The Root Cellar (28 page)

“But you don’t forget?”

“Mercy, no! I don’t forget them good years and I don’t forget the times we had together, you and me.” Susan smiled, and in the smile Rose saw her Susan, and they were setting out again in the early morning to get on a schooner to take them across Lake Ontario to find Will.

“I won’t forget either, Susan.” Rose sat down on the floor beside the rocking-chair.

“I got your silver rose yet.” Susan reached up and slowly undid the chain from around her neck. “It’s been good luck to me. I guess it’s time now to give it back.”

Rose fastened the chain once more around her own neck. They fell silent, smiling at each other. Rose got up and leaned over and kissed
Susan’s old, wrinkled cheek. A feeling of peace came over her. Susan smiled again. Then she disappeared.

Rose looked down at the chair where Susan had been sitting. Then she sat down in it and began to rock, thinking, remembering.

“I loved this house,” Susan had said. “So do I,” whispered Rose, and in those words were a promise. She would see to it that the house was made right. She would bully and cajole the rest of the family into repairing and painting. She would make the garden beautiful in the spring and get Uncle Bob to plant an orchard where there had been one in 1865 when Will Morrissay had gone off to war.

She knew in her heart that she would never see Susan again, nor Will. But in the years that followed Rose thought she saw shadows, and often she felt their presence—especially in the spring when the lilacs and the apples were in blossom.

Author Interview

Janet Lunn in conversation with Louise
Dennys, her editor and publisher.

LOUISE DENNYS: What was the start of the novel for you when you sat down to write
The Root Cellar
? Where did it all come from in the very beginning?

JANET LUNN: My house. It all came from my house on the shore of Lake Ontario in Prince Edward County, where I lived for thirty-one years. More precisely, it came from the kitchen. You know, Louise, that the house is about 180 years old, and you know its wonderful, warm kitchen with the big fireplace and the bake oven. I loved that kitchen. It was Christmas—I remember I was doing my Christmas baking—the first winter we spent there. I am not a person who sees ghosts, but I really did feel the
presence of all those women who had cooked Christmas dinners in that kitchen. So the book started out as a Christmas story.

LD: In a sense, was writing the novel a means of finding your way to that end, to what lay behind that warm Christmas scene in the farmhouse kitchen?

JL: I suppose so. Once I started writing a whole book rather than a short story, I knew I would end with that Christmas kitchen. I always know the end of my stories. It’s getting there that’s the adventure.

LD: When I first visited you in that house, I was so delighted to find that it was identical to the house in
The Root Cellar
.

JL: The only thing that’s different is the sad fact that its root cellar is long gone.

LD: But there would have been one at one time, would there not?

JL: Oh, yes, of course. A root cellar was essential to all those nineteenth-century Canadian farmhouses. They were for storing the root vegetables during the winter months. No refrigerators back then.

LD: Well, let’s put it this way: you were never able to
find
the root cellar. Perhaps someone else will discover it one day. And many people go to visit it now—you’ve made that piece of land in Prince Edward County famous. It has become a literary landscape.

JL: I don’t know about
famous
, but I did have busloads of schoolchildren coming to see the house. I moved to the city a few years ago, so they don’t go there any more. Someone else is now the custodian of that wonderful old house.

LD: And does the house indeed sit right on the shore of Hawthorn Bay?

JL: It’s actually on Pleasant Bay. I gave it the name Hawthorn Bay in
The Root Cellar
because the whole point of land between Pleasant Bay and the next bay to the south used to be called Hawthorn Point. It was filled with hawthorn trees. The trees were all winter-killed some years back, except for two that we had on our property (they happily lasted about another fifteen years). I like “Hawthorn” better. Pleasant Bay seems such a boring name. I wish the “they” who name things would rename that bay.

LD: They should, in honour of the book.
The Root Cellar
is now part of our Canadian
storytelling heritage. Three of your novels, in fact, have a connection to that place—that is,
The Root Cellar, The Hollow Tree
and
Shadow in Hawthorn Bay
. I know they are sometimes called a trilogy because of that connection of place, and also because they are linked through family generations. Though the three books are set in different historical times, several of the same families reappear because they all live on that point of land beside the bay.

JL: Yes, but I can’t think of the books as a trilogy because they aren’t a continuing story with the same characters in them. But they are about the same families in the same locale in different periods of history. In fact,
Shadow in Hawthorn Bay
and
The Hollow Tree
grew out of
The Root Cellar
, although both take place in earlier historical periods. I’ve begun calling these three books “the Hawthorn Bay books.”

LD: Is the idea of family very important to you? What I loved in the Christmas scene at the end of
The Root Cellar
was the sense of warmth and community in that old kitchen. It’s the kitchen of our dreams, in a way—the heart of the household, for everyone.

JL: I have an abiding love for, and belief in, the importance of family.

LD: Why do you think it’s so important?

JL: To start with, I love being part of a family but, as well, I believe that family is the basis of all society: family, neighbourhood, community. People learn what’s important about community inside a family. In
The Root Cellar
, Rose has no family before she goes to Hawthorn Bay. She has all that to learn. She has to learn about family, and she has to learn about friendship.

LD: She discovers friendship even before she discovers family.

JL: That’s true. When she comes back from her first visit to the past and goes to Oswego, stowed away in the car, she starts to learn a little bit about both. When she and Sam sit on the stone wall with Will’s song, both of them are making overtures—however small—towards friendship, towards being a family.

In one sense or another, I was writing about the community where I was living when I wrote
The Root Cellar
. While the novel is set partly in the 1860s, the Prince Edward County community I was writing about was established in 1783 at the end of the American Revolutionary War, when the United Empire Loyalists (those Americans who had supported the English) came north as refugees.

My interest in the Loyalists was sparked when my husband, Richard, and I wrote a history of Prince Edward County for the 1967 centennial year. I grew up in the U.S. thinking that all the people who fought for the revolution were the heroes and the Loyalists were the villains. When I wrote the county history, I had to see that war from the point of view of the refugees. It was quite a shock!

LD: You found yourself living in a community made up of the descendants of Loyalist refugees?

JL: Absolutely. When I read the two-hundred-year-old records of the land granted by the Crown to those refugees, I found that the names on them were the same as the ones on the mailboxes up and down my own road. I felt I knew all those refugees. I was going to write a novel based on those families, but then we discovered we had a ghost in our house, and that was much too wonderful for me to ignore. So
The Root Cellar
became the first of the Hawthorn Bay books, and
The Hollow Tree—
the Loyalist story—was the last.

LD: And that house is as much a character in the book as any of the human characters. It has a vividly clear, tangible quality; we feel the
walls dissolving when Mrs. Morrissay “shifts” through the wall of the twins’ bedroom, much to Rose’s shock. When I was in your farmhouse I remember you saying, “This is the exact spot where my husband, Richard, saw the ghost coming through the wall.”

JL: He saw it in the old parlour, the room we had for our bedroom. It was amazing!

LD: Did you ever see it?

JL: I did sometimes hear footsteps, but I never actually
saw
a ghost. I think some people are sensitive to ghosts and others are not. We all laughed when Richard saw her, because my husband was a very pragmatic man, a journalist dedicated to sorting out three-dimensional reality. He very definitely didn’t believe that there were such things as ghosts. Until he saw that one.

LD: Interesting that it’s the skeptics who often see ghosts.

Now tell us about your own coming to Canada: twentieth-century Rose comes to Canada as an orphan from New York City; Phoebe Olcott in
The Hollow Tree
flees to British Canada from New Hampshire in 1777; and in 1815 Mary Urquhart sets off across the ocean from Scotland and ends up beside
Hawthorn Bay. You too came to Canada as an immigrant. So you did lose your friends, if not your family, like Rose does. You left your friends behind, and you had in some way to remake yourself in a new place.

JL: We moved a lot when I was a child. I spent my young childhood in a farmhouse outside a village in Vermont. Then, when I was ten we moved to Rye, a town in Westchester County, New York, about thirty miles outside New York City, on Long Island Sound. Later, when I was fifteen, we moved to Montclair, New Jersey, a little closer to the city, across the Hudson River. I came to Canada as a university student, married a fellow student, a Canadian, and I stayed here, eventually landing in Prince Edward County, where Richard had grown up. When we moved to the county, not only was I comfortable in farm country, I discovered that some of my neighbours’ ancestors had come from Vermont. I felt a connection between those two places. When I wrote
The Hollow Tree
, I went back to my village in Vermont for the start of the story—I suppose, in a way, to bring my old neighbours to my new home.

LD: Even though you didn’t write the books chronologically, you’ve ranged over three centuries of history in the books, two of them
exploring the relationship between Canada and the United States, or the experiences of the people who came here from the U.S.

JL: Yes. But I didn’t realize at first that it was that which interested me. I got to that realization unexpectedly. And you may remember this, Louise, because you’re the one who all but shoved me into it. You must remember that originally Rose was an orphan coming to Ontario from Vancouver. You asked me why, since I had come from the United States, I didn’t give Rose that background. I couldn’t answer your question, but I went home that day angrily kicking pebbles—metaphorically, anyway. What you’d asked me to do was to deal with something I very badly hadn’t wanted to deal with. You had asked me to think, really think, about how it felt to be a two-country person. So that book turned out to be an answer to your question, and a very important one for me, because in the course of writing the book I had to find out, not only for Rose and Will, where they belonged—because that’s what their story is about—but where I belonged, as well.

LD: What does
belonging
mean to you now?

JL: I have had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t belong anywhere the way my own
children do. It’s not geography we’re talking about, not physical landscape—it’s cultural. I belong to Canada now more than to any other place. But I’ll never be truly rooted in the way my own children are, because I don’t share my earliest memories with those who were born here. But I really don’t belong in the U.S. any more.

LD: So how would you describe that difference between being a Canadian and/or an American?

JL: Hmmm.… It would take a long time and quite a few illustrations to explain that one! Being Canadian is different from being American; we all feel it but it’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced being both. Our history in Canada has been more one of caution than rebellion. Living in Loyalist country all those years made this very clear to me. The refugees who had to flee their homes to create a new country here were bound to approach life differently from those who won their war. The winners were those American farm boys, the “rabble in arms” who beat the regular British soldiers, and they were pretty cocky about it. The refugees came here under the protection of the Crown, and their legacy to this whole country was respect for government. The Americans pursued an aggressive individualism
from the start. But despite some very important differences, the similarities between these two North American countries, largely populated by immigrants from the rest of the world, are really greater than the differences.

LD: The idea of belonging comes up again and again in
The Root Cellar
, for Rose as it does for Will. How do Rose and Will, in their own different ways, come to understand what is meant by
belonging
? Or, why is it important to them?