The Prison Book Club Read Free Page A

services. It made me sick to remember it and for long stretches of time my memory of those experiences, and even of the name of the convicted man, lapsed.
    â€œHow dreadful,” she said with empathy in her voice, and we walked in silence for a while, pointing out blue jays and cardinals. “Given all of that, what do you think? Do you think you could come into Collins Bay and visit the men in the book club? Maybe it would even help you.”
    â€œLet me think about it, Carol. In the meantime, I’ll get you some book suggestions.” We were back at the car near my father’s gravesite. I looked over at his spot. “Bye for now, Dad,” I said softly, and opened the car door for Carol.

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    PROMISES KEPT
    A LTHOUGH CAROL AND I had been friends for more than a year, I still didn’t know a great deal about what motivated her. When she and Bryan invited my husband and me to visit them at their Amherst Island holiday property, a rural retreat of sheep pastures and hayfields near Kingston, one element of her story emerged. She was a serial entrepreneur. One of her former businesses involved buying and selling primitive Canadian antiques, and the couple’s 1830s limestone house was a Noah’s Ark of folk art animal sculptures. Rustic life-size representations of a Dalmatian and a plump white sheep stood in the south sunroom, along with a robin and a crow, all hewn from wood and painted. In the library, other birds filled a high shelf, and a tall carved figure of a Mi’kmaq man in full headdress guarded the entrance to the laundry. A stylized black cat with green eyes sat on a dining room windowsill and a small church occupied one alcove.
    The church was a clue to her other previous start-up. After working as a high school English teacher, she had followed her mother into the Anglican priesthood in the 1990s and then founded an Anglican Church parish west of Toronto called Church of the Resurrection. “I’ve always loved to do stuff from scratch,” she told me.
    Carol’s view was that she might have inherited her combination of entrepreneurial drive and the sense of a calling to help others from her great-great-grandfather Sir George Williams. Williams was a successful businessman in the drapers’ trade in Victorian England and was the man who founded the YMCA movement “to save young men from dissipation,” as Carol put it. Williams set an example that appears to have trickled down to generations of Williamses, expressed through a family culture that placed great value on service to others, and a genetic predisposition to starting businesses and being competitive. Carol mentioned that other Williams family descendants included London mayor Boris Johnson and Colin Williams, the highly successful London-based titanium trader. “The spectre of Sir George has always hung over some of us,” Carol said. “It’s this thing about carrying his genes. I seem to have it.”
    Over dinner, it became apparent why Carol chose books as her vehicle for helping others. She was born in 1945 in Ashburton, England, just an afternoon’s hike across moorland from Dartmoor Prison. Ashburton is a town on the edge of Dartmoor, a wilderness of peat bogs and granite tors where ponies and sheep roam freely. Her mother, Patricia Williams, a young British war bride, had moved there with her two oldest children to escape the Blitz. Carol’s father, David Wilson Blyth, was an army spotter during the war whose job was to identify targets for bombing sorties. Her mother was passionate about reading. When the six Blyth children were underfoot, their mother would tell them not to go outside and play, but to “go away and read.”
    Carol was six when the family finally settled in Canada. “There were long, long summer holidays at lakes where we would just sunbathe and read,” she recalled. Their mother was influential in her children’s lives, guiding four of