This eighteenth bookmark in Project Bookmark Canada connects this location (the former Kingston Penitentiary prison quarry) with Merilyn Simonds's book The Convict Lover.
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The information board was unveiled by Kingston WritersFest's Jan Walter (original publisher); Project Bookmark Canada's Linda Hughes, Laurie Murphy and Hughena Matheson; Dorothy MacDonald and author Merilyn Simonds on September 30, 2017.
The information board goes on to read:
"The limestone split willingly along the rifts, the horizontal layers laid down as true as lintels, half a billion years before. It also cleaved neatly along the joints that opened perpendicular to the layered rock beds. Some joints were obvious, the work of insinuating moisture and cold; others, like the one the prisoner had just tapped into, were barely discernible fissures opened when the primordial ooze suddenly shriveled in the sun, the same sun that evaporated the sweat on the prisoner’s brow.
That this blue-grey rock had once been mud on the floor of a warm lagoon, the prisoner had no doubt. The inner planes of a freshly split block of limestone were soft with rock-sap, smooth and glistening, resilient as flesh. Exposed to the air, the rock hardened quickly. By the time it arrived at the stone shed, where the prisoner had first come to know it, the limestone was dusty white, resistant to the hammers of the men who sat on benches reducing the rough blocks to gravel or shaping them into neat architectural forms – window sills, foundation caps, a plinth to support a courthouse column, steps up to a church.
Darwin’s theories, wondrous on the pages of the prisoner’s library book, became credible in the quarry. The prisoner imagined himself knee-deep in the shallow water where the rock had been born, at the edge of a great Paleozoic sea. Ancient organisms of fantastical shape swam at his ankles, the forefathers of jellyfishes, sea-urchins and fairy shrimp. Multi-limbed creatures scuttled scorpion-like across the mud; archaic snails clung to underwater plants, their shells coiled like rams’ horns. All this before creatures breathed air on bare land, before amphibians, before reptiles, before trees and ferns, before dinosaurs, before mammals, before humans. Five hundred million years before the prisoner stood on the quarry ledge, soft-bodied, boneless creatures had dropped their feces and shed their shells in the mud. Year after thousands after millions of years, layer on layer, lives turned to stone.
The prisoner had spent long hours in his cell, fingering the chiseled face of limestone that framed his bars, searching for a shell, a fern leaf, a bit of bony skeleton that had been trapped in the ooze, their shapes preserved for eternity, the hieroglyphic remains of some ancient form locked in the stone. But there was none. The limestone of Portsmouth, laid down on granite, was pure, even-grained and fossil-free. No record of the living things that had made it. No record of the nameless men who cleaved it from its granite bed and shaped it. All in all, a most desirable building stone."
"THE CONVICT LOVER
. Synopsis .
In 1987, Merilyn Simonds happened upon a cache of letters, albums, and clippings in the attic of her house in Kingston, Ontario. Among the overflowing boxes and stuffed sugar sacks was a collection of letters from the months immediately after the First World War. It was a one-way correspondence, often scratched in pencil on what looked like toilet paper – 79 letters, some of them 25 pages long, written by a prisoner in Kingston Penitentiary to a young girl who lived on the outskirts of Portsmouth village, on the brink of a prison quarry where convicted men broke stone ten hours a day, doing hard time." (
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