Baby Boy Blue

I am re-reading the Williamsburg series of novels by Elswyth Thane.  For those who haven’t read the series it begins with the love story of Tibby Mawes and Julian Day in “Dawn’s Early Light” while chronicling the American Revolution.  The next book, which is the one I read first is “Yankee Stranger” which sees Eden Day fall in love with the Yankee Cabot Murray during the Civil War.  The next 5 books find the Day, Sprague and Murray families swinging between Williamsburg, Virginia and England where they begin inter-breeding with the Campion family and progress through both world wars.  The final book, which I am reading right now, is “Homing” which finds Mab Campion and Jeff Day as the reincarnations of Tibby and Julian which is quite reasonable given all the in-breeding in the family.

       My readers are probably horrified right now by my synopsis but it is a little tongue-in-cheek.  The family is sensible of stopping cousins marrying after the second generation so they skip a generation or two before they go back at it (again, that does sound horrid, doesn’t it?) but they now have a lot of new blood, sort of. 

Besides the love stories, the interesting thing about these novels is the very American view that families ought to be ready to join the fight at the drop of a hat even to the women taking part in the wars.  My twentieth century common sense finds this part of Thane’s philosophy rather primitive.  It’s one thing to defend one’s country, or to try to change one’s country, as her early characters do in the first two stories but it is quite another thing to find the Day twins (brother & sister) in “Kissing Kin” eager to “go kill me some Germans” in 1917.  Even when I first read these books some 40 years ago I thought this was going too far but as I re-read them today I really wonder if this type of thinking was prevalent in America back then.  I have a suspicion that it was and that it exists even today which goes a long way in explaining the Tea Party and the love affair Americans seem to have with fighting in foreign lands. 

A few days ago we saw our fourth boy arrive in this, our fourth generation Canadian.  I’ve noticed there seems to be a real trend towards boy babies even in my workplace.  Mom and I were wondering if this trend is Nature’s way of anticipating something in the near future?  As my father was wont to say “Nature is cruel, but nature is true”.

The 7 books are:  Dawn's Early Light; Yankee Stranger; Ever After; The Light Heart; Kissing Kin; This was Tomorrow; Homing.