Change of Tide

Fran Ashdown was the Head of the Children's Department, Capilano Branch, North Vancouver District Public Library.

The two separate verse stories in this book are joined thematically. Each treats the subject of loneliness and the need for a vision of the future. Described by the publisher as lyrical poems, the verses could be more accurately identified as sentimental doggerel. In contrast, the book has an attractive, inviting format with wide margins, clear type-face and charcoal sketches with a dream-like quality.

In bad and occasionally grammatically incorrect verse, the first story, Change of Tide, relates the misadventures of a little boy who lives in an old packing box, works on fishing boats for a living and plays the guitar with his feet in his spare time. The boy’s unorthodox musical technique has been adopted because the rough nature of his work has caused his hands to swell. An old sea captain encounters the boy by chance one day, befriends him, and begins to give him a carved model boat each time he is in port. The boy’s dream of being taken aboard the captain’s ship as a crew member is shattered when the Princess Helene founders and the captain is drowned. The boy equips each of his boats with a lighted candle and launches his miniature fleet on the evening tide in a ritual gesture of farewell to his friend.

The second story, The Little Girl with the Distant Dreams, does, indeed, chronicle the secret hopes of a young girl employed as a maid in her aunt’s hotel. Ignored by staff and customers alike, the child is inspired by a kindly guest who intrigues her with the story of her career as the principal dancer for a major ballet company. Subsequently, while wandering on the beach, the girl encounters the boy from the previous story and dances to his music. They become friends only to part at the end of the summer in pursuit of their particular dreams of the future. The girl intimates that they are fated to meet again and that in the interim their souls will be somehow bound to one another.

One suspects that the author may have been reading Victorian children’s novels just prior to producing this manuscript — the theme of the hapless child in a cruel world as well as the extravagant sentiment reflect much of the literature of this era. Readers will find it difficult to empathize with the protagonists, as a result of the author’s lack of character development. For example, it is possible to feel only a brief spasm of pity for the boy who is deprived of a benevolent friend and father-figure when their previous relationship has never adequately been delineated. Similarly, the girl must have been singularly unresourceful to achieve a state of loneliness while employed in a hotel. We’re told her aunt ignores her, but the author never makes it clear just how this situation has occurred. Both children in these two vignettes are passive and barely realized figures and for this reason will fail to elicit the interest or sympathy of most young readers.