Love and Ambition in the Arctic by Stef Penney

Continuing our cold theme, our guest for January is Stef Penney.

Photo credit: Ian Plillips-McLaren

 Stef Penney grew up in Edinburgh. She is a screenwriter and the author of three novels: The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), The Invisible Ones (2011), and Under a Pole Star (2016). She has also written extensively for radio, including adaptations of Moby-Dick, The Worst Journey in the World, and, mostly recently, a third instalment of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise series.

The Tenderness of Wolves won Costa Book of the Year, Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year, and was translated into thirty languages. It has just been re-issued in a 10th anniversary edition. http://www.stefpenney.co.uk

Here Stef is talking about her new book with Charlotte Wightwick

Charlotte Wightwick: Tell us about your new novel, Under A Pole Star.

Stef Penney: Flora Mackie first crosses the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. As a young scientist in the 1890s, she confounds expectations to become leader of an expedition to North-West Greenland, where she encounters rival American explorers Lester Armitage and Jakob de Beyn. All three become obsessed with the north: for Flora it is her real home; for Armitage it is a theatre for his ambition; for de Beyn, a place of escape. Their paths cross many times over the next decade, changing their lives for ever. It began as a book about ambition, but I think it’s ended up as a love story.

CW: Were you inspired by any real-life explorers or incidents when developing her character? What about the other characters in the book?

SP: There were no women arctic explorers at the time (the first was in the late 1920s), but there were a few female mountaineers, and a handful of women, like Isabella Bird, who made extraordinary solo journeys. But the High Arctic was (and still is) a very hard place to get to, logistically; an expedition there involved massive expenditure, specially chartered ships, tons of equipment, and a lot of time. Unless you were fantastically wealthy, you had to be able to sell yourself as the right man for the job. So Flora has to overcome many obstacles – some through her choices, some by fate – before she becomes the leader of an expedition. She has to be quite unusual to surmount all those difficulties, but once I decided she was the daughter of a Dundee whaling captain who had spent much of her childhood in Greenland, this almost impossible thing began to work...

With the other characters, I was inspired by historical explorers, although neither is closely based on any one figure. The accounts of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, and the controversy about who reached the North Pole first, or at all, got me thinking about what sort of people explorers are, and why they might lie. At first, I was overwhelmed by that story. They were extraordinary personalities – not just the unfathomable Cook and the incredibly dislikeable Peary, but Peary’s wife Jo (also dislikable) who joined him on a couple of expeditions as a non-active member, and Matthew Henson, his African-American servant, who went everywhere he went, but who was ignored by Peary, and the public, after their final trip. Theirs was a story you couldn’t make up – except they did.

CW: ​Love and ambition are two of the key emotional themes in the book - how do these play out in your characters and what were the key issues you wanted to explore here?

SP: I’m fascinated by the idea of ambition – particularly the point where it tips over from driving a person to achieve a goal, to driving them to lie – or worse – to reap the rewards that goal brings. The love story evolved later, but it became, perhaps, more important in the end. I don’t really think in terms of issues, so I don’t know that I intended to explore anything in particular, other than the collision of those particular characters, in that particular place.

I suppose one thing that emerges is the way Flora holds onto her self and her autonomy under the onslaughts of the time – society, cultural expectations, biology, and indeed, love. Another thing that came to concern me very much is the way that sex is portrayed in fiction. I didn’t set out to write an explicit love story, but as writing progressed, I came to feel that not to precisely describe the affair between the two main characters would be a cop-out (no pun intended!). I’m a pedant; I get annoyed by love scenes where you’re left with questions like, Sorry, did she have an orgasm? How? What were they using for contraception? (Particularly pertinent, perhaps, in historical fiction.) And if you’re writing about the difference between good, bad and indifferent sex – well, it seems to me you have to be specific.

CW: The book tackles a number of serious subjects, including for example the impacts of colonisation and what that meant for the lives of indigenous people - can you say a little about these?

SP: It’s hard to avoid such things in writing about Arctic exploration. It’s also what makes it, for me, more fascinating than the Antarctic, where explorers could continue to behave in their own cultural bubble without anyone challenging them. The parts of the book most closely modeled on history are the various trials the Inuit characters suffer at the hands of explorers. Although there was nothing in Greenland to compare with the genocide in, for example, Tasmania, (because the land was commercially unexploitable), horrific things occurred: some accidental, like the fatality of unfamiliar diseases, and some that sprang from the explorers’ sense of white supremacy. Though some explorers in the book, as in history, are more insensitive than others, no one comes out of it with completely clean hands.

CW: This isn't the first time you've written about northern, unforgiving settings ( your first book, The Tenderness of Wolves was set in Canada) - what is it do you think that draws you to write about such landscapes?

SP: I don’t seem to be able to stay away from them for long. Some people are drawn to deserts – for me, it’s the north. Perhaps because it’s close to the Scottish landscapes of my childhood. We spent all our holidays in the Highlands or on the North-West coast, and there’s something about bleak, rugged landscape that gets into your bones. And that’s even before you get to the ice and snow – it’s beautiful yet deadly; it’s ephemeral and transformative, it both conceals and reveals... Such hostile surroundings force people to reveal themselves, too. Two of the things I most enjoyed writing were my vision of Eden, which had to be a northern place; and being inside a glacier: something truly extraordinary.

An interview with Arushi Raina, by Y S Lee

Arushi Raina's potent debut novel, When Morning Comes, is a coming-of-age story set in apartheid-era South Africa. Told by four alternating first-person narrators - an angry revolutionary, an ambitious gangster, a son of extreme privilege, and a peaceful activist - it sets the narrators' personal stories against the backdrop of the Soweto Uprising of 1976.



Here's the official description:

Zanele is skipping school and secretly plotting against the apartheid government. The police can't know. Her mother and sister can't know.

Her best friend Thabo, schoolboy turned gang member, can tell she's up to something. But he has troubles of his own—a deal gone wrong and some powerful enemies.

Across the bridge, in the wealthy white suburbs, Jack plans to spend his last days in Johannesburg burning miles on his beat-up Mustang—until he meets a girl with an unforgettable face from the simmering black township—Soweto.

Working in her father's shop, Meena finds a packet of banned pamphlets. They lead to a mysterious black girl with a secret, a dangerous gangster with an expensive taste in clothes, and an engaging white boy who drives a battered red car.

A series of chance meetings changes everything.

A chain of events is set in motion—a failed plot, a murdered teacher, and a secret movement of students that has spread across the township.

And the students will rise.

When Morning Comes is a striking achievement. With four very distinct narrators who are often hostile to each other, it would be easy for the novel's structure to fracture or spin out of control. Instead, it coheres. Raina's handling of race and politics is both subtle and consistent. And her prose is by turns vivid and moving, striking and restrained - precisely the vehicle such a story demands. After finishing it, the novel haunted me for days. I'm so glad that Raina kindly agreed to answer some of my more persistent questions here.

YSL: I really admire the way you tell the story through four interlocking narratives. Each voice is incredibly distinct, the characters are frequently at odds with each other, and yet the novel holds together – an impressive technical accomplishment! Why did you choose to structure it in this way?

AR: I’m tempted to say that the book wrote itself that way—it’s a story about collisions, the personal, day to day collisions the characters have with eachother, against a backdrop of the larger collision of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. I needed to go to different parts of the city, to see things differently, to create the underlying tension in the story. But the truth is, I’ve been playing with different points of views for a while, I love how Zanele, Thabo, Jack and Meena all tell the story differently, and how the writer (me) and the reader has to come to terms with which, if any version they most relate to.

YSL: You were born in South Africa, but long after the novel’s action takes place. What inspired you to write about your earliest homeland and what kind of research did you do to establish a sense of time and place?

AR: For the longest time, I didn’t write about South Africa, partly because I didn’t feel I was able to, and partly because to write about home in North America made me feel like I was trying to pull some kind of exotic card out my bag of writer’s tricks. I was partly right about the first, wrong about the second. To write about something familiar from home may seem exotic to others, but may be the story you need to tell, which is less exotic to you, than, say writing about an epic slumber party in the heart of Jersey City (not that there is anything wrong with slumber parties or Jersey City). Like many, though, I finally felt inspired when was leaving Johannesburg to immigrate to Canada. And my doubts about being able to do the story justice, helped. I learned to tread carefully (but more on this later).

It was a tipping point, in many ways, but immigration is not super convenient for research. At high school, we’d spent a number of years studying apartheid history, and the Soweto Uprising in particular. This was a starting point, and a good one—I’d been a teenager then and remembered the experience of reading about it in a textbook. But it needed to be real. And for me, to make history breathe is to make it fiction.

After that, it was a lot of trawling through English and American libraries for the odd reference book on primary resources, and of course, the internet. And South Africans, too.

Arushi Raina, presently of Vancouver, B.C.

YSL: Inhabiting the minds of two black characters living under apartheid is a bold step. How could you feel confident that you were doing them justice? And what do you make of Lionel Shriver’s recent provocations on the subject of cultural appropriation?

AR: I think it is, and having grown up in Johannesburg, the complexities of the country and race relations are raw to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Being closer makes it harder to describe the context in large, defined brushstrokes. And the short answer to your question is no: I can never be fully confident that I’m doing them justice. I can only give my very best shot, I can tread carefully, questioning my assumptions at each step, pulling forward a universal humanity while not shying away from some of those differences. I can look at primary sources and read the words of the South African township youth (there are a number of speeches and records of letters available) - these words are sharper, more eloquent, than anything I could put to paper.

I think the attempt to reach and respectfully tell stories in other voices, marginalized voices is important, as much as the openness to further discussion and debate on my attempt, and depiction is important. I don’t want to be defensive, I want to try my best because it is an important story rarely told, and I want to hear all people’s views, least not South African teens. I think Lionel Shriver is contributing a specific point of view to the discussion, and she’s put forward a number of rather out-there examples. Living in post-apartheid South Africa, interacting with First Nations groups in Canada has made me aware that where there is pain, there is a need to tread carefully. But this does not lessen our responsibility to empathize and try telling difficult stories, always empowering these communities to either be involved or discuss/question what we do as storytellers. That’s really where our learning begins, or at least I hope it does.

YSL: Early in the novel, Thabo says, “it was stupid to put the one thing that mattered to you in a red dress for everyone to see”. And yet he does, repeatedly, because he doesn’t believe he has a choice. This is a powerful metaphor for a lot of things that happen in the novel. Is choice – or the lack thereof - largely an illusion for your characters?

AR: That’s a tricky one. I’d like to think that the characters, including Thabo, come face-to- face with a narrowing pool of difficult choices. And their resilience is in their ability to make and come to grips with these choices.

YSL: Each interracial relationship in the novel begins with antagonism, or at least guarded suspicion. This is logical enough and I imagine there’s a lot of historical evidence for interracial romances like Jack’s and Zanele’s. I’m curious about Zanele and Meena, too. How unusual was it to form platonic friendships across racial barriers?

AR: Pretty unusual. Talking to South Africans who lived through that time, you only did so if you really stuck your neck out. Your entire life wasn’t designed for you to do so. In the rare cases they did, it was through anti-apartheid activism, which, to Meena’s credit, she does get embroiled in.

YSL: Family bonds seem largely broken and/or ineffectual in your portrait of South African society. Jack’s parents value his academic achievements and whatever glory his bright future can reflect upon them; Zanele’s mother is trapped both by single parenthood and institutional racism; and Meena’s relationship with her father is dutiful but remote. This is surely not a coincidence! What connection do you see between a dehumanizing body politic and its subjects’ humanity?

AR: You know, I never really noticed this until you pointed it out! The parents sort of wrote themselves that way, inflected of course, through the point of views of their children. As you’ve pointed out, in many ways the apartheid institution wears at the very core of the family—in Zanele’s case, her family has been split apart by labour and group area act laws, breaking open all the cracks that may have lain underneath a family that didn’t suffer the same injustice. In Meena’s, she has to come to terms with the strange triaging of color, where Indians were treated marginally better to black people. To take advantage of this slight preferential treatment is a recipe for survival, and Meena’s father has already surrendered to it.

I also think that families can be a source of insulation from the threats of the wider world. In many cases, they were, in apartheid South Africa, from my friends’ parents’ accounts. For Meena, Zanele, Thabo and Jack to be who they end up being, they needed to have the insulation damaged, or ripped off.

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation (or two) that really encapsulates the flavour of When Morning Comes?

AR:

“It’s the kind of storm that happens only on the Highveld, the thunder loud and rapid. She doesn’t speak. I need her to. Maybe she’s counting the people who’ve died since we first met.”

YSL: Thank so much, Arushi. While it's a cliché to call a novel timely, that is precisely the case here. I hope When Morning Comes is very widely read, especially at a time such as this.

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This post is my (Ying's) last as a regular History Girl. Thank you to everyone who read and commented over the past two years! If you'd like to keep in touch, please consider signing up for my sporadic author newsletter.

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Arushi Raina grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. So far, Arushi’s also lived in Egypt, Nigeria, India, the US, UK, and most recently, Canada. At Vassar College in New York, Arushi studied Economics and English, where she was able to put together the beginnings of When Morning Comes. Besides writing, Arushi enjoys travelling, arguments, and long car rides. As a day job, Arushi works as a consultant. One day she’ll explain what that means.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (also called The Agency quartet in North America). She's presently writing a novel set in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

Making History ... by One Foot by Julie Summers

I write a great deal about life in the middle of the last century and about people who made history in a variety of different ways. Today I want to tell the story of a group of young men who made history nine years ago and who have joined the pantheon of greats in the small but exclusive field of Henley Royal Regatta rowing winners. Sunday 8 July 2007 and the market town of Henley-on-Thames is enjoying a warm afternoon. On the Buckinghamshire bank of the river the scene is one of colour, pageantry and tradition: blue-and-white striped boat tents marshalled neatly between the pink-and-cream Leander Club hard up against Henley Bridge, and the white marquees housing the grandstands and Stewards’ Enclosure on the downstream side. It is finals day of the regatta, the day when lives are changed for ever by the outcome of an individual race. At 3:50pm two crews of nine young men line up at the start, next to the lozenge-shaped island in the middle of the river crowned by an elegant temple designed by the eighteenth-century English architect, James Wyatt. The umpire is standing in a handsome launch, arms raised, holding a red flag vertically above his head waiting for the two coxes to indicate that their crews are all set. Are you ready? He sweeps the flag down sharply. Go! Sixteen blades dip into the water. They are off.

There is expectation and excitement all along the river bank – not least in the Stewards’ Enclosure where nervous parents fidget, check their watches, exchange anxious glances and wonder why the commentator has not mentioned the race yet. But patience. Then the deadpan announcement over the loudspeaker: The final of the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup is in progress between Brentwood College School on the Berkshire station and Shrewsbury School on the Bucks station. Brentwood College School are the Canadian National School Champions. No mention of Shrewsbury’s pedigree. Upwards of 100,000 people attend Henley Royal Regatta each July. It is an event caught in a bubble of history with echoes of a bygone era everywhere: fine hats, striped blazers, picnics in the car park come rain or shine, decorated launches bobbing on the white booms that line the course, Pimms jugs clinking with ice, champagne and oysters, a brass band playing military tunes, and all the while a titanic battle is being fought on the water. Brentwood had dispatched the favourites, Eton, in the semi-finals the day before and Shrewsbury had beaten Radley in a slower time.

At the end of the island, both crews rating 42, Brentwood College School lead Shrewsbury School by half a length. Forty strokes in from the start and the Canadians already have a half-length lead. Six minutes to go. The grandstand is full of Shrewsbury supporters. There is barely a free seat, the atmosphere tense. Elsewhere people are milling around the bars and chatting. Henley is, after all, a great social event. It marks the end of the summer season, after Ascot, and coincides with finals’ day at Wimbledon. At The Barrier, Brentwood College School maintained their lead of half a length over Shrewsbury School. Time to The Barrier, 1 minute 58 seconds. A buzz. One second faster than yesterday. The Barrier is one of two points where intermediate times are taken, times that later will be scrutinised, compared, delighted at or despaired over. The spectators downstream can see the action first. Crowding along the river bank they get close-up views of the two crews battling it out in the early stages of the race.

The next timing point is Fawley. Now there is a change: At Fawley, Brentwood College School’s lead over Shrewsbury School has been reduced to a quarter of a length. The grandstand is in spasm, spectators begin to move towards the river bank sensing a spectacle. Downstream the shouting has increased and the excitement is palpable. Can the home crew crack the Canadians? At The Three-Quarter Mile Signal Brentwood School led Shrewsbury School by 2 feet. The grandstand is on its feet, a roar is moving up the bank like a giant wave. Half the race gone. At the Mile Signal, Shrewsbury School had taken the lead. Wild elation but fear too. The Canadians were not about to give up and Shrewsbury supporters knew that. ‘We could see them now and it looked hell’, wrote housemaster Martin Humphreys to crew member Tom Hanmer’s parents. ‘Shrewsbury on the far side pounding away, looking a bit scrappy and tired, to be honest. Brentwood on the near side and neat and long. When they came past us Shrewsbury had a quarter of a length lead, but I could see the Canadians were eating into it with every stroke. This was grim.’ The two boats cross the line neck and neck. Then there is silence. The commentary ceases and the Finish Judge has to make his call. The wait seems interminable, time stands still. Then: The result of the Final of the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup was that Shr …. No need for the rest: the name of the winning crew is always announced first. The grandstand explodes in ecstasy … the verdict, one foot. More cheering. The narrowest, the shortest, the tiniest of winning margins imaginable, less than a sixtieth of the length of the boat.

For Brentwood College School a bitter blow. To be a member of a losing crew, however epic the race, there are no prizes. For the boys of the winning crew and their parents, unsurpassed joy, a matter of lifetime pride and for one man in particular this is a sweet victory. Eighty-three-year-old Michael Lapage watched his grandson, Patrick, help to win this great battle. Nearly seventy years earlier, on the same stretch of river, Michael had won silver for Great Britain in the 1948 Olympic Games. The legacy of a Henley win is a long one. It unites generations and brings tears to the eyes of the strongest of men.

An extraordinary footnote to this story is that Patrick Lapage stroked the Harvard University boat to victory five years later. The verdict: ONE FOOT. Now there is history for you...

Another Great Pretender - Grey Owl Catherine Johnson

Look at this chap, all rugged and craggy faced with his long hair, grim set mouth and serious eyes. It's of a man called Grey Owl, taken at the height of his international fame in 1936. What was he famous for? Not an actor in Westerns, but one of the first nature conservationists who - ahead of all popular notions - advocated complete bans on hunting wild animals.

He wrote books, appeared in non fiction films about the wild Canadian country in which he lived and worked (he was a park ranger in the mid 30s), and toured all over North America and Europe giving lectures and meeting royalty (he was presented to George IV in 1937).

He was born in 1888 and like many First Nation Canadians joined up to fight for Britain in World War One.  He'd already been working in the wilds of Obijwe country working as a fur trapper since he was in his late teens. His military documents identified him as born in Montreal and 'Indian'.
During the war he suffered a serious bout of gangrene and ended up in British military hospitals for nearly a year.

He returned to Canada at the end of the war where he took up his life as a woodsman, trapping beaver mostly. The war had taken it's toll and he began drinking.

But in 1925 he met a young woman who completely changed his point of view. She was nearly half his age, she was  Iroquois and called Anaharheo.

Anahareo c1930

She persuaded him to stop killing animals and start protecting them. Grey Owl began writing books and articles about nature conservation, they became hugely popular.

Grey Owl told his publisher - and the world - that he was half Scots and half Apache. That his parents met on one of Wild Bill Hickok's Western Tours in Great Britain and that he'd travelled with them and he was born in Mexico.

Everyone believed hm.

He went on lecture tours and on one stop, in Hastings in 1937, had tea with two of his fans, a pair of elderly English women. They probably had a lot to talk about, they were the women who'd bought him up, in a terraced house just down the hill from where I live now. They were his Great Aunts Cary and Ada. He was Archie Belaney. Hastings born and bred.

They kept his secret safe.

But Grey Owl was drinking more, he split up with Anahareo and married a French Canadian woman shortly after. But as well as being an alcoholic Grey Owl was a bigamist. He'd married legally for the first time just before World War One, then married - illegally - an English woman while he was in hospital in Britain.

He died in 1938 from pneumonia (aggravated no doubt by the drinking) alone in his cabin. The truth came out and his work was discredited. He was the Rachel Dolezal (the American white woman who made a career out of being black) of his age, like her his career depended on his ethnicity and when he was discovered to be a man from an East Sussex seaside town his authority on matters of the Canadian wild was shot to pieces.

But Anahareo, who'd split with him in 1936, forged an independent career as an animal rights activist. She was awarded a medal for her work by an International Animal Rights elected a member of the Order of Canada. Anahareo was truly a woman ahead of her time.

She asserted she never knew the truth about Archie Belaney, that she'd been hurt when she found out his true identity.  When they met he'd already been lying about his identity for the past twenty years.

The only thing that was true  about Archie Belaney was his birth date. Archie Belaney emigrated to Canada as a teenager, as soon as his aunts would let him go. He didn't want to be a grammar school boy from a seaside town, he wanted to be that noble savage he'd read about all his boyhood in books.

The blue plaque in Hastings

Perhaps the more he was believed, the more he wanted to be believed.  I don't know what it takes to make yourself over so entirely. This is far from Mary Willcocks who spent a just few months as south seas royalty - this is whole a lifetime. Did he have to convince himself first? Was it chance, opportunity, foolhardiness or arrogance?   Or maybe, when he was canoeing on the lake outside his cabin in the Canadian wilderness, far from the prom and the pier, he just didn't care...

Catherine


My latest book is about another impostor - The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo is published by Corgi.

PS Hastings Museum has a lot of info about Grey Owl - and I haven't forgotten there was a film about him made recently with Pierce Brosnan.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY by Penny Dolan

I’m in that” trudging through a tangled story state” right now, so my mind isn’t up to too much precise history. Here’s today’s alternative:

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY?

At school, at a certain point, I was (ahem) moved from the form that did History to the class that enjoyed Economic History, and very glad I was too. Later, as far as I can recall, one chose History or Geography, People or Places. You were either studiously academic or supposed to like the open air and walking.  I am very glad how well these subjects now work together.

I am not a great traveller, unless you count books and stories, but when I flew to Canada recently, history and geography seemed inseparable. 

The rail track from Leeds to Manchester went through steep valleys, the trees lush green from the same damp that assisted cloth production, and with names like Halifax and Huddersfield. The railway pushed on through the remains of the industrial revolution: stone bridges, arched viaducts and sudden tunnels; canals, four storey mills and cloth factories. It was a fine journey, if time was not an issue, although one that any “Northern Powerhouse” rail route could destroy. Then, after a purgatory of junk food, booze and shopping, came take-off and flight.

 

Unusually, the day was clear and sunny, so peering down was like gazing at a familiar map of Great Britain. The landscape was a patchwork of green fields, hedges and trees, pleasing now, less pleasing during the Enclosures. The small roads twisted here and there between them, naturally fit around the contours, and curves. Over this gentleness lay the rigid lines of motorways, straight and autocratic as Roman roads.

On the plane went, out over the shipping lanes that carried people and cargo into and out of Liverpool and the other ports along the coast. Now, the calm sea just held the tiny pins of the wind-farm, and the pale silt-laden water still spreading out into Morecombe Bay. The shipyards and trade along this coast have gone.

Next, the plane passed over the great hook of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. In the middle ages, the Cistercian abbey at Furness was a centre for mining minerals; by the twentieth, the small natural inlets offered protection for the building of warships and submarines. 

 

The plane passed across the Isle of Man with its circling road and then above Ireland. At one point, there was Derry, clearly divided by the Boyne, just like the aerial view I’d seen on a recent history programme. 

Then all was gone. We were over the Atlantic.

 

Five hours later, land re-appeared: a vast area of trees, lakes - seemingly small - and more trees and more lakes, a seemingly empty terrain as divided and broken as a jig-saw puzzle. Now I’ve checked, I think this was Newfoundland and Quebec. Then, as I looked down, all I could wonder was why and how would people travel over such a difficult, inhospitable landscape, and when, as there seemed to be no roads winding between the patches of water and rock. Suddenly, from the yellowed text book came a long lost term: “Canadian Shield”.  Surely this landscape, scraped by glaciation, was what that term had meant? The land itself was history and home for the First Nations.

Before long, down below the wings, we saw the long channel of the St Lawrence River. We were flying inland past Quebec city, south west, down towards Toronto, Lake Ontario and the flat lands beyond.

The curving British roads had gone. Now I stared at a grid of square plots and straight roads and flat roof buildings. These were the blind-eyed signs of colonial settlement where the simplest way was to draw boxes on a map and sell the land off in tidy lots. When the geography of a place is so vast, why take landscape into account? Other than the divisions come back to haunt us, as in the troubled lines drawn on Africa.

Once we had landed, I started longing for a map, a real map because I did not know where I was at all. There was only the hire-car GPS - and at one point even that stopped working – and the half-familiar names like Lincoln or Grimsby or Cambridge only confused me further.  How can one understand the land and its story when you are guided by satellite alone?

I apologise if all this sounds like bleating, but I hated being map-less. I hated the sense of not being able to find out where I was, of being unable to read the layers of history in the landscape, the architecture or in the curve of a road. 

Even though we went to a Mennonite Market, drove past Sir Allan MacNab’s Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, peered through the Victorian peepholes out into the torrent of Niagara Falls and more, I felt as if there were layers of history missing, stories I could not see.

I admit I was surprised by that sense of loss. Was it just the lack of a map? Or because I had no history in my head when I could see a map? 

Here, at home, I live in the triangle between York - of the castle, the walls and the Vikings - and Leeds - with its Victorian arcades and waterways - and the ancient sheep pastures of the Dales where low sunlight reveals the strip and furrow farming of older settlements.

There, in Canada, I admit I did feel the absence of those histories.

Penny Dolan

www.pennydolan.com

KINGSTON PENITENTIARY, by Y S Lee

When giving people directions to my house, I sometimes say, "Turn right at the Penitentiary." They usually think I'm joking, but in fact I'm entirely serious. I live within view of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s oldest and most notorious prison. 

Kingston Penitentiary, c. 1901 (photo from "Souvenir views of the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and the Thousand Islands, River St. Lawrence", 1901, via wikipedia)

Kingston Penitentiary was built in 1833-34, using blocks of limestone quarried by convict labour. (Actually, the building is older than the country itself: until Canada’s Confederation in 1867, the city of Kingston and its penitentiary were located in the British colony of Upper Canada.) When Charles Dickens visited Kingston in 1842, he found the town distinctly underwhelming. It had just suffered a disastrous fire that razed large portions of the city centre, including City Hall and the public market. Dickens’s rather sniffy assessment? “It may be said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and the other half not to be built up.”

He must have cheered up as he drove westward along the shores of Lake Ontario, because when he reached the nearly-new Penitentiary, Dickens had nothing but praise for it: “There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated, in every respect. The men were employed as shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far advanced towards completion. The female prisoners were occupied in needlework.” I’m willing to bet that everything was extra-tidy and well-organized that day, for the celebrity visit. 

This building houses the woodworking and machine shops for inmate instruction. (photo credit: Boardhead, via wikipedia)

Dickens’s impression of the prison might seem excessively rosy but the Pen was a newer facility, built along more humane principles. For example, teaching trades to inmates aimed to reduce recidivism. However, prisoners were also subject to very strict discipline: inmates “must not exchange a word with one another under any pretence whatever”. Further, they “must not exchange looks, wink, laugh, nod or gesticulate to each other”. Inmates were flogged for breaking these rules. At the time of Dickens’s visit, there were roughly 400 inmates, including 24 females. The women were housed in “the Female Department”, a separate building within the grounds, until a new facility was built for them in 1934.

Some of the nineteenth-century inmates were children: there is a record of Antoine Boucher, an eight-year-old boy, who was sentenced to either two or three years’ imprisonment (my sources differ) in 1845. A twelve-year-old named Elizabeth Breen is also on record as having been flogged, as well as an eleven-year-old called Alex Lafleur. His offense? Speaking in French.

In its early days, those employed at KP were required to live within earshot of its bell. In the event of an emergency, the bell was rung and all employees mustered to help out.

An aerial view of Kingston Penitentiary, ca. 1919 (photo credit: Library & Archives Canada, MIKAN no. 3259972, via wikipedia)

The penitentiary was in continuous use for 178 years until it was closed in 2013. Kingston Penitentiary was designated a National Historic Site in 1990 – an honour that sat uncomfortably with its use as a maximum-security jail. Because of its historical significance, it can’t be razed. There’s already a national penitentiary museum across the street, in the former warden’s Victorian red-brick home. And who on earth would buy a condo retrofitted into a place of such suffering? Until someone figures out how to use the space (the site is next to a harbour and looks out onto Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands) there it stands, a constant reminder of the gritty and shameful aspects of our history.

(In October 2013, I was privileged to take a tour of the now-empty prison with my camera. If you’d like to know more, please check out Kingston Penitentiary, Part 1 and Kingston Penitentiary, Part 2 at my personal blog.)

'The Home Boy who went to live with the Indians' by A L Berridge

Our broadband went down last week. 

Instant panic. I was surrounded by books and notes and maps and pictures, but how could I possibly work without the internet? I knew my story and the details I thought I’d need, but what about the little questions that come up when you’re going along? What did a lady’s side-saddle look like in 1855? Could a soldier in that year have known the words to ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’? I looked at that white Error Page and knew that as a writer I’d become utterly dependent on the internet.

Which is rather humbling when I think about earlier historical writers who managed perfectly well with notebooks and a library. True, they weren’t expected to include all the little details required of us now (and their readers couldn’t easily check on them if they did) but they did need a dedication and detective instinct besides which my own look decidedly pallid. 

Stanley meets Livingstone

But their rewards were often greater too. We all know the frisson of excitement when refining the search terms finally yields the exact thing we’re after, but ‘real world’ research can make us feel like Stanley when he pronounced the words, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

I know that feeling, because twenty two years ago I was a junior researcher for Central Television, and that kind of thing was my job.

We’re dinosaurs now, but for those who’d like to know how we did it Back In The Day, here’s a potted history of just one case and how it worked out.

This was my brief:

Even that paper is enough to tell us we’re in a different world. It’s not an e-mail, not a text – it’s an actual Memo that someone typed out and faxed.

 

It was also a tall order - find out about a Barnardo boy who was sent to Canada in the early 1900s, ran away, and ended up living with the Indians - but when I contacted the source of the story I learned at least that the subject had the rather unfortunate name of ‘John Thomas’. It was unfortunate for me too, since I’d hoped for something distinctive like ‘Ebenezer Hawkswhistle’, but ‘John Thomas’ and ‘somewhere in Cornwall’ didn’t give me a lot to go on. Given that surname, the only thing I could be thankful for was that he wasn’t Welsh.

But I had to start somewhere, so it was off to the Bodleian to order up every possible book on Dr Barnardo’s. The results were enlightening. This is where I learned about Barnardo’s infamous ‘Canada Clause’ that gave it the right to ship its children off to a supposedly ‘better life’ in Commonwealth countries whether the parents wanted it or not. This was where I learned about the children treated as slave labour in Canada and basically worked to death, the children who were beaten and raped by their host families and had nowhere to turn for redress. I was, in fact, on the track of the ‘Home Children’, whose stories Canada itself had already begun to recognize, and whose fate Gordon Brown finally apologized for in 2009.

Mrs Barnado with emigrant children 1909

As a human being I thought ‘tragedy’, but as a researcher I thought ‘trouble’, and I was right. The next call was obviously to Barnardo’s itself, but although the staff plied me helpfully with books and photographs, they were much more reluctant to talk about the Canada Project or anyone who might have been a victim of it. The most I learned was that if John Thomas had come from Cornwall then he would have been referred to Barnardo’s by another body – most probably the NSPCC.

NSPCC Offices in London

Next stop the NSPCC, and my heart lifted at the sight of records going right back to the 1880s, but sunk again when the friendly archivist wouldn't let me see the one I wanted. She wasn’t being obstructive, but rules of confidentiality protected the records of the living, and there was no evidence John Thomas was dead. 

It was a blow. I pleaded the likelihood, that it was a long time ago, that he had to be dead, but she said we could only be certain that he’d be very old. I took a deep breath, looked her straight in the eye, and said, ‘How old?’

That’s what you can’t do over the internet. We looked at each other for a good ten seconds before she glanced again at the book, closed it firmly, and said, ‘Perhaps a hundred and three.’

I could have kissed her. She’d given me what I needed most – a timeframe for the date of birth – and I was walking on air as I took a bus to St Catherine’s House for the registry of births, marriages and deaths.

It still took me half a day to find what I needed: his were common names, and there were five ‘John Thomas’s within my time frame. I eliminated those from obviously well-to-do families, but the last two had nothing to choose between them and I duly ordered copies of both birth certificates. Which was ‘my John’ I couldn’t tell, but I knew now that he had a middle name – and that it was either ‘James’ or ‘Henry’.

Birth certificate of John Henry Thomas, born 1887

 That wasn’t terribly impressive after a week’s work. There was still the Canada end of the story to explore, but my budget didn’t extend further than a railfare to London, so I made an appointment at Canada House and hoped the archives there might give me some answers.

Canada House, London

They did. The immigration lists were swamped with Thomases, but having a full name and date of birth made all the difference, and two minutes’ search gave me exactly what I wanted. His name was John Henry Thomas, and he’d been known locally as ‘English John’. The nickname was hopeful – the kind of cognomen he might be given if he lived among people of a different race – but I was entirely unprepared for the reaction of the archivist’s assistant. ‘Oh, English John,’ he said. ‘Florence Caswell wrote something about him.’

That doesn’t happen much on the internet either.

It was plain sailing after that. Florence Caswell settled in Manitoba after the Second World War, and her little book of reminiscences was right there in the Canada House library. I flicked feverishly through the pages, and stopped short at the heading ‘English John’, because there beside it was a photograph. A bad one, an old one, (even worse now with second generation photocopying) but there he was in front of me – my John. 

Dr Livingstone, I presume?

His story was there too. He was dead, of course, he’d died in the 1970’s, but he’d told Mrs Caswell his whole tale. He had indeed been passed by the NSPCC to Barnardo’s and in 1899 he was sent to Canada. His first employer was a farmer who was clearly unable to get enough work out of the 11 year old child and returned him to the Toronto base after only two months. His second was a farmer in Saskatchewan, but John ran back to the Distribution House in Winnipeg after only a few weeks. His third was another farmer who worked him for 17 hours a day, and when John ran this time he didn’t bother heading for Barnardo’s. He went for the wilderness and a life of freedom. 

It took him a while to reach it. He was never a beggar and took work where he could find it, but eventually joined forces with a French Canadian carpenter who rowed with him down the Red River as far as Manigotagan. Boudrais found work in a sawmill there, but John refused the offer of occasional odd jobs and rowed on for Lake Winnipeg. He kept himself as long as he could, but when the wild food ran out and his boat sprang a leak he sheltered from the storms on a central island and waited to die.

Ojibwa canoe, late 19th century

And there he was rescued, by a band of Saulteaux Indians seeking refuge from the same storm. White civilization of two different countries had failed him, but the Ojibwa respect and care for their orphans, and a particularly distinguished man named John Robert Bunn took John into his family to bring up as his own. 

‘My’ John stayed with them all his life. Winters were spent fur-trapping near Clearwater Lake, and summers on the Fort Alexander Reservation, selling the furs to factors and socializing with other Indians. John even married one, although this seems to have been only at his adoptive father’s suggestion because ‘he said she was a good cook.’ It was still a happy life, and ultimately a prosperous one – when Bunn died he bequeathed John his trapline, and for the first time the ‘Home Boy’ had a home and a business of his own.

Saulteaux (Plains Ojibwa) Indians in 1887

Mrs Caswell gave much more detail than that, and my own story should have ended there too, but the narrative threw up just too many new leads to ignore. I read how he’d turned up on her doorstep one day clutching a letter, and when she read it to him they were astounded to find it was from his half-sister. The sister was dead now, but she gave a great human interest to a possible film story, and the way she’d traced her brother offered something more. She’d read about him in an interview reprinted from an original in The Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer – and Mrs Caswell gave the date of January 1952.

I had to read it. I’d heard John’s story in Florence Caswell’s voice, but here was a chance to hear it in John’s. The Prairie Farmer wasn’t the kind of periodical I’d expect to find in the Colindale Newspaper Library, but Manitoba has a big library of its own, and after just one phone call they dug out the article and sent me a photocopy through the post. Here.

It’s nothing really, just a little ‘local interest story’, but to me it was fascinating, and the laconic tone of John’s voice seemed almost audible. He talked of his time ‘on the bum’, how he’d eat most things but ‘backed up’ on night owls and skunk, and spoke of ‘the white man’ as if he weren’t one himself. His vagueness as to his past was interesting, and when he only guessed his age at ‘63-64’ I had the extraordinary sensation of knowing more about this man than he knew himself. More, perhaps, than he’d like, and it gave me a little pang to see him describe his father as a ‘doctor’, when I knew him to have been a tin miner who could only mark an X for his name when he registered his son’s birth. Unless, of course, John was illegitimate…

 That’s when I suddenly wanted to stop. I knew all I needed to know, and it was time to wrap things up for Central. There was one last duty to find out if John had left any papers on his death, but the health administrator I spoke to in Winnipeg told me his final nursing home had been pulled down and its papers were in the incinerator. End of the line, but as I typed up the paperwork it occurred to me there was one last stone left unturned. As an ignorant Brit, the name ‘Fort Alexander’ had initially conjured up images of wooden stockades out of ‘Custer of the West’, but I’d had a bit of an education since then and decided it was worth a try. I picked up the phone, dialled International Directory Enquiries, and asked casually to be put through to Fort Alexander in Manitoba.

Church in Fort Alexander Reservation

 

The ringing tone started. A secretary answered, and put me through to a charming young man in the Cultural Centre who didn’t seem in the least surprised to hear what I wanted. ‘Oh yes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I know about English John. He was my grandfather.’

Now that’s something you never get on the internet.

It was a wonderful conversation, but it soon became clear there was no great coincidence involved since it was believed John had had ‘a number’ of children. Whatever his marriage had been like, John Thomas had clearly lived up to his name, and it was lovely to think of lots of little descendants of that once tragic Barnardo boy running round happy and free. When I started researching him I never thought the end of his story would make me smile.

And it was the end. Central did pursue the idea for a while, but nothing was ever made, and as I moved into a new career as script editor I forgot all about it – until now. As I was digging out the material for this blog I wondered how much easier a job I’d have had if the internet had been around, and tried a few Google searches to find out.

Nothing. Zilch. I found a few snippets on Bunn, but John Henry Thomas seemed as invisible as he was when I first started seeking him. Then I tried the usual google-fu things, focussing on ‘Caswell’, narrowing down to the smallest town in his history (Bissett in Manitoba), and found a wonderful little local history site devoted to the area. They had a picture gallery, and among the thumbnails one jumped out at me.

(c) The Bisset and Area Historical Society

 Yep. The ‘Jack’ was worrying, but I right-clicked for metadata, and up it comes as ‘english john henry’ and I knew it was my man. So is this:

(c) The Bissett and Area Historical Society

 Dr Livingstone works on the net as well, it seems.

But not entirely, because that was all I found. No story, no details, none of the information I’d had to run round so desperately to find out. The internet can only give back what someone’s put in, and it looks as if no-one else has troubled to ‘put in’ the story of English John.

And that makes me think. If he’s not here, who else is missing? What other fascinating stories are out there that the net hasn’t even touched?

Maybe we should unplug the broadband, switch off the computer – and go and find out.

***

A L Berridge's horribly out of date website