Angel Walk

June M. Blurton is a retired speech pathologist.

For most of her adult life, Cory Ditchburn has been taking photographs.
She took them in the Georgian Bay area where she was born and grew up;
at a munitions plant in Ontario during the early days of World War II;
in London, England; in Sicily, Italy, and western Europe where Lord
Beaverbrook sent her to serve as a war correspondent and where she made
a name for herself; and back in Ontario when she had enough of the rest
of the world.

Now it is 1995. Cory is 85 years old, and her son is helping her sort
her photos for a retrospective exhibition. It is through these photos
that her story—at least those parts of it that she will allow others
to see—is told.

A central figure in that story is Albert Bloom, a painter and the
father of Cory’s son. Cory

calls Albert her “anti-mentor” because he gave her insight into what
she did not want to be. He was an impossible man, and yet he was the one
person with whom she could really communicate.

The sights, sounds, smells, and feel of the 1930s and 1940s are so well
evoked it is as though the author had been there. Govier’s characters
are interesting and believable. This is an absorbing book.