Pardon My Parka — Joan Walker

Anyone can be a pioneer. All you need to do is to fall in love with a Canadian major in the London blackout and find that he is every bit as attractive when you get him into the light. I don't even suppose that he has to be a major. Or that a London blackout is essential to the romance. That is merely the way it happened to me. For me, it had to happen in London because I am a Londoner born and bred - one of those city slickers who can barely tell a cow from a sheep, and couldn't care less. Jim tried to tell me that life in the Canadian mining town of Val d'Or was just the smallest bit different from life in London, but I said, so what? Then I tried to explain that I couldn't cook - couldn't even boil the proverbial egg - and the least domesticated of women, and it was his turn to say, so what? I could read a cook book, couldn't I? And he said he would rather marry a sense of humour and starve, than marry some domesticated little body, madly interested in the home, and suffer from mental indigestion." Thus Joan Walker begins her hilarious account of a city girl's sudden exposure to a domestic life in the Canadian north.