Love Letters from the Front: 'A Foreign Field' by Gillian Chan

university when you'll just get married and raise children?'" When Stephen comes to Ellen's defence, her father retorts, "'All you young men aren't being forced to put your dreams on hold by the war just so some flighty girls can take your places.'" His anger is something more deeply rooted than plain sexism. In his outburst we hear something of the poor immigrant's struggles, and of his dreams. The immigrant works hard, has to endlessly scrimp and save, and what little money he has is not to be squandered on something as frivolous as educating a daughter.

Stephen dies when his plane is shot down in a bombing raid over Kassel, Germany. A letter from one of his crewmen, Jack Pratchett, a Canadian, relates to Ellen what happened on the plane. When they were shot, Stephen ordered all the men off and steered the plane away from a village, crashing into an open road instead. This act of ultimate self-sacrifice elevates Stephen to the status of martyr, not a man to be pitied like Robbie, a friend of the Logans who is disfigured grotesquely in the war. Jack tells Ellen that he was the last man off the plane when Stephen died, and he had started back to help him only to be urged away. Is Jack the dark figure in Stephen's final dream? In the end, Jack, who feels alienated and has no one to write to, asks Ellen if they can start a correspondence. Ellen's response to this request is made clear in the epilogue.

The epilogue is the only real flaw in the book. It takes place in 1993, when Ellen begins to tell the story of the British pilot that changed her life to her teenaged grandson. Through their conversation, we learn that Stewart did make it out of POW camp, and that Ellen eventually married the boy from "'up Sudbury way'" and had a fulfilling teaching career. This ending ties up everything almost too neatly, with Ellen realising her dream despite her father's disapproval, at the same time raising a happy family with Jack Pratchett. The sudden fast-forward to the 1990s startles, as if the romanticised storytelling that preceded it was like a dream itself, and the contemporary epilogue is too much in the present. If the past seemed more real, it's owing to what historical fiction is: a weaving of hard fact and myth.

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