First observations. Speaks in a staccato fashion. Hair: unruly, dark. Eyes: one green, one brown, furtive. Weight: satisfactory. Barks or grunts like a small animal when overstimulated (according to parent’s testimony). Can raise a smile or a laugh without meaning to. Or perhaps he does. Talks for Canada. Repetitive to a fault. Narrow interests: guns, police, ghosts. All things mechanical. Excellent memory. Trouble at school. Involuntary eye blinking, shoulder shrugs, twitches. Doesn’t fully grasp social niceties. Has potential to progress.

He submitted willingly to having his mind probed. The psychologist wanted to know why women and children should be saved first in a shipwreck, how many pounds made a ton, where was Chile, what did turpentine come from, which part of a thermometer in the illustration shown was missing.

Danny didn’t need to be asked twice before he gave his answers.

He recited numbers, assembled jigsaws, led his pencil tip out of mazes. In rows of squiggles he detected a chosen symbol: a hexagon, say, or a hoop like a flat tyre.

He would have been asked to draw a man, a woman, himself. How he drew himself, or the woman for that matter, is anybody’s guess, but for the man I have my idea, more than an idea in fact, though I cannot be certain, so let’s just say that what he drew that day required many strokes of his pencil and blanched the knuckles of his left hand.

He may have been shown ink blots to comment on. Ink blots that looked like hungry timber wolves. He may have been asked to play a game of word association. That would have been tricky. He wasn’t one to say the first thing that came into his head. There never was a first thing. There were always so many things, and all of them coming up for attention simultaneously; no sooner had he found the word for each than more besides rushed to replace them.

Great was the psychologist’s wonder when the boy’s results were totted up. The test scores identified him as highly gifted, no question about it.

In my mind I picture the parents hip to hip in the waiting room, and the psychologist, after having called them in, seeing Mr Aykroyd, all six feet something of him, and thinking, The man’s a giant. The boy takes after him.

After a number of sessions the learned doctor would have found the name for Danny’s stubborn eccentricities. The psychologist, based on all the information I possess, talked of childhood schizophrenia (as the autistic spectrum was still called then in some parts), a diagnosis originally brought to Canada by German doctors who had fled the war. An excess of imagination, it was thought, leading the child inwards.

Only later would autism become associated with blankness, or incapacity. No longer associated with imagination, let alone artistry.

Danny would attend counselling, as prescribed, for his tics, his anxiety, over several years.

As for the rest, the psychologist had an idea that theatre might remedy shyness. Had the boy any experience of the stage?

‘As an altar boy,’ answered Mrs Aykroyd, unless it was her husband Peter.

Then there was the time he sang for the school, the parents recalled. It had been for the school’s St Paddy’s celebrations. Danny, flanked by a pair of classmates on the flute and the kazoo, had belted out ‘McNamara’s Band’ to a standing ovation. Or so the Aykroyds’ son, long afterwards, would describe it to a reporter in an article for the local press.

He would have been on his best behaviour. Stick to the lyrics, make no waves, hold still and upright throughout, since success, he knew, promised a smile from the headmistress and his parents’ relieved pride.

There was something else the Aykroyds might have thought to mention. Camp Echon. And here my imagination is on the firmest ground, for I was able to locate a photo of Danny, aged eleven, in the pages of the Ottawa Journal dated 2 March 1964. In this first article to take the slightest interest in our future star, his name is misspelled ‘Ackroyd’. A grainy black-and-white photo shows a tall pre-teen boy, with thick lips, riveted eyes and a monk-like thatch. He is hugging a trophy to his cheek as he gazes at the reporter’s camera with an air of utter and deserved self-satisfaction. He had bested five hundred boys to win the Best Camper trophy the summer before.

I imagine the boys around the campfire listening openmouthed, their gooey marshmallows speared on sticks left dangling in the air as Danny told stories to give his audience goosebumps – stories about séances in a farmhouse, and prison escapees on the run, and infants dragged gasping from an inferno’s maw by fathers with flaming hair.

Theatre, the psychologist concluded, could do the boy a whole lot of good.

Lorraine Aykroyd had learned to tickle the ivories as a girl, danced in tutus and dressed up in drama class. Peter Aykroyd hadn’t learned piano or worn a tutu or gone in for school plays, but he had a thing called presence: on his Rotary Club tours he’d bring a hall to a hushed silence simply by appearing at the lectern. Yes, a bit of theatre, why not?, they thought.

✲

And so every Saturday Danny rode the bus along the Ottawa River and the Chaudière Bridge into Ontario, passed the Supreme Court and Parliament Hill, before alighting a stone’s throw from the Ottawa Little Theatre.

The theatre air seemed to agree with him. It inflated his lungs, swelling his chest, not without infusing him with motes of lint and make-up, particles to make a trainee thespian sneeze, although they only sweetened his existence. As did prancing around a stage. Throwing his voice to the stalls. The Mrs Mariers of this world would not approve. Bliss.

He had entered that magical space where misfits recover their value, where even the most peculiar turn to pearls: encores for the klutzy and the closeted, lead villain roles for the short and bug-eyed, and Broadway plays in which the frail and wrinkled make a good living reciting a character’s dying words.

Danny’s drama teacher was a slim, boyish man, with long-lashed eyes and the same soft face he’d had since age ten. And appearing so, children loved the sight of him for he looked anything but teacherly. He was now twenty-three. His name was Brian Gordon, never Mr Gordon; and if any of the boys ever called him Flash, it was always with affection.

Turn-taking games and playful exercises in imagination were the chief characteristic of Brian Gordon’s classes, which were based on techniques invented by Peter Slade. The Englishman had been writing and lecturing on child-centred drama for the past decade by then, and fathered a field that thrives to this day: drama therapy. The earnest intention, rather than treating theatre as academic fodder, was to make children actors in each other’s lives, capable of measuring the different effects of their words, roles and actions on another person. A drama teacher, or therapist, had only to nurture this awareness through the structuring of play and the setting of scenes in order to enable every child to flourish.

When Danny came out of the theatre, he felt more alert to the life that pulsed all around him. Before Brian Gordon he might have kept his head down, lost in thought. He might not have noticed the passers-by on the streets or the passengers on the bus as it rattled homewards. Now he saw things differently. There they were, the very same theatre games that he played, in the prim gossips who matched their faces to their listener’s reaction, in the gestures of candour, of encouragement, of exaggeration that animated hands, in the gaits that stiffened as a cop or a clergyman passed.

✲

Lorraine Aykroyd, though she tried seeing her eldest son through the psychologist’s eyes, hearing his theatrics through Brian Gordon’s ears, was perplexed. She did not see in him the same great promise or creativity. She saw turbulence. Her son needed a firm hand – that was the reverend talking – to straighten him out. Yet while she agreed she also knew that Danny needed more than discipline. He was coming up thirteen. What might the future hold for someone like him? He didn’t seem destined for a white picket-fenced house, a nine-to-five job.

It was at this time that she thought of sending him to the Pius X Minor Seminary in Ottawa. The priesthood would offer him cover for his oddities. After all, she might have thought, men of the cloth need not observe society’s conventions; their cassock exempts them from paying a mortgage or raising a family. To the suggestion Danny’s father, devout like his wife, a walking Bible even, agreed, although I doubt he ever really considered his son priest material. No matter, since the seminary doubled as a boarding school.

Danny was admitted and boarded Monday to Friday. The Aykroyds had vouched for their son’s deep faith, describing to the director his weekly bike rides to church to help at Mass.

Mass. There was a lot of that now at the seminary. And Fathers so obese they slept with bricks beneath their bed, and others, in class, who tossed chalk and worse at dozing heads, and the Sisters of Saint Martha, in their habits, who cooked for the cafeteria.

Latin was compulsory. Headache-inducing conjugations and declensions. The boys ploughed through Julius Caesar’s Gallic War, deciphered the daunting verses of Catullus. Unavoidable, too, the mud and shoves of field sports. Mens sana in corpore sano. Danny wouldn’t have cared for those. He mightn’t have cared much for the dorms either, the bedsheets coarse and scratchy. Monday nights would be worst for homesickness. He might have gone to the window then. The night, black and white with blizzard, was a vast television screen on the blink.

All that said, the seminarians didn’t have it all bad, for some nights after lights-out they would creep out at ten and catch the end of a film at the Auto Sky drive-in. And the nuns clucked around them like mother hens, plying them with milk and cookies they had baked themselves, and raising chuckles with their dry sense of humour. The Fathers, meanwhile, offered plenty of material for imitations. Danny did an excellent Father Baxter. The stoop (unkind tongues called the Father Quasimodo or Modo Man), the chalk-catapulting, the shrill cry of ‘Smarten up, jokesters!’

Other boys who tried to do the Father ended up doing Danny doing him.

And then there was the library, well run and well stocked, where Danny would find every kind of book to read to his heart’s content, and his head’s, his reading tastes being, to put it mildly, eclectic: everything from woodwork to motorbikes to home economics, as evidenced by the many checkout cards that soon bore his signature. The library walls held spacious long windows that bathed the room in brightness; when Danny opened a book’s covers, it was like sunning himself with its pages.

Inevitably, the sixties worked their way into the seminary. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was sung at Mass by the younger priests. Attitudes to long hair, or certain kinds of clothes, were softening. Soon Fridays became dress-down days, when the boys could abandon their shirts and ties for jeans and T-shirts. Danny once came into class in jodhpurs, a leather flight helmet and aviation goggles. I have seen a photo of him in them. Another time he could be seen in long white gloves with a police whistle on a lanyard, loudly directing foot traffic in the hallway connecting the classes.

He would do odd things like that. Not to make a spectacle of himself, for he had a shy boy’s stutter in those years. Or, rather, not only for the spectacle. Most likely, he was still learning to measure his effect on other people, and testing the boundaries of adult patience. Other misbehavers in the seminary weren’t indiscreet in the same way. More streetwise, they’d make sure, say, not to smoke within smelling distance of the Fathers. And they knew better than to shout an explosive word, like ‘bomb’, on a class outing. They knew themselves to be boys vulnerable to cause and effect, and expellable. Not Danny. He always seemed to be teetering on the edge of something.

✲

The same summer that he wrapped up his third year at Pius – maybe thanks to all his mother’s prayers – the mood in the Aykroyd household, and the country at large, was celebratory. This time next week, Danny thought, he would be fifteen and Canada one hundred. Canada and Danny shared their birthday: the first of July. Appointed to the Centennial Commission, his father had had a hand – or even both hands – in organising the 1967 celebrations. And this evening, just a week before the big day, the Aykroyds had something else besides to celebrate, for on this last Saturday in June, in the grand dining room of the Hotel Eastview, Edward Gougeon – Eddy to his grandson Danny – and his wife were ringing in their golden wedding anniversary.

Danny could have done with Eddy back in first grade, marching into Our Lady in his red and black Mountie best, impressing the teachers, putting the fear of God (or, at the very least, of the Crown) into his grandson’s bullies. But Eddy Gougeon had already retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by that time, and everything Danny knew about his grandfather’s career had come to him by way of anecdote and the sterling-silver medal for long service he’d have seen somewhere displayed.

Danny was giving consideration to becoming a cop himself, a Mountie like his mother’s old man, minus the horse. He would pass the Ontario Police College course in Aylmer and ride a Harley-Davidson Police Special and people would call him Constable – no, Sergeant; no, Staff Sergeant Aykroyd. He’d go on and on about bylaws and know just what to say and when, and the interrogation room would teach him all the conversational skills he’d ever need.

At some point in the evening a chic and stately woman rose, looking much like Lorraine Aykroyd, only younger: Helen Gougeon, Danny’s aunt, who gave a toast to the happy couple. Danny was fond of Aunt Helen, who was quite the character, as well as something of a celebrity. The newspapers carried her weekly food column complete with photo (the photos taken at various angles, in each his aunt wearing a different outfit and hairdo, as though she were a dozen women in one), and her recipes had found their way into a cookbook, Helen Gougeon’s Good Food. To think of Aunt Helen as a maker of books! It made sense, considering her way with words, which was as precise as Danny’s mother’s, who was an executive stenographer, but also witty. She was always the life of the dinner party, Aunt Helen, holding court even as she sliced a tearjerker of an onion, an opinion on everything.

The discreet waiters, bearers of wine, or perhaps champagne, threaded between the tables.

‘To the Gougeons!’

Lucky Eddy! Danny thought that he too would one day have a long-service medal, and a wife of fifty years, and all the other satisfactions of the retired policeman.

✲

The night Eddy died, Danny dreamed that Grandpa Gougeon walked by a lake, waving. It was the same lake he’d seen many times before, through the window of the parlour in which his ancestors on his father’s side had long conducted their séances.

The next morning the telegram from Ottawa reached him in Toronto, where he was working at the time. He looked at his calendar. It was 25 September 1975. He would be starting on a new TV comedy show in New York in the next fortnight. NBC’s Saturday Night.