Master of None: The Story of Me Life

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Alfred Wicks has known many trades: military pilot, commercial artist,
Calgary milkman, television interviewer, journalist, author, cartoonist,
book illustrator, co-owner of a tea wagon, newspaper proofreader, and
Toronto publican. On his stint as a swimming-pool lifeguard, he remarks,
“Happily, few people ever used the pool and those who did were able to
swim, something I couldn’t do.” Wicks also played for three years in
the band on the Queen Elizabeth, where he was told that Alfie wasn’t a
suitable name for a saxophonist and was given the name Ben.

Wicks recounts with humor and poignancy his early years in England. He
was 12 when Hitler’s war began, and soon joined thousands of
youngsters who were taken from their homes in vulnerable English cities
and shipped off to safer parts of Britain. This experience led to No
Time to Wave Goodbye, the first of Wicks’s seven books. In 1957, he
and his wife, Doreen, began a new life in Alberta; soon he was a
full-time cartoonist. In 1983, Doreen founded Global Education and
Medical Supplies, which has channeled invaluable aid directly into the
hands of some of the world’s neediest. Wicks’s accounts of visits
made to some of these people are moving and disturbing. There are
adventurous tales, too, of journeys to some of the world’s small but
nasty wars.

Accompanying this amiable and engaging memoir are 35 photographs, but
no index.