The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (50 page)

Nothing so enisles you like the sea. A people surrounded by wilderness can at least imagine that wilderness being cleared and occupied someday. I wanted to make it possible for my audience to suspend its disbelief in the existence of the outside world, at least for fifteen minutes a day, five days a week. The supply boats that came from some nebulous elsewhere and put into each bay once a month did not do that. Nor did the large ships that appeared, mirage-like, on the horizon, or the seagull-sized planes the people saw but could not hear.

I had inherited my father’s terror of domesticity. I travelled to escape, not just the rote predictability and repetitiveness of life at home, but the loss of a sense of self that, for me at least, came with it, the feeling of being subsumed, submerged in that collective entity known as the family.

I went on many more field trips collecting material for “The Barrelman” than I need have. It was my latest excuse for spending time away from home, away from Clara and the children, to whom I must have seemed like a literal barrelman, aloft, aloof, removed. I drove to as many outports as I could reach in my second-hand Dodge, which, since no one but me drove it, was more my home than my new house was. I ate meals in it, slept in it, pulling over to the side of the road at dusk in the middle of nowhere.

I affected an interest in lustreware and drove around the bay collecting, inquiring, inspecting the contents of china cabinets — and only rarely did I wonder what in God’s name I was doing or stop to think what a queer fish I had become. Anything rather than stay at home, than be at home when it got dark. Once a homesick exile, I was now a wanderlusting patriot.

Often, at dusk, a hundred miles from home, I parked on some headland, facing seaward, smoking one cigarette after another, watching the sunset. The sea either induced in you a fateful resignation or made you all the more ambitious, restless, determined to accomplish something that, even in the face of the eternal seascheme of things, would still endure. I had that abiding sense that
something, though tantalizingly close, was out of my reach, but now it seemed to me that it would be for all time.

Even when I was not travelling, I often went out in the car at night and drove for hours through the city or parked on some hill where I could see it, better able than ever to appreciate my father’s fondness for his deck.

On such nights, the whole island seemed to me a glorified out-port, so hemmed in that to own a car was pointless, absurd, a mere reminder of your confinement. For the first time in my life, I understood how a man might be attracted to the sea, even prefer it to the land, especially an island. The land was secondary, a temporary elevation of the ocean floor over which the waters would close again someday.

The old men I saw in my drives around the bay, sitting side-on to their windows, looking out across the water that was often separated from them by nothing more than a stretch of beach, there and not there depending on the tide — I fancied that I understood them now. Each putting-out to sea you could imagine was the start of some journey that, though endless, was not pointless, the point being simply to go and keep on going. They sat, these men, looking out at the sea they were now too old to fish or even venture out onto. But still they were held fast, sea-spellbound.

On such nights, too, I thought of Fielding, whose life was more like that of a barrelman than mine, Fielding in her boarding-house, alone, unfettered, free. I envied her, missed her, wondered what her life was like now that she had quit the booze, and if, having quit it, she wondered why she had ever loved me, or if she ever really had.

I remembered how on edge we Smallwoods had been when my father wasn’t drinking, his agitation, his craving nervousness so palpable that it spread to us, our bodies shaking in sympathy with his, so when finally he took a drink it seemed as though we all had. Surely no one could persist for years like that.

Sometimes, late at night, I drove down Cochrane Street, past her boarding-house, where Fielding’s was often the only light still
on. I pictured her up there, pursuing her solitary occupation while the city slept, writing through the night, sitting just out of sight, keeping vigil until between the Narrows rocks there appeared the first faint trace of blue. Then off to bed.

The Barrelman. Standing in his barrel on the masthead, keeping watch, gazing ahead into the future. Except the fog was in so close there was nothing to see, nothing now for years. To the doldrums we were in, no end in sight.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty-Four:

A DELEGATION OF GROVELLING INDIGENTS

It seems that by 1894, Newfoundland has learned its lesson.

It has been two years since St. John’s was for the second time destroyed by fire. The colony is in the midst of a deep economic depression and unprecedented unemployment. It is bankrupt, all of its savings banks having collapsed. In other words, it will never be in a better position to negotiate the terms of union with Canada.

This statement will seem less strange in light of the following observation made by the British diplomat Alleyne Fitzherbert: “When dealing with Canadians, it is advantageous to seem to be negotiating from a position of weakness, for when faced with an abject opponent, they become concession-happy and will accede to almost anything.”

Concession-happy, compassion-prone, suckers for a sob story, call them what you will, one cannot help pitying the Canadians when one imagines how they must have felt when they heard that a delegation of grovelling indigents was on its way to Ottawa from Newfoundland.

Warned by the Newfoundlanders that he better not hold it against them that they resoundingly rejected Confederation in 1869, Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell mumbles that one thing Canada will never stoop to carry is …? On the question of what words he spoke next, historians agree it was either “a grudge” or “an economic sink-hole like Newfoundland.”

After the Newfoundland delegation pours out its tale of woe, the Canadians propose such terms of union as might be expected from a people fated by an excess of compassion to be duped time and again by the unscrupulous paupers of Newfoundland.

The Canadians, so emotionally wrought up that to even think of negotiating further makes them weep, declare it to be their one and final offer. Luckily for them, they are dealing with a people whose character is just as fatally flawed. The Newfoundlanders pull a “Whiteway” and go home.

Unwilling to let history take its natural course, the head of the Newfoundland delegation, the meddlesome colonial secretary Sir Robert Bond steps in, pledges his own personal credit to underwrite a loan from England of three million dollars and “saves” the country.

Fort Pepperrell, 1943

T
HE
C
OMMISSION
of Government might have ended sooner if not for the war, during which it seemed that Newfoundland was triply occupied: by British civil servants and by British, Canadian and American servicemen. The reign of this hybrid occupation force was for many Newfoundlanders their first glimpse of the outside world.

“Someone ought to tell you people what century this is,” an American soldier whom I was interviewing said in the fall of 1943.

I knew in theory that things were better in America than when I had been there, but I still thought of “America” as the New York of the 1920s.

It was the casual, staggering largesse of the Americans that impressed us the most. Once they entered the war, it seemed that army bases, airports, roads and drydocks popped up in Newfoundland overnight. St. John’s was crawling with free-spending Americans, with their stories of how much better off their people back home were than Newfoundlanders.

The variety of uniforms worn by the men and women walking the streets of St. John’s was bewildering, remindful, to me at least, not only of the war, but also of our tenuous identity, our
non-status as a country, the interregnum that by now was eight years old. It seemed hard to imagine that pulled so many different ways, we could survive.

Each branch of each country’s armed forces dressed differently — white, khaki, green, black, navy blue, grey — each colour marking the person wearing it as a foreigner. There was no Newfoundland Regiment in this war; we could not afford one. Our volunteers joined the British regiments or the merchant marine, dressed in British uniforms and fought with British weapons. In the city, from a distance, they were indistinguishable from the British. Only close up could you see the little coat-of-arms-bearing badges marking them as Newfoundlanders.

Though we were fighting on the same side as all these foreigners, though our national income had doubled because of their presence and twenty thousand unemployed Newfoundlanders had been put to work, I could not help resenting them. There were times when I could not stand to walk the streets, for anyone, of whatever age, who was not in uniform, was presumed to belong to another, remote, less interesting world. Or perhaps I only imagined it. I saw the Yanks smiling at my prisoner-of-war, concentration-camp physique, which I still had, having somehow managed to maintain it through twenty-seven years of peace. I was a whopping 127 pounds, balding and bespectacled.

I skulked about St. John’s, my hands in the pockets of my overcoat, a cigarette in my mouth, watching all the robust servicemen walking about arm in arm with local girls. The absurd image of a whole generation of Newfoundland men stranded for life in bachelorhood because the Yanks had stolen their girls away flashed through my mind.

I had another, more personal reason to resent the presence of the Americans in particular. Radio Station VOUS (the Voice of the United States) had started broadcasting out of Fort Pepperrell in St. John’s. It carried, commercial free, all the most popular American network programs, most of them not previously available in Newfoundland,
as well as the armed-forces broadcasts, endless war updates that seemed to take it for granted that the American war effort was uppermost in the minds of everyone.

This station was more listened to than any local station, including mine, and I took its popularity as an affront to Newfoundland and a threat to my livelihood. I became a bigger “boomer” of Newfoundland than ever. I never spoke a word on air against the Americans, of course, but neither, except when I absolutely had to, did I mention them.

On a rainy night in mid-October, I drove to Fort Pepperrell to see a movie at the Pleasantville movie-house. While standing in line outside, I noticed that American servicemen were being allowed to walk straight in.

“Why should all the Yanks be going in?” I shouted, “What’s wrong with Newfoundlanders? This is our country, isn’t it?”

I was among townies who knew I was the Barrelman, knew me by sight, and I had even signed a few autographs. A big lumber-jacket-wearing fellow at the head of the line shouted, “You tell ’em, Joe.” But when the next Yank, a corporal with two chevrons on his shoulder, passed in front of him, he said nothing.

“Wait your turn in line,” I shouted, stepping out of the queue so the American could see me. The corporal, a tall, lanky, pimply-faced young fellow, stopped just short of the door and at first seemed dumbfounded.

“We built the place,” he said, when he recovered, affecting a good-natured chuckle at my audacity. “It wouldn’t even be here if not for us.”

A pair of white-helmeted military policemen seemed to appear from out of nowhere.

“There are women here soaking wet,” I said. “And older people, too. At least let them in.” That “at least” gave me away.

“Plenty of seats for everyone,” one of the military policemen said.

“Then why don’t you let us in?” I said.

“We wouldn’t get all the best seats then, would we?” the corporal said. He flashed a grin at me, then went inside.

“Never mind, Joe,” said the big fellow at the head of the line.

“Never mind them, Joe,” “Forget about them, Joe,” men mumbled up and down the line. Someone snickered and was told to shut up.

The next few servicemen who went in were ineffectually heckled, but after that nothing more was said. We waited there in the rain, deferring to the servicemen. The MPs, the rain spattering on their white helmets, stood in conversation at the head of the line. An easterly wind was blowing up through the Gut from Quidi Vidi Village, straight in from the sea.

I told myself I should have provoked something, got some Yank, a military policeman, to lay his hands on me, take a swing at me; that would have got the townies going, one of their own being manhandled by some Yank, the Barrelman being picked on by someone twice his size and half his age.

I stood there brooding in the rain, an old, all-too-familiar feeling of inconsequentiality taking hold of me. The land on which Fort Pepperrell and other bases in Newfoundland was built had been leased by the Americans for ninety-nine years. Bargained down from one hundred by the British commissioners, no doubt. Ninety-nine seemed longer anyway. An eternity. It was what criminals who were not meant to see the light of day again were sentenced to. Not even in my family, whose members were notorious for their longevity, had anyone lived that long. I would have to live to 141 to witness the Americans’ departure. The Americans here for ninety-nine years. Just in case.