Patrick’s latest novel draws its title from the first address of his parents’ long and unusual marriage – a street dominated by Wakefield’s prison, in which his father was head tutor at a training school for prison officers – but it’s also more generally a story of married love, romantic compromise and how sometimes secrets and an ability to keep one’s counsel might be key to a relationship’s enduring. It portrays not only his parents’ then very new marriage and his grandparents’ perhaps more romantic one, but revisits the secret marriage imagined, in his bestseller A Place Called Winter, between his great grandfather, Harry Cane, and his husky neighbour, Paul Slaymaker.
In 1952, Harry Cane sold up the Saskatchewan farm he had carved from the prairie singlehanded and where he had grown old, in order to return to England and visit the daughter he hadn’t seen since leaving her as a toddler. Over several weeks he stayed with her in the notorious prison at Liverpool, which his son-in-law governed, and with Patrick’s mother and father in Wakefield but then, for reasons unknown, money was clawed together to send him back to Canada rather than keep him in the bosom of the family. What had he done to deserve this treatment?
