His grandfather became president of Massey-Harris, forerunner of Massey-Ferguson Limited, but died relatively young in 1921, leaving the Findleys not only in serious financial trouble but also with a feeling of having come down in the world. When Timothy Findley was three, his infant brother died and he himself was so seriously ill that he was hospitalized and given up for dead. His stockbroker father, who had struggled to rescue the family from genteel poverty, joined the air force in 1939 (Findley was eight) without informing his son: "I never really forgave my father for that terrible sense of abandonment"--which sense is the subject of an early story,
"War," included in
Dinner Along the Amazon (1984).
Sent to public and private schools (Jarvis Collegiate, Toronto, and St. Andrew's, Aurora), Findley was a delicate child and never completed a formal education. Having recovered from glandular fever, at the age of sixteen, he was withdrawn from school which he hated and was encouraged to educate himself. The money he earned working at Massey-Harris he spent on ballet lessons. At seventeen, he was paid twenty dollars a week as a member of Earle Gray's Shakespeare Company. He also worked with Drew Thompson's International Players, in Kingston, before landing himself the ongoing role of Peter Pupkin in a very early television series, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
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