Unwritten Books 3 - The Young City (26 page)

He laughed. “Can you believe it? Yeah. I can’t think why.”

“We have a lot of questions to answer, a lot of things to do, and a lot of decisions to make,” said Rosemary.

“I was all set on being a construction worker,” said Peter. “Now I have to decide whether to go back to journalism school. But I can’t go to London; that would be too far from you. It’s all too much, too soon.”

“Peter?”

He looked at her. She let go of the rudder and stood up. The boat coasted. “Whatever happens, whatever we face, if the last few months have taught me anything, it’s this.” She reached up and kissed him. “We’ll face it together.”

“I love you, Rosemary.”

“I love you too.” Then she sat back down and grabbed the rudder. “Now.” She pointed. “Forward!”

Peter pushed the pole, and the boat slipped forward and vanished into the future.

I spent most of my childhood years growing up in Toronto living in a townhouse on McCaul Street. The street was on the edge of the downtown core, with the fronts of its houses staring east at the rising towers of the hospital district and the Ontario Hydro headquarters. It is an old residential street being transformed by the city’s expanding core. Our townhouse, we believe, was originally built in the 1890s on a site that was once cricket grounds, but more significantly, before that, a peculiar old creek bed.

Two blocks from my house is a short stub of a street, mostly a delivery lane for the University of Toronto, known as Taddle Creek Road. This street is one of the few reminders of a significant river that used to flow through Toronto’s downtown core. Taddle Creek started life in the neighbourhood of Wychwood near the Bathurst/Davenport intersection and meandered
southeast through the university grounds, possibly even beneath our house, before reaching Lake Ontario near where the St. Lawrence Market is today.

By all accounts, the creek was a treasure. The University of Toronto was originally built with prime views of the creek and its associated wetlands, but encroaching development polluted the Taddle, and gradually the City of Toronto built over it, transforming the creek into a series of bricked-up storm sewers. The stretch through the university grounds, a great portion of which is known as Philosopher’s Walk, was the last to be covered over in 1884.

There is a mystique about this buried river. Garrison Creek was longer, and still has a greater impact on the city’s topology, but Taddle seems to capture the imagination, much like the Fleet in London, England. Perhaps because of its downtown course, the Taddle is a symbol of both the folly and might of industrial progress. For locals, we remembered the Taddle with a strange pride: here was a river we built over. Here was a great watercourse that we killed. Urban legends built up around the Taddle. I was told that there were caverns associated with the buried river beneath Queen’s Park. I was told that the University subway line made use of these caverns during construction. Most of these tales are probably apocryphal, but they are a part of my identification with this river.

And at the back basement of our house on McCaul Street, there was a small hole in the concrete foundation,
and a strange patch of floor that sounded a little hollow. We had no idea what this was. Could it have been a secret chamber that was used when the house was owned by bootleggers during the 1920s and ’30s? (My father has a pretty good idea that the house was used as such during Prohibition because, during his childhood in the ’50s, after his father had bought it, it was amazing how many drunks showed up at the door at the middle of the night asking for a bottle). Or was it one of the caverns associated with the Taddle?

Of course, it was probably nothing. But the idea that there was something under my place stayed with me in the years after we moved to Kitchener. And as I tackled the tale of Peter and Rosemary at eighteen, these elements decided to make their contribution. What if Peter and Rosemary, helping Theo move into that basement apartment, fell through that floor, fell into the Taddle, and walked through the storm drains back into time, emerging on the university grounds in 1884, just as the Taddle was being buried?

My story probably takes several artistic licences. The size and shape of the storm sewer tunnels in this book are probably larger than what reality calls for (although given that some people have little difficulty in exploring the storm drains of Toronto, perhaps I’m not that far off). And the cavern Peter and Rosemary fall into probably doesn’t exist. But it’s still a part of the city’s collective imagination. And I hope that this lends my
story the validity it needs. This is a fantasy, after all — an urban fantasy. And if I can’t take some liberties with reality to tell a fantastical story about my childhood city, what’s the point of being an author?

Today, the Taddle is remembered in plaques and in flooded basements. There has been talk about exhuming the water course, though it seems unlikely given the cost. But various groups are coming together to remember the many rivers that Toronto has buried.

Take a step back in the series and check out other books by James Bow

Fathom Five
978-1-55002-692-4
$12.99, £6.99

On the surface, Peter McAllister has a good life: a good school, good friends, good times — even if his best friend is a girl, sort of a geek, and maybe even more than a friend. But it’s been years since the death of his parents landed him in this small town and he still feels as if his life in Clarksbury is just an inch deep. Does he really belong? Only Rosemary seems real. Then a mysterious woman named Fiona appears who tells him he’s a changeling — a fairy child left to live in the human world — and that it’s time to come home. Can Rosemary convince him that Fiona is lying? Or is it possible that Fiona is telling the truth?

The Unwritten Girl
978-1-55002-604-7
$12.99, £6.99

Years ago Rosemary Watson’s brother, Theo, suffered a nervous breakdown, and Rosemary, now entering junior high, is constantly teased about it. She tries to hide in books, but even there she’s uneasy: she can’t stand to see characters suffer. Rosemary and Peter — the new kid in school with issues of his own — are thrown together and soon find themselves on a life-or-death quest to rescue Rosemary’s brother, who has lost himself in a book. With the help of Peter and her guide, fairy shape-shifter Puck, Rosemary must face the storybook perils of the Land of Fiction and learn to open her heart before it is too late.

Available at your favourite bookseller.

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