Tag Archives: Kingston Ontario

AWOL but now returned


I’ve been away from this blog for several weeks now, after all the entries relating to my new book (Spit & Polish). Partly, I wanted to give you lovely people who subscribe to this blog a bit of a breather. Partly, I was recovering from many week away from home base – I was looking after my kids’ cat and had to relocate for weeks. Coming back, I had all of those appointments and other foolishnesses to catch up on. Sucks the brain away.

And finally partly because, when I returned, I decided I couldn’t live without a cat of my own. I adopted one that (of course) required a five hour driving session to his shelter (Furry Tales Rescue) and back (He is big and orange and polydactyl, so I had to have him), followed by the usual buying frenzy and the somewhat more unusual trying to figure out what was wrong with his leg. But we’re getting along and I’m trying to keep him loving me while also helping him learn the rules of the house. He seems to be settling in well. I’ve named him Archy, after the Archy in Archy and Mehitabel, a book I’ve loved for years. (Archy is a cockroach/ beat poet, but with all those extra toes and my Archy’s singing voice, I think it works)

Look at those toes!

So work has taken a bit of a backseat of late. I am just starting the research for the sequel to Spit & Polish, hoping to get it tied up in draft by the end of the year. In-between I have a few editing projects lined up (by all means contact me if you need a developmental editor as I still have some spaces available), plus my usual onslaught of volunteer activities. This feeling like I have to make a contribution is exhausting sometimes, but to be honest most of my commitments are great fun and grist for the writing mill.

I’m now seeking input for the next book – in it, my nursing student, Ruth Maclean, is sent for her rotation to the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, once known as the Rockwood Asylum. It’s 1947, and treatments for the mentally ill are still pretty basic. The concept of treating mental illness, as versus just hiding its sufferers away, is still new, but the building here was designed by William Coverdale with all the best of intentions, with lots of light and privacy. (It’s not the building’s fault it now is vacant, falling apart, and perhaps haunted.)

Rockwood Asylum

I mean, just look at all those windows! Very unusual at the time for psychiatric hospitals, even more so for asylums for the criminally insane like Rockwood. It’s going to be fun to research more about this building and its inhabitants.

During the time my fictional Ruth is on placement there, there was an existing nursing education program running on site, for Registered Psychiatric Nurses. I can only imagine the tensions between all of the nursing programs in Kingston at the time – the Kingston General Hospital School, the Hotel Dieu School, Queen’s University, and this one. Competition for the best jobs, various comments about discrepancies in programs – this is all familiar to me from my time at Queen’s, where there was still great tension between regular nurses who trained for their RNs, and those that opted for the university program to get their BNSc. Could lead to some interesting interpersonal interludes.

So I’m looking for any information about psychiatric nursing schools, inter school competition, psychiatric care in 1947, and life in Canada in the post-war period. I’d be most grateful if you have any tidbits to share that I could insert into Ruth’s life.

It’s going to be a bit of a challenging time for Ruth again, I’m afraid. Money remains tight, doctors are flirtatious, supervisors are demanding, patients are difficult. Someone may even have an unfortunate “accident.”

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

You can get a Quick Look at the Museum of Health Care here:

Beautiful Kingston, Ontario: Antiquitate Civilitate Humanitate


(A Civil and Creative Community with a Proud Past)

Photo by Rasheeque Ahnaf (Piash) on Pexels.com

That slogan in English reads a bit like something from Winnie the Pooh, with all the capitals, but I’ve got to admit it does sound like Kingston.

Kingston was the first capital of the United Province of Canada. It is filled with limestone buildings, hospitals, universities, military structures, and prisons. We used to have a statue of local boy Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s First Prime Minister, but his history is at best mixed, so he’s been moved to think over his crimes in the local Cemetery. We still have his house from the 1840’s and you can go tour it and marvel at how the elegant of that time lived.

The area has been settled for hundreds of centuries, acting first as a home for Iroquois, and then for the “five nations” formed of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Wyandot peoples. These residents traded furs with the French – beavers were everywhere and their fur much prized. Following this, the French and English traded ownership for years.

Kingston is ideally suited as a defence spot, situated on the shores of Lake Ontario, the end of the Rideau Canal, and near the end of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Various armies and navies have resided here, and there are leftovers. We have Fort Henry and Martello towers, and the military university, Royal Military College. Many of these places have been in use since the War of 1812, where Kingston played a significant role.

So Kingston was a friendly place for the military for decades. After WW2, Kingston’s Queen’s University opened up so many spaces for returning soldiers to get upgraded education, they had to be put up in tents all over the place. The population of the city increased madly, and I can only imagine the trials and tribulations that the local government went through.

In my book, Spit and Polish, I deliberately focused on the immediate post-war period. So many books talk about the war, but it’s often like those stories where the prince and princess marry and live happily ever after. I wanted to see the city coming back to life after losing so many of its population to the war effort.

Ruth has just dipped her toe into Kingston life. She’s coming from the tiny town of Cloyne, about an hour and a half north of the city. She’s so tasked with her nursing school work she barely sees everything else (except stores that sell new stockings!), but she already knows she loves the place. She does go to local eateries and shops, and you’ll see their names in the pages of the book. She also rides the beleaguered Wolfe Island Ferry, which was actually running at the time.

Cloyne overlook

In the current time, Kingston has a vibrant arts community, several colleges and universities, innovative research departments and businesses, and a wonderful climate. I can understand why Ruth loved it.

See Spit and Polish, launching February 29, 2024, for more about this enchanting city and the time.

Life in a Sanatorium


In my upcoming book, Spit and Polish, Ruth Maclean, a nursing student, is reprimanded for her slowness and clumsiness. The nursing school sends her to practice her basic nursing skills at the local veteran’s hospital and sanatorium which, coincidentally, has been flooded with patients and needs more staff. Hmm.

When she first arrives, she is given the patient rules, which were lengthy. Rest periods every couple of hours were mandatory, during which the patients couldn’t even read to pass the time, and nurses weren’t allowed to speak any louder than a whisper. Patients were propped outside in the fresh air, even in winter. The rules around spitting were very intensive, as TB bacteria were present in sputum. It was collected in little pots or bottles that then the nurses had to clean out (ick). Sterilizing and cleaning were major duties every day, often using vile solutions of oil and iodine. It’s a miracle nurses’ uniforms remained white. It’s a miracle nurses remained!

Patients were grouped into several categories: absolute bedrest, basins (where they can wash themselves in their room and go to the bathroom), OTW (out to wash), and then up and about, gradually increasing their amount of time out of bed hour by hour. Any of these steps could be revoked if the patient’s temperature went up. It was a long, long healing time – it’s a wonder patients didn’t go mad (more often). Still the food was often good, since the hospital had to try to reverse the extreme weight loss caused by the disease. That’s assuming the patients could eat. TB often creeps away from the lungs, and patients could have throat abscesses, spinal infection, kidney involvement, and more.

Punishment for not obeying the rules was pretty severe, too: “It is expected that any patient that cannot adapt herself to these necessary restrictions will inform the Medical Superintendent and make immediate arrangements for transfer to an institution more suited to her tastes’, and that ‘she will not endeavour to make herself more comfortable by lack of discipline which can hinder the staff and make matters more difficult for fellow patients’.” (Raymond Hurt, Tuberculosis sanatorium regimen in the 1940s: a patient’s personal diary) Needless to say, nurses disobeying the rules would also be severely reprimanded. Nursing students, even more so.

It was a fascinating period to research for the book, and I was specially interested since my father had been hospitalized for TB in the very sanatorium Ruth is sent to. I also did part of my nursing training there, though by that time it had changed to a hospital for severely disabled children. Still, the building remained pretty much as it was back in Ruth’s day, almost falling apart. It had been thrown up during the war to house women workers at the ALCAN factory, and been unloved surplus ever since. It’s been taken down since I was there, and when I went looking for pictures you could see Kingston was embarrassed by it, as there were almost no photographs available.

There are many books detailing life (and death) in various sanatoria world-wide. Thomas Mann’s classic novel, The Magic Mountain, covers both the physical and psychological aspects of a long stay in a sanatorium in the Alps. It is a good read for a long winter…

Spit and Polish , which does have more action in it than The Magic Mountain, is available February 29, 2024.