Into the Blizzard (28 page)

That was two years after Beaumont-Hamel. Beaumont-Hamel was to become Newfoundland’s defining moment as a nation. The historian Robert Harding writes about this attempt at celebrating the July Drive. Like Vimy for Canada, Beaumont-Hamel was our statement to the world that Newfoundland had arrived as an independent nation. The political powers were determined to make July first a day of nation-building.

Until Confederation with Canada. And with confederation came a revisiting of the tragedy of Beaumont-Hamel. To what it is seen today—a symbol of how we lost a generation of young men who could have risen to power and made Newfoundland strong and viable. Instead, the destruction of the regiment was the
beginning of the loss of our status as a self-governing nation. We sat on our bed, crutches at our side, waiting for someone to take us to the parade on the very day the rest of the nation celebrates Canada. And there we mourned our stripped independence.

James Moore’s house was a five-minute walk from the Colonial Building.

The war ended. On the next anniversary there was a terrific attendance at a shrine in Bannerman Park. The event was close to the signing of the Peace Treaty “in which,” the governor said, “we hope to find the inauguration of a finer and better age.” Newfoundland was not represented at that peace conference, but this celebration “has been the spontaneous act of the officers of the Regiment itself.”

Charles Harris brought up Thucydides, who records a speech in which Pericles pronounced a eulogy over those who had fallen in one of the wars of the Athenian republic. “That was not an isolated event,” Harris said. “It was the regular practice of the Athenians, the most striking historic instance of a powerful democracy, to appoint a regular day in which they could commemorate the virtues of those who had given their lives for the State.”

We often travel on the first of July to spend our summers in Newfoundland. We have a guidebook and I’ve tried naming all the wildflowers. Every year I learn the local names of all the things that bloom here, and then, through the winter, I forget them. Truth be told, I’ve even forgotten the family tree of the people who have owned this house,
and I would have to consult this book to recall how Richard Sellars is related to the land I am now standing on.

We bring on the plane to Newfoundland the potted Christmas tree we had in Toronto—kept alive through the winter—and plant it in the barren acre of grass behind our house. This way, our son will have a memory of his Toronto Christmases when he visits Newfoundland. “There,” he will one day say to his children at the height of summer, pointing to a grove of spruce and fir. “Those are my winters in Toronto.”

Our house in Newfoundland dates to 1908. It was built so that the family of George Loveys could move out of his parents’ house. George and his brother Ormsby, who is listed in the census of 1912 as a carpenter, worked on it.

When we bought the house it had no running water. We went to visit Nellie Loveys, ninety-seven years old, who had been born in the house. We told her we had a son whose first nights on earth, after being born in the hospital in St John’s, had been in the house she’d been born in. I asked her where the well was. Oh, she said, we always meant to dig a well.

So what did you do for water? I asked, and she mentioned taking a bucket to the brook. I went to the brook at the back of the property and almost didn’t make it back. My feet found, hidden in the brambles, an old dry bed of stone where a brook had run many years before.

The house is on a small parcel of land with community pasture in behind. To the west is land that used to have a house on it—you can see the foundation still and, in amongst the rocks, a ceramic door handle, a rusty hand-forged nail.

We needed the land if we were to put in a well and a septic field. And so I set about hunting down who owned it.

If you talk to the old people of a place, they will tell you very specific stories about who owns what and how fields were swapped—someone might need hay for a horse, while another family would like a vegetable garden. A bit of this kind of thing happened with this land. It is how I found the story of the Daltons and their uncle, Richard Sellars. I walked over the field of Richard Sellars where we had dug a well and rocked over the well and added good soil and planted the seeds I had collected from cemeteries all over the Western Front. I walked over this land and understood how the story of Richard Sellars had affected me, and I felt I should get to the origins of Newfoundland’s larger personal story. Which meant retracing the steps of Tommy Ricketts and where he lived and worked and loved and died.

In England, January 1919 was a dull and wet month. The mean temperature was below normal—the least number of days of sunshine since 1901. The first major snowfall of 1919 occurred in the first week. Heavy snow occurred in the Midlands and northern England, causing damage to telegraph wires in the north and a foot of snow to fall at Buxton, Derbyshire. The fog on 13 January made it impossible, at Dover, to see ten yards ahead of you. It rained non-stop on January twentieth and there was hail every day at the end of the month. It was the most flooding in Southport since 1882. Near the end of the month there was another heavy snowfall.

On 30 January, Tommy Ricketts and a large contingent of the Newfoundland Regiment left England aboard the
Corsican.
A week later,
the ship’s captain asked if they should continue on to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia—the ship was delayed because of impenetrable ice. The minister of militia replied that the ship was to come into St John’s “as it was out of the question to take the soldiers so far out of their way and no arrangements had been made for transportation other than that for debarkation at this port.”

The ship would have to steam south to get around the ice floe, and therefore would not arrive until late in the night. Because of this, the city holiday was postponed.

The
Corsican
came into St John’s harbour the night of 7 February, a Friday. The next day the men were let off.

Brigid Browne, in St John’s, wrote to her son studying in Toronto that they will have a great time when the boys come home. Ricketts, she wrote, is among them—our Victoria Cross. They are making up money to educate him. He belongs to a little place where there are no schools. He went back for the ammunition twice in the face of the German gunfire.

Thomas Ricketts climbed out of a rowboat on the harbour apron a hero. The men carried him on their shoulders and placed him in a horse-drawn carriage. The horses were unhooked and men took the yoke and pulled him through the city. He stopped in at one house—the home of a doctor whose son Ricketts had seen die in the war—then continued on. He was asked to stay at the Crosbie Hotel but he insisted he return to his boarding house on Colonial Street. This was where he roomed before sailing off to war. He had been gone for a thousand days. He was nineteen years old and promoted to a sergeant.

When he entered a cinema, everyone stood and applauded him.

A reception was organized on Bell Island, where Matthew Brazil and Bertram Butler and Walter Greene were from. The ice came while he was on the island and he ended up walking over the ice back to Portugal Cove.

He got his photograph taken at Holloway Studio. Robert Holloway had been killed in the war and Tommy Ricketts had been there when he was shot. Elsie took his photograph. Did he say anything to her about her brother or about the war? It must have been strange to them both to know the predicament they were in, this celebration of a heroic deed when her brother was dead. Ricketts was wearing his new sergeant stripes. His gaze is dispassionate, handsome, interior. He looks towards the camera but his eyes are staring inward. He is not stiff. Elsie Holloway must have said something to put him at his ease.

He lived with the Storeys. A fund of ten thousand dollars was struck for his education and he was taught how to read. Edgar House tells of him fishing and catching an eel. He skinned it carefully and cooked it and they pretended to enjoy it. Edgar saved the skin and they dried it and cut it into strips and made bootlaces out of it.

He studied at Bishop Feild College and then enrolled in Memorial University College. He was encouraged to use a gift fishing rod to fish trout in Virginia River. I know that river, having fished the length of it and caught many good trout there. There’s a falls and a deep pool and the
mouth of the river flows into Quidi Vidi at Pleasantville at the grounds where the regiment first gathered to train. But it was Tommy Ricketts who was captured. His son has said this. His son lives in Scarborough near us in Toronto. He was captured by the people of St John’s. Unlike Bert Butler and Matthew Brazil, Tommy Ricketts couldn’t return to his life.

He would have returned to White Bay and been a fishermen. Instead, Tommy Ricketts lived in town at various boarding houses. His grades weren’t strong enough to become a doctor. And so he tried pharmacy. I suspect even that was too onerous for him. He may have become a druggist, which is a step below pharmacy—he always hired a pharmacist at his place of business.

For more than a dozen years he stayed a bachelor. The hero of a nation could not take conventional steps through courtship and marriage. Indeed, many soldiers were halted in their natural development. The women, too—Elsie Holloway never married and neither did Francis Cluett.

At the age of thirty-two Tommy Ricketts started seeing the daughter of the owners of a boarding house at 131 Pennywell Road. He was living there too. Edna Edwards.
She was nineteen. There was some discrepancy between when they were married and the birth of their first child, Dolda. Did they marry because Edna was pregnant? Did they keep Dolda’s presence absent from the census because they didn’t want it to be known?

Dolda means “hidden” in Swedish.

They certainly wouldn’t be the first to marry with child.

The house where they met was torn down, but the houses it was attached to are still there. I got to know one of the neighbours and she was astonished at what I told her.
She said they have a poster of Tommy Ricketts in their stairwell. The stairs that would have been joined to the Edwards boarding house.

There is evidence of that house still—a cement footing for a bay window and the concrete front step. This, I thought, is where Tommy Ricketts met Edna Edwards. She played records and was a flapper and was very young and they were in bedrooms close to one another up there on the second floor. A foundation block to carry a chimney against one of the houses. You can still enter the front door that hangs in the air, which I do, and sit in the first-floor rooms where they met.

Tommy Ricketts had waited fourteen years to get married. What pressure there must have been on him to learn a profession, to settle down.

If you stand in the gap between the houses there is a
rough path that pedestrians use as a shortcut to Prince of Wales Street below Pennywell Road. It is a rogue path, made by feet, not by hand. And I realized I had lived in the basement of a house directly across from this gap, after coming home from travelling in Turkey and Egypt and England. I had lived across from the house where Tommy Ricketts met Edna Edwards.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he said: I know Edna. I talked to Edna every day for years.

My friend had worked in a home where Edna visited her mother.
She was a true lady, he said. She drove a green Chevy Nova. I don’t dye my hair, she said. It’s tinted. She’d go in and do her mother’s make-up.

He was set up in business on the corner of Job Street and Water Street. He brought in Edna’s younger brother, Bert Edwards. And Bert worked for Tommy Ricketts for ten years, before setting up his own pharmacy further west, at the Crossroads. In the newspapers of the 1950s there is a major renovation of the Edwards Pharmacy. And in the paper are large ads for automobiles and furniture with companies named after prominent men, T&M Winter and Ayres and other men that Tommy Ricketts had fought with
and who did not win a Victoria Cross but now they had half-page ads in the paper. And in a column down one page a postage-stamp-sized ad saying bingo tickets were available at the following outlets. In the list is Ricketts Drug Store.

His son says his father was not a businessman. He didn’t have the aptitude. A man who worked for him in the 1960s says Ricketts paid him twice the going rate and he kept terrible accounts. But he served his customers and the west end of St John’s well. He was a quiet man.

You can walk along Water Street and recognize the old stores that have been standing for over a century. There are terrific photos of the buildings that have been knocked down: Ayre & Sons, for instance, is replaced with Atlantic Place. Ayre can mean wind or the air itself or a narrow bank of sand created by the sea. Ayr was the place in Scotland where the men had trained. Because of the geography of the harbour and the hills it is easy enough to pick your way back to the past of St John’s when the roads were cobbled and horse-drawn streetcars were here and there were cinemas and hotels and department stores. But as you draw towards the far end of Water Street, into the west end, things turn a corner and the past begins to be constricted by the new arterial routes that have thrown the wide shadows of overpasses onto the street and the street itself splits into a divided highway and your sense of a pedestrian becomes threatened by auto routes. Still, there are small
buildings that exist here, like O’Mara’s Pharmacy that is an apothecary museum that never opens and the shades are drawn tight. Brennan’s Barber Shop, a narrow building squeezed into a row of buildings, and inside there is a Nestle hair machine that looks like it could electrocute you, photos of a man selling braces of rabbits and fish being sold on the harbour apron and a book open to 1964 and the customer’s rates jotted in pencil. Pencil was used a lot for journals. I decided to wait at Brennan’s and get a haircut. Tommy Ricketts could have easily had his hair cut in this very chair—for his drug store was nearby. The Newman’s vault is here where they stored casks of wine. The Coastal Railway station is across the road and they used to display the Ricketts Victoria Cross before it was transferred by the family to the national war museum in Ottawa. Inside they have little floor tiles of train tracks for kids to follow as they look at costumes and scale models of trains and boats that shipped mail and goods and people around the island. I’ve taken my son there. I enjoy looking at the fabric of clothing, the thick wool weave, the stitching, how well-made and abundant fabrics were in the past. There was an article in the daily paper about house fires and how the roof trusses in new homes are built to withstand snow loads but, in a fire, they are consumed four times more rapidly and can cause roof collapse. That sort of thing. And yet, here was a newlywed couple, sleeping in separate berths because
the sexes were still separated back then, and the train derailed and the oil lamps in the women’s train caught the fabrics alight and the bridegroom rushed in to try to save his new wife and they were both consumed by smoke. No, I do not want to live with open flames around me. I do not want to live in the past.