The tour that I’ve been advertising in my Blog has ended, until the New Year, so I’d like to bring you up to date with our adventures. Naturally, Jane ( my “techie’, and driver, and dresser, and und….well, let’s leave it there) and I had a fascinating time. We saw many interesting parts of the country, were befriended by socially engaged book-lovers, met lots of memorable authors, and gathered a number of shimmering stories.

The next few blogs will run through some of our best experiences.

Let me jump out of order to talk first about a moving experience in Knowlton, Quebec. We went to the Knowlton Festival in mid-October. Now, I know the Eastern Townships fairly well, because of my links with North Hatley, but I had never visited Knowlton. I knew that Paul Martin ( the former Prime Minister who once alarmed an Ottawa book launch with the news that “If Shakespeare had had Doug Gibson as his editor…..there would be no Shakespeare! All the best stuff cut, and left on the floor!”) had his country home there. In fact, the organisers in Knowlton had planned to hire him to insult me again, but unfortunately he and Sheila were out of the country.

So instead the clever people who run this English-language Book Festival in Quebec found an ideal man to introduce me. It was Gerald Potterton, who produced the National Film Board’s animated cartoon of Stephen Leacock’s story,”My Financial Career”, which played a large part in attracting me to Canada,as I tell in my first book, Stories About Storytellers.

The evening began with that cartoon, which is still very funny. And so is Gerald, born in 1931. Before introducing me, he told me privately that they had been considering a number of major Canadian stars to do the voice-over narration for the Leacock piece. But as a sort of place-holder they asked a guy in Winnipeg to read the piece, and he read it in one take, and it was perfect.

But before our evening event, in exploring Knowlton we came on the ancient Anglican church of St.Paul. And there, very  close to the entrance on the wall we found a Memorial Plaque to “Honor Heward Grafftey”, a woman who died in 1943.

And Hugh MacLennan sprang to mind.

In my chapter on Hugh I talk about how during his time as a teacher at Lower Canada College he befriended a boy in distress, who never forgot his kindness, and later defended the very old MacLennans. I kept that boy anonymous. But I can now reveal that it was Heward Grafftey.

What I wrote was this: “One boy, later a distinguished MP, told me that he was summoned to the headmaster’s study  and briskly informed that his mother had just died. Released into the school corridor, he stood there blinking in shock, until one of his teachers, Hugh MacLennan, came up, threw his arms around him, and held him fast, while the macho crowds flowed around them, gaping.”

It was in that little church in Knowlton that I realised that this had happened in 1943. And I thought about Hugh.