All the Way Home

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

They say that “you can’t go home again,” and Hugh Windmar, famous playwright, is inclined to believe that this is so. Nevertheless, however unwillingly, Hugh returns to the family home in Saskatoon, where for the first time in 40 years, the whole family, save only the brother whose memory still haunts the gathering, are assembled for probably the last time.

The meeting is in some ways as painful as he had dreaded itwould be: families always know best how to “draw blood” from one another; but in other respects the reunion is cathartic. Some old ghosts are exorcised, some old wounds salved.

The fragmented stories, of parents and of siblings, come together in a family mosaic that is believable and moving — a picture of youth on the Prairies when times were hard and tragedy was never far off. Only hope and dreams were in good supply ... The survivors remember those who did not come through the bleak years or the frenzy of war; and remember too their own younger, more vulnerable selves. After all, it is still and always home.