There Was Change Coming

From preface:

It would have been hard enough to live in the Prairies when farm fields were baked into nothing and grasshoppers were falling from the sky onto the already-sparse crops, but growing up in Depression-era southeastern Saskatchewan is just one small notch on a long list of challenges we might want to call traumatic today. In this memoir, an account of the time from her birth to her entrance into adulthood, she closes the gap between the way we live now and the way we used to live. You'll read about the slow death of her father to TB, daily bombs dropped on her neighbourhood in England, a rheumatic fever that kept her from school for one year, and the resiliency that emerges from these trying experiences.

Audrey née Clarke, clearly, was a remarkable woman living in a fascinating time. And this story, which is an insider's look at the two major events of the beginning of the 20th century, is undoubtedly about her. But it's also about someone who, in writing an autobiography, ends up writing about everyone around them. In the pages ahead you'll read about uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, friends, and friends of friends. You'll hear about a father who "ever since ... [returning] home from the Sanatorium had slept in the tent in the trees." A poor pony with one blind eye. A rural Saskatchewan connected to the world by one large wooden telephone. A coastal England bracing for invasion by day and wrapping itself in darkness by night. Treaty 4 territory with its own long history. "Blue" babies who tragically and inexplicably die. Men who save tiny dogs at Dunkirk. Teachers who cane their students with thin bamboo sticks. Sixteen-year-olds who leap across oceans. Kids who run through barbed wire. Teenagers who learn to sew baby bootees. And a woman who finds herself in the middle of it all.

Dettagli