Guest post written by author Iain Lawrence
Iain Lawrence is a journalist and the author of many acclaimed novels, including Ghost Boy, The Skeleton Tree, Lord of the Nutcracker Men, and the High Seas Trilogy: The Wreckers, The Smugglers, and The Buccaneers. He is the author of fifteen books for young readers and has received many accolades, among them the Governor General’s Award and the California Young Reader Medal. Deadman’s Castle is Iain’s first book with Holiday House. He lives in the Gulf Islands, British Columbia, Canada.
Even fictional people need a real place to live. From the very beginning, I knew that Igor – the young hero of my latest novel for children – would make his home in a part of Calgary that I knew as a child. He would live in the house we called the Yellow House, and he would play in the old ruins that I knew as Deadman’s Castle.
Igor is twelve when he moves there. I was eight. It woke up on my first morning in the house to find that I had a new baby brother. My father had delivered him in the night, among the piles of unpacked boxes in the living room. He’d wrapped him in the first thing that came to hand – the fuzzy rug shaped to encircle the toilet.
Like every place from my childhood, the area around the Yellow House seems to have three realities. There’s the neighborhood I knew at the time, the one I remember, and the one that is actually there. It’s a sad moment to realize how different they are.
At first, I thought the only one that mattered was the one I remembered. Igor would live in my house and walk down the streets I’d known as a child, seeing the things I’d seen myself. Anything missing from his world, I would fill in from other neighborhoods I’d known.
I added a park from Toronto, a cemetery from Vancouver. I stitched them together like Frankenstein with his monster parts, creating a neighborhood that spanned fifteen years and more than 2,000 miles. It seemed real to me. But as my editor quickly discovered, it was only a dream world that made no sense to anyone else.
Like Steven Leacock’s romantic hero who “galloped off in all directions,” Igor walked both north and south to reach the same place. The river changed course. Things appeared and disappeared like mirages in a desert.
To some extent, that was due to my sense of direction being as bad as Igor’s. He can never find his way twice to the same place, and it wasn’t much better for me. As a child hired to sell balloons during Toronto’s massive Santa Clause parade, I ducked into an alley to blow up balloons and somehow lost the parade. I wandered around for hours, trying to track it, and never even found my way downtown. At Igor’s age, I taped the letters L and R to the handlebars of my bicycle so I could tell left from right. As an adult I drew charts for a sailors’ guide book, and reversed east and west so often that I worry what disasters I might have caused.
It’s no wonder that my editor felt lost as soon as she set foot in Igor’s neighborhood. Unable to find her way through it, she asked for a map.
Well, that sounded easy. I went to Google Earth and looked down on the serpentine path of the Elbow River. Then I zoomed in on the big bend where the Yellow House had been, knowing already that it was no longer there. A thousand feet at a time, I fell right into that third reality. I saw not only that the neighborhood had changed a lot, but that it had never been the way I remembered.
My dead-end road was three times longer than it should have been, and not really a dead-end at all. My route to school was not the great expedition I launched every day in my mind, but a short walk up the river. The wilderness had shrunk, and Deadman’s Castle was in the wrong place altogether.
I wonder if it’s always that way. Do we rearrange the parts of our lives and go back to them like Rip van Winkle, startled by the changes? If I ask my older brother about the Yellow House, it’s as though we lived in different places. His may have changed in other ways, but he will look at my map and know without turning to Google Earth that everything is wrong.
In Igor’s world, it doesn’t matter. I redrew the river and bulldozed streets, and now he lives in a real place now where everything makes sense. I can picture him there, walking down his little shortcuts between his home and his school and the castle. I can see him looking out his window at a river that always flows in the same direction.
It wouldn’t have happened without the diligence of an editor who insisted on accuracy. For that, I’d like to say thank you.
