was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. "I was rushed to Fredericton at the age of two or three months to be baptized," Lochhead told an interviewer in 1988, adding that the ceremony took place in the home of his maternal grandparents. He agreed that although he lived and went to school for most of the year in Ottawa, as a boy, his heart was in Canada's Maritime provinces. "We heard so much about it from my mother, who was a great Maritimer, but not overbearing, not tiresome—she had a healthy, natural enthusiasm about where she was from." As a result of his mother's Maritime roots, Lochhead spent his boyhood summers at Duck Cove, near Saint John on the Bay of Fundy. Years later, he wrote about the significance of the early experiences he had there. "[F]or me, they help to explain the sense and feeling of place and people, which have become part of my poetry. They help to account for a closeness, a confidence which I have in being in the Maritimes." Lochhead's only sibling, Kenneth was born in 1926. The brothers spent most of their holidays together in New Brunswick and shared a fascination with their parents' forested cottage property on the Gatineau River north of Hull, Quebec. Kenneth, who became one of Canada's foremost painters, recalled how his family loved the natural beauty of the place: "My mother didn’t want anything cut; the trillium would come up, and that was a sacred rite of spring...And my brother looking at birds and mother waiting for certain birds to appear; these images were poignant in the excitement of their experience and connection." Over the years, Douglas Lochhead wrote several poems set in the Gatineau, while Kenneth painted a series of landscapes there. Lochhead's last collection Looking into Trees includes poems inspired by his brother's paintings which are also reproduced in the book. Education and military service In 1939, Douglas Lochhead enrolled in the pre-medical program at McGill University following in the scientific footsteps of his microbiologist father and his paternal grandfather William Lochhead who taught botany, genetics, geology and zoology at Macdonald College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec and who, in 1908, had founded the Quebec Society for the Protection of Plants from Insects and Fungous Diseases. Douglas Lochhead remembered spending many enjoyable hours in his grandfather's library reading his scientific papers, his collection of 19th century poetry and books