I go by two names: my writing name is Ann Diamond. My birth name is Anne McLean.
I am also the granddaughter of the former mayor of St-Jean sur Richelieu, Doctor Alexis Bouthillier. Last year, by chance, I learned that his house at 240 rue Jacques-Cartier-Nord was being restored to become a shelter for homeless drug addicts and would reopen in 2024. I had never visited this house, which my grandfather sold in 1932, but I had seen photos of it and heard about it from my mother. In my possession I still had my grandfather's eight foot tall clock. Last October I spoke with the director of Le Musée du Haut-Richelieu who accepted it into their collection. I also left them the family photo album.
I am currently working on a screenplay called The British Invasion, which begins in St Jean sur Richelieu where my mother was born in 1913 and lived until 1941. My mother Thérèse Bouthillier was almost erased from the history of SJSR but she was the only daughter of Doctor Bouthillier, the "doctor of the poor", deputy and mayor of St Jean during two world wars.
A wonderful conversationalist and a great listener, my mother Therese kept secrets well. I think she learned this during the war and then while married to my father, an RCAF intelligence agent who expressed himself primarily through the music he taught in Montreal high schools from 1948 to 1962.
So I also didn't know until recently that she had "adopted" a boy from the south of England, born in 1943 in Dartford, a small town with an air force base where Pilots were trained and flew missions over the English Channel - many were shot down over France.
In 1956 as a teenager, the English boy then named "Mike" was flown to Montreal and was part of a special program run by Air Force medics at McGill. This is how we met when I was 5 years old and my family had enrolled me in this ultra-secret program for “gifted children”.
In 1962 at age 19 Mike (now "Mick") founded a rhythm and blues group which began playing clubs in London. In June 1963 they released their first record. Thanks to the air force I went to London, aged twelve, to celebrate with them --
Two years later, April 1965: Mick visited our house in Laval when he was 22 and I was 14, the year he and his band became major stars in America and around the world. Even if he didn't understand her little daughter very well, finding her a little strange, he would never forget my mother who was his first "femme inspiratrice." That's French for Muse.
My script in progress, The British Invasion, now opens in St Jean sur Richelieu during the Second World War and evolves into rock and roll during the 1950s and 1960s, having side effects that last to the present. My mother was a "giant" -- and mysterious -- woman. Here she is in 1943 at age 30 in her wedding photo: thanks to the magic of makeup and photography, this "ugly duckling" looks like a movie star.
I wonder about her life during the Great Depression and the war in SJSR. It seems to me that she deserves to be better known in her own city but she left her hometown in wartime under traumatic circumstances: a (possibly) murdered father, a crippled mother, a bank foreclosure…
Less pretty than her deceased half-sister, and nicknamed "La Grande Bouthillier" because at 5'11" she was the tallest woman in her town. Tall and shy, she attended Marguerite Bourgeois convent with the future poet Rina Lasnier, and lived in the shadow of her father's brilliant career and tragic death in December 1940.
The “Thérèse Bouthillier” buried in the municipal cemetery in the Bouthillier tomb on rue St-Jacques in St-Jean was her older half-sister, who died of tuberculosis in 1910 at the age of 10. Her mother Rose Eglantine followed. My grandfather re-married Alice Roy and their daughter, the second Thérèse was born in June 1913, the same year my grandfather bought the big house on rue Jacques Cartier. At 27, my mother was a spinster still living at home when a train from Montreal killed her father in a fatal accident in which the driver of the car escaped without injuries.
Le Canada Francais (“the oldest French language newspaper in North America”) put the tragedy on the front page. They still talk about it in the high school that bears my grandfather's name. The kids do projects: Accident or assassination?
For my mother, it was just the start of a series of shocks.
Days after the death of her beloved father, she discovered that their fairly comfortable life was based entirely on borrowed money. He had left behind a huge legacy of public service, and a mountain of debt. As mayor and provincial deputy, he had been an important figure. As a country doctor during the Great Depression, he was rarely paid. He died, owning thousands to the bank.
To pay these debts, my mother sold the house and moved with her invalid mother to Montreal where she found a job as a switchboard operator at Sicard's and rented out rooms to soldiers. In his Air Force uniform, my father knocked on the door – the start of a romance with many consequences for my mother, including the loss of her francophone identity. She held onto her religion and a few friends and relatives, but she never returned to St-Jean.
She always spoke English with a French-Canadian accent and my father's extended family in Ontario adored her. She was their “Aunt Thérèse”. But her past in St Jean was always a mystery to me: she very rarely talked about it.
Growing up in Montreal and attending English-speaking Protestant schools, I knew her as a mother with a kind heart and a clear, sharp mind - she was dignified, friendly, sensitive and discreet.
She once told me about the time at convent when Rina Lasnier, a couple of years older and her neighbour in St- Jean, asked her point blank: “Why don't you soar?”
My mother's response was to laugh.
Modest and retiring, my mother hid an aristocratic side, which can be seen in the 1943 photo. Sometimes she used this photo as a calling card during her occasional negotiations with the world outside her immediate family.
In 1956, after his visit to Montreal, Mike brought a copy of this photo back to England. For the young boy, my mother became his image of an ideal woman. Of Norman French stock, the daughter of a politician, she must have symbolized a world to which he aspired and which was denied to him in England.
The collaboration played out at long distance between our two mothers. Frustrated in her suburban life with a husband who was often absent and uncommunicative, my mother dreamed of a better life for her daughter. In 1963 when my dad lost his job, she began to think this English boy was the key to a glamorous life in Swinging London. Using all her charm, wisdom, diplomacy - and maybe a little blackmail too - she set about secretly matchmaking. In her imagination, I might aspire to be Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady -- and someday live abroad as a princess (or slave) to a great prince.
In this clandestine arrangement, she collaborated with a psychiatrist from McGill, the famous Doctor Peter Roper, a former Royal Air Force pilot in Great Britain. This was the same psychiatrist who had recently "cured" my father by erasing his memories and leaving him unable to work or support our family.
As a “gifted child” I was also a guinea pig in a program that used music to condition young people. Thanks to electroshock I had no memory of my visit to London two years earlier, although that visit seems to have inspired a few songs: "Go Home, Girl," "Play With Fire" and "Heart of Stone."
In 1965 I couldn't recognize"Mick" - he was not at all the same guy as little "Mike" whose memory was also lost in the mists of my childhood. But the British Invasion had just begun in earnest and the first stop on the road to conquest was Montreal.
April 22, 1965, the Rolling Stones land at the Dorval airport two days before their first concert in North America, at the Maurice Richard Arena. I don't have a ticket - I'm too young to go to a rock concert by myself. At school all we talk about at recess are British bands and “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?”
Its Easter vacation. I'm home from school. The doorbell rings as my mother stands at the kitchen sink looking out the window. She turns to me:
"There's someone here to see you. Let him in."
I go open the front door. It's Mick Jagger wearing jeans and a brown corduroy, his hair nicely washed.
I let him in.
It was like the moment the train crashes into my grandfather's car. Part of me dies instantly, the other half leaves the scene without injuries but also with no memory.
My mother is very upset with me and I don't know why.
Over the next few months, her health collapses just as the Stones' fame begins to take off.
New original songs fuel their rise to the top of the Hit Parade, including “Satisfaction” which would stay at #1 for weeks.
Unlike their first covers which were often simple "feel-good" rock and blues tunes, these new songs reveal a lot of anger, frustration, pain and trauma. Mothers, daughters, pills and mental illness featured prominently in the lyrics:
19th nervous breakdown
Paint it black
Have you seen your mother baby (Standing in the shadows)
Mother's little helper
Stupid Girl
My mother's life becomes a constant round of doctors and hospitals - she is quickly becoming an invalid. Soon I don't really have a mother.
At home as a family, we collectively suffered from PTSD and barely spoke to each other. We watched TV or read in our rooms in the evening. Lying on her bed, my mother prayed her rosary and spoke to saints, and sometimes to her deceased parents.
I don't know what she thought or remembered at that time, but I know I had no memory of the afternoon of April 23 1965, when Mick strolled into our living room and then followed me downstairs into the basement where our piano and ping-pong table stood.
Perched on the piano stool, I might have played the only piece I knew by heart: The Minuet in G by Johan Sébastien Bach.
Leaning against the garage door, he asked me about the school, before getting to the point of his visit: “I’ve come to ask for your hand in marriage.” That's when I burst out laughing.
“But I don’t know you.” After that, the flashback becomes blurry and chaotic.
He ran from our house and never came back. That evening, the Stones played at the Maurice Richard Arena.
My friend Irene was there.
The following Monday, in the school hallway, she described the spectacle: The Stones played for 25 minutes before the cops pulled the plug and chased the kids into the street. The Stones fled in their cars. End of show. I listened like a zombie, emotionless, thinking I hadn't missed much. Poor Irene! And what a waste of $3 for the ticket!
The fact I remembered nothing about Mick's visit or its aftermath, is a pretty clear indication they sent me to the brainwashing clinic for a memory wipe the same weekend of the concert .
The school year ended in June, shortly after I first heard the song Satisfaction on our kitchen radio. I wasn't sure I liked it, but my body certainly picked up on Keith Richards' irresistible riff.
In July, my girlfriends threw a sleepover as a farewell party for me. I had just heard that I was being sent to a new school in a middle-class neighborhood far from the immigrant ghetto where I felt so happy. We stayed up until dawn talking and listening to music. I was wearing my pink Mary Quant doll pajamas that the Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, had bought me in London two years before. I had no idea where this outfit came from because that trip too had vanished behind a wall of amnesia. Perhaps on Dr. Roper's advice, my mother had even lied to me and said she had sewn them for me, which was impossible because the stitching showed they were factory made. I thanked her and didn't ask questions.
My mother was sick all summer - we spent it at our cottage in the country where I helped with cooking, learned to water ski and listened to the radio. All that summer, the Stones' song Satisfaction remained at number 1, followed by the Toys’ A Lovers’ Concerto - the Bach minuet that I practiced on the piano in our basement - at number 2.
In the fall, the Stones came to Montreal for the third time that year and played at the Forum. This time the stage collapsed, the audience rioted, and they barely got out alive.
No one ever spoke to me about this concert, neither before nor after. At my new high school, I was a fish out of water, slow to make friends - unlike at my old school where everyone was a Stones fan and I would have heard about it. I never saw the blow-by-blow account of the show by Christy McCormick on the front page of the Montreal Star the next day - with photo of “Nick Jagger” and manager Oldham running for their lives.
I think my parents must have hidden it from me because it was unforgettable - and might have triggered my memories.
My father's memory was slowly returning and he started driving me to and from school every day as if he feared for my safety by taking the bus alone.
I was now interested in folk music and I started listening to Bob Dylan the following spring thanks to a boy in my class who played the guitar and introduced me to French existentialist novels. The following summer, at the cottage, I read La Nausée by J-P Sartre and La Peste by Albert Camus, in English translation.
The Stones released their first album of all original songs, titled Aftermath. I bought it and listened to it in our basement, where Mick had briefly stood. I particularly liked Going Home which was 14 minutes long and taught me everything I needed to know about sex at 15.
There was one song missing from the North American album but I heard it once on the radio and couldn't get it out of head:
Baby, Baby, Baby you're out of time
At school, I was a model student, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, prefect, award-winning writer, on my way to a career at the United Nations that no one told me about. Teachers and principal treat me with kid gloves, like a precious object that could explode at any moment.
“Are you patriotic?” the vice-principal asked me.
“No, not really,” I answered. I joined a group of sullen rebels who met at lunchtime and shared complaints. I sold an essay on “television as brainwashing” to Seventeen Magazine. They paid me $150 for it but it never appeared in print.
I was headed for university in the fall but my father had shouted at me, when I showed him the application form: "You're not going to McGill!!" I didn't understand much of all this: I had good grades, all my friends were getting accepted into McGill. So what was the point of studying? Instead of soaring, I decided to dive. With no effort of any kind, I enrolled in Sir George Williams' bachelor's program – less prestigious but more progressive.
In the fall of 1968, I joined the revolution. I became head of the “news” desk of the student newspaper at Sir George Williams University. In November, I saw Leonard Cohen for the first time at a poetry reading at the Seven Steps bar.
In December, riot season began...
I'm truly gobsmacked. Only last night, I found myself reflecting on the term 'British Invasion' in a very conscious and deliberate way. And then this. Given its locus in the backyard of the City of London and the Tavistock Institute, the term suddenly revealed a more insidiously sublime and 'market-tested' origination. I happen also to be in the UK where things are a bit dodgy at the moment, to say the least. I note the timing of this post at (currently) five hours ago. So, both rough simultaneity and synchronicity. The term arrived to me as opposed to 'churning up' via normal cogitation. Hard to explain, but after awhile, I think we all come to a more textured sense of our mind's workings. Cheers.
Thanks for your comment - it's nice and confirming. Wonderful synchronicity. And it was a "Full Spectrum" Invasion that opened new avenues of domination...
More to come.