A few weeks ago, my Poetry Friday post celebrated ‘locale’ by looking briefly at the poet John Betjeman who wrote moving poems about the England of his time. Reading Betjeman’s poetry reminded me of a book I’d recently acquired at a cast-off library book sale. A Winnipeg Childhood by Canadian writer, Dorothy Livesay, recounts the author’s growing-up years in the central Winnipeg neighborhood of Wolseley in the early 1900’s. Livesay, a celebrated Canadian writer whose centenary is this year, presents the neighborhood she grew up in through her alter-ego child character, Elizabeth.
Reading about my particular neighborhood as it appeared to Elizabeth a hundred years ago was fascinating. Some things never change: In “Preludes,” Livesay describes a hot summer day that leads eventually to a rip-roaring thunderstorm that is watched from the verandah. How often, my children and I have sat out on our verandah as well, watching summer storms with their peals of thunder and cracks of lightening in much the same way as observant little Elizabeth! A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law showed me an old black and white photograph of her Mennonite aunt sitting on a chair at a lakeside cottage of a family she worked for as a maid in Winnipeg. In “Anna,” Livesay describes young Elizabeth’s relationship to the Polish immigrant woman who accompanies the family to their cottage at the Lake of the Woods. For me, seeing the photo and then reading the story later brought new perspectives from the past to the kind of world that existed in Winnipeg in the neighborhood my children currently call home.
Do you live in a richly storied neighborhood? Are there any books about your locale that recount a childhood spent there? Have you read them to your children? What was their response?
Photo Credit: © Bryan Scott of Winnipeg Love & Hate