The Touchwood Hills, as they were affectionately called, resembled nothing so much as an unmade bed, a random series of slanting planes and ridges before the prairie reluctantly gave way to the northern bush. At the foot of the east hill lay our homestead, three hundred and twenty acres of excellent topsoil located in the dead centre of Western Canada.
From here I could see my own home, with its red-shingled roof and triple dormers like half-shut eyes. It was set back a quarter-mile from the main road, surrounded by lilacs and caraganas, and backed by a row of weathered wooden granaries. My mother was taking the wash off the clothesline, our Border Collie, Laddy, beating her calves with his shaggy tail.
In the field beside the house, my father sat on the cultivator drawn by our team of horses, Bess and Bonnie. The summerfallow changed colour behind him as the weedy soil rolled over to reveal its ebony underbelly. White gulls fluttered around the plough like oversized butterflies.
My sixteen-year-old brother Jack stood in the dry slough bed nearby, pitching forkfuls of hay bigger than himself into the hayrack. Each time he swung his arms, a shower of golden stalks followed him like the tail of a comet.
Much as I loved the familiar scene, I secretly thought farming was a wretched business. I was tired of hearing about the glory years after the Great War, when every farmer drove a new truck and every farmer’s wife wore a fur coat. I had grown up during the long drought that followed, the dirty thirties bringing one crop failure after another.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie Stewart waving from the tractor on his father’s field beside me. I raised my hand politely in return. My father had dropped a few hints about the eligibility of an only son with clear title to a half-section right across the road, but I dreaded the idea of farming — least of all with a big, good-natured beast of burden like Charlie. Instead, I cherished a secret dream of going to university.
I mounted my bicycle again, coasted down the hill, and turned onto the long driveway, lined by a double row of feathery blue spruce trees. I recalled the back-breaking trips Jack and I had made from the well, soaking the tiny saplings with pails of water while the drifting soil threatened to bury them alive.
“What a blessing my parents aren’t alive to see this,” Mother said.
As we sat at the table eating pork sausages and fried potatoes, we studied a map of Europe hanging on the blue plaster wall. Shiny steel pins from her sewing basket marked the line of invasion. The pinheads had already marched across Czechoslovakia and into Poland, leaving behind scattered holes like gunshots.
The large kitchen was the heart of our home. In winter the wood stove kept it warm, and in summer it was cooled by a breeze that flowed through the screened windows. A bouquet of late-blooming marigolds sat on the table in a green ceramic vase. Over the kitchen door hung the first needlework sampler I had sewn myself, at the age of ten. The crooked letters spelled: “Homes weeth ome.”
Dad sat at the head of the table where he could see his entire farm through the open window. A breath of air lifted the edge of the lace curtain, bringing with it the faint scent of smoke. Somewhere a farmer was burning off his stubble.
“Don’t worry, Anne. There’s still the English Channel between us and them.” It was a sign of my father’s ambivalence that he sometimes referred to the English as us, and sometimes as them.
“Did you ever see a German tank, Dad?” Jack asked, piling more sausages onto his plate. My brother was keen on weapons and his latest fascination was with the new Panzer.
“No, son, they came in at the end of the war and I’d already been shipped home. It must be quite something, like a mobile cannon with steel belts wrapped around the wheels. Apparently it can crawl over boulders, fences, anything.”
We were silent as we shared the horrifying vision of tanks rolling across the bright fields, driven by foreign savages indulging their lust for conquest, as the king said in a recent speech.
My mother reached for the milk and poured it into her cup first so the scalding tea wouldn’t crack the bone china. I loved to watch her eat, the way she buttered her bread one bite at a time: so gracious, so mannered, so … English.
I never called it home, at least not out loud, but I sometimes thought of England that way. I had once heard the term “ancestral pull,” the yearning to return to the birthplace of your forefathers. I knew it existed. I felt it in my bones.
My mother had grown up in an English seaside village, the only child of scholarly parents who encouraged her decision to become a nursing sister during the Great War. Both parents had died suddenly during the 1918 flu epidemic. The poor girl continued her work in the military hospital where she met my father, who was recovering from a vicious shrapnel wound, and later followed him to Touchwood.
I was pleased when people told me that I resembled my mother, because she was beautiful. We were almost the same height, although in the last year I had gained an inch on her. Both of us had a thick mass of wavy dark brown hair, hers with a few silver threads, and our eyes were the same shade of hazel.
I had even inherited my mother’s crooked face: the left eyebrow permanently cocked and the left side of her mouth quirked upwards, as if smiling at a private joke. MacTavish had once told me that I looked older and wiser than I deserved.
I glanced at my father gripping his coffee mug in his fist, his fingernails blackened with soil that no amount of scrubbing could remove, and asked myself again how he could be so indifferent to his own heritage.
His grandfather had come from the Orkney Islands to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company and married a Plains Cree. Dad had looked up some distant Scottish cousins while he was on leave during the first war, and had come away blessing his grandfather for having the good sense to leave that godforsaken place, with its rocky soil and sleeting winds.
“Just be thankful we live where we do,” he said for the hundredth time. We raised our eyes to the map again, as if in prayer. In 1939 the sun never set on the British Empire, and Canada was the biggest pink patch in the whole world.
Cambridge, England
October 20, 1939
Dear Anne,
Thank you for your recent letter and the photograph of the children. We were surprised to see how much they have grown. Rose is quite the young lady now.
Roger’s teaching position continues, although class sizes have dwindled since so many students have enlisted. It’s a mercy you aren’t in England. I have often felt sorry for you, so far away from civilization, but now I wish we had emigrated when we had the chance. Both my cook and housekeeper have joined up and we are in an awful muddle without them.
The tin of sweets you sent was most appreciated. We are simply longing for a taste of sugar. We don’t even have marmalade for our toast now that the oranges aren’t getting through from Spain.
Will you please send me some American cigarettes? And six pairs of silk stockings.
Your cousin, Pamela Spencer
“Dear old Pamela,” Mother said. “She always thought she was better than the rest of us, but when she landed an officer she became insufferable. After he started teaching at Cambridge, Pamela conveniently forgot she had any relatives. It must be a real comedown to clean her own house again. Well, I can’t afford silk stockings, but I’ll send her a carton of cigarettes.”
I thought my mother was being a little harsh. After all, Pamela led the life of a real English lady. No wonder she wasn’t used to scrubbing floors.
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