Barefoot at the Lake: A memoir of summer people and water creatures, by Bruce Fogle (September Publishing)

Along with other city families, the Fogles spent the months from June to August at their Lake Chemong cabin, involved in the local community and wasting days on Swallows-and-Amazons-type summer activities, while father, Morris, commuted to work in his Toronto florist shop. Life followed a familiar pattern: fathers were for day trips, “mothers were for everything else”.

In Barefoot at the Lake Bruce Fogle recalls the events of one summer, aged ten, which sparked his lifelong interest in animal welfare. It is 1954, fields are being cleared for new homes, destroying garter snake habitats, polio is still a worry, a rabid raccoon destroys a milk herd, and the vet discusses promising surgery trials that replace devastating cataracts. Uncle Reub has come to stay. He has abandoned his medical practice and sits outside in his city trousers and shoes, looking across the lake, a large unread book on his lap and tears in his eyes; sometimes he wears his pyjama top all day. Eventually, he leaves his look-out post and joins Bruce. They meander through meadows and sweetgrass, and visit the fort in the woods surrounded by snake skulls, and frogs hanging from the trees. Uncle Reub spins enthralling adventure tales; his probing questions encourage Bruce to wonder whether wildlife is more than a plaything for boyish pranks and experiments.

Everything is coloured through Uncle Reub: ‘It rained that afternoon, the kind of rain that came and went faster than my uncle’s moods.’ Over the summer, Bruce recognises his uncle’s shortcomings, and it stimulates a reconsideration of his silent father.

Nuanced, restrained prose delivers an unsentimental memoir. ‘A single strand of lake weed was as soft and as fragile as a strand of cooked spaghetti but when it was torn by storms from the bed of the lake and twisted and tied by the lake’s waves it became stronger than my father.’ The childlike sensibility and mature storytelling are finely balanced, punctuated with the kind of gentle humour and keen insight that comes with time and distance.

Reviewed in the TLS, 4th November 2015