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Janet Lunn is writing about being caught in a war ALAN CAPON/Whig-Standard Janet Lunn is back writing after her husband's death By ALAN CAPON Whig-Standard Staff Writer HILLIER v ^ A publisher's request to write an introduction to an anthology of children's stories came at the right time for Janet Lunn. She had written little since the untimely death of her husband Richard (Dick) in August after a long and courageous fight with cancer. "This got me going and I've started to work again on books," she said. Lunn is author of Double Spell, Larger than Life, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and, her most recent book, Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, published in 1986. This is the story of 15-year old Mary Urquhart who, one spring morning in 1815 in Scotland, hears her cousin Duncan calling her to join him in Upper Canada, 3,000 miles away. The call is so insistent she makes the perilous sea journey to Quebec, travels up the St. Lawrence and makes her way to Hawthorn Bay on Lake Ontario only to find, on her arrival, that he has died. "I was astounded to win all those awards for Shadow in Hawthorn Bay," Lunn said. "I was working in another culture and using Scottish Gaelic." With the book she is now working on she is back on familiar ground. Her heroine lives in the Connecticut River Valley, where Janet Lunn herself was born, and makes her way, in the year 1777, to the Bay of Quinte. "The story idea came to me one day when I was driving from here (her home at Nile's Corners, Hillier Township) to Trenton. It is about a girl who had no intention of being a Loyalist, but inadvertently she becomes one. What I am trying to say is that war catches people who don't want anything to do with it" Today is Lunn's 59th birthday and she planned to mark it by reading stories to children at the Belleville library. At Christmas four of the five Lunn children, and a number of grandchildren, will be at home with Janet Lunn: Jeff., who is recently home from Calgaiy and is now studying broadcast journalism at Loyalist College; Alec, who lives in Picton; Kate, who teaches French immersion in a kindergarten class in Oshawa; and Eric, from Toronto, who works with a housing co-operative. Another son, John, who is a flute maker, lives in Boston. Janet lives with her two cats, Peachey (named for a character in a favorite film of hers, based on Kipling's story, The Man Who Would Be King, and Ivan, in the gracious old house at Niles Corners, about 22 miles west of Picton, where she and Dick lived for many years. It is not far from where her late husband grew up, helping to tend the family's 50 beehives while his father was away working as a land surveyor with the CNR. "Dick worked on the railroad for a time before he went to university and then worked for The Whig-Standard. I like railways too and I have always wanted to have a ride in a caboose. I tried to get a ride once but the railroad men believed it was unlucky to have a woman cm board!"