Cannington Manor comes back to life
Did your family go for Sunday drives when you were young? If so, you may have heard of Cannington Manor or perhaps even visited the site. You will also know that it was not a house but a town that died.
In the 1950s, little was left of the settlement’s former glory, but my siblings and I could imagine the British aristocrats and their stately houses—the balls, the race horses and the scarlet-coated riders meeting for a hunt—all part of the Cannington Manor legend. So what if all that remained was the church, a temporary visitor’s centre, a dilapidated bachelor’s shack and traces of a mill.
As a child, I cared only for the romance of the past, and I initially planned to write a light romance and to place it in southeastern Saskatchewan. However, a larger story emerged as I immersed myself in the history. I couldn’t help imagining the hopes and dreams of all the people who responded to the lure of the once-burgeoning pioneer town.
When I met Thomas Beck, author of The Pioneers of Cannington Manor, I knew this would be more than a light romance. A latecomer to the settlement, Beck devoted himself to the task of preserving settler stories, so it was appropriate that he later became the curator of the seasonal museum/visitors’ centre.
Even after his death, others in the community were eager to tell their stories. But I didn’t want to write just another history, fascinating as those stories were. For me fiction is the way to access deeper truths. Therefore, I wove the two together, inventing characters to live alongside the people who once dreamed of Cannington Manor as a home and trading centre.
The wedding of Mary Humphrys to Ernest Maltby seemed a perfect occasion to introduce a young Englishwoman named Florence Southam — young by our standards but a spinster in Victorian England. To my great joy, Stonehouse Publishing of Edmonton liked my manuscript, so with their help and support, I can now say “Read my book and discover whether Florence succumbs to the charms of this strange new world.”
Few and Far is available through Stonehouse Publishing, at bookstores (McNally Robinson in Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Chapters-Indigo in Regina), from Amazon. ca or from the author, Allison Kydd (akyddwrt@sasktel.net).