Blaine's Way

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Adolescence is always a difficult time; but surely never more difficult than during the years of the Great Depression. The 1930s in rural Ontario were sour and pinched. Work as long and as hard as you might, it seemed impossible to make any headway against the tide of the times: the tide of failure. It was all too much for the shaky marriage that held Blaine’s parents tenuously together on the family farm that just could not support them. Only the lonely sound of the train whistle, heading to the great world he had never seen, held any promise of escape to the young Blaine.

Then came escape of a very different order. World War II erupted, and, flushed with patriotism and the longing to be full-grown and free, under-age Blaine enlisted to find himself, shortly afterward, an immature 17 year old in the hell that was Dieppe.

Severely wounded, a changed Blaine, now truly and forever a man grown, returns to the farm with a very different view of his world. Years pass, and as a grandfather, he looks back to record the story of his life for his newborn first grandson to hear one day, when he is old enough to be interested. He looks back on a boyhood so distant it now seems to have been lived by a stranger. Evocative, nostalgic, and vastly different from Monica Hughes’s previous published work.