Growing Up Rural.

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

In her introduction, the author tells us she grew up on a farm in mid-20th-century Lanark County, Ontario, went to school in a one-room schoolhouse with a teacher who habitually went home for lunch and left the children to fend for themselves, and later became a kindergarten teacher in rural schools, married, and had a family. In these short and simply told stories, she relates incidents that will intrigue readers of all ages with their good-natured look at our rural past.

An eight-year-old mistakenly receives a stroller instead of a bike for her birthday gift, kids race their bikes in class while the teacher is at lunch, a child is humiliated at having to wear bloomers made of discarded sugar bags, a disastrous Christmas concert is performed in front of an audience containing a dad from prison together with his police escort, and two teenage girls are left to manage a farm while their parents take a trip out west. Adult concerns are seldom featured, but she does take a dig at that “great treasure of rural life,” the party line whereby separate families shared a phone line, and “Irma’s Fall from Grace” traces the unsuccessful attempt of a senior citizen to cut down an unsightly clump of burdocks at the end of her lane by stringing together a series of electrical extension cords.

Isobel Eastman finds humour everywhere and her stories will surely delight children who love silly things and will be astonished at the life their grandparents lived. For many adults, the stories may simply raise a smile, but for others they will provoke thoughts about the march of history.

The small but clear black and white photographs tell their own stories, depicting bikes, a baby carriage, people hauling a Christmas tree over the snow, and a clutch of hens. The instructions the teenage farmers received about culling hens is a mystery probably not known to city folk.