“The menace of the Communists to our Canadian way of life is vividly evident. In a Communist Canada, every surviving citizen would be subject to a rigidly tyrannical control of every detail of his existence. He could not choose his job, or change his job. For grousing he could be ejected from his home. For lateness he could be sent to a slave-camp in the Yukon…

“The Canadian Chamber of Commerce believes that Communism is an organized and even fanatical world movement opposed to true democracy and to the freedom of the individual. In the light of this belief, the Chamber holds that it has a responsibility to its members and to all Canadians to expose the aims of the Communists and the methods they employ, and to draw the attention of all citizens to the threat which Communism represents.”

—From The Communist Threat to Canada, a booklet published by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in 1947.

When I set out to write my new novel, Far Creek Road, I was lucky to have a small archive of Cold War material already in the house. It sometimes seems as if my husband’s family has saved everything since they first settled in North America. This means the attic is a little crowded, since one branch of his family landed on the ship after the Mayflower. Another ancestor arrived in Upper Canada to fight in the War of 1812. When my mother-in-law gave an old button jar to the Royal Ontario Museum, they found it contained a set of buttons from a British Army officer’s uniform of 1785.

Everything came down to us courtesy of my husband’s maternal grandfather, who made sure nothing he thought valuable was thrown out, including the Cold War ephemera. I remembered coming across the Chamber of Commerce pamphlet years ago, and looked it out when I began to do research for Far Creek Road. I already knew the novel would be set in a suburb of Vancouver in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile crisis, and planned to tell the story of a communist witch hunt through the eyes of a child.

“Blackmail

“Every blackmailer is not a Communist, but every Communist is a potential blackmailer. Moral indiscretions, frequently framed with a cooperative Party girl, financial irregularities such as ‘padded’ expense accounts and ‘kickbacks’ for handing out union jobs, and any intemperance or indiscreet remark that can be colourfully contorted into something anti-union, anti-Semitic or pro-Fascist and the like, are carefully recorded and filed away for use, if necessary. Those with labour union experience know many a tale of clever Communist traps rigged for the unwary. They have learned to be careful and circumspect in both private and union life.”

—Excerpt from How Communists Operate! A Brief Memorandum on Communist Tactics, also issued by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, this time in 1948.

In my novel, the main character is a nine-year-old girl, Mary Alice (Tink) Parker, who strikes up a friendship with a boy named Norman. Tink’s uncle is a tough, rubber-faced former lumberjack who’s the head of his union local, which is leftist but anti-communist. Given his political sophistication, Uncle Punk recognizes signs that Norman’s parents may be members of the Communist Party, or might have been at one time. Did they flirt with communism while they were students? Leave the party when many Canadians renounced communism after the Soviet invasion of Hungary? Or do they remain committed members?

The other key question is asked by Tink’s father. Are the Hortons’ private beliefs anybody’s business? Violence can’t be tolerated, but what happens when a government legislates belief, or the crowd decides what people ought to think? Hall Parker speaks in a rare calm voice at a time when passions are elevated—and stoked by incendiary handouts. 

“The Chinese Water Torture Trick

“The Chinese could reputedly drive a man mad by having drops of water drip incessantly on his shaven head. The Communist’s effective twist to this trick is a campaign of suave, intelligent and apparently well-intentioned questions directed at a union leader day after day, month after month, to create the impression that he has not shown sufficient energy and wisdom in his union duties. Those familiar with this tactic simply denounce the tormentors for what they are. The unwary often blow up and quit their office, leaving it open for a secret Party member. Few people would continue to carry on in the face of such persecution.”

—Chamber of Commerce pamphlet, 1948 

It wasn’t hard to get a picture of the paranoia of the times from both the pamphlets and, oh, maybe a shelf and a half of books I bought to research the novel. What also helped me understand it was the fact I started to write it at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. As I wrote, I watched the herd effect take hold of society. We huddled together in the face of a faceless danger, taking comfort in doing what everyone else was doing, whether it was banging pots at 6 p.m., wearing masks, sanitizing shopping carts or keeping six feet apart in the supermarket.

Then that part of it stopped, the herd veering off into what now looks to me like widespread denial, given the number of infections still being reported. (I got an email from my agent minutes ago saying she’s got covid.) I continue to wear N-95 masks in crowded public places because my husband is immunocompromised, but few others do. Yet there’s this: people have told me they want mask up, but since hardly anyone else does, they don’t want to stand out from the crowd. 

Research can take many forms, and one is extrapolating from what’s going on around you, human nature being human wherever it’s found. During the Cold War, people were afraid to be non-anti-Communist even if they didn’t have strong political views. They kept their heads down. Now they–we–are doing it again. And I know what it feels like, when I didn’t before the pandemic began.

One final thing: I was struck by how well the Cold War booklets are written. Granddad also saved an undated handout from The Telegram newspaper of Toronto headlined Red Menace in Canada? It boasts of its readability, even though the vocabulary in its eleven pages is far more sophisticated than mass-market reporting today.   

“Much of the daily news and the literature of three continents is concerned these days with Communism and Communists,” it states in a hefty font on the cover.

“They are a major factor in international politics and a considerable one in the domestic policies of the United States, Great Britain, and most of the Western World. 

“What about Canada? How serious is the Red menace here?…

“The Telegram assigned reporters Allan Kent and Clem Shields to investigate the present state of Communist fortunes in Canada and to try to find answers to these questions…

“Their report is written in clear, factual style,” it says–and it is.

In the 75 years since these pamphlets were published, what we call a “clear, factual style” has changed. I recently watched two episodes of the new Netflix series Life On Our Planet. The visuals from Industrial Light and Magic are stunning but I found the script painful, even as Morgan Freeman voiced it with slow, gravelly authority. All the sentences are short, and both the rhythm and the vocabulary are repetitive. 

“For the first time in history, there was a global power. Dinosaurs. They were to rule for over 150 million years.” 

“Earth never remains stable for long. Sometimes that helps life. Sometimes it hinders it.”

I streamed the show after reading a story about a 2022 Gallup analysis of U.S. education department figures. It shows that that 130 million adult Americans—54 per cent of those aged between 16 and 74—currently read at or below a grade six level. Watching the show, I wondered if the filmmakers on Life on Our Planet knew the figures and had deliberately pitched the voiceover at a grade six level. They were going for a mass audience, and kept it simple.

I bring this up because when you’re writing a novel, especially a piece of historical fiction, you have to try to get more than the political context right. You also need to write your characters’ speech in a way that feels appropriate to the period. I don’t mean trying to reproduce it. Hilary Mantel doesn’t fill her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell with courtiers saying “forsooth.” Instead she writes simple declarative sentences peppered with period vocabulary and a notable absence of contractions. 

A moment ago, I pulled the middle volume of her trilogy off my bookshelf, Bringing Up the Bodies. Sitting back down, wondering what had happened to my copy of Wolf Hall, I let the book fall open randomly.

“‘I think I can speak frankly to you, Cromwell,’ Fitz says… ‘A queen should be mild and pitiful. She should move the king to mercy—not drive him on to harshness.’”

So when writing about the Cold War period, I kept not only the politics in mind, the hysteria and the herd instinct, but also the fact that people at the time spoke slightly differently than we do now. Both the sentences and the attention spans were longer in 1962, and I tried to reflect that. After reading Far Creek Road, people who remember the period tell me that my dialogue sounds right, and the characters feel true to the period. That’s satisfying. It was a fun book to write–even though I don’t like thinking about the danger of the herd. 

Looking for holiday presents? Far Creek Road is available in stores as well as from Amazon, Indigo and at your local indie through my publisher, ECW Press.