22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

This novel was a Historical Fiction set in the years during and after World War II.  It follows the lives of a young Polish couple, who were recently married with an infant son, when the Nazi invasion of Poland separated them, and threw their lives into chaos which changed them forever.  

Both Janusz and Silvana grew up in a small village in Poland.  Silvana, on a small peasant farm, and Janusz in a wealthy family.  After they married, they moved to Warsaw, where their son Aurek was born.  They were both very happy living in the city, until the Nazi’s invaded Poland.  

       Janusz quickly joined the military, but the train that was carrying him to training camp was attacked by air, and in fleeing the train, Janusz received a head wound,  fell unconscious in a field, until days later, when he began to recover, and found that the train and its other passengers had gone.

Alone and abandoned for weeks, he eventually hooked up with two Polish soldiers, who told him the Nazi’s had already taken over Poland, and the two were headed for France to join the Polish Resistance. Janusz joined them, and once in France, ended up living with a French farm family, where he fell in love with Helene their daughter.  

       He felt guilty, being still married to Silvana and having Aurek, but everyone told him she was probably dead, and he really loved Helene.  Then when the Nazi’s invaded France, Janusz left Helene and boarded a freighter for England where he joined the air force.

Before Janusz had left Warsaw, he told Silvana to take Aurek, and escape the city to live with his parents.  On her way there, her train was attacked and destroyed.  Her son Aurek was killed, and in the panic caused by his death and finding another boy his age who had been orphaned during the attack, Silvana took the orphan, called him Aurek, and pretended he was her son.            

       They began living rough in the nearby forest.  She then basically spent the whole of the war, living in the woods with Aurek, eating what they could find.  

One winter, near starvation, and utterly exhausted, Silvana gave up, and holding Aurek in her arms, she lay down to die.  A peasant farmer discovered the two, and he and his wife nursed them back to life.

When the war ended, Janusz was able to buy a damaged house at 22 Britannia Road, which was in a bombed out area of London.  He filed forms in an attempt to find Silvana and Aurek.  At the same time they were in an English refugee camp in Poland, and they were sent to rejoin Janusz in England.

It was a very difficult reunion for both Silvana and Janusz, because both had changed so much during the war, but they both wanted to be a family again.  The boy Aurek felt great resentment and jealousy toward Janusz, thinking of him as “the enemy” because of his mother’s attachment to Janusz.

Silvana felt full of guilt, feeling responsible for the real Aurek’s death, and had become extremely obsessed with keeping her adopted Aurek alive, she didn’t tell Janusz, this Aurek, was not his son, because she feared he would abandoned them.

Complications arose, that split the couple up, but in the end, their love and their strong desire to be a family, won out.  

It was an unusual story, with Silvana and Aurek struggling to survive for so many years in the forest, which left Aurek extremely attached to Silvana, and pretty much a “nature” boy, growing up suited only for living in the woods, and having spent all of his formative early years devoid of people, so that he did not develop the normal social skills for interacting with others. 

Toward the end of the novel, I realized that all three adult main characters, (there was also Nick, a black marketeer in post war England) were trying to love someone, projecting on them, someone else who they had loved, and who had been killed during the war.  Janusz, with his French love Helene, Nick, with his intense attraction to Silvana, who looked like his dead wife, and Silvana, who had taken an orphaned child as a substitute for her original Aurek.

    

    Our library’s Book Club, instead of having everyone read the same book, chooses a “theme” for the month and everyone can find a book that interest them, within that theme.   In June, our theme was “Books With Numbers in the Title”.   That is why I read Nineteen Minutes, that I blogged about the other day, and 22 Britannia Road.   Both were novels that I really enjoyed reading, and that I would probably have not ever picked to read, if it wasn’t for our Book Club’s theme.  

Look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Invasive Plants: We're Guilty

    A decade or so ago I learned about a flowering plant called Purple Loosestrife, with colorful blooms that gardeners had been planting.  Loosestrife took off like a grass fire and spread everywhere, choking out natural vegetation.   When I learned about it I was shocked, because some friends had given us a plant and it vigorously growing in our flower garden.  

    I pulled the Loosestrife out and dug out the roots, making sure that I destroyed it.  I hate invasive weeds and certainly didn’t want to be responsible for spreading it.  

    However, now it looks like we are responsible for spreading some invasive plants, not Loosestrife, but certainly a couple of others.  The photo above shows one of them:  Batchelor Buttons.   We had a couple of those plants in our flower garden, and now they are spreading everywhere.  The photo above show them growing in a grove of trees beside our yard.  We didn’t plant them there, they magically appeared.  The patch is very prolific and thick, and at this point, unstoppable.  I have found sprouts of Batchelor Buttons trying to grow in my greenhouse.

    Another invasive plant that we had planted in a flower garden and has now gone out on its own is Goutweed.  We probably should have clued in with part of its name being “weed” that maybe we shouldn’t plant it, but it had decorative foliage, grew nicely in the shade, and was being sold a plant store, so without giving it a thought, we bought it and were very happy with it growing in some of our shady flower gardens.  

    The photo below shows Goutweed now growing on its own, in the woods.  Again, we didn’t plant it there, it just somehow spread, and it is now taking over areas where native plants once grew.

    These, like other invasive plants, grow so vigorously because they don’t seem to have any natural enemies or anything that will eat them.  I feel really bad about our role in their spreading, but certainly the plant store trade that sell them to unknowing gardeners hold responsibility and a huge part of the blame.  We would not have planted these pest plants, had we known how invasive they were.

    

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

My Changing Wild Lawn

    My lawn is not a monoculture, I strive to keep it on the wild side, so that it provides some benefit to the pollenating insects.  While my lawn may look shabby compared to those sterile, groomed mono-cultured lawns, I think mine is healthier and certainly more sustainable, and I like to think I am helping Mother Nature out.  In doing so, I can watch the succession, the ebb and flow, of the different plants, each with their own schedule for blooming.

    Back on my May 23rd blog, I had a photo showing my lawn’s patches of Forget-me-nots  and dandelions that were blooming.  Their blooming cycle has now finished, and I have mowed them down.  Now it is the Daisies, Buttercups, and Clover that are in bloom.  I will let them bloom until they start to decline, then mow them down, and wait to see what blooms next.

    I enjoy seeing a bit of color and beauty scattered through my lawn.  I find that a lot more interesting than a static expanse of the same hue green.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

I found this novel to be very immersive, thought provoking, and relevant.  It had me engrossed from the very beginning.  Set in a small New Hampshire town, it follows the lives of various locals, who of course know each other, and their reactions and the changes to their lives, after one of their children, a 17 year old bullied student at the local high school, walks in with two automatic pistols and murders 10 of his schoolmates, wounding 20 more.

Because Jodi Picoult does such a good job of introducing the reader to the inner thoughts of the characters, both before and after the shooting, the reader feels like he too knows them, and it is fascinating to read how their personalities and relationships change, as they struggle to deal with their new reality, caused by the shooting.  I have always found courtroom dramas interesting, and this novel with its legal twists and turns, reminded me of the John Grisham novels I have enjoyed.

Of course, after something as dramatic as a school shooting takes place, everyone asks themselves why, and what they could have done to prevent it.  Those students who were wounded and murdered, are never the only victims of such a crime, their parents, friends, and particularly the parents of the killer are particularly impacted, and in the case of the parents of the killer, blamed. 

    The role of constant bullying and the intense need for status among the various high school groups, play a huge part in causing such crimes, not to mention the easy access to the flood of firearms in the US.

While the school shooting plays the central role in the storyline, I was appreciative that the description of the event was not as explicit as it might have been.  I felt the author gave the reader what was needed, without exploiting the event with gore.

I was very glad that I happened to pick this novel to read.  As you might expect, the title “Nineteen Minutes” refers to the brief amount of time it took the shooter to change the lives of everyone in the community.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

My Guitar Stand

    First off, as you can see from the photo above, our jam was back playing on the porch of McBride’s Train Station last night.  We meet every Tuesday to play, but it happened that every Tuesday so far this year, the weather has been cool or showery, so instead of being able to play outside, we ended up playing inside, in the train station lobby. Everyone enjoyed the perfect weather and was happy to be outside looking down Main Street and the mountains beyond, again.

    I hadn’t played my electric guitar for a very long time.  The other day when I opened its guitar case to get it out, to my dismay, I discovered that my guitar stand wasn’t there.  That threw me into a panic, because I didn’t know where it could be.  I really liked that guitar stand because it is small and foldable, which allowed me to keep it in my guitar case, and not have to lug it around separately.

    I thought and thought about where I could have left it, and wondered if I had left it in the Legion Hall, where we used to play a half a year or so ago.  I was able to borrow the keys to the Hall and went to look, but it wasn’t there.

    I was in a panic, I had run out of other places to look, and I really needed a guitar stand for my electric, so I went online to see if I could find one like it.  I did, of course, find one just like it on Amazon, so I ordered it.  Two seconds after ordering it, I saw that I had mistakenly ordered a stand for an acoustic guitar and not the one for an electric guitar.  I browsed Amazon further and found the electric guitar stand I needed, so ordered it too.  

    Both stands arrived, and fortunately, the acoustic guitar stand works really well for my acoustic guitar and is smaller and more portable, so I was happy to get it.  The new electric guitar stand was exactly like my old lost one, so I was happy with it also.

    Last night, because the jam was going to play outside, I had to take along the PA equipment, which we don’t use when we play in the lobby.  When I arrived at the train station and started to set up, I was looking through the case where I keep the microphones, and guess what I found---  It was my old missing electric guitar stand.  So I guess I now own two of them.

    Isn’t that the way things always go. 

Memories Are Not A Steel Trap

    Yesterday, when I sat down to write my blog, it was going to have a different ending than the one that appeared.  In writing it out, I was going to say, I had always regretted not making myself get up early to go golf ball hunting with my father, and that I felt real regret and guilt about not doing so.

    Fortunately though, when I started going through my 1990 diary again, so I could write down how many golf balls my dad had found each day, I discovered that I actually had gone out in mist and darkness of early morning to accompany my father in his quest for golf balls, something my memory told me I hadn’t done.  It was a great relief to see that I had done that.

    It all goes to show, that what you remember, is often very flawed and not exactly what happened.  I have said before, how happy I am that I took the time to record the days event (even those unimportant ones), because I now realize I have forgotten and mis-remembered so many things in my life, over the decades. 

    Quite often at night, when I was tired and would really rather go straight to bed, I made myself take  the time to jot down the events of the day, and now, in my dotage, I am so happy that I did.  It is so enjoyable to clear away some of those cobwebs that are obscuring the past, and to re-live some of those events, no matter how insignificant they were.

    I found it interesting that on that Sunday, July 15, 1990, I watched “The Simpsons” for the first time.  The show didn’t start running in Canada until many months later.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Golf Ball Hunter

    A friend recently got back from visiting her parents in England.  When she was telling about her trip, she mentioned that she stayed in a B & B, near her parent’s house.  When I wondered why, she said her parents owned a regular sized house, but her father used one room for his Lego projects and another room for his trains.  This started me thinking about my father.

    I can’t remember my father ever dedicating himself to a hobby.  He looked after the lawn, property, and house maintenance and maybe on a rare occasion, went fishing, but I can’t really think of anything that I could say was his hobby, at least when I was living at home.  That changed after I had moved to Canada, and my brothers and sisters, also “left the nest”. 

    Then in our weekly phone calls, my mother started mentioning that my dad would go out early every morning and hunt for golf balls.  (Our property did butt up beside a golf course.)  

    Dad would find the golf balls, clean them up, put them in egg cartons, and sell them.  I was happy to learn that he finally seemed to have a hobby to keep himself occupied, but I didn’t really realize just how huge that hobby of his was.

    In the summer of 1990, we flew down to Indiana to visit with my family.  While there, my dad continued his early morning treks to the golf course, and the number of balls he brought back astounded me.  Here are the number of golf balls Dad found that I recorded in my diary:

    July 3-    40

    July 5-    53

    July 6-    50

    July 7-    50

    July 8-    70 (My brother Roy joined Dad in the hunt)

    July 9-    103

    July 11-    70

    

    On on July 14th, before I went to bed, my mother suggested to me that I go with my dad on his early morning golf ball expedition.  Hearing that we would have to leave at 5:00 AM, I declined the invitation, but a few days later on July 15th, I woke up at 4:30 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got dressed and went out golf ball hunting with my dad.  

    It was still dark outside, and misty, but it was warm.  We tramped around in the woods beside the golf course, but didn’t find many balls.  The golf course did have a tournament the day before, so I guess they had a more talented cliental playing on the links.  The water level of the lake on the course was low because they had been irrigating,  and with Dad’s extending ball grabber, we were able to pull 50 balls out of the lake.  All together, we found 73 golf balls that morning. 

    July 16-    70

    July 17-    91, plus a #2 Iron, golf club

    We left on our flight back to Canada later that day.    

    

    I have always been amazed at the huge number of golf balls that my father collected and sold, and what terrible golfers must have played at the course.

    Now thirty years later, memories of all those golf balls remain in my memory, and whenever I see a golf ball (not very often), I always think of my dad.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

    

 

Bear Scat

    While bears are a part of the environment here in the Interior of British Colombia, we rarely see them, and especially now, with Kona exploding into barking whenever she gets a sniff of any wildlife, but just because we don’t often see the bears, they often leave a “calling card” of their visit.  I found this pile of bear poop by the barn a couple of days ago.  The bear probably came through the yard overnight, when Kona was safely tucked away sleeping.  

    As you can see, bear scat is black in color, and usually spotted with seeds.  Some of the seeds in this pile look like oats, and I am not sure where the bear found them.

    The local bears don’t cause any trouble around here, except in the fall when they wreck the fruit trees in their attempt to “bulk up” for the winter.

    Below is a cartoon I did a few years ago.

 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Lupine Blooms, At Their Prime

    Obviously, I never get tired of looking at, and taking photos of my ever-expanding patch of Lupine.  I came across the one above, all backlit by the evening sun, and couldn’t pass it by without taking a photo.  Patches of Lupine are now self-propagating on both sides of my pond, and on the bank of the road across from our driveway.   You can’t help but notice the hum of bees gathering nectar from the Lupine every time you walk past them.

    The photo below shows some of the colors of my Lupin.  The Lupine that grow naturally in the Robson Valley, are blue-violet and that color is dominant in my patch, but after planting some Lupine of other colors, they are coming up with an interesting mixture of colors.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

A Coincidence

    Every once and a while something happens that feels Cosmic.  I realize that it was just a fluke, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was somehow more than that.  I had one of those coincidences yesterday morning.

    Our provincial property tax is due by July 2nd, and so I was looking over what was due, and thinking about which of several options I would use to pay it.  I could pay it online, but in the past I had run into frustrations using that method, so I didn’t want to do that again.  I could pay the tax at the bank, or I could mail in a cheque.  When I thought about mailing it in, I decided to see if I had any stamps left.  I found the envelope where I keep the stamps and looked through it.

    “Oh, that’s right, I have some of these Donald Sutherland stamps,” I told myself when I saw them in the envelope.  I had purchased them more than a year ago.  Having assured myself that I had stamps available, I put the paying of the property tax off, and went downstairs to watch some television, before going outside to work.

    I sat down, turned on the TV, and checked the news.  There was a “Breaking News” story being reported:  “Actor, Donald Sutherland has died.”

    The music to “The Twilight Zone” began playing in my head upon hearing that news.  I hadn’t given any thought to Donald Sutherland for a year, when I bought those stamps at the post office, and he was out of my mind until a few minutes ago when I saw the stamps, and suddenly, here he turns up the news, minutes later.

    It sure seemed an strange coincidence.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

    

 

Clothesline

    Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day and shortest night of the year.  Since the solstice is all about the Sun, I thought I would celebrate its existence with this photo of our “Solar Clothes Dryer”.  I took the photo yesterday on a whim, and was quite impressed at how colorful and distinct it turned out.

    Our clothesline wheels out over the garden, and since there is a high fence around the garden to keep the deer out, I have a removable section of the fence to allow the clothes access.  The Sun does a wonderful job of drying the clothes, and since there was no wind yesterday, the clothes were very dry, stiff, and fresh when I wheeled them back in and took them off of the line.

    Sadly, clothes lines are a disappearing part of modern life.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

"Passage of Time" Exhibit

    Not wasting any time after the close of the Quilt Show at McBride’s Valley Museum, the show “Passage of Time” is now on display, featuring art works on that theme.  I contributed two of my paintings for the show:  “Patina” and “Tail Light”.

                              Patina                                                                          Tail Light

    Both of these images came from my old 1977 GMC Pickup truck.  Here is what I wrote about them:

Patina and Tail Light

At first glance, these two paintings appear to be images of truck parts.

Patina, shows the area between the front driver’s side wheel-well and part of the door, and of course, Tail Light, shows the tail light, but when I chose to paint them, I was not trying to illustrate truck parts, but hoping instead, to communicate something about the “ravages of time”.

Time degrades everything.

Imagine how this GMC pickup looked in 1977, when it rolled off of the assembly line.  It was all shiny and smooth, but like all things, time takes its toll.  Over its lifetime, the truck was scraped, scratched, dented, and began to rust.   The scars it received record the history of how it was used, (and abused).

What attracted me to these two images (beside the colors they possessed) were how the damage they had incurred over time, recorded a story of their lifetime, just like the scars, scratches, and physical damage that my own aging body had accumulated record the story of my life.  Both are a physical record of what had been experienced over the time we existed.

View my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Our Morning Walk Around the Pond

    Every morning, Kona and I do a walk on the path around the pond.  This time of year, that walk is full of visual delights, because of all of the flowers that are in full bloom.  On the north side of the pond, the path is like a jungle, with the plants closing in, elbowing each other to get a spot in the sun.   Kona and I often get our legs wet, walking through the leaves that are covered with rain or dew drops.  In the photo above on the lower left you can see a small clump of Siberian Iris, and the colorful elongated blooms toward the center are Lupines.

 

   More Lupine can be seen on the opposite side of the pond as the path continues on the dam.  Finally, in the home stretch, we get to the open pasture, with the house in sight.  It is a short walk, but I always find it interesting and peaceful.  Kona, often takes off into the woods at the far end of the pond, whenever she catches a whiff of a scent the deer left, which happens just about every time we do the walk.  I can hear her barking deep with in the forest, like she is some tough hunter.  

    I think you can see from the photos, it’s a very green world we live in during the spring and summer.

   

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Scenic Dining

    In yesterday’s blog I mentioned driving to Tete Jaune for a restaurant meal.  Most of the places to eat in the Robson Valley are pretty much burger-oriented, but the Riverside Cafe the Tete Jaune Lodge offers diners a high quality meal amidst spectacular mountain scenery.  The Cafe has just reopened after a very long absence, and from the size of the crowd of local residents that were there on Saturday, it was a welcome return.

    The Riverside Cafe unfortunately can not be seen from the highway, and their sign does not do justice to the experience that they offer, so the bulk of their business is from locals from Valemount and McBride, who know about it.  Of course that is great for us locals, but for business, not the best economic situation.

    The cafe offers dining both inside the quaint log building and outside beside the flowing Fraser River, with the Cariboo Mountains in the back ground.  Because of predicted rain, our reservations had been made for inside.  However after stuffing ourselves on the buffet, and then visiting with friends at our table, we went outside to enjoy the scenery, because the weather was unexpectedly perfect.  

    It was sure a treat to have the Riverside Cafe open again.

You can take a look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Cloud Show

    Yesterday we made the 45 minute drive to Tete Jaune so that we could have a restaurant meal with friends.  As we drove, we were treated by a dramatic visual display of clouds that were building over the mountains.  On our left, on the Rocky Mountain side of the Robson Valley we watched sheets of rain arcing as they fell from the clouds (photo above).   As we drove a bit further, we did drove through a patch of rain.

    At the same time on our right, the Cariboo Mountain side of the Valley, large, puffy, cumulous clouds were building over the peaks (photo below).   The clouds on both sides of the Valley, gave us an added and interesting bit of beauty to the drive.

 

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Valley Museum Quilt Show

    McBride’s Valley Museum has been putting on a show of quilts done by the Valley Piecemakers.  Unfortunately, the show has pretty much ended.  However, here are some photos of some of the quilts that where on display.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Music At The Dunster Museum

    Every year the Dunster Museum has a musical celebration when they open for the season.  Last Sunday afternoon was this year’s Museum opening.  Like last year, they invited our Tuesday Night Jam to do a session, and the photo above, shows us in action.  

    The Dunster Museum is located right across the road from the Dunster store (which is Dunster).   The old Dunster Railway Station which is now the museum, is, as you might expect, situated right beside the railroad track, and as we were performing, a Via Passenger Train came loudly down the track, and slowed to a stop at the Station to allow the passengers to view the festivities. 

     As we continued playing our songs, I imaged what those passengers must have thought of the gathering, probably something like,  “Oh, what a quaint little cultural festival the mountain villagers are putting on.  They probably gather around the railway station and play music every Sunday afternoon.”

    It was funny to realize that what they were thinking, was exactly what I start thinking, whenever I come across something similar in a foreign country.

    Anyway, the train soon went on its way, but the music continued.  

    Locals, Jane and Keith performed on their alpine horns, although without the mountain echos.  That was followed by a rhythmic beats of a drum circle.  It was all an enjoyable afternoon in the hamlet of Dunster.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca