Recently someone suggested that I write my autobiography. At first I was reluctant to do so because my life has not been particularly exciting. Realizing that living conditions during my childhood were much different from anything my children or grandchildren have experienced I decided to go ahead. So here it is for what it is worth.
I remember one of my older brothers telling me about the "big event" that took place on November 3, 1923. My mother called my father in from the yard and told him that the time had come. He left in a hurry to walk the three miles to Harry's Harbor to fetch the mid-wife or "Granny" as we called her. The name "Granny" was considered to be impolite and we did not use the word when our parents were listening.
In those days the nearest hospital was over a hundred miles away and it could take several days to get there, so the services of the mid-wife were indispensable at "baby time." In addition to delivering the baby, they stayed at the house for nine days and did most of the housework unless there was a family member who could help. The period of nine days was considered to be a critical time in the mother's convalescence and she was supposed to remain in bed for the whole time. The woman's fee was five dollars and free room and board.
I was rather sickly as an infant and, fearing that I might not survive, my parents called in the local Methodist lay preacher. He baptized me as a temporary precaution until the minister made his next call at the village. My parents decided to have me christened "John". My older brothers objected strongly, saying that a fellow with that name would be a solemn sort of guy and no good for playing with. They were told that they could call me "Jack" instead. This idea was acceptable to them. I don't remember much playing, perhaps because of the age difference.
They had gotten their idea of what someone called "John" would be like from our neighbor who had that name. He lived alone for several years after his mother's death, was sort of reclusive and did not have much to be cheerful about. In the course of time, so the story goes, he heard of a young woman in another village who said she would marry the first Christian who asked her. So John took off in his rowboat and sure enough returned in a couple of days with his bride. It was rumored that when it became time to go to bed the first night he fainted and she had to put a wet cloth on his forehead to revive him. There were other stories told too, which maybe I should not repeat.
The earliest childhood memory I have is of an event that must have taken place when I was about five years old. My mother was in her rocking chair nursing my baby sister, Winifred. I was standing on the back ends of the rocker enjoying the ride when we saw a man with a large pack on his back walk by the window and knock on the door. My mother didn't want to get up and disturb the baby so she asked me to answer the door. I was so scared of the stranger that I pulled open the door and scurried back and hid behind the chair while Mom talked to the man. He was a peddler who was going door-to-door trying to sell a variety of items from his back-pack.
Most of the original settlers on our part of the coast had emigrated from England in the early eighteen hundreds or earlier and up to my grandfather's time had retained their charming old dialects. Here is a story with an example of their "lingo". My great-uncle, Job Strong, had taken a small schooner and crew to Labrador to try his hand at a summer of fishing there. After a disappointing season he was on his way home in his lightly laden vessel when another ship came within hailing distance. The other captain called out a remark containing the word "light", which unfortunately Uncle Job only heard indistinctly. He answered with irritation, "What business be it of thine if Oi be light?". "But skipper," the other captain said apologetically, "I didn't say your ship was light, I said the wind is light." "Oh" said Job, "What a vool Oi be!"
For a long time we used the English monetary system and some of the older people had a lot of trouble adjusting to the dollars and cents. My mother told me that her grandfather Marsh, who had been born in Wareham, England, always referred to a five cent piece, or nickel as we call it today, as a "Tuppence ay penny", which means two pennies and half a penny. An English penny was equal to two of our cents and they also used a half penny piece. Some of these coins were still in circulation until about fifty years ago.
It also took a long time to get rid of the old English system of weights and measures. My brother, Bill, was once in a little village store when a man came in and asked the merchant for a stone of sugar among other things to be charged to his account. A stone was the equivalent of fourteen pounds and Bill watched as the merchant carefully weighed out ten pounds. This is an example of how some of the merchants cheated the illiterate fishermen who were slaves to the merchant and his barter system. The men would turn over the entire seasons catch to the "sharks" and be paid in purchase from the store.
My grandfather died while still in his forties and at the age of eighteen it became my father's responsibility to support his mother and the four younger children. He was a fisherman like the rest of the villagers but was also a skilled carpenter and worked at that trade whenever work was available. He built several churches and schools and for three summers he had the opportunity to work in Boston where his three sisters had moved after they had married. By 1930 the depression had hit and there was no work in Boston or anywhere else. Around this time my two older brothers had finished school and had obtained teaching positions, so my father had two fewer mouths to feed. Beginning salary for teachers was twenty dollars per month, out of which they had to spend twelve dollars for board, but somehow they managed to save enough money to go to college. Bill, the oldest, wound up with a Ph.D. from Boston University.
The only means of transportation until the nineteen fifties was by boat in the summer and by dog team in the winter. During the spring break-up we were isolated as the coast would be blocked by loose drift ice and the snow was too slushy for the dogs. We always made sure that we had enough staples stored away to last through the winter because the dogs could not haul heavy freight, only mail. In the summer time transportation for passengers and freight was by the railway system A main rail line was operated across the island with branch lines going out to terminals in various bays. From there it was taken by small steamship and distributed to the many little coves and harbors around the coast. Our ship was the S.S. Clyde that operated out of Lewisporte and served communities around Notre Dame Bay from Cape Freels to Cape St. John. There was also a telephone in the local post office so that telegrams could be sent. The postmaster kept a news-book in which he copied items received over the wire and displayed in the window for public information.
The great social events of the year were the school concert at Christmas and an occasional tea and sale of work by the ladies of the village. I can remember taking part in the Christmas concerts and how scared I would be of standing on the stage and reciting a poem in public. There seemed to be and endless sea of faces in front of me stretching on for miles, but in actual fact the hall could never have held as many as a hundred people. On a less formal scale, young people would often come to our house in the evenings. We would gather around the old reed organ and while away the time singing songs, or playing records on the old spring-wound gramophone. In the early thirties we acquired a battery powered radio and that became the local attraction. Within a few years every family had a radio and that put an end to the socializing.
Our "Institution of Learning" was a one room school with about twenty students from first to eleventh grades. Most kids dropped out of school early. Our mother had been a teacher and knew the importance of an education, so she insisted that her children keep their noses to the grindstone and encouraged us all she could. In school we wrote on slates. When we filled in both sides the teacher would check our work and then we would erase it by sprinkling the slate with water and wiping it off with a cloth. In the winter the water bottles would often freeze during the night and we would have to thaw them by putting them on the wood-stove, a process that often resulted in a broken bottle. One rascal filled his bottle with "pee" and of course put it on the hottest part of the stove with the expected result. "Phew"! Needless to say that fellow was one of those who dropped out early.
The teachers in small villages were usually high school graduates who had taken a six-week teacher training course in St. Johns. The older boys quickly learned how ready the teacher was to use the strap and adjusted their behavior accordingly. When I was in the fourth grade we had a lady teacher who was a real pushover and we made her life miserable. The next year we had a man who was really brutal and would take off his belt and whack it to the sinners without mercy. One fellow about my age was well behaved but had difficulty memorizing his spellings. One day the teacher told him what would happen to him the next day if he did not do better. The boy went home and told his parents that he was through with school and he never darkened the door again.
Of course, there were no school busses in those days and some of the kids had to walk over a mile to school, in the winter on snowshoes. At recess time, and during the lunch break which lasted two hours, we played outdoor games such as "scout-out" or "rounders". It was similar to baseball but we used a soft rubber ball and batted it with our bare hands. In spring the cove sometimes filled with loose pieces of ice that were called icepans. We played the rather risky game of "copying" which was a dare-devil stunt of jumping from pan to pan. The ocean water was very cold even in summer and few of us learned to swim.
Most of us had chores to do which kept us occupied after school hours. We would have to help in the barn as most families had at least one cow, a horse and a few sheep. Then there was firewood to be sawed up with a buck saw and split and taken inside to the wood box. Water had to be carried in buckets from the well for both the house and the barn. And, of course, there was usually snow to shoveled.
In the summer we had to help with the vegetable garden. We made hay that was cut with a scythe and spread out to dry with hay forks. Then it was taken to the hay loft to be stored for winter. I think the job I liked best was picking wild berries of which there were several varieties available from July to September. Wild strawberries were the first to ripen then raspberries and partridge berries. In the fall the potatoes and other root crops had to be harvested and taken to the cellar for winter storage. The girls were expected to help with only the lightest of the outdoor jobs, and they would have to help with the dishes and spinning, knitting and sewing, etc. There was very little money to be earned but when the depression hit we were so self sufficient that we got along much better than people in the cities.
Almost everyone slept in on Sunday mornings. I remember one faithful lay reader who walked a mile and a half one morning to perform his duties only to find that not a single person showed up. Undaunted, he went up to the pulpit, read from the Bible, had a prayer, sang a hymn and went home.
On Sunday nights the picture was different as almost everyone went to church. I assume that the married folk went for the proper reason but the younger people went with the hope of pairing up after the service for a long walk home. The boys would seldom walk a girl home from his own village. It was more interesting to take a longer walk to the next one. This would frequently cause some resentment to the boys in her neighborhood and there would be an occasional fist fight.
One day when I was in second grade we were all sitting quietly at our desks when suddenly one of the bigger boys jumped to his feet and yelled, "My God, there's an airplane!" Sure enough a plane was passing over, the first one we had ever seen, and the teacher allowed us all outside to watch until it disappeared in the distance. My mother visited an elderly neighbor the next day. Of course, the first thing they talked about was the plane. Aunt Lizzie remarked, "The thing that puzzles me is I can't figure out how they are able to get to where they are supposed to go." Mother answered, "The man in it steers it to wherever he wants it to go." Aunt Lizzie gasped in disbelief, "Oh, goodness, you don't actually believe that people go up in those things do you?"
Money was scarce in those days but it was rare to find a family in dire straits because people in our village had learned to be self sufficient. The men were all fishermen and supplemented their income by raising vegetables and by hunting both on the land and on the sea. When my father was a boy there were lots of caribou but by the time I was old enough to shoulder a rifle they had become quite scarce. Moose had been introduced to the island in the early twenties and soon became an important source of meat. It wasn't lawful to hunt them until the fifties, but poaching was common long before that.
I was about sixteen when I had my first experience at moose hunting. Someone had seen a track in the snow and figured out where the animal was hiding, so several of us surrounded the area while one guy went into the woods to chase the moose out. It did not come in my direction but pretty soon I heard shots and I got so excited that my knees shook and it's a wonder that I didn't shoot myself. I had an old Snyder rifle, a relic from the Boer War of 1899 to 1901. It was a 57 caliber and had a kick like a cannon. For other game we had rabbits and ptarmigan on the land and seals and different kinds of sea birds on the ocean.
A mile down the road from us lived two brothers who were always in difficulties because they didn't have the initiative to make a living in that type of environment. When the fish would strike they would always miss the first run because they didn't have their gear ready. Their gardens never seemed to produce well and they had no cow or goat to milk. Once, they went to the local merchant with their usual tale of woe and he agreed to give them a week's groceries on condition that they would cut some firewood for him. When the week was up and they were getting hungry again they went back and asked for another week's supply. The merchant, of course, wanted to know how the project was going and they answered, "We're doing really well, sir." "But," the merchant said, "I want to know how many cords of wood you have ready to deliver." The brothers told him, "We're doing really well, sir. We have our axes sharpened."
It was a custom in rural villages for the older members of a family to move out as soon as they were old enough to make their way in the world. The youngest son would take care of the old folks and inherit the family farm. I wasn't content with my destiny and tried to escape the inevitable by volunteering for military service in World War Two. I was rejected for medical reasons and so had to accept my fate, as by this time the older brothers had left home and my parents needed someone. I managed to make a living by supplementing my income from the fishery by enlarging the little farm and starting up a mink ranch. One year the fishery was a complete failure and I got a chance to help build a school in Indian Burying Place. It was there that I met Jean who later became my wife. We settled in Jackson's Cove and had five children. We made some improvements to the home by installing a wind powered electric plant, a bath room and a septic tank. We got water by means of a hand pump, far from perfect but a lot better that freezing our butts in the old outdoor privy.
My mother died in 1958 and my father a year later so suddenly I was free to pull up stakes and get out of there. One thing that helped make up my mind was the decision of the Government to force people to take their children out of one-room schools after the eighth grade. They would send them to larger towns where there were better schools but they would have to board with strangers. To us this seemed a terrible arrangement and we decided that we had to get out of there. I had been corresponding with my father's sister during his illness and she suggested that we move to Boston. After a long time, working through red tape, we finally got our American visas and arrived in Boston in June 1960.
Before leaving Jackson's Cove in 1960 our family had always attended the United Church of Canada or its predecessor, the Methodist, but our commitment had only been superficial. On arriving in Massachusetts, one of the first people we met was Nathan Hubley who had been instrumental in starting a new Evangelical church called Grace Chapel, which we started attending. Soon we realized that the most important element in our lives was missing and we both decided to commit our lives to Christ. Since then we have had Him as our close companion and friend. We do not know what the future may hold for us but we confidently leave the future in His hands.