Summer Island

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Two of the stories in this collection, “The Honeymoon” and “Prophet Still, if Bird or Devil,” originally appeared in Saturday Night the latter story won the Belmont Award in 1967. It is unfortunate that Phil Murphy died before this excellent, finely crafted collection of stories, his first book, was published.

Phil Murphy’s father was an ex-actor and editor of the literary/dramatic/fine arts section of a Toronto daily newspaper. Phil, his sister, parents, and their “aging and idiosyncratic family cat,” Sir Joshua (Sir Joshua Reynolds in full), spent their summers in a cottage on Ward’s Island. The book consists of seven stories set on the Island during the summers of the 1930s, beginning with childhood, when Phil was eight, and ending with middle adolescence, 15 going on 16, the end of summer, the breakup of his family, and the outbreak of World War II.

These stories will appeal for their nostalgic element of an earlier age, of a Toronto that is no more. There are descriptions of the island ferry, the “Clarke” (“the aroma of soft coal mingled with oily rag and hot metal, the scrape and clang of stoker’s shovel on firebox door”); the flora and fauna (herons, swallows, hummingbirds, owls, red-winged blackbirds, Baltimore orioles) of the Island that have long since vanished; the dances at Casa Loma (“…the scent of face-powder and the chaste floral perfumes girls wore then...thronged with long-vanished archetypes, clean-cut, decently dressed, well-behaved scions of the North Toronto middle class, moving sedately together”).

Like most chronicles of childhood, Summer Island is a description of growth from childhood and innocence to maturity and knowledge. Incidents gradually help to shape Phil’s growth and his realization that life is not all play. The suicide of the wife of a next-door neighbour, and Phil’s grief at not having been able to prevent it; his guilt over the death of a crow for, which eight-year-old Phil was unwittingly responsible; the realization that adults can be hypocritical and betraying; the death of his beloved cat; a knowledge of the growing forces of evil and darkness in the guise of the usurper of his father’s place in the marriage; the unthinking pro-Nazi sympathies of his young friends; and the outbreak of the War.

The book can be enjoyed for the sheer value of the craftsmanship alone. Murphy has a fine, dry sense of humour and a wonderful ear for dialogue.

There is, at times, a quaint, old fashioned air to the work. Summer Island takes its worthy place among chronicles of childhood and the loss of innocence. A beautifully written book.