The Inspiration for Mothers Keep

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Frank Wayne Mottl’s new book opens up in Gibsons, on the Sunshine Coast, a little more than a century ago.  Like his first book, 'the Cumberland Tales', ‘Mother’s Keep’ blends the flavours of actual and imagined events. This has prompted readers to ask him about the characters.

Mottl said his granny, one of the many World War I brides who came over from England, was the inspiration for Mother’s Keep.

“She was a scullery. And the first chapter kind of deals with that. She was out in the woods gathering some firewood and she met this Canadian soldier out there. That part of the book is true,  he actually fell in love with her, but he was already married back in Canada,” said Mottl. “So he went back after recovering. The war was over. He went back home to Canada. And after two or three years, his wife passed away. So he wrote my granny back in England and said, ‘my wife passed away, come on over to Gibsons and live with me.’”

Mottl’s mother wrote down a lot of the family’s stories from the years that followed: the depression years; rural living in Gibsons; her best friend’s restaurant which ‘the Beachcombers’ made famous as Molly's Reach.

She is the inspiration for one of the three daughters mentioned in the book.

In reality, there were four daughters: “But in the book it's actually three girls and a boy. So I kind of twisted things around a bit and the book is told from the boy's point of view - who was actually a ghost.”

Granny moved in with Mottle when she was 80 years old and he was living in Cumberland.

“When I was a kid, we used to walk through the woods to get water. You have two pails, walked down the trail and it was just a big open well, and we carried them back again. Then finally she got a little pump well, off the back porch of the pantry. And then uncle Chuck, who is an electrician, brought electricity down this little wire. Uncle Ron and my dad installed a little pump underneath the pantry sink so she would have running water. She turned on a tap, looked at them, and said, ‘what the hell do I need that for? Pull it out.”

Mottl lives in Campbell River now, but wanted to launch ‘Mother’s Keep’ in Gibsons, “because that's where it all happened.”

The formal book launch has been delayed because of COVID 19. You can purchase it at Save on Foods in Campbell River, which also has copies of his first book ‘the Cumberland Tales’, or through Mottl’s website https://www.frankwayne.net/

He is currently working on another book, which incorporates Sam Yik and ‘Broken Back’ from ‘the Cumberland Tales.’ He also incorporates politics from Ancient China, including the story of a scholar whose poetry incurred the ire of the government authorities and was destroyed.

Photo credit: Frank Wayne Mottl at the launch of his first book, The Cumberland Tales