A History of Manufacturing in Winnipeg: Tales of Reading Road, #2

By Kevan Kenneth Bowkett

She and he both need the same object. Whose determination, skill and luck will prevail? — A story in which a collection of facts becomes an assembly of wonders.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sixth Planet Productions
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223672029

Kevan Kenneth Bowkett

Kevan Kenneth Bowkett is a Winnipeg writer and researcher. His writing has ranged from an International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies to poetry to Elizabethanesque drama in Time’s Fancy: The War of King Henry V and Joan of Arc. He’s also done door-to-door sales, built and slept in an igloo, and run for Parliament. .......... To sign up for Kevan's e-newsletter to keep in touch with his new books, productions, and other projects, please go to http://eepurl.com/g1dX6z

Book preview

1.

Oh, I thought I heard you saying something to your sister about your father. That’s cruel hard on Sarka, poor kid, if she believes it, I said.

She believes it—and so do I, said Miranda.

What? It’s nonsense, Miranda. Sarka can’t be right.

Don’t say bad things about my little sister or I’ll kick your face purple, you jealous male shit!

And I brought my hands up to cover my face, bending forward a little, in shame and humiliation. She was right. That’s what I was. I was still jealous of her, of her smarts, of her fighting abilities. But what real man ever feels humiliation that a woman is better than he is? Granted, they’ve been conditioned by tens of thousands of years of patriarchal militarism that insists precisely on this. But so what?

I fought down the feelings, then brought my hands down, met her gaze, and said, Miranda, I’d never say bad things about your sister in a million years. But how can this be true? You sneaked into my house and took the book—for this? You’re serious?

I am, she replied, coldly. Do you think I’d have gotten into someone’s house under false pretences and stolen something they value if I wasn’t serious?

But it’s all nonsense! It’s delusion.

It isn’t, she said. "It’s all—it’s all magic. It’s all in the book."

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So, what were we quarrelling over anyway?

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It was a big gleaming coffee-table book of my grandmother’s. It dated from the mid-1980s, but had a much older-sounding title, An Illustrated and Literary History of Manufacturing in Winnipeg. It was exactly what its title said, and I liked poring over the pictures, from sketches of watermills and daguerreotypes of smithies going back to the mid-nineteenth century up to a photo of a desktop computer taken the year the book was published. As I grew older, I also began to appreciate the written parts—they were extracts by observers of the city’s manufacturing industries from 1812 up to 1984. The word literary in the title was not ill-chosen: some of the passages were indeed lyrical, especially the older ones. Although there were also some recent segments by Jane Jacobs, the great student of cities, and these were most literary too.

She knows some things about how cities work, she does, said Grandmother one evening, after I’d read her a Jacobs passage I felt to be especially felicitous. Not the whole story, mind you, but some significant pieces, I’d say, P’eng-lai, my boy.

I, P’eng-lai Westerfield, turned back to look at a spread of a factory making bottles in the 1930s. I was always fascinated by the intricate parts of the mechanism. And it seemed that the whole system, the network of manufacturing and production in and around the growing city was like a gigantic machine, with all its parts in order. Even then I knew that was hardly an original thought—in fact it was outdated—but thinking it felt like a good way to appreciate the intricacy and coordination of the whole. As Jane Jacobs would say, it was all a vast cluster of many people’s vital little plans that were nevertheless interlinked.

But there was another interesting feature of An Illustrated and Literary