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  • Testimonies and Secrets: The Story of a Nova Scotia Family, 1844–1977 by Robert M. Mennel
  • Gerald Hallowell
Testimonies and Secrets: The Story of a Nova Scotia Family, 1844–1977. Robert M. Mennel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 332, $65.00 cloth, $32.95 paper

About to retire and desiring a challenging new project, Robert M. Mennel serendipitously happened upon a treasure trove in the old farmhouse he had moved into as a summer resident on Nova Scotia’s [End Page 282] South Shore. In trunks and shoeboxes he found a remarkable diary kept over forty-two years by Lunenburg County millwright John Will Crouse, from 1871, when as a young man Crouse laboured to earn money to restore his ancestors’ mills in the village of Crousetown, until a year before his death in 1914. Mennel has used the diary, John Will’s “confession” (11), along with letters, photographs, a family history, and the recollections of neighbours, to recreate the world of an extraordinary family and the community in which they lived.

Mennel has organized and presented this wealth of material in a very readable form. Rather than overwhelming the reader by quoting extensively from the 13,000 entries, he has cleverly mined the diary to tell the story of the family and its position in the community, the building and working of the mills, and the economic and social development of the interior of Lunenburg County. Enough of the diary is presented to give the flavour of John Will’s writing, including his erratic and rather endearing spelling: “meschenes” (machines), “men-shines” (mentions), “pair trees,” “larnt to skite.” Frequent epigraphical quotations from literary sources, particularly Ernest Buckler’s Ox Bells and Fireflies, help to define the ambience and tenor of rural Nova Scotia life.

As well as describing the world of work, in a mixed farming and milling economy powered by oxen and water, Mennel explores religious issues (Methodists versus Anglicans), politics (Liberal), education (apparently a good deal more demanding than today), and the social life of the time. John Will spent his entire life “within a twenty-mile radius of Crousetown” (111), but he was well aware of events in the wider world: “Piece treaty between Rusia and Japnce sined … War is costly” (114). Though proud of his German “Foreign Protestant” origins, Mennel notes, John Will was an “unabashed anglophile” (112), firmly and patriotically attached to the British Empire and the Crown.

The story does not end with John Will’s death, for Mennel ably carries on the family saga over the next two generations. Indeed, his depiction of the family’s fortunes and their foibles is one of the highlights of the book. John Will, nearing death, reflected on his marriage at thirty-nine to his sixteen-year-old neighbour: “Lord help me to bare with a wife like I got” (167). Daughter Elvira, born nine months after the wedding, destined to chronicle the community’s business in the local newspaper – “incessant prying” (195), said the neighbours – went forth in local society with her son, leaving “Dadda” at home. Elvie’s son Harold Eikle, who became a successful teacher and accomplished musician, was coddled by both mother and grandmother. Tellingly, at age thirty-five in 1947, he received Johanna Spyri’s Heidi as a [End Page 283] Christmas present from his mother. Pressured into marriage at fifty, Harold was shocked to discover that his wife expected to enjoy conjugal relations. Harold styled himself as “different” (220). Late in life, after many troubled years as a closeted homosexual in Crousetown, he found a measure of happiness teaching in distant Alberta, socializing in the hotel bar with his “rough and ready” cowboy friends (255). One of the strengths of this book is Mennel’s development of these strong and conflicted characters.

On occasion Mennel, who lives in New Hampshire, reveals that he is “from away.” He claims, for instance, that Lunenburg was named after “the town of Leuenburg in the Electorate of Hanover” (18), a theory long discredited (the town was named in honour of King George, whose titles included duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg). Nor would anyone local locate the town “near the mouth...

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