turquoise years.” Back in the early 1960s when she was a teenager, everything seemed to be the colour turquoise—fridges, countertops, cars, and even clothing. The book is a charming, humorous, yet heartbreaking story of a motherless teenage girl trying to find her place in a family who show their love in peculiar ways.

With Farrant’s impeccable talent for language, her story is beautifully detailed, and her character depiction is strong—especially her Aunt Elsie Sexton who raised her from age five. This story will bring back memories to all who remember being a teenager in Greater Victoria in the 1960s.

Marion Farrant was born in Australia to Nancy and Billy, an odd couple whose marriage was doomed to fail. Billy met Nancy in New Zealand when he worked as first mate on a freighter travelling between Canada and New Zealand. Once the family moved back to Vancouver where Billy lived and worked, Nancy was miserable. She hated the rain and cold weather and took Marion back to Australia three times on cruise ships.

“The whole time in Vancouver was a disaster.” Elsie would later claim. This was because Nancy cried much of the time. She missed Australia and, because it reputedly got back to Elsie, that my father and his family were boring. Nancy was restless, wanting things she couldn’t find in Canada with my father.

Nancy had also probably discovered that Billy and his family were not rich as she had first assumed. They were ordinary working people. By the time Marion was five Nancy could not cope with being a mother either, so she left Billy to raise his daughter alone. From then on, she had very little interest in her daughter. Marion grew up hearing wild stories about her mother travelling the world on cruise ships in the company of rich men, some of whom she married and then divorced. Billy was well rid of her, claimed his sister Elsie.

Billy had asked his sister who lived in Cordova Bay on Vancouver Island if she and her second husband Ernie Sexton would be willing to take his daughter and they agreed. Billy continued to support her and faithfully visited her every other weekend, but Marion was forced to join a strange family of misfits that she describes with incredible insight and humour during her teenage years from thirteen to eighteen.

Aunt Elsie believed in raising her with tough love. She rarely complimented Marion on her achievements at school or in dancing school, claiming it would make her “too big for her britches” or even worse “too uppity.” Nonetheless she provided a home for the young girl despite frequently telling her “You’re nothing but a time bomb. You never listen. What did I do to deserve such trouble?”

Other members of Marion’s new family were Ernie, Elsie’s disgruntled husband; Aunt Maudie (a widow) who lived with her son Kenny who imagined himself the best Elvis Presley impersonator around, when he wasn’t sleeping the day away; Grandma who “wasn’t all there” and Elsie’s daughter, Doreen, who was more sympathetic towards Marion and befriended her despite her husband Bob’s off-colour jokes when Nancy had once sent Marion a present of an inappropriate see-through nightgown and a pair of bikini underpants with the words “Hi Sexy!” stitched on the rear. Bob loved to tease Marion about that.

Marion was beyond embarrassed, and it wasn’t even her birthday! She hated the gift and being the motherless girl at school she frequently tried to make a joke of it by saying “My mother is missing and in action.”

Marion Farrant tells these stories through the words of a child who hated to be different but slowly managed to come to terms with the loss of a mother who failed to keep promises on numerous occasions—like when she announced she was coming for a visit and threw everyone into a frenzy but then never showed up. Meanwhile, Elsie and Ernie had cancelled their family trip south to accommodate her, and the house had been cleaned from top to bottom to make a good impression.

Marion made friends at school, especially Doris, and together the girls spent hours combing the beach below the Cordova Bay home. As they began to mature, they decide they had no desire to become “women” and Marion was certain she did not want to marry and become a slave to any man, as Aunt Maudie had been to her late husband and now was to her lazy son, Kenny.

Local readers will especially enjoy the references to places and people in Greater Victoria, like Paul’s Restaurant in Victoria, Rae-Ella, the hairdresser on Quadra Street, Miss Blythe the dance instructor and her star pupil Sherry Ross (who later formed her own dance school in Victoria). Other references include car races through town on a Friday night, stopping at the White Spot, and so much more that was all part of the 1960s scene for young people.

One of my favourite stories in the book is the scene where poor Marion is forced to have her beautiful, sun-soaked, long blonde hair, cut by the famous Rae-Ella. A pixie cut is chosen, and Marion hates it. She and Elsie leave the salon for home where Marion shuts herself in her bedroom threatening never to come out. Only when Doreen arrives and tells her “it’s not so bad. Makes you look older. Here, let me fix it.” After Doreen had backcombed it and sprayed, the flat hair came to life. “I could almost see myself as a Debbie Reynolds look-alike.” Marion said, especially when Doreen added: “You look quite pretty, really and truly.”

Somehow, this intuitive, talented and very observant teenager who constantly questioned life, managed to survive in a family that loved her in strange ways.

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Valerie Green was born and educated in England, where she studied journalism and law. Her passion was always writing from the moment she first held a pen. After working at the world-famous Foyles Books in London (followed by a brief stint with MI5 and legal firms), she moved to Canada in 1968 and embarked on a long career as a freelance writer, columnist, and author of over twenty nonfiction historical and true-crime books. Hancock House recently released Tomorrow, the final volume of The McBride Chronicles (after Providence, Destiny, and Legacy). Now semi-retired (although writers never really retire!) she enjoys taking short road trips around BC with her husband, watching their two beloved grandsons grow up and, of course, writing. [Editor’s note: Valerie Green has recently reviewed books by Olga Campbell, Beka Shane Denter, Kate MacIntosh, Rosemary Neering, Winona Kent, and Michael L. Hadley for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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