Down Memory Lane

The Air House was on the south side of the big Van Riebeek Square, next to an eighteenth-century Residency which housed a department of the Ministry of Public Health.

Eric Ambler: The Night-Comers

Right there, in my mind's eye, there was a picture of the big square. It had various buildings all around it and beyond them there were large fields. But why fields? Hadn't I read in the previous paragraph that the square was in the midst of a city of a million and a half? So beyond the square there had to be other buildings, perhaps even plain houses, but no fields. I quickly backtracked to the previous paragraph. Yes, it was just as I had thought. What was going on here? Why was the author saying one thing and I was imagining another? I was under the impression that the author's words set-up a sort of framework on which our imagination builds a picture based on our experiences. But here I had built a picture that was definitely different from the one described. Was my imagination so wild that even the author whose words I was reading couldn't restrain it? Or was I changing the story I was reading to something of my own?

Farley Mowat - Wolves & Whales

Farley Mowat (1921- ) is Canada's best-selling author and environmentalist. He has published 45 books and sold 17 million copies in over fifty languages. Outside Canada, he is not as well known as compatriot Margaret Atwood. But still, he is the most Canadian of Canadian writers because well, he writes about Canada. In Mowat's stories, Canada is not simply the setting or the background. It forms the foreground. So he is the Canadian author, just as Gordon Lightfoot is the Canadian musician.

He was born in Belleville, Ontario in 1921. He was the only child of Angus Mowat, a writer and librarian, who relocated his family several times in different places across Canada, a practise that Farley was to continue as an adult. As a boy, Farley loved nature and animals, and his room at times resembled a small zoo. His amusing stories The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) and Owls in the Family (1961) vividly recollect that period. Later he joined the war effort and took an active part in the invasion of Sicily and Italy. From his war experiences he later wrote The Regiment (1955) And No Birds Sang (1979). After the war, Mowat studied Biology at the University of Toronto and wrote his first book, People of the Deer (1952). This book singlehandedly exposed the mistreatment of Canada's native people and made Mowat a celebrity overnight. As a result the Canadian government started shipping food to the Caribou Inuit people whose very existence they previously denied.