The Root Cellar

by Janet Lunn

  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?

  JL: Rose feels that she has never belonged anywhere. She has been traipsed around the world by her grandmother, and her grandmother never allowed her to have friends. So she has had no anchor but her grandmother—a woman who probably cared about her but was so undemonstrative as to seem unloving. Rose desperately needs to feel not only loved, but that she belongs somewhere. At the start of the story, she certainly doesn’t feel that she belongs with the Hawthorn Bay family, but she has begun to feel that by the end. I remember what an important moment it was for me, in the writing of the book, when, on Christmas Day, Aunt Nan gives Rose a miniature toy car that once belonged to her brother, Rose’s father. In that moment Rose suddenly feels that her father was not just a daydream—he once lived, he was Aunt Nan’s brother, his connection to her own world is real. She does belong to the Hawthorn Bay family. I felt that shared moment so strongly.

  LD: While writing it?

  JL: Yes. Those sudden, intense shared moments are so pivotal in life, as they are in stories. They tie us together in a way that years of shared experiences can’t always do. Looking back on the story after I wrote it, I could see that the connection Rose makes with Aunt Nan through that toy car, the connection she makes with Sam sitting on the stone wall in Oswego while he plays Will’s song, the connection she makes with Will when she buys him the 10-cent harmonica—they pull the bits and pieces of her life together. I didn’t see that while I was writing, though. Often, while I’m writing, I don’t consciously realize the underlying meaning of what I am saying.

  D: Do you think that’s true for most writers?

  JL: I think it’s true in the books I like best. When a book is full of deliberate symbolism, it can be very interesting, but it’s apt to be completely cerebral. It never touches the heart. So I don’t strive for symbolism or for figuring the underlying meaning of my stories too carefully. I trust my subconscious to do that job.

  LD: Do you feel that you have to allow a story to tell itself to a certain extent?

  JL: Yes, I do. But, at some point, you have to take the story that has told itself and give it shape. You know, as an editor, that an important part of your job is to get the writer with a story that has all but told itself to organize it into a cohesive narrative. When hopeful young writers ask me how I work out a story, this is what I tell them: I plot my story carefully. Then, when I start to write, characters, dialogue and even events I haven’t planned leap onto the page. Then comes the hard part: I have to decide whether to stick to the carefully plotted outline or go with what’s appeared unbidden. If you stick with the outline, you end up with a dead story. If you follow every stray thought, your story won’t hold together. Somehow you have to merge these two strands. This is what makes writing an art, not a science.

  LD: Let’s look, for a moment, at some of those “unconscious” ideas now. In The Root Cellar, you circle around ideas of being gone, as much as of belonging. Rose is gone—separated from herself and her world, as well as shifting through time. Will is gone—he runs off to war. Mrs. Morrissay is there one minute and gone the next. And what makes the story so moving for me is that Rose has to learn how to find herself above all. All the way through the novel, in the language and the images, I feel you are circling back to that idea. Even in the importance that you give to music and song. Lost and found; music and silence; sorrow and joy; darkness and light. How conscious were you of these powerful ideas when writing the book?

  JL: I never thought about any of those themes, not consciously. Nor did I realize when I set out to write this story that I was going to war with it. I’m sure that what was happening here in Canada politically played a part in how I was feeling. The separatists in Quebec were being quite noisy—I can’t think of a better word for it—and I remember thinking, “Oh Lord, are we going to have a civil war in this country?” I grew up in the shadow of the American Civil War. It was still very alive in national memory when I was a child. There were still veterans from that war marching in the Memorial Day parades. They were old, old men, probably as old as the oldest of the Second World War veterans now. Our Vermont village had sent soldiers to that war. The stories my neighbours told about that war had been told to them by people who’d lived through it. My great-grandmother remembered seeing Abraham Lincoln when she was a child. We still sang Civil War songs in school. I was born only sixty-seven years after the end of that war, and I am now seventy-two years old. It wasn’t so very long ago.

  LD: As a new Canadian, did you have to take on a different perspective on the American Civil War than you might have done if you had still lived in the U.S.?

  JL: I didn’t. Historically, the pre-Confederation Canadian governments supported the American South because the British did; the North England cotton mills got their cotton from the American South. In fact, Jefferson Davis, who was the President of the Southern Confederacy, sent his son to Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. But probably most Canadians supported the North, as slavery was outlawed in all provinces here. A great many people along the border supported the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves find their way to Canada.

  LD: Strange to think that your birth was closer to that war than you are to your own birth today! When you moved to Canada and found yourself in a community of United Empire Loyalists who had fled as refugees from the States, did you find that your new community had held onto its stories in the same way that they had in the States?

  JL: Yes, and they still do!

  LD: Was that one of the reasons you came to write the book? To tell those people’s stories? I do remember you saying, when you began The Root Cellar, that you were deeply concerned that we, in Canada, didn’t have a strong tradition of writing down the stories abou
t ourselves and our past and our country. You became one of the first significant writers in children’s literature to do that. Is it still important to you?

  JL: Oh yes, I think it’s terribly important. I think a community only develops a sense of itself through its stories. We don’t know who we are without our stories. Families don’t know, a community doesn’t know, a nation doesn’t know. Story is the heart of a people—story in sculpture, in painting, in music, in writing. At every family gathering, sooner or later, someone says, “Do you remember the time …?” Everyone else will nod, remembering, and the stories begin. At national holidays, radio and television programs fulfill that function. Stories remind us who we are and bind us together.

  LD: What are the novels that, for you, do tell those Canadian stories?

  JL: When we’re talking novels for adults, I’d say Margaret Laurence’s, Alistair MacLeod’s, W. O. Mitchell’s—really, there are quite a number. And, although they’re short stories, Alice Munro’s.

  Among the books for young people, I suppose Lucy Maud Montgomery is the quintessential Canadian writer, even though she belongs to a time long past. Her prose is pretty flowery, but it still conveys that down-to-earth quality that characterizes so much Canadian fiction—even our fantasy. It characterizes our national psyche. Among the contemporary writers, while there are certainly others, Jean Little, Kit Pearson, Kevin Major, Brian Doyle, are the names that leap into my head.

  LD: Do you feel we can get a truer sense of our hopes and traditions, our past, our country, through fiction than out of history textbooks?

  JL: I think you need both. You can get the facts (or at least an approximation of the facts) from the history books, but the only way to get inside history is through fiction. But I don’t like fictional biography. I am really bothered by the idea of taking someone’s life and turning it inside out or embroidering fiction all over it. I respect historical reality too much. You can never know the absolute truth about the past, but you can come closer to how it might have been by examining it through the hearts and minds of fictional characters. You can take a period of time, read everything you can find about the people who lived during that time, and create characters who might have lived then—but you have to be careful not to assign your twenty-first-century sensibility to them. Writing The Root Cellar was an intriguing exercise because I had a twentieth-century heroine moving back in time to befriend two nineteenth-century kids.