A Place Called Winter

Travel Guide

Three very different settings and their differences are highlighted by their stark contrast

The Asylum, Canada

As the novel opens, Harry is fighting to stay sane and alive in an asylum where he is forced to undergo treatments to settle his mind and to solve his ‘ troubles’. The treatment is harsh and unexpected. What has led to this? What is Harry’s story? Even a more comfortable establishment, causes Harry to have flashbacks on his life, taking us to London and then back to Canada at the start of the railways…..

Edwardian London

In London, Harry is a shy young man with a stammer and a lazy attitude to life in general. When at last he is married into the Wells family from Strawberry Vale in Twickenham,  London, it’s more a platonic relationship than anything else and his life is once more a societal expectation rather than a free reign. Observing women in the street-

Were they blameless less or scarlet?

Of course it was in the nature of respectability to reveal or imply nothing but itself.

These are the times with plenty of expectations and social constraints – taking a bath in Jermyn Street or attending the musical theatre of the Gaiety girls with his wife. They settle in Herne Bay and for a while life is good if not boring. Such strict constraints and expectations are shattered when he falls in love with another man. When people find out, the consequences are shocking.

Canada

To feel that emigration is the best solution to avoiding a relationship and the shame it would bring on your family is shocking and sad to read. Under the threat of total social isolation, he sets off to Canada where the saying is ‘Civilisation will follow the railway’ Harry becomes homesteader and a labourer on a remote Saskatchewan prairie.

The Canadian wilderness with its new railway towns is harsh, cold and very very remote and the settlements are changing the face of the landscape. On a map of the Canadian Pacific Railway System, you can find Castle Battleford the home of the Dominion Lands office.

“Another lesser railway went on from there to stop at places like Unity, Vera, Winter, Yonker and Zumbro. “Troels says the places are named in alphabetical orders because there’s nothing else to call them in such a vast, empty space.”

The land and the work is harsh. The development of the railways and the men working on it is fascinating as it is hard to imagine the scope of the work they are doing. Painful, laborious and brutal conditions. Indeed even the packing list which all immigrants were issued with before arrival seemed harsh, then the reality once they get there is all the more so.

Two pairs Canadian mittens

A cholera belt

Two jerseys (Guernsey knit for endurance)

In this harsh climate far far away from the troubles of uptight and clinical London, Harry forms a new life and new friends but the threat of war and of other things is not too far away –
Where are the shackles around Harry’s ankles the tightest? In cold static London, the Canadian wilderness or the asylum?