I must begin by apologising to the inhabitants of both Armagh and Peterborough, Ontario, for taking liberties with their commercial activities. Freeburn’s in Armagh and Robinson Lumbering in Peterborough are entirely fictitious. Sleator’s did exist in the 1930s, but I have modified it to suit my purposes.
As with all my novels I try to be accurate about both the social and the economic situation in which my character find themselves, together with the actual geographic setting where they live and work. While the city and countryside of Armagh is very familiar to me, I could not have been as confident about Peterborough, Ontario had it not been for the Canadian Library and Archives Service.
For an extremely modest fee they provided me with a ship’s manifest which allowed me to locate the family of my great-uncle, who went away and never came back. With the help of a childhood friend, my cousins were contacted and my questions about Peterborough answered with documents, photographs, old books and a bicycle ride around Quaker Oats.
Here in Belfast, I must thank the television company, now resident in my great-aunt’s tall, terrace house, who let me stand on a chair among their computers so I could look out the attic window and refresh my memory of the Antrim hills and the view over Moonstone Street.
Ellie Scott is the gentlest of my protagonists, but she is typical of many Irish country girls. They have little formal education, but possess tenacity and common sense, virtues which stand to them whether they help to open up the Canadian forest at Scott’s Plains or make a life and home in the difficult 1930s in a country town like Armagh.
Finishing this novel in the autumn of 2008 with the dark shadows of recession and unemployment making daily headlines, I hope this fiction may bring comfort to all those women who will do what Ellie does and make the best of all their capabilities at a difficult time.