CRYING ALICE

When it all began I was upstairs in my cupola working on my history of the farm. Tomorrow was the last day of school for a while because its roof was about to collapse. Finding a steady crew to fix it had been difficult. It was 1945 and the whole world seemed to be at war and practically all our able men who usually did these sorts of things had been shipped overseas, so the roof repair was going to take twice as long as it would have in times of peace. It was just one more reason to hate the Nazis, said our principal.

There was nowhere else to put us during the reconstruction, so it was decided that we would have our summer vacation in the spring and go to school in the summer after the roof was fixed. They tried to be upbeat by calling it a special spring vacation, but it fooled no one. We were to be done out of our summer, and this was very hard on the families who needed their children to help bring in the hay. But it meant I would have whole weeks to really dig into my writing. I got a lot of writing done during school holidays, especially the summer one. But not a lot during the school year, as our school was quite a long way from the farm. To get there, I left early in the morning. I had to walk across our fields to Becher Bay Road and all the way down that to East Sooke Road, where I would catch the school bus for the long trip to school. Then there was time in school, which I always enjoyed, after which the long trip in reverse to get home and by the time I got there, I usually didn’t have the requisite creative energy to work.

Old Tom, when he found out I was a writer, bought me a magnificent rolltop desk in a junk store in Victoria. He had it delivered and put into the cupola to surprise me. It had secret drawers. Then he found me a typewriter, and he was very good about keeping me supplied with paper. I always think of Sina as the giver of presents and such, but the best presents I have ever gotten have been from Old Tom because, although he doesn’t do it often and he doesn’t say much when he does, he somehow knows exactly who I am and what I want. Once I commented on the poster in our doctor’s office called “The Land of Make Believe.” I was besotted. It was full of fairy-tale figures on a mysterious dark black background—everywhere you looked was magic and enchantment—and two weeks later, quietly swollen with suppressed pride, Old Tom brought home a framed copy and hung it in my bedroom.

Sometimes I stared at it for inspiration. But at night after school and dinner, when I was tired and sitting at my desk, I just stared into the darkness outside. You could see an amazing array of stars from my cupola.