We all recognize the stereotypical “redneck” in movies and novels, the working class guy. You know, the guy who comes up to the protagonist in the bar and, for no apparent reason, starts spouting racial slurs and being an asshole to women. He’s definitely a racist and probably a rapist, and we know him right away. He’s a bad person.

He’ll be beefy and ruddy-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be fat and pasty-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be skinny and balding and weak-looking, but you get it, he’s a bad guy.

And, of course, he’ll sound dumb as hell, misusing words, saying “ain’t” and “youz,” he’ll frown and scratch his head at the protagonist’s witty putdowns, and be generally incapable of stringing a sentence together. That’s the cherry on the cake of being a bad guy—poor grammar.

In the world of movies and in many novels, bad grammar associates with being uneducated, which associates with being stupid, and that associates with being a bad person.

Of all the classist tropes today, this is possibly the one I hate the most. I find it offensive, in part because it’s so hatefully inaccurate. Most of the working class people I know—family, friends, co-workers—regularly make grammatical errors and they are not bad people. Neither are they stupid, regardless of their lack of college degrees. Stupid and uneducated are not the same thing. 

My own father, “unskilled labourer” though he was, was one of the smartest people I ever knew. He could drive anything, load anything, build anything, fix anything, and learn anything. He was self-taught on guitar and a wonderful singer. He had a million stories.

He was also, however, often grammatically incorrect. He used to say he “already done that” or that he “brung” something home with him, he’d tell you that he “borrowed” his buddy the sawhorses and who he “seen” uptown. 

As a teenager, I loved to help with his many chores and projects, but sometimes, let’s face it, I just didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. He’d chuckle, head shaking, and tease me, “Can’t learn ya nothin!” before showing me again.
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Often, he would say this with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth or sucking at his teeth because a dentist for dad was one of the many things we just couldn’t afford.

In writing A Seven Year Ache, I was not unaware of the function, often at an unconscious level, of bad grammar as a signal of stupidity and bad character. But I knew that Rosie’s story was powerful and I knew the truth. That good people, especially if they’re poor, often have bad grammar.

In part because I recognized these insulting and untrue stereotypes of working class people, I made a conscious decision to stick to the voices I knew and be accurate in portraying them. My aunts and uncles born in the 1910s and 20s had little or no education and they did not speak standard English. And all my main characters’ lives were based on theirs.

So I wanted to show that these characters, whom I had portrayed as interesting and complex people, worthy of respect though flawed in various ways, also made grammatical errors. Rosie begins her story with the striking statement, “My Momma ain’t no girlie-woman,” telling the tale of the time Momma rescued Poppa from a rampaging bull, even though the men thought there “weren’t nothin’ nobody could do about it.”

One of Rosie’s many characteristic errors is to substitute the present tense verb when speaking about an event in the past.  For example, in describing their first encounter with the bear, she says that it was in their second year on the homestead “when me and my little sister Carleen first come upon the big animal.” This is a convention of our oral storytelling that establishes immediacy and involvement.

Although readers can find Rosie’s grammar a little confusing at first, many have shared that, captivated by her rapidly unfolding story, they usually accommodate very quickly to Rosie’s voice, truly enjoying her engaging way of putting things. Her voice, like her imperfect character, does not diminish her worth, or their experience of her story.

But I went a little further because I wanted to turn the stereotype on its head; the one that says good and decent people speak correct English and bad people have bad grammar. I gave all the good characters, even those who would have had more education, a tendency to sometimes follow the grammatical patterns of the poor.

For instance, after the death of Eileen in chapter three, when Constable John Elliott is trying to stop Kenny and the boys from killing Ed Welsh, he says “You would have justice for a day. But then what? All of yuz in big trouble! And yur mother losing more childern” (page 92). And in dismissing the men afterwards, he says, “This here is alright. This is all took care of now” (page 94).
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Likewise, when Old Albert is diagnosed with throat cancer, Doc True tells the family, “If a person had money, you could take the train to Winnipeg and get the tumour cut out. But it wouldn’t make no difference. Cancer is cancer” (page 109).

This act by professionals of taking on some of the expressions and grammatical structures of the poor was not meant as patronizing or talking down. Rather, as with many of the teachers and business people of my youth, it was perceived in the spirit of the interaction, as their way of being courteous and agreeable.

Perhaps this is why, after the council by the fire in Welshes’ yard, Rosie says of Doc, “Apart from that faded bow tie and the battered old black medical bag he’s never without, you would think Doc was just a regular fellow. He never puts on airs” (p. 94).

So, in A Seven Year Ache, I flipped the social class stereotype of bad grammar as signalling bad character. In fact, the only people in the novel who speak impeccably are the truly bad. The pompous eugenicist Mrs. Murphy has a stunning vocabulary and speaks with precision and eloquence. Her leering, sexist husband, the Major, also speaks perfect English. As does the racist, child-molesting, union-hating cad, Ronald Thorne-Finch.

In using bad grammar as a signal for good personhood, and reversing standard narratives about social class and personal morality, I wanted to stand up for working class people, highlighting their unique voices, and their smarts and strength and worth, in spite of a lack of education.
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Thus proving, perhaps, that my father did not “learn me nothin’” after all.

*Spoiler Alert: You may want to finish the novel BEFORE reading this essay.
 
We don’t know exactly what is going to happen to Rosie at the end of A Seven Year Ache, but there are reasons aplenty to suspect that it’s not going to be good.
 
Not only has Rosie lost Culain forever, but Doc True has passed away, Mitch is terribly sick and gone to the sanitarium, and Baby and Sunshine, Mother’s oxen, have both died, leaving the family more isolated than ever. Rosie seems determined to head north where there are “six men for every girl,” a plan with which we know Mother is absolutely not on board. The symbolism of Rosie’s intention to leave (baby) Hope behind is not lost on us, and Rosie’s dreams, often disturbing, certainly do not bode well at the end.
 
Most readers of novels expect, and are granted, a happy ending. Writers are taught that protagonists, over the course of the novel, will usually resolve the central conflict and, by changing themselves or their circumstance in some way, should obtain happiness, or at least hope, in the end. So even if it’s not a happy-ever-after ending, at least the reader is left with a sense of optimism and satisfaction.
 
The main reason A Seven Year Ache doesn’t have a happy ending is because it’s based on the lives of real working class people in the early Twentieth century, unconventional women with unconventional lives, and those kinds of lives just rarely had pretty endings.
 
All of the devastating things that happened to characters in A Seven Year Ache actually happened to my relatives on whom those characters were based. My little auntie Kathleen (Carlene in the book) really did die of fever in the early days. My Auntie Eileen really did get pregnant by her married employer and die of a botched abortion in 1937. My actual grandfather died excruciatingly of an untreated throat cancer.
 
And my then-thirteen year old Auntie Beatrice really was sexually abused by two adult men for whom, when my Gramma reported it to the constable, the only repercussions were that each was fined $5.00. But Beatrice was incarcerated in the Winnipeg Home for Girls, where she was sterilized and physically and sexually abused over a period of eight years, eventually emerging as a damaged and tragic, often violent, woman.
 
Similarly, I knew my Auntie Rosie well, and although A Seven Year Ache is a snapshot of her life and decisions in the early days, Rosie’s life went on in that same formative direction. A parade of new-man solutions, invariably turning into new man-problems. And I know where that pathway led her. It was not the devastating journey taken by Beatrice, but hers was also certainly not a fun fall.
 
So, having a view of Rosie’s story in the context of her larger life, I could not in good conscience weave a happy resolution at this point.
 
For those of you who were truly saddened by the novel’s ending—and I’ve heard from several—I can offer the consolation that you will meet our Rosie again in the second novel, Three Days Till Rapture. The protagonists for that one are Grace Kirk and Valentine Labeau, but Rosie will be there too, and you’ll have a chance to catch up on where her life has gotten her at that point.
 
Poor, dear Rosie.
 
So the truth of my aunties’ lives determines the resolution of A Seven Year Ache. But I feel that the lives of working class people today also demand resistance to the expectation that we “play nice” and smile for the camera.
 
You know, life is getting harder for the poor today, not easier. And when I look around me at my relatives, neighbours and friends, it is not a pretty picture I see. Many, many lives of quiet desperation, unmet dreams, failed relationships, and abandonment by adult children and extended family. Poverty. Addictions. Poor health. Hopelessness.
 
Years ago, when I had suffered yet another upset in my personal life, a beloved therapist posed this question to me. “Oh Fisher, when are you going to get your happy ending?”
 
These years later, I find humour in the actual wording of her question. In my writings as a therapist now myself, I have referred to the multiple and seemingly unending problems suffered by the poor. And to the lack of awareness of many counsellors about the persistence, and the sheer magnitude of problems we typically bear. The unsolve-ability. That’s why we just need therapists to listen! And midwife us along our way. Instead, they get discouraged with us, primed as they are for a privileged client and their typical one-time issue—then back to living the dream.
 
So, understanding the larger context of the lives of the poor, I do quite willfully write this subtext into my stories. That poor people, and particularly poor women, are dealing with myriad challenges and abuses that are unlikely to result in pleasant returns.
 
In Rosie’s case, there is also the lesson of the ethic, taught to every poor girl of that era at her mother’s knee. Be a “good” girl, follow the rules, marry the right man, and you should be okay. But break the rules, be a “bad” girl, and you will reap the whirlwind.
 
In Three Days Till Rapture, we will see how the “good girl” ethic works out for Grace when she meets her undoing in the person of Valentine Labeau.
 
But for Rosie and the story before us, the possibilities seem pretty bleak.

​And that’s the truth.

NOTE: THIS STORY IS BASED ON TRUE ORAL ACCOUNTS OF WORKING CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
 
I try to envision him there in a Dutch field hospital in 1944, not the grizzled old man, Tom, sitting across the table from me, whose reminiscence is spare and plain. But Tommy, a boy of twenty-one, far from home; his strong, young leg blown away and what is left of his knee, shredded and bloody. The mattress is dank-smelling and dull, crusted here and there with clots of dried liquid—he does not want to know what. Surrounding him is a decimation of strapping, youthful bodies, a din of moans and prayers, the next shipment of life-saving drugs, uncertain.
 
Later, upright, the awkward man-hewn leg strapped to his hip, and newly learned to walk again, he had bought the pair of wooden shoes, a treasured gift for his baby sister, Violet, my mother. Hand-carved by a young Dutch woman named Greta—the meticulously painted blue windmills, the lone tree billowing beneath it. Majestic, golden, unbowed.
 
Greta had lost everything; her mother to starvation fever, young husband shot dead in the countryside stealing apples to feed their three-year old daughter, Yrena, who sickened that March anyway. And Greta had recovered her dead father’s carving trade, enough at least to fashion the wooden cross, inscribed Yrena 1942-1944, above cherubic hands clasped in prayer.
 
Tommy could see the depth of sorrow in the young woman’s eyes, could feel the gratitude from her heart to his when he handed over the last seven guilders he had to his name, then cradled the precious shoes, so marvelously light and strong and strange, to his heart.
 
They were stolen from his gear as he slept, fitful and fevered, on the rough crossing back to England.
 
My uncle Tom, the old man in his plaid cotton shirt and time-worn suspenders, is unperturbed by this. But I, listening to his story, am miffed. “Stealing from a wounded soldier?” I say, eyebrows vexed. “What kind of person would do such a thing!”
 
“Musta ben another boy,” he explains, graciously. “Whoever took ‘em. Musta ben a soldier too, prob’ly hurt and homesick and desperate to bring back something good. Something good outta all the bad. So I ain’t sore about it, not now anyways. I cried like a kid at the time!”
 
From my view looking back, he was a kid at the time.
 
I try to think of him before that, landing on the shores of Normandy on June the ninth, three days behind the D-day troops. Neck-deep in cold salt water, his two strong legs thrashing, finally able to right his balance under the eighty-pound pack slung onto him. Tommy. Dirty blonde hair all crazy curls, eyes like Manitoba sky on a summer’s day—blue, calm, promising.
 
Or back before that even, at the staging area on the Salisbury Plain. “We knew something was coming,” he says. “Turned out to be D-day, though we didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know when. Just knew it was something big, and it was coming.”

He says that when he first ran away from home at seventeen so he could lie about his age and get into the army, he was just in it for the three square meals a day. They had come from such poverty and hard times that the idea of becoming a soldier, getting fed well, wearing the uniform, and having a new pair of boots, sounded like a splendid deal. He’d sign up, he thought, the war would be over by Christmas like everyone was saying, and then he’d just come home again, new boots and all. Girls in town who wouldn’t give a Church boy the time of day were google-eyed over every man in uniform.
 
But by the time he had gone through basic training with the Princess Pats, more training in Ontario, and then shipped out to England from Truro, Nova Scotia, it had finally sunk into him that he was going into battle. And it had dawned on him, and everybody else, that people were going to die.
 
So when his friend Chris from back home in the Swan Valley, came to see him and said he should transfer over to his outfit so they could be together, Tommy turned him down.
 
Because he thought, if he was going to have to see people die, or if they were going to see him die, he didn’t want them to be people he knew and cared about. He didn’t want to have to see his friends die. Didn’t want to have to see people he knew get shot or blown up, and he didn’t want them to see him that way either. He thought, if that was what was coming, and he knew by then that it was, then he’d just rather be with strangers. That wouldn’t be as awful, to have to see a stranger die.
 
So he told Chris no, he would just stay put.
 
There were 50,000 men by then, amassing on the Salisbury Plain, ready, it was May, 1944, and minds and courage were frayed. And then, Chris came to see him again, scared shitless, and with this plan about a blighty. A blighty was a self-inflicted wound, not something serious, just something you could do to yourself so you’d be no good to go into battle. Shoot yourself in the foot, literally. Something like that. That way, you’d get out of it, you’d get to go home and no one would be the wiser.
 
But Tommy told him no. He said, “Look Chris, I’m scared, everyone’s scared, but I mean, this is what we came here for.” By then they had started to hear about the horrors the Germans were doing to the French people and the Dutch and others. And he said, “Chris, this is what has to be done.”
 
Tommy felt bad for Chris, he didn’t blame him for being terrified, everybody was, and he was scared as hell by then himself. But he just didn’t believe it would be right. Chris really pressed him too, and they had a big argument. “You think yur better than me!” Chris screeched, and he went away mad.
 
A few days later, Tom got news that Chris had been hurt while cleaning his gun and was being sent down to London before being shipped back home, He got an Honourable Discharge and he never went across.
 
Tommy didn’t judge him, but he just wouldn’t do what Chris had done. And the rest is history, as they say.
 
Within days, there was an immense movement, all the D-day troops went over, and then, on the third day after D-day, Tommy’s squadron was called up and over the Channel they went, landing at Juno Beach on the French shore. There were thousands upon thousands of Allied troops, they had won the day and driven the Germans back, and thousands were heading east towards Berlin. Tommy’s outfit would go north on foot, up the coast of Normandy, to the liberation of Holland.
 
I try to think of him, just a boy, marching up dusty roads, crossing fields and small streams, walking, striding, two solid legs carrying him onwards, curly blonde hair tousled by breezes, eyes blue and clear, heart strong.

The Dutch people were a beautiful people before the war, he says. They kept dairy cattle and were famous for their milk and cheese and beautiful, healthy children. But those people, when the Canadians came, were in a terrible state. For three years, they had been occupied, the Germans had taken over their businesses and farms and food, and upon their retreat, whatever crops they hadn't eaten, they burned.
 
The Dutch people had been starving, literally starving, for years.  “And if you’ve seen that old black-and-white footage of what the Jewish people looked like when they were found, the few who lived through the concentration camps, just human skeletons with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, well, that’s what the Dutch people looked like when we found them.”
 
Arriving in the Dutch towns and villages, marching or driving, people were just crazy about them, cheering and making parades, patting their backs or arms as they went by. “They just loved us Canadian boys,” my uncle says. “And they were so grateful, it was kind of overwhelming. Here we were, just a bunch of poor prairie boys, not treated particularly well in our own country, welcomed and loved and treated like kings by these poor Dutch people. It was an amazing thing.”
 
But then, of course, the Canadian soldiers had to be billeted there too. They had marched hundreds of miles with only army rations, often running out before reinforcements could get to them, canned Spam and that sort of thing. So then, as they marched through Holland, at each town, a few of them would be billeted at homes and farm houses here and there. And those people, who had been starving, would feed them. The army made arrangements to pay them and kicked in some food too, and then the Dutch families would feed the Canadian soldiers.
 
He says he remembers sitting on benches at those long wooden tables in the farm kitchen, him and a few other fellows, eating. The man and wife would sit with them, and they’d have plates but not much food on them, just being polite, pretending to eat. And they’d load up the Canadian soldiers’ plates with steaming food, because that was their food that the army had paid for. And the children, little children of all ages, would be leaning up against a wall or peeking around a doorway, watching. “Watching us eat, with their hungry eyes,” my old uncle says.

“Well, I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Little children. Starving. And we were sitting at the table, eating.” So while he was eating, he would take things, potatoes, chunks of meat and cheese, an apple, and he would slip them in his pockets, so he could sneak them out and give them to the children later.
 
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “we needed that food. We were pretty close to starving ourselves. Not like the Dutch were, but we had been on the move for months, marching, running, hiding, digging in, and we had had to fight, shooting and being shot at, bombs flying, and it wasn’t over yet. And all that time, we were carrying heavy gear, eighty pounds or more. It was hard physical work and we had all had to tighten our belts, literally, more than one notch. But how can a man sit and eat, with children going hungry?”
 
So he would go out to the yard after supper, lean up against a shed, and light a smoke. And the little kids would come out, shy, with their big eyes. And he’d wave them over, and give them his supper, as much of it as he could spare. And he was not the only Canadian boy who did that either, he’d see other guys from his outfit, over by the barn or leaned up against a tree, giving away their supper to the little Dutch kids.
 
Tommy was wounded three different times in the liberation of Holland. The first time was on the hike up the Normandy coast, a mine had exploded nearby and he took some shrapnel in the leg. One big rusty shard in the right calf and a bunch of nicks, cuts, and burns on the outside of the leg and thigh. Him and his sergeant dug out as much shrapnel as they could, and then they had a couple fellows hold him down while they pulled out that big shard.
 
“Jesus! I screamed and wailed and begged them to stop,” he admits. “I thought it was the worst pain possible at the time. . . Little did I know.” 
 
They put on sulpha powder so it wouldn’t go to gangrene and bandaged it up pretty good, and his Sarg told him he could wait on the side of the road for a field ambulance if he wanted. But they were half ways up the coast and Tommy didn’t want to leave the guys in the lurch. He said he’d be fine, he would just be gimpy for a day or two. He walked another thirty miles before the pain abated.
 
“It was just the first couple days it almost killed me,” he says. “But I had a chunk of wood I kept tucked back between my teeth, and I could chew down on that when it got real bad, and keep on going till the next time we took a break.”

​The second time he got hit was after they’d already reached the Netherlands.
 
“We were up north of Rotterdam, we’d been picked up by the rest of the Second Canadian Corps, a good bunch of fellows, we’d been joking and talking. Maybe I was too comfortable, distracted and had let my guard down, but anyways, it was early evening, we were posted around the central area and I figured I’d roll a smoke. I guess it was a grenade, but all I knew was there was a whiz and a thunk, “Jesus! Jesus!” some guy was yelling, and the next time I opened my eyes, I was laying in a hospital tent somewheres, cold as hell, head all bandaged up, with a headache that would kill a moose.”
 
He was there for about two weeks and the pain was starting to let off a bit. He wasn’t seeing double anymore and he’d gotten over that thing where he wanted to throw up every time he tried to walk. They said he got a pretty nasty hit, there was still shrapnel in his skull the doc said was too deep embedded, it would be more dangerous to try to get it out. So they just left it in there. He told them he’d be fine, he just wanted to get back to his outfit.
 
Well, the commander came in and he said, “Son, you done your duty. You don’t need to go back no more. As far as the Canadian army is concerned, you’ve earned your Honourable Discharge. You can go home. Just wait here till the next supply run is heading south and jump on. You could be there with your family in a month.”
 
Well, he told the C.O. he didn’t want to do that because all them guys in his outfit were still out there. Still getting shot at and dodging bombs, still sleeping in the cold. How could he go home and leave them here? He told the man no, he better get back to them damn fools in his outfit, or they might get themselves killed without him.
 
“Well alright,” the C.O. said. “If you’re that determined, we won’t stop you.”
 
So he hitched a ride with the next supply shipment going north instead. It took him days but he finally caught up with the Second Canadian Corps just north of the Hague, and him and the guys traveled with them a few more weeks.
 
“That last time,” he says, “we were on reconnaissance, and clearing in the area north of the Maas River. They’d been rounding up any Germans still around and we were checking for stragglers. It was October, I remember, just a miserable cold, wet drizzle in the air, and we were out in the woods on this hillside, and there was a deserted cottage and some out buildings. So a bunch of our guys went to check the out buildings and me and this other young fella, his name was Les Dawson and he wasn’t much older than me, a good guy all round, well, me and Les went to check inside the cottage.” 

​“And pretty much as soon as we got in there, we could hear that German Howitzer begin to fire. That’s their big 88’s, the big guns. When you hear that thing, you know you only have seconds before it hits. But we didn’t really know exactly where it was going to land, outside where the other guys were, or on the cottage, or what. But, so me and Les heard the report and we both threw ourselves down on the floor. And as I dove down, the place had been all trashed and there was this long wooden table laying on its side and I threw myself that way and kind of got behind it. Only thing was, my leg sticking out.” 
 
“And it was a direct hit, I guess, on the cottage. Total direct hit. I don’t remember anything very well after that, but there was the damage of the explosion, the roof smashed right in, half the floor gone, and then  shrapnel everywhere. I was knocked senseless, but apart from that, I wasn’t bad. Because I’d been mostly behind that big table by the wall. Except my leg that was sticking out, which was bad.”
 
“But Les, my buddy there, well, he wasn’t behind nothing, there was jist him and the 88. He must have been dead right there on the spot, the moment that thing hit.”
 
“I looked down and I seen my leg, or where my leg used to be, I guess. And it meant nothing to me,” he says. “I actually didn’t feel a damn thing at that time, that’s how shock works. And then I was out again. I woke up in a French field hospital, that’s where they did the operation, and that is where the pain began. Jesus, I thought I would die just from the pain alone. . . But I still to this day can feel that damn leg at times, phantom leg as they call it. Sometimes the little toe still itches me mercilessly.”
 
“Oh,” I say. “So that is a real thing.”
 
“Yes,” Old Tommy says. “So that was it. That was it for me and the war, the liberation of Holland, and everything. I didn’t make it home for many months after that, because of all the surgeries I still needed. But I did eventually make it.”
 
I don’t really know what a person should say at this point. But I want to say something. “You lost a lot, my dear uncle,” I observe. “What a journey, what – what a gift you gave. What a sacrifice.”
 
“Yes,” the old man says quietly, looking away towards the small window. “Too much really. More than a man should be asked to give.”
 
I reflect upon the story my uncle has told, sitting amicably in his small dining room, the light of one small window going softly to gray. He refused to go into battle with boys he knew, because he didn’t want to see them die, choosing instead to go with strangers. Then wound up caring so much for those strangers, now friends, that he clawed his way back to them, not once, but twice, when he was wounded and could have gone home.
 
He lost his leg and more than that, for the love of strangers who had become brothers. A movie trope based on truth.
 
Beyond the window is a blood-red hummingbird feeder and a small yard; tame roses, big garden, and a wooden flag post, painted white, flying the Maple Leaf.
 
“But after all that happened over there, all that was lost, the leg, everything, I’m still glad we went.”
 
Our hands rest casually on the plastic cover of his dining room table, and he reaches out and slaps the back of my hand affectionately, blue eyes twinkling clear as ever. I grin quietly back, turning my hand so I can fondly take hold of his old paw.
 
“I wish I hadn’t lost my damn leg!” he concedes. “I’d give a lot for that. I’d give almost everything, I guess. But those were beautiful people, the Dutch people, and it was a crime beyond imagining what was done to them. It was not right. And what we done there, the Canadian boys, liberating those people and driving the Germans out, well that was a thing worth doing.”  

This is not a victim story. When my sister and I were in middle school, we were pushed, called names, laughed at, and regularly excluded by the other children. We were not invited for sleepovers. When the boys would shove each other into us and screech like maniacs, chasing each other around with “Lavell fleas,” the girls would sit primly on the school steps, giggling into their hands.

I offer this truth only by way of indicating how astonished I was, how utterly gob-smacked, with the parallels between our lives and those of the “poor little Kelveys” in Katherine Mansfield’s classic short story, The Doll’s House.

Written in 1922, the story shows how wealthier parents poison their children against the poor, and for poorer children, the social barriers against overcoming the position into which they, and their parents, were born.

In The Doll’s House, three little wealthy girls, the Burnells, receive an astonishing gift, an amazing doll’s house, fully furnished and realistic, and they use it as social capital, bringing the other proper little girls in pairs back to their yard to see the marvelous thing. All except two little unfortunates, the Kelveys. Daughters of an Irish washerwoman and an absent drunken father, Lil and Else Kelvey are disdained by the others, and so, of course, meant to be denied the doll’s house delight. But in the end, Kezia, the youngest Burnell, invites the Kelveys into the yard and, for a brief moment before being shooed away, they get to see it.

I encountered this story at three different times in my life; the first time, in high school. I had read stories before in which there were poorer characters, even stories that inspired sympathy for the poor. But I had never really seen a story that showed so completely an understanding of those characters. A story that was about those characters, and in which the reader was on their side.

It was the first story I ever read that clearly acknowledged social class hierarchy and prejudice. Though I was too young at the time to define what social class disadvantage even was, I knew and experienced its effects often.

The similarities between us and the Kelveys were undeniable. My sister, one year older than me and two inches taller, and I were often seen wearing other people’s hand-me-downs, faded dresses too long or too short. When out in the world, we were silent little, big-eyed urchins. My mother was not a washerwoman but she was uneducated and a Christian to boot, so yes, definitely seen as lacking the proper culture. My father, like the Kelvey father, was a rife subject for titillating gossip.

Leaned up against the brick wall of the old school at recess, reading, as was my typical way of making it through recess, I read this story over again. Too young and inexperienced to have a literary vocabulary, still, I could see that the author was taking the Kelveys’ point-of-view.

It made me personally happy that the little girls did get the chance to see that amazing dollhouse. At their age, I would have so liked to have a dollhouse like that. Or a pretty painted room of my own, like some of the girls at my school had, or a canopied bed, or a musical jewelry box. Or new clothes that looked nice.

I didn’t spend my days and nights craving them. But if I were to dream, while flipping through the Eaton’s catalogue, say, I would have liked to have them.

But more than that, my high school self felt somehow understood by that story. Validated. I felt the author knew me, and accepted me, kind of liked me. Just because of the story she had written.

Instead of a sympathetic tongue clicking at the plight of “those less fortunate than ourselves,” as the poor were then characterized, this story had a sharp finger pointing at the cruel “better” kids and their parents.

I read it as an affirmation. Someone . . . some woman . . . long ago, understood my life. She knew about the cruelty of children who had things. And where they learned that cruelty. She knew the degradations of poverty on the poor. Knew it wasn’t our fault. And she knew that what was done to us, though it hurt us, was not the sum total of who we were.

She ended the story back with the Kelvey girls, out of view of prying eyes and unkind judgements. And she had little Else, with one of her rare smiles, telling her sister, “I seen the little lamp.” 
​

The writer seemed to see my spirit too, my hopefulness, my determination to get away, to move up, to be something better. And the possibility, maybe even the inevitability that, someday, I would prevail. That someday, I would transcend the shabby expectations I had been allotted.

She knew that the story of a girl like me did not have to be a victim story, but instead could be one of hope.

A writer did that.

And because of this story, and others, I decided that someday, I would be a writer too. Because I had those kinds of stories to tell. About poor people and who they really were; interesting, complex people whose stories were worth knowing.

In my university Literature course, I came to a better understanding of the symbolism of the lamp as transcendence. By grad school, I was the one pointing out the workings of social class and the place of figures of authority in maintaining social hierarchy. 

Around that time, I was also working on genealogy, building my family tree, and found an even stranger parallel between this story and my life. I discovered that my grandmother Josephine’s Irish granny’s maiden name… was Kelvey. True story. And that is why, in writing A Seven Year Ache, I bequeathed to my Rosie the married name, Kelvey.

There is a fond place in my heart for this story, and for Katherine Mansfield, the long-ago woman who wrote it. Just as with a first love or a first kiss or a first friend, The Doll’s House is memorable and bittersweet and stands, unblemished, in time. This story was the first glimmer in a life’s journey to read, and to write for, my own people.

And through this story, I also "seen" the light. 

NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE STORY OF WORKING CLASS LIFE
​
Only rare people get a private audience with Her Majesty the Queen. But the great lady granted one to my best friend Caroline in 1970 . . . though not by design.

That was the year of Manitoba’s centennial and for several days in July, the Queen and her family travelled across Manitoba by train, stopping over briefly at many a town and village. And our little town, Swan River, was lucky enough to be one of them.

This caused a great stir uptown, as all the town leaders got busy trying to put together a plan that would wow the Royal Family, something worthy we could present to them, a unique something our little town had to offer. It made sense that they came up with a little specialty rodeo, as the big summer event that always came later in July was the Northwest Roundup and Exhibition.

​Our whole town is a little horse-crazy, rich and poor alike.

All the important people of the town were vying for optimal seating at the event, and vying to get their daughters introduced to the very eligible Prince of Wales.

Down at our end of the tracks, we laboured under no such illusions. The one-hour rodeo was too rich for our blood. We were pretty poor and so lacking in prestige or influence that, even in the seventies (as to this very day), our roads were not paved and the town did not supply either waterworks or sewer services. The closest any of us would get to royalty was when the Queen and Prince Phillip and their two eldest children were to do a walking tour down Main Street to the Fair Grounds. The streets en route would be lined with adoring fans.

My dad did tease me though. “Don’t ya wanna get up there with the bigwigs and meet the Queen? Try to make googly eyes at young Prince Charles there? I hear he’s lookin’ for a wife.”

“As if!” I giggled, wrinkling my nose.

I would actually have dearly loved to go, but I had already agreed to babysit four kids for my regular lady so she could go and see them walk by. I sighed and accepted that I would miss the whole thing. 

And I did miss out on seeing the Queen that day. But my friend, Caroline, didn't. She got a private audience instead. 

Caroline was a different kind of girl, she didn’t even care about seeing the Queen. She was a tough girl who lived in jeans and would always rather be out somewhere on God’s green earth, not crowded in with a bunch of preening girls, trying to get seen.

So when she told me the next day that, actually, she had met the Queen and they had a nice visit, I just thought, “Well, that figures!”

She said that in the evening after the town’s big deal, she was with her then-boyfriend, Roe, riding horses on the path between Railroad Avenue and the tracks. They had Flicka, the big black work horse, and that beautiful palomino mare, Dolly.

And suddenly, running down the tracks towards them, flashing badges, was about twenty guys in suits.

We didn’t, and don’t, get a whole lot of guys in suits down our end of town.

So then, they didn’t know what was going on, Caroline and Roe, and they got down from the horses as  told, nervous, surrounded by this sea of suits, and wondering what the heck was going on. Were they in some kind of trouble?

And then, the sea of suits parted and some lady and this young guy come walking up to them. And it was the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales, no kidding, wearing boots and pants and she's wearing a kerchief on her head and he’s got on, like, a little birding cap or something.

And they just come right up to Caroline and Roe, and start chatting with them. Asking like, how old the horses are, what their breeding is, what is their feed, normal stuff. And the queen actually comes in by Dolly, and says, “May I?” and Caroline says, “Sure.”

And the Queen takes hold of her bridle and strokes Dolly’s cheek, she’s just a natural with the mare, and she smiles up and coos to the horse, a look of pure, soft delight on her face. “Now aren’t you a beautiful girl?” she says.

And they continue to chat a little, quietly, just casual, like when you meet any other human being along the path on a Manitoba evening. And then the Royals leave and go walking back up the track to their train.

And this is a true story. This really happened in July, 1970. My friend Caroline met up with the Queen of England on a path by a gravel road. Completely unrehearsed.

And she just seemed like a really nice lady, except for being the Queen.

And she knew a beautiful horse when she saw one. 
​

A friend of my son’s sat at the table, looking through old photos with us. “What year were colours invented?” he asked, absently.

I cocked my head. “You mean colour photography?”

“No,” he said. “I mean colours. Like, back in the day, they had no colours. Like this,” he said, indicating a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, circa 1920, chopping wood in the yard of the old homestead. “Like, there was no colour, see? The trees were gray, the sky was gray, her clothes were gray. What year did they start having colour in the world?”

After shushing my son’s laughter, I explained that, actually, there was colour in those days. Everything was in colour. The poplar trees in the yard might have been an emerald green, the sky was blue as a Manitoba morning. In 1920, my grandmother’s hair was likely still the colour of straw and her dress would be a little faded, no doubt, but it was probably made of gingham, so it would be a lively pattern of white with either a bluebell blue or maybe a soft, sturdy pink.
​
“The world was full of colour back then,” I told him. “And people’s lives were as beautiful and colourful, or as ugly or plain or hard, as ours are today. Just that we can’t see it in the pictures. They didn’t yet have the technology, colour photography, to really let us see their world in full colour as it was.”​

In some ways, reading historical fiction is like this. I know that women long ago must have been fully human, complex and multi-dimensional, perhaps a little flawed, but large as life. And yet, too often, the characters I read are just … lack-lustre. One-dimensional. Syrupy good. Or, on the other hand, they are powerhouse women, full of confidence, and brandishing suspiciously modern sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews. Sometimes, they possess scientific or medical know-how not in keeping with their place in history. (Being a medical doctor who has travelled back in time helps here: winking at you, Diana Gabaldon.)

This is the job of the writer of historical fiction; to bring to life, in ways both believable and meaningful, characters from forgotten times. The best kinds of historical fiction show women’s lives in full, vibrant colour.

This vibrancy begins with accurate details of life in their place and time, which requires the writer to research, research, research, and study actual history. Most writers of historical fiction tend to focus on a particular time period; for instance, Scotland during the Jacobite rebellions, or Southern Ontario in the Nineteenth Century, or Western Canada during the Great Depression. To study that history, we read copiously, but with focus, about our period. We read coursework, we do library research, we read biographies, go to museums, examine historical artifacts and tools and processes. We hear oral histories. ​  

For my novel, A Seven Year Ache, based broadly on the lives of my kin and set thirty years before my birth, besides coursework and reading in history, sociology, and women’s studies, I had inherited many oral stories about my mythic grandmother and aunties, and was also able to conduct life story interviews with elderly relatives. And I did many hours of genealogical research, corroborating the stories with censuses, marriage, birth and death records, county maps, homestead records, and newspaper clippings.

Along with the research, writers also spend copious hours thinking and planning, especially when pre-writing and while drafting. We think about our characters and we think about what our characters’ lives would actually be like. Some writers begin with extensive written notes and storyboards. I did a great deal of thinking while walking my dogs down long, gravel roads and while highway driving back and forth to my home town. I walked the fields and roads of Pretty Valley, where my characters had lived; I kept company at every season with the once-noble Roaring River. Sometimes, if I had been worrying at how to handle a certain character arc or how to reveal the next plot point or how to work the next bit of dialogue, I would actually awaken in the morning, having dreamed the solution.

For most of the history of the world, the vast majority of women were what we today would call working-class; people without professions who worked with their hands and on their feet. Often, they had little or no education. Granted, there is an inordinate amount of interest in the stories of that tiny group of women with the servants and castles and elegant, ritzy social affairs in need of attendance, but that was not the experience of most women. For most women, on a daily basis, there was work to be done, actual physical work, without which, in many cases, they and their families could not have survived.

So, women in good historical fiction don’t have a lot of time for primping. Or daydreaming about Prince Charming. They are busy, busy, busy.  Probably, as in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, bringing herbs and expertise to an 18th century Scottish clanswoman in labour. Or, as in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, at the tender age of sixteen, having to earn one’s keep as a housemaid. In fact, even while incarcerated in the penitentiary, Grace was hired out as a domestic servant to the Governor. ​

In A Seven Year Ache, set in Manitoba during the Great Depression, the prairie women are, by necessity, hard workers and their work often carries the novel onwards. My Rosie cooks for her family and her mother’s, nine children in all. This requires chopping and bringing wood for the stove, preparing vegetables she has herself grown, and using meat from animals she has herself raised and slaughtered. She has to milk the cow before churning butter, and carry and heat water from the well before scrubbing clothes on a scrub-board and hanging them on an outdoor clothesline, winter and summer. Rosie also supervises and directs all those children and feeds and changes the babies, all while finding time to ruminate on her unsatisfying marriage and an ever-present ache for passion and fun.

Women of that place and time were kind of busy. Hence, the old saying, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” ​

Characters in good historical fiction must have engaging, well-drawn personalities and interesting yet believable responses to their context. But again, it’s a thin line writers walk; to build deeply engaging and relatable characters that inspire the reader's empathy—but minus the implausible 21st Century worldview and mindset. 

Vibrant women characters engage in realistic but appealing ways with the world in which they live. They influence, and are influenced by, the contingencies of that world. Atwood’s Grace, though from a poor background, works her situation to attain any benefit she can. Outwardly cooperative and grateful in her relations at the penitentiary, still, she is careful in what she reveals to Simon Jordan, often manipulating the interactions so as to retain her own control of the truth.

Roaming through the Highlands on horseback with Jamie Cameron, fighting the King’s dragoons, was dangerous, tedious, and cold for Claire Randall in Outlander, the food was nothing to write home about, and oh, that rocky ground she and Jamie had to lie on! Sometimes, they just tossed and turned for hours! ​

My Rosie was a feisty girl, taking after her tough, unconventional mother. But she got worn down by the unending, backbreaking work, the poverty and hopelessness, the dirt and the failure and the kids coming one after another. Weak to temptation and devastated by deaths in the family and other terrible losses, her eye was drawn to someone she was not supposed to be looking at, an error of unknown consequence.

This is our final gift of vibrancy to the lives of historical women; we bequeath to them deep and riveting emotional lives. They have dreams and desires, sometimes unrequited; they have sorrows and longings and, in some cases, a mean and unrelenting ache. Claire’s longing was for her true husband. Grace’s longing was for privacy and justice and freedom. Rosie’s was for passion and excitement and … something, just something better than the hand that was dealt her.

It all begins with a writer’s certainty that women in the past were real people. Knowing this, we paint them large and true. ​

NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell

Bill and Ollie Up a Tree, Told by brother Tom Church

Back when they were about twelve and thirteen, Bill and Oliver was out in the bush about a half mile from home, hunting for squirrels with a twenty-two, and they seen a moose. Well, it was out of season and the game wardens were always around, keeping an eye out for poachers. They could fine you or even throw you in jail if you got caught. Because what with it being the Depression and people literally starving, you wouldn’t want some poor sod to shoot one and feed their children.

Well, all they had was the twenty-two, not nearly enough fire power to kill something that big, but brother Bill decides he’s going to shoot the moose. So he takes aim, shoots him in the shoulder, which pisses off Mr. Moose and he comes stampeding after Bill and Ollie.

So Jesus, they shimmy up a couple little poplar trees and the moose is madder than hell and starts ramming the tree that Bill is in. And Bill’s got the twenty-two, so he shoots the moose a couple more times, which only makes the moose madder and he’s going crazy on Bill’s tree till it feels like it’s going to topple. Bill can’t even get a bead on him anymore and then he drops the gun and it falls on the ground right behind the moose.

So then Bill’s yelling for Ollie to get down and get the twenty-two, and Ollie says, “Why? Why does it have to be me? I don’t want to get down there.”

But Bill yells at him to get the goddamn gun. So Ollie gets down, grabs the gun, and starts climbing his tree again, but this draws the moose so then he’s ramming hell out of Ollie’s tree. Ollie’s screaming, clinging on for dear life, and Bill’s yelling, “Throw it to me! Throw it to me!” So Ollie somehow manages to throw the gun back to Bill, Bill shoots the moose a couple more times, and lo and behold, the moose drops dead. Killed by a twenty-two.

Well, the boys are just giddy, they got a big, beautiful moose, enough to feed the whole neighbourhood for weeks, and they go running home. Dad’s out in the yard and they’re all excited, yelling that they took down a moose with the twenty-two, they got  him and he’s just out back down by the creek.

Well, dad hauls off and cuffs them, cursing. “Don’t be ridiculous!” he tells them. “You know goddamn well a moose cannot be killed with a twenty-two! You need your head examined!”
​
Ollie’s holding his ear there, crying, and then they see the game wardens over by their truck in the yard. Apparently, they’d been doing the rounds, looking for poachers.

Dad rants on at the boys about how it ain’t funny to tell lies and stop their damn joking and get them chores done like he told them. Game wardens give it all another glare and finally crawl up into their truck and go chugging out the lane.

Only after they’re long gone does dad say, “Okay boys. Let’s go get that goddamn moose youz took down with a twenty-two.”
​

Oh Yes, I Will, Told by brother Charlie Church

That was me that took out my brother Bill Church’s eye, although it wasn’t on purpose.

We were just little guys, I was six and he was five, and we were out at the barn doing chores. We’d been arguing for hours, trying to outdo and outbrag each other over every damn thing. We had watered the animals and shovelled manure and then I was up in the loft, pitching down hay, and Bill was at the bottom, telling me that he could do this better than me and he could do that better than me.

And I said, “Bill Church, you shut up. Or I’m gonna poke you right in the eye with this pitchfork.”

And he said, “Oh no, you won’t.”

And I said, “Oh yes, I will.”

And he said, “Oh no, you won’t.”

And I said, “Oh yes, I will.”

And I took a jab at him, just in play, jabbing to the right of his eye so I’d miss it, but at the same time, he ducked left. And I poked him right in the eye with the pitchfork.

Hell of a thing. I never meant to do it and I told him after, I was so goddamn good and sorry. But Bill lost his vision in that eye at just five years of age. That’s what kept him out of the army when the war came around.

But apart from that, it don’t seem to have kept him back from anything else much.

​End of Part 2 of 3

 
When Joe Moneyas showed up at my house in 1996 with a tiny, sickly puppy, I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not need a dog, a dog was the last thing I needed, I needed a dog like a hole in the head.
​ 
​I had taken a job on reserve while my husband remained in the city, I was single-parenting my three children, and by two months into a teaching contract I couldn’t get out of, I had realized that I was in way over my head.
 
I kept the dog, of course, a worm-ridden, starving pup who, at just three weeks old, had lost its mother to a speeding, swerving truck. My sons named her Xena, “the stranger” and we fed her milk from an eye dropper and let her sleep in Mommy’s bed.
​

I thought I didn’t need a dog the day she came, but I was wrong in Spades.

Sometimes, gifts are sent to us that we don’t even know we need. And when I think back now to the many years that followed—hard, painful, disappointing years—I see that the only real friend I could count on for most of them was Xena.
 
She sat with me in my loneliness, guarded me in my terror. She gave hours of quiet company as I worked into many a late night; companionship and stress relief on our long walks down gravel roads and up the trail to the Ferry Landing. With her quizzical expressions, crazy antics and boundless energy, she made me laugh a million times. She loved to swim in the Big Lake and to haul around gigantic logs that were many times her size.
 
Though she looked more like a Border Collie than like her Rottweiler mother, she was a tenacious fighter, surviving several attacks by packs of reservation dogs, all of whom towered above her.

​She taught me about dogs and she taught me about people too, myself especially. I threw myself into those pack fights without hesitation, kicking and punching, willing to be torn to pieces for Xena.
 
Until she came, I did not know that I was the kind of woman who would literally face death with a big "F you," just for the sake of my friend.
 
The great Irish hero, Cuchulainn, was called The King’s Dog because of his undying loyalty and fierce fighting skills. I think dogs epitomize loyalty, not just because of their unswerving commitment to us, but also because of its reciprocal nature—they inspire us to return that loyalty in kind.
 
She knew when I was hurting, my Xena, sometimes even before I knew it myself. When I wept, she would stay close, often touching me with her nose, showing care and attention. It makes sense that she could figure out what crying meant since dogs howl and kiyike when physically injured and distressed.
 
But once, a woman came to my house who was not my friend and said some very unkind things to me in a completely normal tone of voice. Trying to fake not caring, I sat very calmly, matching her pleasant tone. I felt a light touch on the outside of my knee and, looking down, there was Xena, gazing up at me with rapt attention and deep understanding. It seemed she did actually sense my inner turmoil, even without any visible body language cues.
 
After our first year at Hollow Water, Xena and I were often joined on our walks by three, four, or five other of the roving, mongrel dogs. A man once told me that the reason I was never bothered by bears or wolves on all those long walks on deserted roads was probably because we all were perceived by watchful eyes as a pack, the dogs and I together.
 
In the ten years I lived at Hollow Water, I grew to know and love so many of those mongrel dogs, and they me. And their lives and hardships were often heavy on my heart.

Sitting together after a sweatlodge once, an elder named Brightnose answered my question about how to help the dogs. He nodded and said, “You know, before our people were horse people, we were dog people.”
 
And then he told a story about how, when the People were in a time of great crisis, dogs were sent to them by Creator as a gift. And dogs worked with them, dragging heavy loads and assisting in the hunt, dogs loved them and protected them, and brought them healing.

“That’s the dog’s job,” he said. “To heal the People.”
 
But he said the People have forgotten that now, and they don’t treat dogs right or feed them or take care of them. And they don’t allow dogs the honour of healing them anymore, they don't let them do their job. And that is one reason why the People struggle. Because they have forgotten Creator’s great gift, the dog. 

It’s interesting how spirit teachings often align with science. I read a National Geographic article on the evolution of dogs and it said that, although most animal species emerge gradually over many thousands of years in a certain place on the globe, the archaeological evidence seems to show that dogs emerged, and merged their lives with ours, in multiple sites on many continents at around the same time, ten to twelve thousand years ago.
 
Almost like they were just set down there, I thought, by some compassionate, unseen hand.

​Many years have passed now since Hollow Water.
 
Sixteen years after Xena came to me, I sat with her on the floor of a vet’s clinic on a red-checked picnic blanket at the end of her life. I told her that she was a good dog and that she had done her job.

“Xena, I wonder if you have any way of knowing,” I choked through my tears, “how much I love you.”
 
And she gazed back at me, that look of complete adoration in her eyes, as if to say, “Mom, I wonder if you have any way of knowing how much I love you.” Then she lay down her pretty head on her delicate paws and went to sleep.
 
The poem still kills me, The Rainbow Bridge. It says when dogs leave this world, they go to a beautiful meadow beside a rainbow bridge and for countless happy hours, they play and frolic with the other dogs there. Then, one day a dog cocks their head, looking down the road afar, and runs with joyous abandon to greet the person coming to them there.
 
I see now that dogs have always come to me. In almost every photo from my childhood, you will see a dog. There was Pepper and Lady and Snowball, and then Sich and Sir and Hamish. Then the dogs of Hollow Water and all the others down through the years.
 
I have always been a dog person.

I live again now on the edge of my small town, and down the yard is a space I call Xena’s Rest, a peaceful grove where my old dogs are laid.
 
My Xena, of course, beneath a young poplar tree. Then Sasha, a beloved though troubled old German Shepherd dog. And then, beautiful Dagger, a huge Malamute husky whose grandmother was a wolf. Brave and strong and true to the end. They lived to be old, old dogs, every one.
 
And that is where, long years from now, my other dogs will lie, including the two snoozing under the camper here as I write these words, Crazy Ed the boxer and Shy Maggie, the big black I got from the Rescue.
 
I was never big on the standard concept of Heaven: a dry, ancient city, streets paved with gold, a mansion of my own. Raised a barefoot country child, I wondered, how would I be happy there? No poplar trees, no crows or dandelions or dirt roads, no dogs.

But the great evangelist Billy Graham once said, “God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.”
 
So perhaps, in time, I will cross that bridge and find my dogs awaiting me there. My God, what a glorious pack we’ll make.

NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell

​Bill Church’s Two-legged Dog/ Kids in the Fire

Crazy about a baseball

The pitch black of night and the house was ablaze

​NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell

True story 1940s

​Dad storytelling at the table, 2004

Grandma Josephine Lavell, 1960

True Story, Eileen Lavell d. 1937 “Ever remembered, ever loved”