BOOK REVIEW: In the Quiet After the Slaughter

Here’s a book review by Libros Libertad, an independent publisher in Vancouver, on a novel written by Don McLellan about the post-war development at Renfrew Heights, the area between Grandview Highway and 22nd Avenue, between Rupert and Boundary.

An exerpt from the review:

At the conclusion of the Second World War, Canadian combatants returning from Europe exacerbated an already-chronic housing shortage. In Vancouver, veterans and their families were billeted in downtown hotels. Hallways served as playgrounds, lobbies as nurseries. Indignant returnees halted traffic with their chagrin, prompting authorities to borrow an untested solution from the United States: public housing. In a single summer a forested hillside on the city’s eastern periphery was cleared and the first of hundreds of look-alike bungalows constructed.
The newspaper ran a photo of a bulldozer felling the first sacrificial tree. Demand for the rental units outstripped supply, so the coveted homes were let to those who’d endured considerable frontline action. Successful candidates were also required to have at least two children, encouraging action amongst hopeful applicants of a more welcome sort. An appropriate moniker for the residential development suggested itself nine months hence: Diaper Hill. Streets were named after memorable battle sites from both world wars, villages such as Normandy, Vimy, Dieppe, Anzio, Mons. Each narrow corridor had several homes fitted with a wheelchair ramp extending to the sidewalk – at least to where the sidewalks were meant to be. (Homes tenanted by the shell-shocked, of which there were many, featured no telling characteristic.) Until financing for paving was secured, rainfall turned roadway and footpath into muddy fjords. Postal workers refused delivery, a slight later avenged by a parliament of snappy canines. By the new millennium few of the bungalows or their original inhabitants stood erect. Folks began referring to the development as Widows’ Hill. To many who live there these days, the Renfrew Heights Housing Project for War Veterans, where many of the following fictions are set, is remembered, if at all, as a quaint municipal curiosity. To original residents, however, the Project was more than a home. This modest neighbourhood was a sanctuary, a place to reassemble war-weary lives in the quiet years after slaughter .

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