That’s Jessie Barfoot looking away from us on the new cover of my third novel, The Corner Garden. I love the designer’s portrayal of Jesse, and I’m launching the revamped cover today with a story about what inspired the book.

Jesse narrates the novel, and she introduces herself by saying, “I think I’ll call myself Gretel in this book. It’s not really my name. My name is really Jesse Barfoot, which is a perfectly respectable name, I guess, except that there’s nothing respectable about me. That’s one of the reasons we moved to Toronto. I’ve reached the age of fifteen and a half, and we’re going to get a New Start.”

Jesse’s book is a diary, and she’s started keeping it after moving in next door to an elderly woman with a beautiful garden whom she immediately decides is a witch. Jesse’s mother, Michelle, has been a single mother all of Jesse’s life, but she’s recently married a kind-hearted lawyer and they’ve moved to Toronto. Jesse has nothing in particular against the lawyer, whom she calls Pudge, but she still feels lost, like Gretel from the fairy tale. She’s also drawn to the witch, whose name turns out to be Martha van Tellingen—at least, she says it is—a Dutch woman guarding a secret she’s kept since she was Jesse’s age and living in Amsterdam during the Second World War.

Martha also kept a diary when she was 15, and we alternate between Jesse’s increasingly troubled narration and Martha’s troubling diary. Jesse thinks of wartime Holland in terms of Anne Frank—author of one of the most famous diaries in the world—and presumes the cranky Martha was a Dutch innocent caught up in the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Yet we soon learn that Martha’s father was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator, a member of the fascist NSB, the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, which aped Hitler’s policies. What this did to Martha, and what she did during the war, gradually comes to the surface as Jesse batters her way past Martha’s defences. Through this eruption of the past, both their futures are threatened.

The book is based partly on the woman who lived next door to my family when I was growing up in North Vancouver. Much of the newly-constructed suburb—built on the traditional lands of the Squamish people—was settled by veterans of the Canadian Army who served overseas during World War Two. I think some of the lots were land grants given to returned soldiers, although I don’t think my parents got one through that program, even though my father had been a sergeant in the Canadian artillery. He served overseas from 1939 to 1944, shipped home in dreadful shape a year before the war ended. He had served as a gunner during the Battle of Britain, where he lost some of his hearing, and later took part in the invasions of both Sicily and Italy, fighting in the brutal Battle of Ortona. Farley Mowat wrote about Ortona in his memoir, And No Birds Sang. My father didn’t survive the battle in any better shape than Mowat. 

Our neighbours in North Vancouver were German, and it became known that the man had served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht during the war. They were shunned by many of the other veterans, but my father was a complicated man. He was kind to them, telling me years later that he had joined the army when he was a kid who knew nothing about politics, and he’d fought on the right side largely by accident. He’d wanted adventure and wanted to serve his country. Our neighbour had been even younger than he was when he signed up with Hitler. He told my father that he’d been equally ignorant, and was torn by regret.

His wife wasn’t a well woman, although she cultivated a beautiful garden, a rockery on the slopes of Grouse Mountain. Since I loved flowers, I would sneak into the neighbouring yard to sing to the azaleas and pick small bouquets. I was eight years old when we moved out of that house so I was very young when I trespassed. In my small way, I didn’t know any better, either. 

Sometimes when she saw me, the woman ran out of the house shrieking incoherently. Sometimes she took me into her lap and told me I was a good girl, I was the best kind of girl, a blond girl, which was even more frightening. My mother said later that the woman confided in her that she felt she was being punished for what the Germans had done during the war by being unable to bear children. She also seems to have remained a Nazi, given her frequent Aryan mutterings. My parents didn’t like her but felt sympathetic toward her husband.

It’s the sort of thing that stays with you powerfully, and if you’re a writer, feelings that strong eventually lead to a book. Of course, you flip things. North Vancouver becomes Toronto, Jesse Barfoot isn’t me, and when I set out to write The Corner Garden, I wanted readers to assume at first that Martha was an innocent survivor of the war, so I made her Dutch instead of German. Like Jesse, we think of Anne Frank when we hear “Amsterdam” and “World War Two.” What we often fail to consider is that the collaborator who betrayed the Frank family was every bit as Dutch.

Complicity continues to fascinate me. I’m still reading books about the Netherlands during the Second World War, some of them newly published. Out this spring is The Diary Keepers, which focuses on the diaries kept by Dutch citizens during the German occupation, sometimes at great risk. Two much more controversial books came out last year, both by Canadian authors offering different theories about who betrayed Anne Frank and her family. 

I went to the Netherlands when I was researching The Corner Garden, and spoke to a woman who had known Anne’s father, Otto Frank. She told me something about the betrayal that I haven’t seen written elsewhere; something I brought with me while reading these three books. Next up, I plan to review them. 

In the meantime, a new cover. Enjoy.

Lesley Krueger’s new novel, Far Creek Road, is set in North Vancouver during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s available here at booksellers across Canada and at Amazon internationally.