She now had an oversized, insulated steel mug of coffee in front of her, perhaps anticipating a long meeting. After the agenda was approved and the minutes reviewed, the concerns of our young intern, Colm Veitch, were the first item of business, deferred at our last meeting. He is pursuing archival studies at UBC, and interning with us for another semester. After treating us to a mini-history of information storage—from clay tablets and animal skins to CD-ROMs, by way of papyrus, parchment, vellum, rag paper, wood paper, microfilm, and microfiche—and reminding us that more than 90 percent of the books in the Research Library are less than one hundred years old and thus had been printed on acidic wood-pulp paper, he proffered the grave prediction that within another hundred years, at best, they all will have crumbled to dust.
He said there was a more pressing issue, however; it was not the books, but the book-keepers, who were in immediate danger. Our fire extinguishing system was obsolete, he announced. (I recalled that he had mentioned this to me when he was here last summer, but just in passing. He was brand new on the job, a mere student assistant, and had not been bold enough to make an issue of it.) It was a so-called dry system, he said, using concentrated CO2, designed to protect irreplaceable documents and books. In the event of a fire, and the sounding of the alarm, the ventilation system would immediately shut off. We would then have only sixty seconds to evacuate before the gas was released.
He had noticed the red cylinders all over the building, but as far as he could make out there were no separate zones with independent release systems, so the entire supply of gas would be expelled all at once throughout the building. To be effective, it all must be expelled within ten seconds, shooting from the tanks at extremely high velocities. If by chance the alarm didn’t go off, the odorless, colourless gas would asphyxiate everyone instantly without any warning symptoms. An “accidental dump,” as it was called, was not all that uncommon. One had occurred just recently in an air traffic control tower, he said, where the gas was used instead of liquid in order to protect sensitive electronic equipment. Fire investigators couldn’t figure out why the system went off.
There was a long silence after Colm’s revelations, as if we were already mourning the death by asphyxiation of several members of our archival crew. We were all waiting for chairman Alice to speak. He seemed to be searching for something among his papers, trying to talk by opening his lips but not his teeth. Finally, without any discussion whatsoever, he struck an ad hoc committee to neutralize Colm’s concerns, if not the acid and the CO2.
The main reason for Alice’s hesitations, his unresponsiveness, his great difficulty in speaking, was that after surgery his jaws had been wired shut to reduce movement. If his nose became blocked, however, problems might ensue, and it was rumoured that he carried a pair of wire cutters in his pocket in case of emergency. No wonder that the threat of fire and pestilence and imminent destruction might not seem like such a big deal to him. He might have been worried about asphyxiation, but for a different reason altogether. His face had a funereal aspect at the brightest of times, but he now looked desperate, on the verge of weeping.
I knew that Alice would never bring up the real problem, however, which I felt I had accidentally diagnosed after reading about his condition in the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. One afternoon, while waiting to speak with someone in the medical library about some archival documents in the Founders’ Archive, I read in this hefty, authoritative tome that the root of the temporomandibular joint problem was stress, which caused a person to clench and grind his teeth, making the muscles and ligaments around the joints tight and painful. The problem, in other words, was not in the joints but in the joint—the one he directed, the Archives, the various parts of which would not take direction, from him or anyone else.
The next item on the agenda was the ongoing question of faculty access to the Research Library stacks. First, students had been denied access because of persistent theft. Surprisingly, the thefts had continued, so faculty had also been denied access, leading to much acrimonious grievance and protest—the Troubles, as we now referred to it, for a professor emeritus of Irish history was rumoured to be behind the campaign. Today a petition from the entire history department was presented, demanding free access. Alice was in no mood for this and, again without any discussion, struck another ad hoc committee. Then he suddenly excused himself from the rest of the meeting.
As discussion had been pre-empted for the first two agenda items, we went off on quite a few tangents for the remaining ones, and though I know I’m not required to minute all these digressions—arguments, complaints, enthusiasms, diagnoses, miseries—I usually do, for they’re generally more interesting than the actual agenda. Ergo, I’m always the one with his head down at meetings—and not just meetings, but lectures, conferences, workshops, and symposiums—diligently recording almost everything that’s said. Sometimes there’s no agenda, no program, no formal paper; or the presenter will not make it available, or departs from his text; or the most interesting information comes out of the questions at the end. I’ve witnessed—and recorded—some emotional free-for-alls.
I write down everything, in fact, though I’m not a writer, just a self-appointed, obsessive recording clerk. It’s a job no one else wants, at least in my experience, in all the organizations I’ve ever belonged to. My colleagues jokingly refer to me as a “recording artist,” but no, heaven forbid, not a writer. All those drafts, revisions—visions and revisions—reconstructions, amendments, without any hope of an amen. For a recording secretary, a humbler scribe, the first draft, thank god, is usually the last—except of course for the clean copy, the typed copy, and I have been known to make more than one. And then, I’ve noticed, curious things happen, corruptions of the most innocent kind. There must be an artistic impulse in all of us!
When I was in Literary Manuscripts about ten years ago, I will never forget reading on the last page of the “final” draft of one of the landmarks of our literature: “Abandoned, August 15, 1969.” This was on the last of a dozen drafts, most of them handwritten, the last two or three done on a manual typewriter, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages. And still with hundreds—no, thousands—of changes and corrections. I thought of Dante’s inscription over the gates of Hell: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” And what is surely our greatest proverb: “We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.” Hope is surely the most incurable of the human virtues.
What is Miles’s grave nostalgia, his melancholic mania, but a great withering hope, imbued with an unquenchable thirst for justice. He remembers…he remembers…he remembers…everything. “The history of the Colony is only very partially contained in printed books,” Prowse wrote in A History of Newfoundland. “It lies buried under great rubbish heaps of unpublished records…in rare pamphlets…forgotten manuscripts…” And not just unpublished, rare, and forgotten, but lost, destroyed, unwritten, and unspoken. Yet archived—darkived—in minds, hearts, and souls, Miles Harnett’s not least among them.
A darkive, indeed. Just asc.
It’s worth remembering that the word record means “memory” or “remembrance,” from the Old French word record; the Latin word recordari means “to remember” as well. And cor, of course, refers to the heart. Memory, the oral tradition, our first archive, long before so-called recorded history, when the only records were what was learned by heart—stories, mainly, which were changed in the telling. Of course, the oral tradition, like the past itself, as some wag once remarked, is not what it used to be.
I myself am a print-bound child of Confederation. History for us began, as Miles has taken every opportunity to remind me, in 1949, and this neurotic note-taking on anything and everything is more than just the archivist’s curse. I’ve never trusted memory, so now my memory—for so-called facts, at least—is so bad from lack of use that I can’t remember anything, which makes me even more anxious about forgetting things, and more obsessive ab
out writing them down than ever.
At last count I’ve filled one hundred and twenty notebooks, the old black hardcovers that you can use on your knee. I started them about twenty years ago, when, freshly minted from archival summer school in Ottawa, I heard one of our pre-eminent historians reproach us for our embarrassing record-keeping heritage—the carelessness, the neglect, the deliberate destruction of personal, mercantile, ecclesiastical, and government records. What has been saved is just a fraction of what was created. We should be more than just sorters, sifters, and keepers. We live in a place with five hundred years of history, but our archives are less than forty years old.
After leaving work I ventured to the edge of the tch, the trans-campus highway, to pick up the trail along Rennie’s River. After eight, sometimes ten, hours of stale air, dry heat, and artificial light—especially if I’ve spent half a day at a cantankerous meeting, or in the Rare Book Vault (the Tomb, as we call it), where all our rare and irreplaceable books and documents are stored—the walk along the river trail feels like a resurrection. Birdsong, sunshine, rushing water, a fresh breeze. The flowers, the trees, the light, the air! Today it felt as if summer had started again. Indian summer, perhaps, though it felt like winter the week after Anton arrived.
Halfway down the trail, I thought of my young colleague, Colm Veitch, still interred in the Tomb, still beavering away when I left just before six o’clock. A tireless and obsessive worker, he went back down there after our meeting. He will undoubtedly find a place with us when he’s finished his degree. He seems oblivious of his surroundings; bare beige wall or babbling brook is all the same to him. When on the scent of new and exciting archival revelations, he has been known to work up to sixteen hours a day, barely stopping for a bite to eat. But he’s very young, only half my age, and has the stamina and enthusiasm for it, the heartwarming idealism.
Lately, he’s been combing through the newly acquired papers of the St. John’s Housing Corporation, which we thought had been lost. It was the first Crown Corporation in all of Canada, though of course it wasn’t actually in Canada when it was incorporated. He’s hot on the trail of Sir Brian Dunfield, a former Justice of the Supreme Court and the esteemed founder of the historic neighbourhood of Churchill Park. Acting on Anton’s tip when he first arrived, I had confirmed in my preliminary research in these papers that I was living in one of the original houses, in what used to be known as “The Housing.” There is a photograph of Sir Brian in the files, circa 1946, standing in someone’s kitchen—the cupboards look exactly like mine!—smoking a pipe, and chatting with a happy new homeowner.
As Sir Brian Dunfield’s self-appointed, unofficial hagiographer, Colm intends to cast him in the utopian mould. He sees him as a socialist philosopher of some sort (his academic background was in philosophy), a philosopher who shared his sandwich. Sir Brian, Colm believes, may even have eclipsed Sir William Coaker, our great fishermen’s union leader, in service to his fellow man. In the spring of 1942, in the middle of the war, Sir Brian was appointed chairman of the Commission of Enquiry into Housing and Town Planning in St. John’s, a body set up to investigate the quality of housing in the city and to recommend a scheme for re-housing the poor and re-planning the city. The commission produced five reports in two years—surely a record. The third one Colm sees as a socialist manifesto, no less, not like Marx’s revolutionary document exactly, but perhaps a Newfoundland version of Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England.
The preliminary work I’d done on the genial Sir Brian Dunfield and the Housing Corporation I turned over to Colm when his interest became so piqued he could hardly contain himself. Enthusiasm like that should not be restrained. Some may view this as unseemly in an archivist or, indeed, in a scholar of any kind. Some would not even grace us with the word “scholar,” seeing us merely as custodians, record-keepers, high-class clerks. Clerk-scholars, perhaps? Colm, who reads all the discussions and debates in the latest archival journals, tells me that this matter of the traditional scholar-historian archivist versus the new clerk-technician is a much-debated topic these days.
I left the trail at Rennie’s Mill Road, where the river, joined by Kelly’s Brook, continues on to Quidi Vidi Lake, and then through Quidi Vidi Village to the sea. But instead of making my usual U-turn and heading west up the valley of Kelly’s Brook, I turned east along Empire Avenue, then up a short laneway to Circular Road—the east end of Circular, between Rennie’s Mill Road and King’s Bridge Road, arguably, as they say, the most beautiful stretch of old houses in the city, most of them still in their original state. When people think of Circular Road, this is usually what they have in mind, but the west end of Circular is another story.
At that end there is an old brewery surrounded by much more modest houses, in one of which Elaine and I, when we were students, had what Holmes and Watson would have called rooms. We woke up each morning with the smell of hops in our noses and the sight of granules of soot on the ledges of the open windows. If it was windy, the soot was all over the place—on the floors, in the bedclothes, in the bathtub, on the kitchen table. Tractor trailers charging back and forth to the plant would discharge clouds of diesel smoke from the high exhaust pipes behind their cabs—right in through our second-storey windows, or right into our faces if we happened to be gazing out at the scenic brewery stacks.
At the top of the laneway was the house I was looking for, the number still fresh in my mind after rooting around all morning in the Vertical Files. It was a very ordinary-looking mansion as these Circular Road houses go. Here once lived a Knight of the Empire—the Silent Knight—Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, a man who gave a whole new meaning to the term “the Unknown Soldier.” Miles always referred to him as “Mr. Smokescreen.” In the file that we have on him, tissue-thin as it is, there are references to no fewer than five St. John’s addresses: Circular Road, Churchill Park, Waterford Bridge Road, Military Road, and Orphanage Lane. When he first arrived, in 1925, he lived for a short time in Bonavista, on the northeast coast.
Evasive tactical manoeuvres on Sir Henry’s part, perhaps, evidence for the view that he was in hiding from the IRA (his name and address, however, had been published in the St. John’s telephone directory!) and that an IRA assassination squad had actually come to St. John’s to find him.
I have been conscripted as a researcher by an English military historian at Sandhurst, a professor Ian Nowottny, who’s writing a book called Sir Henry Hugh Tudor: a Military Life. Almost half that life—the non-military half—was spent here in Newfoundland. He lived among us for forty years, in fact, though hardly anyone knew who he was, why he was here, or even that he was here.
Sir Henry Hugh Tudor was, theoretically at least, the most powerful British military figure in Ireland during the fight for independence, though some historians doubt his actual authority and influence. He had served with distinction in the Boer War and the First World War. He was credited with the invention of the smokescreen, a military manoeuvre he describes vaingloriously in his self-published memoir, The Fog of War, the manuscript of which we have in the Archives.
I walked down the steep steps into the valley of Kelly’s Brook, a buried brook for almost its entire course, all the way from the west end of the city to the east. Last year the final quarter mile or so, where it joins Rennie’s River, had been disinterred, or “daylighted,” as it was described in the newspaper. Here the original waterway had been artificially recreated: a rock-lined, gravel-covered stream bed with crooks and meanders and “riffling rocks,” alders and bulrushes. But the new stream bed had turned a rusty red, since most of the brook, which is even longer than Rennie’s River, is still buried in a fifty-year-old steel pipe that serves as a storm sewer. A few miles up the valley it runs past the old city dump, now buried as well, but never cleaned up.
Sir Brian Dunfield’s 1942 Housing Commission socialist manifesto had pointed out that 80 percent of the houses of the poor had no toilets, n
o indoor plumbing, no running water. People used to bathe and wash their clothes in Kelly’s Brook until it became a health hazard and they were ordered to stop. The neighbourhood children then took to warning the sailors from the Portuguese White Fleet not to bathe or wash their clothes in it. Finally, “Stinky Brook,” as the children called it, was buried in a pipe.
Farther up the valley, smoke was pouring out of the large barbecue hut next to the Elks Club, and not just up through the tin chimneys, but from under the open eaves, and out through the cut-out doors and windows. When I passed by, there were Elks out on the asphalt, all bulls, some with bottles of beer in their hands, some bent over, coughing and slapping their thighs. They must have been distracted by something and left the steaks unattended on the charcoal grills. There was so much smoke now that no one could get back inside.
Through the large bow window of the clubhouse I could see women, and a few children, laying long tables with white tablecloths, cutlery, and flowers; other women came rushing out to see to the coughing men. There was a tragicomic and nostalgic residue of tenderness in this scene, this sepia-print of the old order, the clear, secure, but now politically incorrect, division of labour: the women inside the house tending the tables and the children; the men outside with the beer and barbecues, the hearth in the garden giving them the opportunity to adopt the traditional cooking role. But no one is feeling tender anymore.
Into the Elks Club parking lot, however, came another hopeful pair—as I said, the most incurable of the human virtues—in the conventional white convertible, followed by a long line of honking cars. It was a marriage feast that was being prepared, and a lovely bride of a day they had for it.
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