The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (43 page)

But back to the “mob,” without whose spirited involvement the revival of the Nones would have been a failure. I doubt that any of them had ever run a Nones before, yet how well they played their parts. Just when it seemed his age and
the “mob” were catching up with Sir Richard, some new “threat” would be announced that would set him running even faster. Among the methods of execution recommended by some, and by others rejected on the grounds of being too good for him, were hanging, drowning, shooting, stoning, crucifixion and castration. At various times throughout the Nones, Sir Richard was told he would soon be:

Swimming with the fishes

Floating arse-up in the harbour

Hanging by his ankles from a lamppost

Sorry he was ever born

Wishing he was dead

Begging for mercy and forgiveness

Drawing his last breath

Dying like a dog

Aware that all the money in the

world couldn’t help him now

Such inventiveness! By nightfall, Sir Richard had still eluded capture but was too fatigued to take part in the post-Nones revelry. Upon being made aware that a large contingent of the “mob” was waiting outside his house, he decided to spend the night elsewhere, lest the sight of him so run ragged dampen their spirits.

The next day, when Sir Richard went to his office, a crowd of a couple of hundred gathered and waited for him to leave. He walked through the crowd, accepting their congratulations on a Nones well run. Just as he was about to get into his chauffeur-driven car, a man reached out his hand, grabbed the pipe from Sir Richard’s mouth and put it in his own!

IV
 
INTERREGNUM

The sorrows of Newfoundland have at last awakened the sympathy of the mother country, and Englishmen were never so ready as they now are to learn more about its inhabitants.

— E
DMUND
G
OSSE, FROM HIS
P
REFATORY
N
OTE TO
D.W. P
ROWSE’S
History of Newfoundland

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty:

ONE AGITATING CATHOLIC

Representative government returns. A clamour for responsible government begins. Anarchy looms.

Led by the Catholic agitator Philip Francis Little, the Liberal Party campaigns on the issue of responsible government in the 1852 election, promising to petition the British government for it if elected.

The Liberals win and their victory is seen by some as an endorsement by the electorate of responsible government. Their position can be summed up in the following syllogism: The Liberals supported responsible government. The people elected the Liberals. Therefore, the people want responsible government.

The argument put forward by the Conservatives to the Colonial Office that the syllogism fails because it depends on the assumption that there is a connection between what people vote for and what they want falls on deaf ears. Responsible government is granted in 1855 and Little becomes Newfoundland’s first prime minister.

Dark days follow. Among the darkest is March 26, 1857, when the infamous Labouchere Despatch is issued, in which the colonial secretary instructs Governor Darling to tell the Newfoundland people that henceforth, if they want their territorial rights arbitrarily amended, they will have to do it themselves.

Thus is Newfoundland all but set adrift by Britain, though certain deluded individuals hail the Despatch as our “colonial
Magna Carta
.”

The British

C
ERTAIN THAT OUR
party would lose by a landslide, Sir Richard at last consented to let me run for election, in the riding of Bonavista South, site of my near death and rescue at the hands of Fielding. Only two Liberals won their seats in the election, and I was not one of them. I lost badly, as did Sir Richard and Lady Squires.

Prime Minister Alderdice asked Britain to appoint a commission of inquiry into the state of the Newfoundland society and economy. Or as Fielding said, “he has dropped the pink and green from the flag and is waving in surrender the white part that is left.”

Whitehall complied, sending out Sir William Warrender Mackenzie, first Baron Amulree, who conducted hearings throughout the country and was treated to a country-wide admission of misconduct and inadequacy. The baron and his commission were received like parents in whose absence we had torn the house apart and to whom we were now relieved to unburden ourselves of our guilt, having lived with it so long.

I travelled with the commission to cover its hearings for my paper. In Spaniard’s Bay, a fellow told the commission that “where
I comes from, your honour, all we does is drink, even the women is at it; half the children don’t know who their fathers is. Oh my, oh my, it’s something shocking is what it is, I don’t know why we acts like that. We’re just low-born, I suppose, we don’t know no better.” As I sat there, I felt myself turn crimson red and for a moment I hoped the commissioners might mistake me for an Englishman.

Every Newfoundlander in the room but me was laughing, but the baron, bankerly Scot that he was, looked gravely diagnostic, as if he had just shrewdly detected the fundamental flaw in the character of Newfoundlanders. He was the most open-minded man I had ever met. Told two contradictory versions of the same event, he believed both, as long as each reflected badly on the character of Newfoundlanders. I have never met a man so eager to have his sensibilities offended. A day was not complete until he had professed himself shocked by something.

A contagion of self-debasement swept the land, as if we had lived in denial of our innate inferiority for centuries and at last were owning up to it. There was more than a hint of boasting in it, a perverse pride in our ability to do anything, even fail, on so grand a scale. Whether our distinguishing national trait was resourcefulness or laziness, ineptitude or competence, honesty or corruptibility, did not seem to matter as long as were famous for it, as long as we were acknowledged as being unmatched in the world for something.

In the end, the baron recommended that the House of Assembly and the elected government of Newfoundland be done away with, and a Commission of Government be set up to rule the country, all the members of the commission to be appointed by Britain, three to be from Britain and three from Newfoundland. In return, Britain would underwrite Newfoundland’s debts. This state of affairs would last until the country was again self-supporting and independence would be restored “upon request from the people of Newfoundland.”

Newfoundland was entering a limbo, the whole country now was on the dole. We had admitted, neither for the first nor the last time, that nationhood was a luxury we could not afford.

I was choked with shame and anger, anger without object, unless it was the land itself for imposing upon us an obligation for greatness without giving us the means to meet it, a greatness commensurate with our geography.

My father at first welcomed the Commission of Government, and I could understand why. He had himself been just such a commission for decades now, endlessly taking stock of himself and the world, postponing action until all the findings were in, knowing they never would be. It was as if, at last, the rest of the country were in step with him, as if this new national development vindicated the way he had lived his life, as if he had known the country was headed down a dead end and would have to double back and for this reason had remained aloof. The failure of an individual in a country fated for failure was inevitable, excusable.

But soon it disturbed him that everyone was as unresolved and full of doubt as Charlie Smallwood, that everyone, now, not just him, was on the outside looking in, faces pressed against a black glass through which we could barely make out certain shapes and moving forms, the commissioners fussing busily about, weaving our fate.

My father dreamed one night that the Narrows boot was gone. “The Boot is gone, the Boot is gone,” he claimed he woke up shouting.

“If you did, you didn’t shout loud enough to wake me,” my mother said.

In the dream, the Boot had been blown away in a storm and nothing but the iron bar and the chains that hung from it remained, the chains swaying back and forth, faintly rattling in the wind; the whole thing like a swing from which the seat had been removed. Then suddenly he was on the Boot as it floated raft-like out to sea, a boot-shaped vessel bearing its name in luminescent
paint: Smallwood. This was not unlike the dream I had before leaving Newfoundland. I shuddered to think that through his blood my father’s very dreams had been passed on to me.

When cousin Walter decided soon after to give up making boots, my mother declared it was of that his dream had been portentous. Smallwood’s boots were made of leather, and fishermen’s leather boots had been doomed to extinction by the invention of the rubber boot, the lighter, more flexible, less expensive, imported rubber boot, as my father gleefully described it. The day of the leather boot, that most pedestrian of all footwear, had come and gone.

“For leather no one gives two hoots / We’ve seen the last of Smallwood’s boots,” my father roared for hours one night when I slept over on the Brow.

Field Day, February 1, 1934

The British are coming, the British are coming …

Field Day, February 21, 1934

You may wonder, commissioners Hope Simpson, Lodge and Trentham, what sort of country this is that you have been appointed to run. (That you have been appointed to run it tells us all we need to know about how highly esteemed you must be among your colleagues.)

You have arrived in February, perhaps not the best month to form a first impression of Newfoundland. By April, it may seem to you that the snow, which covers everything, will never melt. But it will, and the first soul-uplifting knobs of granite should come peeking through about mid-May. As for midsummer blizzards, they are so rare that they are hardly worth talking about.

You may have heard Newfoundland described as a sportsman’s paradise and so it is, though the local saying that trout are easier to catch here than tuberculosis should be taken with a grain of salt.

I hope you will soon feel at home here. There are some, the nay-saying churls let us call them, who think you should not have made it a condition of lending us financial assistance that we relinquish to you our right of self-government. But we are in your opinion unable to properly conduct our own affairs, and you more than proved yourselves qualified to make such a judgment at the Battle of Beaumont Hamel, where one out of every four Newfoundlanders you sent against the Germans came back neither dead nor wounded. As if that was not enough, so judiciously did you employ the Newfoundland Regiment at the Battle of Arras ten months later that when it was over, fully half of them were still standing. In other words, in the space of ten months, you doubled your efficiency.

If I hear one more Newfoundlander whining about the “suspension of democracy,” about how, now that we have given it up, we will never get our independence back — well, let me make a suggestion. All those Newfoundlanders who don’t like it should take their passports and their X-ray plates and emigrate to Canada. Only British know-how can get us out of this mess, for which we have no one to blame except ourselves.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty-One:

THE AXE, THE FOX AND THE WOLF