Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television

Dominique Marshall is an associate professor of history at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

This sequel to Neil Sutherland’s well-known book on Canadian childhood
at the turn of the century is based on oral history. Two hundred
interviews of adults born between 1910 and 1950, from three
neighborhoods of British Columbia—two in Vancouver and one in the
centre north of the province form the core of the study. The opening
chapter offers a defence of recollections as reliable sources and an
examination of their unique nature: far from being an impediment to
childhood historians, the way people remember offers important clues to
the past.

Accordingly, the structure most informants used to talk about the
unfolding of their early years constitutes the organizing principle of
this work. The earliest memories are discussed first, with their
concentration on events and feelings related to relationships within the
home. The specific memories invariably devoted to special events,
school, and play are the subjects of the last three chapters. Routines
of children’s activities have left precise and general traces, from
the cultivation of turnips and the carrying of water on winter mornings
in Evelyn, to scrounging in Vancouver. Child minding, school bullying,
and friendships are described here with an exceptional wealth of detail
and strength of evocation. The interviewees placed their actions within
“many continuums”—the quick repetition of the daily chores, for
example, intersecting with the slower rhythm of the settlement of a
pioneer home and the larger history of the consolidation of the schools.


The multitude of interviews allows for convincing discussions of the
impact on children’s lives of sickness, death, separation,
immigration, war, economic depressions, and ethnic prejudices. However,
the emphasis on diversity sometimes leads to departures from the
structure and vocabulary of the informants’ “narratives,” as
evidenced in some weaker passages on domestic architecture. At times,
the author stops short of attempting to integrate the primary material
by asking broader questions—about the evolution of the roles of the
sexes, the meaning of secularization, or the transformations of the
political culture, for instance—that could offer bridges between the
individual stories and some elements of theory, which are introduced
abruptly.

On the whole, Sutherland presents the book’s “overlapping
memories” with a rigorous sense of their limitations and differences.
Growing Up offers an important contribution to the understanding of the
subjective and material worlds of English-Canadian children.