Mnemonic by Theresa Kishkan Read Free Book Online Page A

privacy with old roses and apple trees around it. Many years later, while engaged in research for a novel I’d set in the orchard settlement of Walhachin, I was astonished to discover that elderly man, Bertram Chase Footner, had been responsible for designing and building the houses of that settlement. I’d been there for research and had been taken by the remnants of the old community, a few of the bungalows with their steep-pitched roofs, high ceilings, and wraparound porches attesting to careful attention to climate. His own house there — for he’d lived for a time at Walhachin; his daughter Mollie had been born there (the middle-aged daughter I’d known a little in my teenage years) — was built of river-stone and still sits quietly elegant above the Thompson River.
    If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have asked Mr. Footner questions. I’d have asked about his life after the Boer War when he built bridges in the Sudan, a time and place so far away from our semi-rural street in Royal Oak, named for its groves of Garry oak. But he died in 1972 before I knew I would go on to write books, that I would be passionately interested in the history of the province I’d been born and raised in and took for granted until my own middle years.
    I’ve tried, not hard enough perhaps, to find out if he had built the house he lived in at Royal Oak and perhaps the other two that resembled it on what might have been a larger lot that he’d subdivided. One archivist I spoke to insisted that the street hadn’t existed before the 1950s. Yet there was an ancient farmstead across the road when we first moved there, with an equally ancient apple orchard and cider press. The owner, Bill Mahon, told my parents it was the oldest house in Saanich. It was torn down in the late 1970s for a subdivision. Well, maybe not under the current street name, I suggested to the archivist, but the road itself certainly existed well back into the century and maybe before. He wasn’t convinced.
    That single degree of separation (albeit tenuous) between myself and Walhachin, the Boer War even, is something to ponder. Growing up, my brothers had received the Boys Own Annual from their former Cub Master at Christmas and these were full of stories of the struggles between the British and the Afrikaners as the nineteenth century turned over to the twentieth. The names — Transvaal, Mafeking, Natal — entranced me. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement, had distinguished himself during the Boer War, which was probably the reason that my brothers received the books as gifts. But still that history had its resonance for a girl growing up in Victoria with its own traces of colonialism, its Majors at the Bengal Room gazing mournfully into their gin.
    My mother scoured the Goodwill on lower Yates for riding breeches and boots for me, a worn trace of those soldiers. Tags on the jodhpurs might hark back to India or Jermyn Street and sometimes the aging leather boots had old-fashioned trees within them to keep them shapely. I imagined someone — maybe a widow or a landlady — collecting up all the old garments and putting them in a carton to be taken to the Goodwill, for who else but a girl whose allowance didn’t stretch to proper riding clothes would want such things? They were impossibly cheap. $1.29, or $0.75. The detritus of lives passed, and now forgotten.
    Of course it makes no difference that the house my Brownie pack entered to gaze upon the spoils of colonial hyper-confidence and activity was not the Newcombe house. I knew nothing of this then. I knew no First Nations people then. When we took a Sunday drive out past Brentwood Bay, we’d pass the tidy old farms on West Saanich Road, the fancier houses near the water, and then we’d come to the Reserve. Small noises would come from my parents’ throats. They disapproved of the unpainted houses, the untidy