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gleaming yellow-green in the puddles. My granddad, Percy Piper, stepping out of the public house andspying the paper in one of those puddles, a brochure that had been making the rounds in the Woolpack. I pictured him plucking it out and taking it home and hanging it over a wire in front of the fire, prying its crinkled pages apart as it dried.
    At the time they called my dad a “nipper.” This didn’t refer to his size (he was seventeen, he must have been tall) but to the fact that he worked as a carter’s helper. I imagined him coming home from work to find his brother Roland reading to their mother in a shrill voice. All the characters in these scenes have the Lancashire turn of phrase and eyes the colour of wet slate, a shade I’m partial to but did not inherit myself. My grandmother was exactly twice my dad’s age at that time. I pictured her as a great overgrown girl with a wide, freckled face (she was still a great overgrown girl when I knew her in her seventies). She wore a dark serge skirt, a blue pinny, streaks of dried bread dough on it where she’d impulsively wiped her fingers while she was mixing, and wooden clogs. Above her head was a motto printed on cardboard in Gothic script: HOME IS THE NEST WHERE ALL IS BEST . “Here, Willie, you read,” she said.
    â€œâ€˜Let us take possession of Canada!’” my father read. “‘Let our cry be
Canada for the British!… ’
What’s this, then?”
    â€œYour da found it,” said his mother. “Boris has one too. It’s free land in Canada. Boris is dead set to go.”
    I imagine my dad’s cousin Boris coming over that night and all of them studying the pamphlet together. This was the year after the Boer War ended, when the English were all fired up to hold on to their colonies and it looked as though Canada was about to be taken over by types who ate garlic and prayed to plaster statues of the Blessed Virgin. Not that it was prejudice or politics that inspired my relatives, not that they ever thought about it that way. They had their own reasons. Boris, for example, was a stableman for the tram, and Manchester had started laying down electric tramlines.
    There was a voice behind the pamphlet, a minister named Isaac Barr. His tone was candid and respectful. He was addressing himself to a superior type of colonist, however poor. In a section headed “Programme of Action for Men of Small Means,” he declared that a resolute colonist can, in a week’s time, erect a small house to shelter himself for the winter. My dad fetched a pencil and they noted each mention of money: the steamer fare, the train fare, a registration fee for the land. My dad sat down to do the sums: eleven pounds, eighteen shillings, nine pence. This before living expenses, a horse and plow.
    â€œThe blighter’s out to line his pockets,” my granddad cried in dismay.
    â€œNay, Percy, the man’s a reverend,” said Nan.
    â€œI’m
doing it,” said Boris (a fleshy youth with black hair standing up in clumps fortified by the grease from his scalp). “I’m signing on,” he said. “I’m that afraid of electrification.”
    No one asked my father what he wanted. Every Saturday his mother opened his pay packet and slid six pence spending money across the kitchen table — that’s the sort of boy he was. Canada must have seemed to him like something made up.
    His parents talked into the night, but when Boris left, my father climbed the stairs and crawled into bed beside his brother Roland. In my version of events, he lay awake for a long time, breathing in the marshy smell of Roland’s scalp and watching a wavy moon slide down the ancient glass of the bedroom window. In the other bed his little brother Hugh ground away at his teeth, and the voices of his parents drifted up the stairs. My father couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he heard his