Gillian Chan
ISBN: 1553373499
Kids Can Press, Limited
2002
A Foreign Field by Gillian Chan is a coming-of-age historical romance set in Hamilton, Ontario, during WWII. Its two young protagonists are British RAF pilot Stephen Dearborn and schoolgirl Ellen Logan, a first-generation Scots-Canadian whose two older brothers are away at war. The blend of romantic and epistolary conventions with acute historical detail is well served by the brevity of the novel. The letters constitute the main storytelling device, allowing the reader inside the heads of Ellen and Stephen, while using third- and first- person narrative techniques. The result is a witness to the innocence and the horror of war, of how it brought two young people together, and how it eventually tore them apart.
Ellen and Stephen first meet in the Logans' doorway, when a case of mistaken identity causes Ellen to give Stephen an over-familiar embrace. Mistaking him for her brother Graham, this initial meeting sets the tone for Ellen's cool attitude towards the British boy in blue, who charms the rest of the family so much that he is invited for dinner on more than one occasion. Soon, he acts as a kind of chaperone for her. She resents Stephen, an outsider whose presence is galling when the whereabouts of her other brother Stewart are unknown. She admits, "'I'm being mean about him, I know. It's just that he's always here, and Stewart isn't.'" Ellen's good friend Deanna reminds her, "'It's not really fair to take it out on this guy. He's obviously just lonely and homesick...He'll have worse to face soon enough.'" Soon Stephen's visits become routine and he is treated as part of the Logan family by Ellen's parents, so much that he takes Ellen to her first dance and to the church bazaar. Eventually, almost without knowing it, they fall in love.
A Foreign Field has a mix of equal parts romantic cliches and social commentary. Like any good sentimental wartime romance, there are stern fathers, bungled encounters, noble death, and bittersweet first love. The sexualised situation of these young men, away from home, with most girls "'going all goo-goo-eyed at the sight of a uniform, whatever's inside it'" is notably not eschewed. The RAF base gates are flocked with girls looking for a dashing foreign trainees, and later Ellen's friend Barb moves out of town to have a baby out of wedlock. By contrast, Stephen and Ellen's relationship is perfectly chaste. Their letters, which are equally austere, help document the passage of time in a concise manner. Chan uses the epistolary form to a great extent, with the letters written by Stephen to various family members, friends, and Ellen showing the psychological effects of war. "'It's hard to say this,'" Stephen writes his father,'"But if I don't make it through the war I hope my skills will have played a small part in defeating the Germans and making the world safe again. When faced with such an awful threat, we all have to put off our dreams and aspirations.'"
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