On a quiet street in Montreal West, there’s a house that Robert Drummond never walks past without giving a small nod. It once was the home of Lloyd Higginson, one of 47 young men from the neighbourhood who died in the Second World War.
“There’s a letter his sister wrote him after he left. She told him how she couldn’t wait to welcome him home on the same front step where she’d said goodbye,” Drummond said. “But he was already dead when the letter arrived. It was returned, unopened. Stories like that, they stay with you.”
That kind of loss – personal, specific and gut-wrenching – is at the heart of One Town in a Very Long War, Drummond’s new book chronicling the lives of Montreal West’s Second World War fallen. What began as a modest plan to hang remembrance placards along Westminster Ave. evolved into a thoroughly researched, emotionally powerful 300-page tribute.