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The day I signed a contract to publish my second children's book, I should have been deliriously happy. But I wasn't. Driving home, I realized I'd committed myself to telling my father's personal story, a story he had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep quiet.

Why was it so important for me to share his story? Wasn't I being disloyal to the father I adored? Was it even ethical for me to do this? I knew I was not the first author to face this dilemma.

My brother and I had only the barest skeleton of our father's life. We knew he'd been born in 1897 in England and his father had died, leaving my grandmother with eight children. We didn't know why or when our father had come to Canada, but we knew he'd joined the RCMP and had met our mother in Saskatchewan. We also knew Dad had fought in the First World War because sometimes he'd roll up his sleeve and let us see the wrinkled scar a German bullet had made in his upper arm.

As children we were enormously proud of our RCMP father who looked so splendid in his scarlet tunic. But, as is the way with children, we were preoccupied with our own lives and never asked him anything about his life before we existed.

When I was 20 I went to work in England, and one day over tea my Aunt Hilda talked about how difficult it must have been for my grandmother, long since dead, to put all her children in orphanages.

"Orphanages?" I said. "My father was never in an orphanage. He'd have told me."

My aunt assured me that she and her sisters had indeed been in a girls' orphanage in Southampton, and my father and his brothers had been sent to boys' orphanages, although she wasn't sure where.

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I was shocked. Why wouldn't my father have told me? That night I phoned home to Canada - an extravagance in 1955 - and my dad said he hadn't told me because he wasn't particularly proud of being in an orphanage and he thought I might blab the story up and down the street. He was right. I would have. I thought it was touching and even romantic, but I realized that he didn't.

I married in England and came back with my husband to Canada, where we raised three children. During those busy years I never found time to ask my father about his life. He retired in 1957 and died in 1961.

When I became a grandmother I published my first children's book. Then, when I was in my late 60s, an English cousin wrote that she thought my father might have been a Barnardo boy. I had read about the work of Dr. Thomas Barnardo and other well-meaning people in England who had sent more than 100,000 children to Canada as badly needed indentured workers from 1869 to 1938.

I was intrigued and wrote to Barnardo's After Care Centre in Ilford, England. A few months later I received confirmation that my father had in fact been in their London Boy's Home in 1910 and had left for Canada a year later. Shivers went up my back when I opened the brown envelope that arrived in the mail. It contained the earliest photograph I'd ever seen of my dad and the dates of his trip to Canada at 13. The Barnardo records documented my father's experiences - some bad and some good - working on Ontario farms.

I was hooked and decided to try to follow the trail of my father's life. On the websites of Archives Canada and the Canadian War Museum, I learned that my father had joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915 and had been injured the next year at the Battle of the Somme - that explained his war wound. From the RCMP archives I learned that after the war he'd signed up with the Mounties and rose in the ranks, serving in almost every province across Canada before retiring in Victoria.

I learned that 12 per cent of Canadians (roughly four million people) are descendants of the British Home Children who were sent here to work. Because I feel proud to be one of them I decided to write a book for children about my father. In the course of researching, I've talked to other Home Children, also referred to as child migrants, and discovered that often they too are ashamed of their humble beginnings. Shamed because they were abandoned by their parents or, as in my dad's case, had a widowed mother who couldn't look after them.

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Charlie: A Home Child's Life in Canada is a book that almost wrote itself, but the day I signed the contract with a publisher, my heart sank. My father had been dead for almost 50 years, my mother for 10. There was no one I could ask for approval.

I did a lot of hard thinking. I know of many authors who have permanently alienated family members and even acquaintances who think they're in a book when they're not. I decided to go ahead because my brother and I believe our dad was ashamed for the wrong reasons. His is a true Canadian story. As a young boy he showed great courage and self-reliance by travelling to a new country. He worked hard on Ontario farms, fought on Europe's battlefields and served for almost 40 years as an RCMP officer. We are enormously proud of him and I can only hope that reading about his life might have made him proud too.

The book came out in August and I'm proving my father right. I'm blabbing the story, not just up and down the street, but across the country. I'll never know if I'd have had my dad's approval, but I hope I'm right that telling his story will encourage all immigrants to honour their difficult journeys. I want them to be proud of their contribution toward making Canada the exceptional country it is.

Beryl Young lives in Vancouver.

Illustration by Paddy Molloy.

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