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Incident at Willow
Creek
by Don Hunter
Edmonton: NeWest Press,
2009, ISBN 978-1-897126-41-7, 192 pp., $19.95 paper.
Incident at Willow Creek, by British Columbia writer Don Hunter, is set mostly in southern Alberta in the fictional village of Willow Creek, not far from Lethbridge, during the summer and fall of 1944. The story begins in present-day Wales with the funeral of Kristen Evans, who was born in Canada in 1912 but lived in Wales for more than 60 years after moving there with her husband in 1947. Kristen's daughter, Liz, has inherited a bank lockbox containing a couple of letters and an official Canadian government document about Camp 10, a prisoner-of-war camp located near Willow Creek, where Germans were held during World War II. As Liz reads the rather stilted and obscure government report and the letters, she starts to learn pieces of an incident she had never been told about, and a tragic secret her mother had never revealed.Most of the novel, starting with chapter two, takes place in 1944, with short flashes into the present day. Kristen and her ten-year-old son David run a small gas station and general store in Willow Creek. Kristen's husband had joined the army early in the war but had been captured at Dieppe, and shipped off to a German prisoner-of-war camp. Kristen has received only four postcards from him in the intervening two years.
Ironically, there is a Canadian prisoner-of-war camp located very near them, and David and his two friends, Ian and Pauli, are very interested in the prisoners, often watching them from just outside the fence. Because there is little chance of the prisoners escaping, some of them are permitted to work on projects outside the camp and sometimes at nearby farms, where many of them are treated well. David sympathizes with the prisoners, hoping that his father is treated well, too, and eventually he becomes friendly with one of the Germans, a submarine officer named Eric Kruger.
Hunter successfully works in various viewpoints, including that of the German, Kruger, and several of the prison guards. One of these guards, Steve Roper, is a hustler who makes money from the war on the side, while wishing he could arrange some time alone with the attractive Kristen. He is, however, basically fair with the prisoners, in contrast to Sergeant Major Jack Bishop, who runs the camp and frequently acts out his failures at home by mistreating the prisoners and bullying the other guards. He particularly mistreats Kruger, and is very annoyed with David and his friends who are, in Bishop's opinion, trying to "fraternize with the enemy." From the beginning the reader knows that some tragedy is going to occur, and the flashes into the present frequently remind us of this, adding suspense to the story. We begin to suspect the "tragedy" will involve Bishop, and to hope that he is the only one!
In an Internet interview, Don Hunter reveals that his novel actually had its beginning in a short story he wrote about a prisoner-of-war camp in Britain, near where he grew up, and that it was only after he learned about similar camps in Canada that he decided to expand the story and place it at a small camp in southern Alberta. Although the specific Willow Creek camp he describes is fictional, there were many similar branch camps and labour projects throughout Alberta, as well as large ones at Lethbridge and Medicine Hat, each of which housed over 12,000 prisoners. Before writing the novel, Hunter travelled to Lethbridge to research the camps and life in southern Alberta during the 1940s.
Hunter's characters are all well developed. At times their back history is perhaps a bit too detailed, but it serves to make the characters interesting and unique, and helps the reader relate to them and understand some of the reasons for the way they act. I particularly enjoyed Hunter's descriptions of the prairie:
The colours blurred and blended as the prairie flowed westward until it reached the base of the distant foothills, beyond which loomed the vast shapes of the Rockies. Towering pillars of cloud dominated the sky, tiers of deep blue and puff-ball white stacked one atop the other, like a gigantic layered cake. (13)
Hunter's previous writings include Spinner's Inlet, published in 1989, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
Donna Gamache is the author of Spruce Woods Adventure (Compascore Manitoba) as well as many short stories for both children and adults.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.