Although Munro’s story was published in the mid-1970s, it is set in the postwar period of Munro’s adolescence. Edie, a narrator who is likely Munro’s contemporary, looks back to a coming-of-age experience in an older time, when the memory of the Second World War was fresh in Canadians’ minds. While no fighting took place on Canadian soil, as British Commonwealth citizens, Canadians flew to Europe to fight on the Allied side. The country endured shortages as a result of its contribution to the war effort, something which the story documents in the comment that “cars were still in short supply then, after the war” (57), the reason given for why Mrs. Peebles does not have her own vehicle. Prior to Chris’s entry into the community, the war functions as a reminder of violence and upheaval. The characters can measure their lifestyle and progress against it, judging how much or how little their lives have changed over a generation. While Edie’s farming family still lives without electricity and embraces old-fashioned maxims such as “have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die” (54), the Peebles subsist on convenience foods and jump on the new trend of buying up a farm to live in rather than work on.