Thetford Park can be best characterized as a short novel. It’s a book you should be able to finish going from SFO to JFK, or even SJC to ORD – a four-hour plane ride should be just enough.
First published in 2011, it’s been extensively revised along the years. The last version of the book was written in 2019. A paperback version was made available on Amazon and is available wherever you can order from Amazon – almost worldwide. I price this paperback at $10 USD and $10 CDN, to make the book accessible.
Plot
The plot is about getting from point A to B – young men crewing a ship from Halifax to Liverpool on a ship loaded full of ammo. It is hard to get more guttural than that. You are taken by a dory or skiff onto a ship out of a previous war, given a berth, you have a job, you do your duty, and off you go.
You are young, cold, wet, perpetually hungry and lacking sleep. You don’t know if you’re going to make it to the other shore, to England. World War II was an exercise in lowered life expectancies. That’s Thetford Park. The ship is trying to get there. She brings her crew. From Halifax to Liverpool. The Author(s)
Jean (John) Bédard. Jean Bédard started calling himself John the day he drove his family across the border south to Orange, California in April 1964. Jean served in the Canadian Merchant Marine from 1942 to 1950 and the Canadian Armed Forces from 1950 to 1953. Returning from Korea, he joined Canada Immigration (or its incarnation at the time) and worked the Port of Montreal and the American border before snagging green cards and immigrating to the US.Convincing his wife, Thérèse, to move to Southern California, he worked as a janitor in a juice factory, a women’s shoe salesman, and a grocery store security guard before proudly becoming an American citizen and joining the US Customs Service. John retired as a Senior Inspector after 20 years, including a 2.5 year tour in Laos as an advisor from 1972 to 1975.
Pierre Bedard. As a writer and technologist, Pierre spent his life turning concepts into reality. He translated both Victor Hugo’s Hernani and his grandmother’s memoirs, la rive sud from French to English. He co-wrote Thetford Park with his father, John, and wrote about his own experiences selling to steve jobs.
Moving to the Bay Area from San Diego in the early ’80s, Pierre worked as a sales and business development executive at Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, and IBM. He attained an MBA (’89) and JD (’09) from Santa Clara University, all while working full time. Pierre currently chairs the Los Altos City Library Commission and aims to get a new library built.
He has written/translated/channeled his many voices, his father, John, his grandmother, Amabilis, his uncle, Michel, and Victor Hugo.
Thetford Park, or Voyage 8-East as John called it, was supposed to be his second book. John got sick, too sick. He fell out of bed and ended up in a convalescent home for rehab.
At the time, the book was nothing more than a notebook of character sketches somewhat organized into chapters, standing alone in silos. There was no narrative, no thread. No thread but the North Atlantic War.
I collected John’s notes and began to weave his strongest character sketches, family legend, and other research on Canada’s “Park” ships into Thetford Park. I was lucky enough to take a cruise aboard the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a “Liberty” ship, a merchant mariner berthed in San Francisco, one of the last sailing. Her engine room was used in Titanic.
I stitched things together, applied some glue, visited Greenwich, established a timeline, and published Thetford Park. It needed to be done quick for Pop, John.
That simple.
MY NAME IS JAKE, SHORT FOR JACOB – JACOB SHORT.
– opening line of Thetford Park
Writing Process
This book was an effort by both father and son – the father to birth it, the son to bring it to market. It includes the things (baggage, trauma, and good times) at play in every relationship, all in the words.
With a ninth grade education and a coarse 1940’s style and approach, John wanted to be heard. He wanted to write, so he wrote. The most important thing I gave the ship was a timeline, the trip from Halifax to Liverpool – on a ship full of ammo, with people you don’t know but get to know quickly in the cramped quarters. I gave the book a cadence of time and space for John’s characters were missing. I picked up where he left off and finished it before he passed.
I used a washing machine technique – obsessive, painful repetition. The washing machine method embraces writing as nothing but rewriting. You stare at open water long enough, and you start wondering if you are editing your seventh draft back to your fourth draft.
Write. Rewrite. Rewrite. More rewrite.
And then, rewrite some more. I printed the chapters out, setup a card table, and began to build the timeline, identifying and fixing holes in logic and the time space continuum.
I looked at chapter page count. To keep some tempo. Tenor. The book needs to be good enough to read.
He saw them all.
– closing line of Thetford Park
Factoids
Thetford Park is fiction based on fact. “Park Vessels” in fact existed, and John sailed on several of them starting in 1944. Prior to 1944, he was on the Canadian Coast Guard ship CCGS Ernest Lapointe, an icebreaker commissioned in 1941. John Bédard was likely one of the first galley boys on the Lapointe, which today is dry-docked at L’Islet, Quebec, at the Musée maritime du Québec. That’s the author on the fantail of the ship, alight icebreaker, on the cover of the print edition of the book.
Thetford Park is very popular in the United Kingdom. Over 500 readers have downloaded and/or purchased the book, available exclusively on Amazon.com worldwide, but a full third of the sales/downloads come from the United Kingdom.
I suspect it’s the title of the book and war sea stories sell in an island nation. The original Thetford! Could it be the region and city of Thetford in the UK located in Norfolk. Or is it Liverpool? Maybe it’s the terminus in Liverpool, on the Mersey River docks.
The ending. I changed the ending twice, though I did keep the same ending John visualized. The out of body experiences and the overall conclusion of the Thetford Park were from John. The mysticism of Thetford Park, talking to spirits on watch and communing with the creatures populating the afterlife – that is John. He never denied the existence of the spirit world lest they mess with his own way through life. The crew takes the same attitude. The mysticism of Thetford Park, talking to spirits on watch, communing with the hereafter are all themes, and certainly all things John lived through as a merchant mariner.
There was never a Thetford Park. There were many “Park” ships, and if the Thetford had existed, she would have been the Thetford Mines Park, named after the city of Thetford Mines, located in the Eastern Townships of Québec, known for its rich veins of asbestos coursing under city streets. As the mines expanded, whole districts were moved out of the way.
The name honors my mother’s family of asbestos miners and engineers. My grandfather and many of my uncles knew their way around cordite, so it’s appropriate that the ship was headed to war full of ammo. Jean sailed on several Park Ships in his career as a merchant seaman. I added his life’s details to the back of the latest edition of Thetford Park, adding the small book Jean du Sud, written by his brother Michel, to the back of the novel.
Motive. Though Thetford Park was first conceived by John Bédard, I put the meat and bones on it, enough to turn it into a minor novella or book. “Motive” is really about the backstory. Why I done it.
I graduated from Santa Clara University School of Law in December of 2009. I had taken four and a half years to get through the part time program, working full time at IBM while attending classes four nights a week. While continuing to work, I studied to take the California Bar, which then ran three days. Today it’s been shortened to two days.
I took the bar in July of 2009.
You were given a website address and told to try to enter using your username and password after the results were posted.
If you passed, you got into the website.
If you failed . . . you didn’t get in. Not to the website, nor to the California Bar.
I was traveling a lot at the time and found myself in my hotel room in Mumbai at two in the morning, overlooking the Arabian Sea at Juhu Beach, aimlessly trying to enter my username and passcode into the California Bar website. I intuited my fate after thirty tries.
I failed the bar exam and had to make a call: study for the next sitting of the exam in February, or give it up.
John’s health started going downhill, so I decided to finish Thetford Park.
I timed my writing of Thetford Park to the sitting of the California Bar in February. Figuring that it was as good a mark in the sand as any, I went for it and got a reasonable draft that I published on Lulu.
John enjoyed a reading or two before he passed in September of 2012. I remember reading him passages as he was recuperating in the convalescent facility after falling at home. It somehow felt right.
Characters vs. Story. The characters are all John’s. He had titled the original book Voyage 8 East. I never knew for sure which of the characters were John (or Jean), nor did I ask. The easy guess is Jacob Short, the cabin boy, but I imagine he is a pastiche on a multitude of people at different times in the voyage.
Jean began the voyage in Halifax. I ended it in Liverpool. When I think of my work on this book, I visualize threading a needle while riding through a curtain of cold, hard saltwater, bringing the crew to Liverpool in a logical manner.
Whatever the reason, and for your readership, my father and I are always thankful. I say that both of us are thankful because I’m certain his spirit senses it. He believed in the hereafter.
Who am I to question that belief?