A Song of Distances

On January 19, 1942, Christine Bothwell lost her older sister Barbara when a U-boat attack sank Canada’s Lady Hawkins merchant ship off North Carolina. Weeks later, the 16-year-old lost her first love, an American RCAF pilot, when he was gunned down over Germany. With her widowed librarian mother seeking solace in glasses of sherry and her incestuous brother recuperating from a broken hip, young Christine was torn out of childhood and thrown into a maelstrom of grief, hopelessness and despair. In this powerful and poignant memoir, Christine Bothwell Stewart relives the pain of grief, the joy of first love, the lack of mothering and her transition from child to young adult with strong insight, wry humour and love. Her story bears witness to the many victims of World War II that never donned a uniform or lived in a theatre of war.