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New book The Bealeaguered features families living in D-C

September 5, 2019   ·   0 Comments

Written By MARK PAVILONS

Community storytelling is at the heart of books written by a Brampton author.

Lynne Golding released the second in her series of books, The Bealeaguered, which introduced characters living in Caledon and Dufferin.

Golding is passionate about strengthening the community with storytelling and connections through the local history of the region. 

The Beleaguered reveals a new family whose members have made their homes and their livings in Shelburne and the Forks of the Credit area of Caledon.

“… Elsa’s maternal grandfather, Tobias Pichler, a short, stocky red-haired man, had immigrated to Canada from Austria in 1857, settling in the Forks of the Credit area in Caledon, where he began to work quarrying limestone. It was hard work, but it suited the industrious Austrian. In no time, he mastered the English language of his employer, Bill Hill, and gained the friendship of all of his fellow quarrymen, including another Austrian, Klaus Gruber, who had immigrated to the area nearly a decade earlier.

“Tobias was sad when two years into his work at the quarry, his friend Klaus left the employ of Bill Hill to take up farming in Shelburne, a community just north of Caledon. The one consolation – nd it was a big consolation – as what Klaus left behind in Caledon: his sister, Lena, who a month earlier had become Tobias’s wife. Eventually, Tobias too left Bill Hill’s employ. Within eight years of his arrival at the Forks of the Credit, Tobias acquired his own quarry operations, taking with him all of the know-how Hill had imparted and a good number of Hill’s customers …” reads an  excerpt from the book.

Award-winning Golding spent eight years visiting her 108-year-old  great aunt Jessie and listening to the real-life tales that would inspire The Beleaguered, the second book in her Beneath the Alders series. This instalment chronicles the devastating effects that the war had on a small town in Canada through the eyes of a young girl coming of age. 

On the afternoon of Aug. 4, 1914, Jessie Stephens and her family acknowledged what most Canadians knew to be true: Canada was at war. They acknowledged it without knowing what the war would cost in men or materials; without knowing where its battles would occur or troops would be sent; without knowing the anxiety, uncertainty, and sacrifice that would be experienced by those at home; without knowing the innocence they would lose, the beleaguered state they would assume. 

“The life my great aunt was told she would have – the one where she would go to university and then teach for a couple of years before getting married, having children and leading a life, similar to the one her mother led – hat life was not available to her,” Golding said.

“It wasn’t available to her sister Ina, or her cousin Hannah, or to many women of her generation. The Beleaguered tells the story of why that was so; of the sacrifices made by those at home during the war; and the greater sacrifices made by those overseas; and how those sacrifices changed the trajectories of the lives of those who survived.”



         

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