The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  I walked on, wondering how they got to build this clubhouse right in the middle of “the valley,” as this particular green space, playground, and unofficial public park was called. Perhaps, like the old brewery looming above it, it was here before the park and the houses below “the Old Track,” the old railway line, were built, before Kelly’s Brook was covered in. As I passed the raised manhole cover above the steel pipe, I could hear the water rushing, dark and angry, beneath my feet. Buried or not, I thought, a river or a brook is as much a living thing as a woman or a man.

  Farther up the trail, not far from where it entered a short stretch of trees and a side path turned off and led up to my street, a man and a woman appeared suddenly out of the trees, the man in the lead, walking fast and swinging his arms, looking as if he wanted to leave the woman behind. He was naked from the waist up, his shiny black hair reflecting the sun. It was slicked back flat and parted right in the middle. He was wearing black dress pants and black shoes and carrying a white shirt bunched up in his hand. There were tattoos on his arms and chest. The woman was wearing high heels and having trouble keeping up on the gravel path. She had long orange-yellow hair and was wearing a white, flouncy semi-formal dress well above her knees. When she reached the point where the path widened and the sides had been mowed, she removed her shoes and began to walk barefoot on the grass, trying to catch up.

  Not walkers or hikers, that’s for sure; more like drivers who’d had to abandon their car. Heading to the wedding reception, I guessed, but not looking very receptive, looking very mad at each other, in fact, or at the world. The sun was at their backs, and they both glared sullenly at me as they passed; but I was staring into the sun without my sunglasses—my face scrunched up, my eyes narrowed—and they might simply have been returning what they saw as an unfriendly look. After my long walk on the trail, however, my heart was as light as a bridegroom’s. I held them with my glittering eyes for the briefest of moments—neither of us nodded or spoke—and though they looked to be in the most unfestive of moods, and might not have minded being delayed, I made no move to hold them with my skinny hand, to impede their progress toward the marriage feast.

  Never talk to strangers with tattoos, my mother used to say, reciting it, intoning it, in a formal sort of way. I used to think it was a proverb.

  7. LORD AMULREE’S NEWFOUNDLAND DOG

  They were right…all those voices were right

  And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,

  Nor its peace the historical calm of a site

  Where something was settled once and for all…

  —W. H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”

  To borrow a few words from the Great Gibbon—he can certainly spare a few—from his Memoirs, I believe, not the monumental Decline and Fall: It was at St. John’s, in the former country of Newfoundland, on the 15th of October, 1982, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the fountain in the courtyard of the Colonial Building (if you’ll excuse the common attribution)—the House, La Malcontenta—while the sneakered urchins were screeching and running through the fountain spray, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the country, by way of a Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds, first started to my mind.

  It was early evening, Miles himself was sitting on the bench beside me—I had known him for about five years by then—and, needless to say, the decline and fall of the country was never far from his mind. He had just finished telling me that the inscription on the fountain, now difficult to make out because everything was covered with mud and dust, was taken from one of the incendiary political pamphlets of Dr. William Carson. Elections are fountains from whence flows the purity of parliaments, it read, but it seems that “the Founding Father,” as Miles calls him, was not pure enough to get elected to the first Newfoundland parliament and was now turning over in an obscure grave.

  “I bet not one of our elected members, or the hisstorians—here was a sibilant gift horse that he never looked in the mouth—could tell you where it is,” he said.

  I knew exactly where it was because Miles had never allowed me to walk past it without genuflecting, had led me to it like a child being taught the formalities of grief, the obligatory respect due a deceased parent, any time we had taken a walk downtown. Carson’s grave was in an obscure corner of the churchyard of the Anglican Cathedral on Church Hill, and as long as there wasn’t snow on the ground, Miles would always take the time to scratch around like an old hen among the thick grass and weeds of this ancient cemetery, now unused, to find a few wildflowers to lay by the stone.

  The Colonial Building fountain was erected in 1956—a year late, Miles reminded me—to celebrate one hundred years of so-called responsible government, granted in 1855.

  “Nothing but chaos and conflict up to that point,” he said. “Not that our first government was irresponsible. As Prowse said, the Constitution of 1832 was a ‘veritable political Frankenstein…a constitutional creature that looked as if it had been deliberately designed not to work.’ The men who had fought for self-government, and who had been elected by the people, were in the Lower House, and the ones who had opposed it, and who had been appointed by the Crown, were in the Upper House—a ‘Colonial House of Lords,’ Prowse called it.”

  The commemorative fountain was now disintegrating, however, and was being dismantled and removed, and Carson’s symbolic fountain—the franchise—from which had flowed the parliaments of the country of Newfoundland for more than one hundred years, the country that he and other reformers had founded, had been officially removed in February 1934. The country’s parliaments would never flow from that fountain again.

  In February 1984, as the fiftieth anniversary of this tragic historic event drew near, Miles wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, published in the Evening Telegram, asking for a public apology from the British government for the disgrace it had inflicted upon us—and upon itself—and for “posthumous diplomatic recognition,” as he called it. Needless to say, he never received a reply, at least not from Mrs. Thatcher.

  If, in October of 1982, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the fountain in the courtyard of the Colonial Building, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the country by way of a Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds had seemed a mere quixotic notion, by October of 1984, as I sat musing under the apple tree on a bench on Toulinguet Close, in the unexpected warmth of an Indian summer, this notion had blossomed into a Bosworthian obsession. Miles was sitting on the bench beside me once again.

  “Miss Georgie was thirty-four years old when she lost her voice,” he was saying—he always referred to Marie Toulinguet, or Georgina Stirling, as Miss Georgie, as if she might have been a favoured niece—“and she died thirty-four years later, the year after her native land lost its own voice—1934, as you know. But did you know that the Newfoundland wolf—a unique species, I’ve been told—became extinct that same year?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said, as gravely as I could.

  Miles saw all these numbers and fates as signs. He was now always on the lookout for signs, for Recognitions, ever since he’d read that anonymous letter in the paper—though he would never admit this, of course—in response to his open letter to Margaret Thatcher.

  No doubt this was a lot of symbolic weight to place on one woman’s shoulders, but not as much as Miles had loaded onto the weak back and the missing feet—the result of a serious rugby injury—of the traitorous politician Frederick Alderdice. That the last prime minister of Newfoundland literally didn’t have a foot to stand on was a little-known fact that Miles had discovered in a collection of “letters home” in the Commission of Government Fonds in the provincial archives at the Colonial Building. “He has no feet and only one leg,” wrote chief commissioner Sir John Hope-Simpson.

  That the poor, demoralized Newfoundland state, in the symbolic personage of our last prime minister, hadn’t had a foot to stand on was surely the fi
nal missing piece of Miles’s personal zodiac of inauspicious signs; the final Aristotelian Recognition in the tragedy that was Newfoundland history—his Newfoundland history, at least—the one that had settled the case for him once and for all. For days after this great archival discovery, a certain lingering amazement was still evident, as if he had been up till sunrise on the roof of the House and had finally seen the zodiacal light—or had just returned from a personal consultation with the Auspices.

  For the first eight months of 1984, I had been seconded to work down at the government archives, and Miles seemed to have followed me down. That ill-omened year, as his hero Orwell had prophesied, arrived with more than its share of signs, omens, and Recognitions. Miles knew his Aristotle—and his Greek tragedy. He had taught the interdepartmental offering, Classics in Translation, for twenty-five years in “the British department of the Old Colony Club,” as he once referred to the English department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where a British Lord, hand-picked by Premier Smallwood himself, had been appointed president as late as 1967. And in 1984, the Muses, or the Fates, seemed to have hand-picked Miles for the role of Aeschylus’s Watchman on the Roof, waiting for “a new star, the promised sign.” Of what, I can’t remember—the fall of Troy?—and maybe it was no longer clear to Miles.

  By summer’s end, however, all he had seen so far from the roof of the House—literally and figuratively—was Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest in the heavens, constellation Canis Major.

  “O gods! Grant me release from this long weary watch,” said the Watchman.

  As a seconded temporary employee, I had access to every nook and cranny of the building, every closed room, gallery, stairway, basement vault, and attic space, and Miles would ask for a personal tour at least once a month.

  “The house itself, could it take voice, might speak aloud and plain,” said the Watchman.

  In the attic, whose ceiling was still charred from a lightning or chimney fire many years before, he would climb up the long ladder and open the hatch to the roof, which had a spectacular view of the Narrows.

  “You go on back to work,” he’d say, then disappear through the hatch. I’d have to go up and get him at the end of the day.

  On one occasion, however, I forgot all about him, and left him in the building overnight. Perhaps he had stayed up on the roof—it was a warm summer night—still watching for the new star, the promised sign. Or perhaps he had spent the night wandering through the building looking for the ghosts of what he called the godforsaken Gang of 27, the traitorous last Members of the House, who had, without a single dissenting voice, voted the country out of existence and were surely doomed to wander the halls and stairways of La Malcontenta till the end of time, repenting, seeking forgiveness—but woe betide those who sought it from him.

  In the morning, I found him asleep on the couch in my office with an empty mickey of whisky beside him on the floor.

  “I speak to those who understand,” said the Watchman, “but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.”

  Spent all day on the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds. Well…not officially a fonds yet, but certain to be one, it’s just a matter of time, under the rubric of “personal archives.” Right now, it’s just a rogue vertical file, but with a wily, dedicated filer. Yours, as they say, truly. “My life is a fonds,” as one of my colleagues likes to say.

  Though just a po-mo, fringe-fest notion to most archivists—a very conservative lot—the creation of a so-called total archive, comprising a broader, more idiosyncratic, more representative repository of personal records, is now being enthusiastically advanced by the progressive conservative cell in our own archival journal. A total archive would contain “the flotsam of the individual life,” give “glimpses of the inner soul,” document “our complex inner humanity,” and be “more of an archives of character than of achievement,” as one of these enthusiasts has put it. This will counteract the stultifying emphasis on government and other institutional records—legal, corporate, and ecclesiastical—and on the personal fonds only of high achievers, pursuers of fame and fortune.

  I have to agree. What of the unfortunate and unknown? Is there no room at the archival inn for them?

  When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries…

  Of late, in pursuit of one personal archive in particular, I’ve heard more than a few bootless cries.

  Archives, our po-mo theorists insist, must be a choir of multivarious voices, including those who can’t sing, a book of multiple narratives, not excluding those who can’t write: the voices and stories of underachievers, losers, and cranks; the marginalized and the dispossessed; the proverbial voices crying in the wilderness; the erratics carried along by the great indifferent glacier of history and dumped like foundlings at our feet.

  You could think of Newfoundland itself as an erratic, I suppose—bits of Dr. Piercey’s geology lecture were still drifting back to me—an orphaned land mass, a geological foundling, like our rejected foundling father. It was left on the doorstep of the North American continent when the supercontinent, the geological fatherland of Pangaea, “all lands,” the entire continental crust of the earth, broke apart over two hundred million years ago, and the various segments, the so-called tectonic plates, began their continental drift on the Seven Seas.

  From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: unedited version of “A Letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,” read to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on February 15, 1984; edited version published in “Letters to the Editor,” the Evening Telegram, February 16, 1984.

  Before Miles began, someone dressed like an anthrax handler or a bomb defuser entered dramatically from the wings—the men’s washroom, to be more precise—and laid a steel box on the table in front of “the distinguished assembly,” as Miles sometimes referred to the oft-times obstreperous Travers Tavern regulars—when he wasn’t calling them a bunch of Newfoundland dogs. These dogs, however, untamed though they were, were forever loyal to “the Prime Minister of the Indignation.” Miles acted as if he hadn’t even noticed this mysterious, glass-masked attendant, covered from head to foot in a heavy white canvas suit, who vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Miles simply lifted the hinged cover of the box, removed his mauled-looking copy of the Amulree Report, gave it a quick contemptuous look, dropped it on the floor at his feet, and planked a shoe upon it as if it were some verminous creature that might attempt to escape.

  The Editor

  The Evening Telegram

  Dear Sir:

  (I enclose a copy of a letter to the Rt. Honourable Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain, in the hope that you will publish it on February 16, 1984, a significant anniversary date for the country, of which, no doubt, you are aware.)

  The Rt. Honourable Margaret Thatcher

  Prime Minister of Great Britain

  House of Commons

  London, England

  Dear Prime Minister:

  I write you today not on my own behalf, and certainly not on behalf of that “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about,” who no longer seem to care, perhaps never cared, but on behalf of that “most obscure of all classes, our ancestors…the democracy of the dead.” I thank your great countryman Chesterton for those fine words. He was talking about tradition. Tradition, he said, means giving votes to this much larger and greater constituency. Of course, our last prime minister, Mr. Frederick Alderdice, was not a big fan of the vote, either for the living or the dead. It was only a theoretical thing, he said, not all it was cracked up to be. This was in November 1933, during the last session of the House of Assembly of the independent country of Newfoundland, just before he and his fellow members used their own votes to do away with the country forever.

  I think your fellow
countryman Sir Oswald Mosley—for every Chesterton there’s a Mosley—head of the British Union of Fascists, was saying the same thing around the same time, and so were his supporters, the Harmsworth boys, Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe, who built the Great Paper Mill and town of Grand Falls in the middle of the Newfoundland wilderness, circa 1909, to provide a safe supply of newsprint for their papers, the Daily Mail not the least among them, the most widely read newspaper in the world at the time. In January 1934 an article appeared in the Daily Mail entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” written by none other than publisher Lord Rothermere himself. In it, he encouraged his readers to support a political party with the same purpose and drive as Hitler’s and Mussolini’s. Anti-democratic sentiment was in the air, in Britain and elsewhere. The Fascists were calling for the barring of Jews from the British public service. They had been barred from service in the perfect little English-country-garden town of Grand Falls twenty-five years earlier! And in February 1934 democracy came to an end all over Newfoundland.

  I write you on the fiftieth anniversary—not a golden one, needless to say—of this the darkest day in our history. On February 16, 1934, when I was only ten years old—and you were nine, I believe, according to your Dictionary of National Biography—I saw my father leave the house and walk out to the flagpole in our garden. Now, he hadn’t erected the flagpole, not being a political man; it was there when he bought the house. I watched through the window as he lowered the Union Jack, our official flag, and raised our unofficial flag, the Tricolour, the Pink, White, and Green. It was the one and only political act of his life. No…it wasn’t a political act, or a nationalist act, but a private patriotic act. He never said a word to anyone about it. He died three years later, but that flag—the very same one, in fact—still flies above the house I inherited from him. I inherited the land as well. And I don’t just mean the land around the house.