Veteran writer Les Cartwright Look out your window. It is January. Without any difficulty, you can picture this: a raging storm, snow coming down, fierce and heavy. The roads are all but impassable making driving perilous and frightening. Still, the hero wants to get home and so, he fights his way along the storm-laden roads, but not without incident and not without fear.

It is not only the snow storm that terrifies him but the timing: it is not January; it is June, when the sun should be shining on gardens full of blooms. The gardens were there the previous day — this storm is utterly a surprise in its ferocity and burden of snow.

No one saw it coming, but the answers to how authority deals with it are not good ones.

This is the premise of Les Cartwright’s new book, If Winter Comes.

For most of his working life, the Orangeville resident was a quality control manager for companies building aircraft. Born in the U.K., Mr. Cartwright and his wife Eileen moved to Preston, England, where he took a job in the aircraft business.

He tells the story of how he really began writing by explaining that he and Eileen were quite involved with the Banthe SPOR TS Bomb mo ve men t in th e early 1960s. One evening, after the weekly meeting with their group, and after an hour at the local pub, they all went back to the Cartwrights’ home.

As it happened, the wonderful drama by Dylan Thomas, Under Milkwood, was on the radio and at the end of it, Mr. Cartwright declared that he, too, could produce such a piece. His friends gave him the challenge to do so.

He wrote it: Waiting for May Day; sent it to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); the producer liked it but the powers-that-be did not. Letters back and forth were to this effect.

Undaunted, Mr. Cartwright wrote six pages of another play, called “Who Wants Work”, which dealt with what the workers in his own factory thought about while they worked, while they were at home.

The BBC folk were better impressed and asked him to finish the play. Once it was done, he was invited to go to Leeds, where the BBC had their studios, to assist in producing the play for radio.

This success lead to a number of his plays being produced on the BBC, which was very satisfactory.

In 1967, when he and Eileen came to Canada, where her sister and husband were already living, Mr. Cartwright, who got a job fairly soon building aircraft, began again to offer his work for radio drama, now to the CBC.

He wrote a play which he offered to radio and theatre. At the time, the Liberal government was spending money for local incentives where at least four people were employed. Theatre Aquarius SPORTS expressed an interest in his play, although he had to change its British angle for Canadian. The play’s title was changed as well from Feet Under the Table to Peace Ever After. The theatre produced the play to good reviews.

Soon after their arrival in Toronto, the Cartwrights started looking for a home. Eileen had no intention of staying in Toronto. They found an advertisement for a century home in Waldemar. It turned out not to have a furnace, just wood stove for heating, which was a little too rustic. However, they then realized that Orangeville was just right for them and came in 1968.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Cartwright was approached by two would-be partners to edit a new newspaper which would be handed out free, hopefully supported by local advertising. It was called The Forum and he wrote the whole thing, cutting and pasting columns measured by eye, written on his typewriter.

Facing tough opposition from the chain-owned Orangeville Banner, the Forum had a short life once he discovered there were never enough hours in a day to do all the writing and sell ads as well.

With the assistance of Maurice Cline, the retired principal of Orangeville District Secondary School, the little tabloid was briefly revived as The New Forum, but once more couldn’t survive with its limited resources. However, he has since written for both Orangeville’s current newspapers, about politics and education at one time and another.

For a variety of reasons, the Cartwrights returned to England in 1973, where they stayed for three years. Naturally, Mr. Cartwright wrote another play, this one inspired by the miners’ strikes of the time. Called Come Home Bonne Blue, it was considered too controversial for use at a time of political turmoil.

Three years later, the Cartwrights were glad to be back in Orangeville. As the movie says, “writers write” and before long, Mr. Cartwright was working on a novel and then another, but neither of them made any headway with publishers.

At last, he wrote If Winter Comes and, having met people who had published their own work, he decided to go that route.

The book is a hard but interesting journey through a strange time. Most of Mr. Cartwright’s writing is fascinated by what the characters think, what is going on behind the faces and the eyes of people. So, not only does If Winter Comes present a challenging plot and situation, it also follows the struggle of thought behind the actions of the personalities dealing with the testing times he sets for them.

If Winter Comes is available at BookLore, always there to support innovative talent, and online at www.xlibris.com. Says Mr. Cartwright: “The next thing will write will be my life — with no holds barred.” +