It’s a photo that’s 76 years old: a sepia snapshot, fading and scratched, showing two infants with quizzical looks on their faces flanked by beaming parents, one dressed nattily in military uniform.
The man is Arthur ‘Paddy’ Plowman, who shortly after the photo was taken set off to serve in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, a wireless operator on Lancasters that flew mission after mission over Europe.
He never returned to his wife Enid or their daughters Wendy and Robbie. He died when his plane crashed while returning from a bombing run over Germany.
Over 70 years later, Guelph author Wendy Gruner and her sister Robbie set out on a journey to try and learn about the father they barely knew.
The result of that journey is Children of a Faraway War, Gruner’s first book, which details the journey of loss and discovery, sadness and humour, and perhaps most of all, family.
“I never set out to write a book,” Gruner says from her Guelph home. “We did this trip and I said to my sister ‘I think there’s a book in this.’”
They travelled around England connecting with places and eventually people who could help them get to know the man they never did. Some of those people were their father’s friend.
An original 400-page manuscript was chopped back to the finished version of Children of a Faraway War, which will be released on Nov. 11, which is not only Remembrance Day but also the date her father was killed, his Lancaster bomber shot down while returning from a mission over Germany when he was 27.
Wendy was just two years old when her father, a wireless operator, left to join the Royal Air Force bomber command.
Her father became a topic of non-conversation in the family home. They knew he had died, but very little else. Their mother Enid didn’t bring it up and Wendy and her sister were hesitant too.
“We just didn’t know much about him.
“We were just told ‘his plane crashed.’ As a little girl I had this notion that it crashed in Germany and he was still somewhere wandering around,” Gruner said.
Over the years, it became a subject that just wasn’t discussed in the family, although Gruner isn’t entirely sure why.
“It wasn’t a banned topic at all, it was just in the air that we didn’t,” she said.
It was, “in a way,” just off-limits.
“My mother didn’t talk about him and we didn’t ask, and that’s why we need to smack ourselves, because we didn’t ask,” Gruner said.
“It was ‘too private.’ We didn’t even know about my father’s diary until quite late in the day,” Gruner said.
It became even more off limits when their mother remarried five years following their father’s death.
The diary, which largely describes her father’s wartime experience, training and locations, rather than personal reflections, spurred the idea for a trip.
“I said to my sister, ‘why don’t we just go to all these places? We don’t know a lot about him and it might be fun.’”
What followed was a discovery not only of the places their father had been, but of people who knew him.
“Later we found some amazing things. We have since found a number of the men who he served with,” she said.
“One of them was the navigator on his first crew. We managed to find him and I interviewed him. He told us so much.”
Gruner is originally from Australia. She travelled the world as a young woman before settling in Canada and a long career in teaching.
She moved to Guelph a little over a year ago to be closer to her three daughters who came here for university and never left.
Gruner holds no resentment over how little her mother shared with her about her father.
“I don’t blame her. I don’t blame anyone. It’s just the way it was.”
She says what came out of meeting those who knew her father was a sense of who he was.
“He was just a nice man. A nice, thoughtful, happy chap. And that’s okay. You find a really nice person and that’s not a bad thing to find.”
Her book, published by Iguana Books, will be available through Amazon and other online sources. She hopes it will be stocked in local bookstores.
