Written by Barbara Greenwood
When I was growing up, I loved reading stories set in the past. But one of the places I never found myself, in the story-trips I made through books, was in Canada’s past and by the time I was in my teens I wanted to know why. I knew interesting events had taken place here. I lived in Toronto and for my first nine years we lived near Yonge and Eglinton. At least once a week I passed the large post office building at Montgomery Ave. with its blue and gold plaque telling how William Lyon Mackenzie and his rebels gathered right on that spot at Montgomery’s Tavern before their brave but fruitless march down Yonge Street to try to wrest their rights from the Family Compact.
Many years later, when I was ready to try my hand at writing my first novel, it seemed natural that I should set my stories in Canada’s past and, more particularly, in an area where I had grown up. Stories are about characters in conflict. The Mackenzie Rebellion offers many such situations. I decided to focus on that climactic moment in the rebellion when, having staked all on their march down Yonge Street, the rebel farmers are defeated and have to flee for their lives. The story centres on a family who finds a wounded rebel hiding in the barn and then has to choose between the safe and politically correct action of giving him up to the authorities or the dangerous but humanitarian action of helping him escape.
I always look first for the conflict at the heart of my story, but before I start to write I have to "dress the set," get the "feel" of the times. Novelists build a sense of place detail by sensory detail. Before I could write the story that would become A Question of Loyalty I needed to know the smell, feel, taste and sound of life in an 1830s farmhouse. A few years previously I had been a volunteer guide at Gibson House, our local pioneer home. Dressed in period costume sitting in the front parlour doing embroidery, churning butter in the kitchen, helping with the baking, learning to spin, I had taken in the feel of that house, those olden times, through my ears, eyes, fingers and nose. Also, because I needed to know what each member of my fictional family would be doing from dawn to dusk, I read diaries of the time, making lists of everyday chores and activities. This kind of primary research is what the historical novelist needs to build a book’s "special somewhere."
Excerpted from Somewhere Meant For Me, Canadian Children’s Literature: A Journal of Criticism & Review, No. 48, 1987, originally part of a speech delivered at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Education, London, Ontario in July, 1986.