The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  Miranda was carrying a plastic bag stuffed with several old plaid shirts that she used as painting smocks (men’s extra large), which she had bought over the years at the Sally Ann. She was bringing them over to Elizabeth Tailors on Elizabeth Avenue for repairs. Established in the late fifties when Elizabeth Taylor was in her heyday, it was now run by two Vietnamese sisters who had come here as refugees during the Vietnam War and had worked in the shop since the early seventies. I waited outside while Miranda dropped off her smocks, admiring the beautifully stitched piece of cloth hanging in the window. “Open All Days,” it said. Taped to the glass was a large colour poster of the ancient port city of Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which, unlike the small fishing village where the two sisters came from, had escaped the ravages of the Vietnam War. No cars or high-rises or other modern ubiquities are allowed in Hoi An.

  A cheerful and talkative pair, the sisters had told me all about their country the first time I brought over some of my own shirts for alterations. I have a habit of rubbing my frequently unshaven jaw against my collar while I’m working at my desk. The cloth becomes threadbare, though the rest of the shirt looks practically new. I have the collars removed and reversed, something Mother used to do when I was a boy. The sisters had laughed their small heads off at this—if coyly, with their hands over their mouths—the first time I requested it, but they agreed to do it. Yesterday, I recommended them to Miranda when she said that, in preparation for her “full year of painting,” the first thing she needed to do was get some new smocks. All the shirts needed were buttons and elbow patches, and a few stitches here and there.

  Walking up Elizabeth Avenue, we passed a woman walking a long, low, reddish black dog, like a blood pudding on a leash. It was so low to the ground, in fact, and its legs were moving so fast to keep up, that it looked more like a fast-moving insect than a dog—the insect that, as children, we used to call an earwig. It was thought that it crawled into your ears. The thought of it can still make me get up off the ground when I’m stretched out on the cool grass on a hot summer’s day. I found out later that it’s not an earwig, not even an insect, but a centipede. I also discovered that the only “insect” I had ever actually liked (except for the ethereal butterfly, of course, which everyone likes) is not an insect either. The small, lumbering, greyish black creature that we called a carpenter (though it’s really a sowbug) is a crustacean, one of the very few that live on land. Like the spider, which is not an insect either, it has a rudimentary form of lungs instead of gills—“book lungs,” as they’re called. I think I may be a land-lover with book lungs myself, ill at ease on water or in the air.

  Earwigs, centipedes, carpenters, sowbugs, spiders, crustaceans—another world, another career, another life! I could have been an entomologist, I’m sure, picking up where Philip Henry Gosse left off. “Is that in Gosse’s or Lowe’s Entomologia Terrae Novae?” students would ask. An insect, I’m sure you’d like to know, has three distinct body parts: head, thorax, and abdomen; three pairs of legs, no more; and tracheae, windpipes. Biology! Taxonomy! If I had world enough and time.

  What exasperating scholars they are, though, biologists and taxonomists. (I thought geologists and archeologists were troublesome, not to mention historians.) Relentlessly revising, reordering, renaming, rediscovering, reinterpreting—reimagining—the evidence, the documentary record, the archive of life on earth.

  This very summer, in the year of Our Lord 1996, over three hundred years after van Leeuwenhoek discovered his little beasties, I read in the paper that biologists now think they’ve discovered the existence of another distinct microscopic society, the Archaea. Now that sounds interesting. A major branch of life, no less, so that, at least for the time being, there are three “domains” instead of two, and no fewer than thirty-four “kingdoms.” Not only that: they believe that this is the branch from which all other life forms have arisen. And where are these little beasties a-dwelling? In sewage, sludge, sediments, and swamps—so much for the human pedigree—and in so-called hostile environments: hot sulphur springs, beds of hot coals, salt ponds, volcanoes, seabeds nine thousand feet beneath the surface of the sea. No need for sun or air. Two-thirds of their genes, the article said, are different from those found in other forms of life.

  To get away from the traffic on Elizabeth Avenue, we turned into Clarke Place and walked up the path to Burton’s Pond. Rounding the corner where the path meets the road around the pond, we saw a sad-looking muddle of ducks on the other side. Animated, quarrelsome, and noisy beggars, usually, who might even take a bite of your unprotected sandalled foot when you’re feeding them, today they were as silent as swans, and absolutely still. Most of them were looking in our direction as we approached, but some had swivelled their heads and buried them in their back feathers, as if they didn’t want to look. Then, right at our feet, we saw what it was they might have been trying to avoid looking at: one of their own flock mangled on the pavement, a bloody mash of feathers, bones, and flesh. A car must have come around the bend too fast, and obviously just minutes ago.

  “Oh, God,” Miranda exclaimed, and put her hand up to her mouth as if she might retch. Then she quickly set off on the path around the pond. I was mesmerized by the sight, not so much of the dead duck, but of the live ones staring at their fallen brother—or father, son, sister, daughter, or mother—as if they were trying to make sense of what had just occurred. The whole pond, with its tiny islands of aquatic plants and trees, was eerily quiet and calm. Even the gulls were silent. Shock, confusion, mourning, empathy, even an awareness of death—all seemed evident in the ducks’ dazed expressions. They looked as if they were thinking, reflecting, but who could ever be sure. Perhaps they were just waiting for him to get up and scurry back to the safety of the group. My thoughts quacked with the callous cliché dead duck as I set off after Miranda on the sandy path.

  After strolling around Burton’s Pond, we walked across Prince Philip Drive to the boathouse at Long Pond, but Miranda was too tired to walk all the way around. We went back home by way of “Pesticide Crescent,” as Anton had always referred to it, past the lifeless, chemically glazed carpets of lawn that he frequently used to point out to me. In the thick grass on the edge of the soccer field in Churchill Park, Miranda found a fluorescent, multi-hued goalkeeper’s glove that looked like some exotic bird blown off course on its fall migration, as they often are in this windy part of the world. As we passed the bust of Winston Churchill, glowering at the Square, Miranda placed the glove on his head, giving him a frivolous, sporty look. We stopped in at Vincent’s for coffee, and to see what was on the menu for supper, though it was still only four thirty or so. Wiener schnitzel was marked on the chalkboard, and the new chef was busy preparing it. I thought he was Australian, but maybe the waiter who told me that had said Austrian. In any case, Miranda didn’t like the smell of the schnitzel—it was making her nauseous—so we didn’t even stay for coffee.

  We made cheese omelettes and tomates en vinaigrette for supper, and we had another small glass of orange juice and champagne. After coffee, Miranda hennaed her hair—honey brown—a twice yearly ritual, she said, at Easter and just before the school year began, though it wasn’t beginning for her this year. She was going to spend the entire year painting, she said yet again. Perhaps she was becoming doubtful as to just how much time she would have for that. Afterward, in the living room, she laid her honey-brown head, wrapped in a blue towel, on a flat black cushion on my lap. With her pearl-studded ear, she looked for all the world like Vermeer’s blue-turbaned Girl with a Pearl Earring. Anton had told me, however, that last year a conservator had examined the painting with a microscope and discovered that the jewel wasn’t a pearl at all, but was made of glass.

  ARCHIVARIA

  [from the Brendan

  “Miles” Harnett Fonds]

  “Evangelical Agriculture,” a short talk regarding the Commission of Government’s (commissioner Thomas Lodge’s, in particular
) plan “to turn Newfoundland into Holland,” delivered by Brendan “Miles” Harnett to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on February 26, 1996.

  There’s hope from the sea, but none from the land. Our text for this evening, ladies and gentlemen. Hope from the SEA, but none from the LAND. An old Newfoundland proverb, Dutchie. Could be a Dutch one, too, I s’pose, you being into reclamation in such a big way, but p’rhaps we’d have to switch it around.

  Now the Land Settlement Program, the one started by the Commission o’ Government—the Cormack settlement was the last—well, that was about reclamation, too. Evangelical agriculture, you might call it. The Great Leap Forward. All described in the Little Red Book by Commissioner Thomas “I-had-no-particular-desire-to-go-to-Newfoundland” Lodge, who was the chief evangelist behind the scheme, the man in the pulpit, the man behind the plow. He tells us all about it in this Little Red Book. Dictatorship in Newfoundland, it’s called. Yes, dictatorship. Essential reading, Michael. He had a big change of heart, you see. He repented after he went back home to the Mother Country. Turned his back on his countrymen and their undemocratic ways. Lord Rothermere and his Daily Mail might be throwing in his lot with Hitler and Mosley and Mussolini, but he wasn’t. He felt he’d wasted three years of his life in Newfoundland, that Britain’s “bizarre experiment in dictatorship,” as he called it, was “an unforgivable sin”—those were his very words, the Gospel According to doubting Thomas, “an unforgivable sin”—but that we, the sinned against, the disgraced, the disenfranchised—not the sinners—would be the ones who would pay “the spiritual price.” And wasn’t he right.

  But before Thomas became a prophet, he was a mere evangelist. Evangelical agriculture was his creed. Reclamation. The Land Settlement Program. The vanguard of “economic rehabilitation.” It was obvious, he said, that we couldn’t live on fish—he hated fish—so…“the only alternative is the land,” the basis for a “social reorganization of the country…complete social reconstruction.” I’m quoting here. But he was aiming even higher than that. He had bigger things in mind, bigger things to fry—not fish, but vegetables. In his view, and I quote again, “The problem of Newfoundland is more moral than material. It is a function of the character of the people…Had the island been colonized by dour Lowland Scots, instead of West countrymen and Irishmen of charm, there would never have been a problem.”

  Obviously, nothing less than moral reconstruction, moral rehabilitation, moral engineering, would do. Perhaps there’s a gene. Commissar Thomas “the-only-alternative-is-the-land” Lodge had witnessed the “moral transformation wrought in the depressed human material” that had been sent out to plant potatoes in the reclaimed bogland commune at Markland.

  Pardon me, I need a little libation here.

  Like the House, Markland, the first land settlement, was built on a bog, and though Thomas hadn’t observed first-hand the reclamation wrought in this unpromising agricultural material, he had witnessed the reclamation, the “moral transformation,” of the ten men—ex-servicemen, dole recipients—who had first offered themselves for salvation. He had personally seen them off at the train station in May 1934 and had then met them again about two months later. Behold, Lowe! It was as if he had seen a vision. “Within two months,” he said, “it was clear that the question of moral recovery presented no insuperable difficulty. When I saw in July 1934 the moral effect wrought on these ten men, I urged the trustees to consent to a considerable extension of the experiment. I did so because I could see no other hope for the island but a vigorous land settlement policy.” If five thousand welfare families paralyzed by “demoralizing idleness” could have been settled on 5,000 ten-acre communes, he estimated, the whole moral problem of Newfoundland could have been solved.

  Now there’s reclamation for you, Dutchie. Two birds with one stone. And you thought your people were at the forefront of this noble activity, even being invited over to England—another country in need of moral rehabilitation—to reclaim the Fens. But you did have a small part in the Newfoundland project as well. You’ll never guess who ran the show, who became the commune commissar out there in Markland, a man described by Mr. Lodge—he was only joking, o’ course—as having “a capacity for being incoherent in four languages.” Unlike your coherent multilingual self. No, you’ll never guess, Dutchie. Rudolf the Red, o’ course. Your countryman Cochius, who landscaped Bowring Park and all of Newfoundland’s memorial battlefield parks in Europe. But the Markland battlefield gave him the most trouble. Agitators, inside and out, according to Lodge.

  In 1935, Rudolf the Red-nosed Cochius became the hard-nosed manager at Markland, ran it as a collective, a communal farm, a labour camp. “Is Markland in Russia?” one of our newspapers asked at the time. I remember seeing it spread out on the kitchen table, my father hunched over it—he used to bring a pile of papers back from the printing plant—but I had no idea what the headline meant. No one was paid in cash on the Markland farm. It was the truck system all over again, but communist truck this time instead of capitalist truck. Potatoes are a sort of currency among them, as Father Patron might say.

  In the fall of 1934, ten fishermen from the south coast were landed at…Lourdes!—I’m not making this up—on the west coast. On it went. After that came Vinland—grapes, what else! Haricot—bean farming, I suppose. Midland, Brown’s Arm. Cormack was the last…about a dozen farming settlements in all.

  Could you bring me another glass, Woody. I’m dyin’ o’ thirst.

  Now I’ll get to the point, Dutchie. There’s just one small problem with farming in Newfoundland, something you don’t have to worry about where you come from. Just a small thing, mind you. I don’t want to make too much of it. Nothing that would get in the way of moral rehabilitation. On the contrary. It would only enhance the penitential potential, so to speak. Perhaps those commissars weren’t as stone-stupid as they seem.

  I’m talkin’ about SOIL, Dutchie, if you haven’t already figured it out. NEWFOUNDLAND HAS NO SOIL! Like the worm, not indigenous to the place. The glaciers stripped her bare, scraped her clean, dumped it all on the Continental Shelf, the Grand Banks. That’s why they’re called banks. That’s why we have fish—or had fish. The world’s biggest fish farm for the past five hundred years. Now there’s a place for reclamation and land settlement, come to think of it, now that the fish are gone. Thirty-six thousand square miles—almost as big as the Island itself. Only two fathoms deep in some places.

  I have a vision, b’ys, even greater than Lodge’s. We’ll reclaim the Grand Banks! We need ten good men—no, maybe just six…six commissioners…six commissars—and a bunch of your polder-makers, Dutchie, to come over and give us a hand—the ones who helped the Brits drain the Fens. The Grand Banks green with spuds! Grapes! Beans! The Southside Hills white with sheep. Mutton and potatoes in every pot. Lord God Almighty, I’m dizzy with excitement. Let me sit down. Where’s that drink, Woody? There’s hope from the land after all. The only alternative is the land.

  “Lord Amulree’s Newfoundland Dog,” a short talk regarding an actual dog owned by Lord Amulree, and said to be present at all the 1933 Royal Commission (in camera) hearings, delivered by Brendan “Miles” Harnett to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on March 5, 1984.

  Our subject tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is Newfoundland.

  “What else.”

  “There are no ladies here, Miles.”

  “At least none that we know of.”

  (Loud laughter. Miles waited until it subsided.)

  A small, much maligned country, a lost country, a dead country, as the philatelists call it.

  “The what!?”

  “It’s not flat, Miles. It might be dead, but it’s not flat.”

  “You put your stamp on it, Miles.”

  “Give us forty verses, Miles.”

  “Tell us a cuffer.”

  “Yeah, Miles, tell us a cuffer.”

  (Mil
es sipped his drink, smiled.)

  You all remember the Last Judgment.

  “The Damulree Report.”

  “Judgment of the Lord.”

  “1933.”

  Yes, 1933…The last time I was in London, more than fifteen years ago, I went into the Mary Evans Picture Library in Blackheath, a large house that had an archive of historical photographs. There was supposed to be one of Lord Amulree on display, posing with his Newfoundland dog, Haggis, a Landseer that he brought over from Britain in 1933. Those black-and-white Newfoundlands—Amulree seemed to be fond of black and white—were named after Henry Landseer, who first painted the breed in 1838. The photograph had been removed—no one knew where it was—but in the very same spot where it used to hang there was something even better (serendipity, I guess you’d call it): a picture of Sigmund Freud and his chow chow, Jo-Fi, who used to sit in on his therapy sessions. It’s not well known that Freud relied on Jo-Fi’s judgment more than his own in diagnosing his patients’ mental problems. I’ll spare you the details, and my layman’s analysis of what this might say about psychoanalysis—“the talking cure,” as it’s called.

  Now the most interesting thing about this picture, apart from the fact that Freud and Jo-Fi looked so much alike—all that dog needed, I’d say, was a set of black, round-rimmed glasses—was the sorrowful, empathetic look on the dog’s face. That dog had seen and heard it all. Looking at it, I recalled the picture of Amulree and his dog that I’d seen so long ago in a house in St. John’s. And then the whole thing became clear. As some of you may know, Amulree had that Newfoundland dog with him at all the Royal Commission hearings, and though the Lord had a rather severe, judgmental look, his dog, Haggis, had the same empathetic expression as Jo-Fi.

  Now, as you all know, the 1933 Royal Commission hearings were held in private, in camera, as they call it. The word camera originally meant a room. In this case, more of a camera obscura than a camera lucida. Think of it as a big, dark confession box, or a psychiatrist’s office, with that dog present at all the sessions. Make no wonder we confessed, guilty or not; no wonder we admitted failure, defeat, despair; no wonder we debased and humiliated ourselves; no wonder we put on the hair shirt. You’d tell that dog anything he wanted to hear. He looked so forgiving you’d tell him anything. But there’d be no forgiveness for us. The talking cure didn’t work for us. No one was listening. No one. We were talking to ourselves.