An Explosion tale
Tattrie delves into the horror of the 1917 Halifax Explosion
By JEFFREY SIMPSON
Sun. May 10
The 1917 explosion of a French munitions ship in Halifax Harbour was the city’s biggest tragedy.
But journalist Jon Tattrie has never been able to get over how sanitized the stories about the blast seemed to be, despite holding such a significant spot in local folklore.
"I was struck by how little violence and suffering there is in our stories about the explosion," Tattrie says in a recent email interview.
"We talk about family dramas, about life in 1917 Halifax and the rescue effort, but rarely about the horror Haligonians went through, especially in the first 36 hours, before help started to arrive."
That’s probably because the disaster happened in the middle of the First World War and people had become resilient out of necessity, Tattrie says.
But in penning Black Snow: A story of Love and Destruction (Pottersfield Press; $19.95; 192 pages) he tried to change that.
"I thought it was time for a novel where the explosion is the central character," he says.
It didn’t start well.
He began writing the story as a serial in the now defunct Halifax Daily News to mark the explosion’s 90th anniversary in 2007.
"It was so boring I couldn’t find the energy to press the keys on my keyboard to make it go on," he says.
So he took to the streets of the north end, the hardest hit part of the city, for inspiration and started reading up on the 2,000 people who’d died and 10,000 who were injured in the blast.
"The scenes I came across — decapitated corpses, half-dead sailors staggering around the streets, blinded people crawling across the rubble — didn’t match the stories I had been told growing up," he says.
"I thought it was time for those stories to take centre stage."
He tells the tale through the eyes of Tommy Joyce, who has returned to Halifax after experiencing the trench warfare in Europe and is knocked off his feet in the explosion. As a blizzard blankets the city in snow, Joyce joins the rescue effort, desperately searching hospitals and morgues for his wife, Evie.
"I wanted to write an explosion novel that didn’t make it seem like something that happened long ago and far away, but something happening right now," Tattrie says.
"There would have been a lot of men in Tommy’s situation — the city was packed with soldiers heading to and returning from the European war. That was a great help for the city after the explosion, as the battle-hardened and unfazed soldiers did a lot of the rescue work, but it just about finishes Tommy."
- The Chronicle-Herald, May 10 2009