Into the Blizzard

by Michael Winter

  When he entered a cinema, everyone stood and applauded him.

  A reception was organized on Bell Island, where Matthew Brazil and Bertram Butler and Walter Greene were from. The ice came while he was on the island and he ended up walking over the ice back to Portugal Cove.

  He got his photograph taken at Holloway Studio. Robert Holloway had been killed in the war and Tommy Ricketts had been there when he was shot. Elsie took his photograph. Did he say anything to her about her brother or about the war? It must have been strange to them both to know the predicament they were in, this celebration of a heroic deed when her brother was dead. Ricketts was wearing his new sergeant stripes. His gaze is dispassionate, handsome, interior. He looks towards the camera but his eyes are staring inward. He is not stiff. Elsie Holloway must have said something to put him at his ease.

  CAPTURED

  He lived with the Storeys. A fund of ten thousand dollars was struck for his education and he was taught how to read. Edgar House tells of him fishing and catching an eel. He skinned it carefully and cooked it and they pretended to enjoy it. Edgar saved the skin and they dried it and cut it into strips and made bootlaces out of it.

  He studied at Bishop Feild College and then enrolled in Memorial University College. He was encouraged to use a gift fishing rod to fish trout in Virginia River. I know that river, having fished the length of it and caught many good trout there. There’s a falls and a deep pool and the mouth of the river flows into Quidi Vidi at Pleasantville at the grounds where the regiment first gathered to train. But it was Tommy Ricketts who was captured. His son has said this. His son lives in Scarborough near us in Toronto. He was captured by the people of St John’s. Unlike Bert Butler and Matthew Brazil, Tommy Ricketts couldn’t return to his life.

  EDNA EDWARDS

  He would have returned to White Bay and been a fishermen. Instead, Tommy Ricketts lived in town at various boarding houses. His grades weren’t strong enough to become a doctor. And so he tried pharmacy. I suspect even that was too onerous for him. He may have become a druggist, which is a step below pharmacy—he always hired a pharmacist at his place of business.

  For more than a dozen years he stayed a bachelor. The hero of a nation could not take conventional steps through courtship and marriage. Indeed, many soldiers were halted in their natural development. The women, too—Elsie Holloway never married and neither did Francis Cluett.

  At the age of thirty-two Tommy Ricketts started seeing the daughter of the owners of a boarding house at 131 Pennywell Road. He was living there too. Edna Edwards. She was nineteen. There was some discrepancy between when they were married and the birth of their first child, Dolda. Did they marry because Edna was pregnant? Did they keep Dolda’s presence absent from the census because they didn’t want it to be known?

  Dolda means “hidden” in Swedish.

  They certainly wouldn’t be the first to marry with child.

  The house where they met was torn down, but the houses it was attached to are still there. I got to know one of the neighbours and she was astonished at what I told her. She said they have a poster of Tommy Ricketts in their stairwell. The stairs that would have been joined to the Edwards boarding house.

  There is evidence of that house still—a cement footing for a bay window and the concrete front step. This, I thought, is where Tommy Ricketts met Edna Edwards. She played records and was a flapper and was very young and they were in bedrooms close to one another up there on the second floor. A foundation block to carry a chimney against one of the houses. You can still enter the front door that hangs in the air, which I do, and sit in the first-floor rooms where they met.

  Tommy Ricketts had waited fourteen years to get married. What pressure there must have been on him to learn a profession, to settle down.

  If you stand in the gap between the houses there is a rough path that pedestrians use as a shortcut to Prince of Wales Street below Pennywell Road. It is a rogue path, made by feet, not by hand. And I realized I had lived in the basement of a house directly across from this gap, after coming home from travelling in Turkey and Egypt and England. I had lived across from the house where Tommy Ricketts met Edna Edwards.

  When I mentioned this to a friend, he said: I know Edna. I talked to Edna every day for years.

  My friend had worked in a home where Edna visited her mother. She was a true lady, he said. She drove a green Chevy Nova. I don’t dye my hair, she said. It’s tinted. She’d go in and do her mother’s make-up.

  RICKETTS DRUG STORE

  He was set up in business on the corner of Job Street and Water Street. He brought in Edna’s younger brother, Bert Edwards. And Bert worked for Tommy Ricketts for ten years, before setting up his own pharmacy further west, at the Crossroads. In the newspapers of the 1950s there is a major renovation of the Edwards Pharmacy. And in the paper are large ads for automobiles and furniture with companies named after prominent men, T&M Winter and Ayres and other men that Tommy Ricketts had fought with and who did not win a Victoria Cross but now they had half-page ads in the paper. And in a column down one page a postage-stamp-sized ad saying bingo tickets were available at the following outlets. In the list is Ricketts Drug Store.

  His son says his father was not a businessman. He didn’t have the aptitude. A man who worked for him in the 1960s says Ricketts paid him twice the going rate and he kept terrible accounts. But he served his customers and the west end of St John’s well. He was a quiet man.

  You can walk along Water Street and recognize the old stores that have been standing for over a century. There are terrific photos of the buildings that have been knocked down: Ayre & Sons, for instance, is replaced with Atlantic Place. Ayre can mean wind or the air itself or a narrow bank of sand created by the sea. Ayr was the place in Scotland where the men had trained. Because of the geography of the harbour and the hills it is easy enough to pick your way back to the past of St John’s when the roads were cobbled and horse-drawn streetcars were here and there were cinemas and hotels and department stores. But as you draw towards the far end of Water Street, into the west end, things turn a corner and the past begins to be constricted by the new arterial routes that have thrown the wide shadows of overpasses onto the street and the street itself splits into a divided highway and your sense of a pedestrian becomes threatened by auto routes. Still, there are small buildings that exist here, like O’Mara’s Pharmacy that is an apothecary museum that never opens and the shades are drawn tight. Brennan’s Barber Shop, a narrow building squeezed into a row of buildings, and inside there is a Nestle hair machine that looks like it could electrocute you, photos of a man selling braces of rabbits and fish being sold on the harbour apron and a book open to 1964 and the customer’s rates jotted in pencil. Pencil was used a lot for journals. I decided to wait at Brennan’s and get a haircut. Tommy Ricketts could have easily had his hair cut in this very chair—for his drug store was nearby. The Newman’s vault is here where they stored casks of wine. The Coastal Railway station is across the road and they used to display the Ricketts Victoria Cross before it was transferred by the family to the national war museum in Ottawa. Inside they have little floor tiles of train tracks for kids to follow as they look at costumes and scale models of trains and boats that shipped mail and goods and people around the island. I’ve taken my son there. I enjoy looking at the fabric of clothing, the thick wool weave, the stitching, how well-made and abundant fabrics were in the past. There was an article in the daily paper about house fires and how the roof trusses in new homes are built to withstand snow loads but, in a fire, they are consumed four times more rapidly and can cause roof collapse. That sort of thing. And yet, here was a newlywed couple, sleeping in separate berths because the sexes were still separated back then, and the train derailed and the oil lamps in the women’s train caught the fabrics alight and the bridegroom rushed in to try to save his new wife and they were both consumed by smoke. No, I do not want to live with open flames around me. I do not want to live in the past.


  Across from what was the railway museum is a memorial plaque commemorating Tommy Ricketts and his pharmacy. He sold comic books and candy to kids. Ricketts travelled to London once, in 1929, to attend a dinner given by the British Legion at the House of Lords. He met General Hart, the oldest living Victoria Cross winner. Ricketts was still the youngest.

  There is a story that, when King George VI visited St John’s in 1939, Tommy Ricketts declined an invitation to join him at an event. So the King had his car stop in front of the pharmacy until Ricketts ventured out to shake hands with him.

  The last photo I’ve found of Tommy Ricketts in his pharmacy shows him holding a magazine from off the rack, opened to a story called “How to Fool Smart Ducks.” This is True—The Man’s Magazine, and the ducks story was written by Ted Trueblood. It’s the October 1954 issue. Ricketts was fifty-three.

  True’s masthead reads “ ’Tis strange, but true; for truth is always strange—stranger than fiction.”—Byron.

  Ted Trueblood had been the editor of Field & Stream. He was a conservation leader and led the fight to preserve salmon rivers from hydro dams. He popularized catch and release methods. He fished, in the 1950s, for salmon in Newfoundland. He was similar to Lee Wulff, whom I saw perform when I was a boy at the Arts and Culture Centre in Corner Brook. Lee Wulff and his wife, Joan, practised spey casting and I watched, with my father, as Lee Wulff cast his line with a red bow on the end, cast it across the stage and then changed direction and flipped that line out into the audience. The red bow landed daintily on the top of a bald man’s head. We all stood and applauded. It was my first time in a theatre, and for a long time I associated theatre with the practice of fly-fishing.

  Lee Wulff, on catch and release: Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.

  Tommy Ricketts, who was captured by the Newfoundland people, died in February of 1967. He collapsed on the floor of his shop, right here, on this spot, in this store that no longer exists, but the space exists, the land where last he stood and where I now stand. He was buried with full military honours, a state funeral in the graveyard near Quidi Vidi. A red cushion held his medals. The coffin placed on a gun carriage. There was snow on the ground as there was when he came home from the war, when he was carried on men’s shoulders.

  MORGAN MACDONALD

  If you keep walking west from Ricketts’s old pharmacy, up along Waterford Bridge Road, you’ll come to Bowring Park. Here is Basil Gotto’s The Fighting Newfoundlander and the replica of the Beaumont-Hamel caribou. The caribou was a gift of Major William Howe Green. Green served as a musketry instructor during the First World War and was a cousin to Edgar Bowring. It’s a strange thing to see this same statue in a different place. The sculpture of Peter Pan is here too, the one Bowring had made when the Florizel broke to pieces.

  The caribou, over the years, had been damaged. The kids swing on the antlers, a deputy city manager said. Morgan MacDonald removed the caribou and took it to his foundry. He cut the caribou open and installed a structure inside to reinforce the antlers. Morgan MacDonald is in the memorial business. He has created several recent war memorials for Newfoundland outports. There is the sculpture of two modern Newfoundland soldiers in Conception Bay South, a man and a woman, modelled on soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. He dreamt up the idea of making half-size models of the caribou for local monuments. He built one for my hometown—and his—in Corner Brook. That’s how I got to know of him, walking past the old Co-op grocery store, where the new City Hall is, and seeing his caribou in the same posture as the Beaumont-Hamel caribou. The caribou, while half the size of the original sculpture, is about the same size as a real, living animal—something monumental brought back to normal dimensions.

  CALYPSO

  That fall I drove west to hunt with my father. I had a caribou license. I passed the turn-off to many bays and coves where the men of the Newfoundland Regiment had been born. Halfway across the island I darted into Lewisporte, for I wanted see the wreck of a ship that had trained the Newfoundland sailors for the British Navy. The Calypso was built in 1883, and was one of Britain’s last sailing ships. There are engravings of her in full sail, and she looks like something that fought during Napoleon’s time. She had steam engines, but could be propelled entirely by sail, which allowed her to serve where coaling stations were rare. She had been used by the British in fleet exercises and war games, where the fleet was divided and one side protected England while the other attempted to invade. This was back in the late 1800s.

  And there she is, you come around a corner and look for her bow and she’s there, near the shore in Embree. A calm sea, her masts cut down, but there is the bow of the Calypso jutting out of the lowtide water. I got out of my car and marvelled at this quiet deck of wood and iron. It would be nothing if you did not know her story. But when you are informed, it is easy to slip into the danger that Nietzsche outlined: over-attention to the past turns men into dilettante spectators.

  The ship was named after the nymph Calypso, who kept Odysseus hostage for five years. Calypso, daughter of Atlas, lived on the island of Ogygia. Plutarch wrote that Ogygia is five days’ sail west of Britain. Which, when you think about it, suggests Newfoundland. The Newfoundland sailors who trained on Calypso were kept from home for the duration of the war, from their island home, for five years. The word “calypso” means to conceal knowledge.

  See, Nietzsche said, the great thing is already here!

  I got back in my car and headed for my father.

  HUNTING CARIBOU

  It’s a long drive—eight hours—but soon I was motoring along the Humber River, past the hometown of Hugh McWhirter, to the area of Newfoundland I hunt in and know well. There is a woods road and a marsh that cuts across the road near Big Falls. You can hear the water rushing although the falls is too far to see. It is like some big battle rumbling in the distance. I hunted with a rifle my father found for me. It is a Lee-Enfield, from 1943, but pretty much the same rifle they used in the First World War. My father knew I wanted a bolt action: the gun that built the modern British army. James Paris Lee, who invented the Lee-Enfield, moved from Hawick to Canada at the age of five. The family lived in Galt, Ontario, which is near Waterloo. I had a reading in Waterloo a few years ago, and drove into Galt just to stop and take in Lee’s childhood home. There is a plaque there much like the plaque at the site of Tommy Ricketts’s pharmacy.

  We hunted near territory that the Beothuk roamed over. I have canoed, with friends, down the Exploits and slept in a tent on land where you knew the Beothuk had once built a mamateek. Natural points of land that provided good views of game and places to fish and shelter from the prevailing wind. They dug a round shallow pit for their mamateek and we set up our tents in one of these cavities. I carried a shotgun and crept up on some ducks. I shot six but there was one duck I’d only wounded and I had to track him down the river. He hid himself beneath the dead roots of a tree overhanging the riverbed. I bent down to get him and he turned one terrible, innocent eye to me. I pulled him out from this overhang of earth and felt I was involved with events of the grave. I wrung his neck. We dug a hole and built a fire and plucked the ducks. When the fire was rendered to coals we put a pot with the ducks in the hole and buried the pot. Again, cooked in their graves. Then we unearthed the pot and ate the ducks. They tasted gamey: fish-eaters. We slept in our tents on the Beothuk site and I thought of the sculpture of a Beothuk that stands someplace in the woods near here, a memorial to a people now extinct.

  We were on the river for three days, deep within the heart of the island, and it felt like we had returned to an earlier, pre-industrial time. There was a sharp turn in the river that almost switched back onto itself, and there in the distance was a glint through the trees of something metallic and fast. Then you heard it, above the noise of the river: the Trans-Canada Highway.

  The Beothuk used to build fences to corral the caribou to openings where they lay in wait with bow and arrow. The Germans did much the same with the N
ewfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel that morning of the Big Push. They waited for the men to climb out of their trenches and allowed them to be funnelled down to the gaps in the barbed wire and permitted them to walk through these gateways before opening fire with their machine guns. Mown down in heaps is the way Arthur Hadow described it in the regiment’s diary. The Newfoundlanders had met their Red Men. And, when their bodies lay open to each other, through gunshot and shrapnel, Ivor Gurney’s red wet thing was made evident to them. They had become, to each other, their own red men.

  I did not fire a shot that hunting season with my father. We saw nothing alive in those woods and across that yellow marsh, a field very much the size of the field at Beaumont-Hamel. And as I emptied the magazine from my Lee-Enfield I remembered that not one member of the regiment fired a shot that day.

  We spent the night in the log cabin my father had built when I was a child. I had noticed, in the trunk of my father’s car, a portable tent. I asked him about that. He said in winter he doesn’t trust the roads. If there is a blizzard, he said, and I can’t get through, I want to be able to abandon the car and hike into the woods. You won’t find me trapped in a car, he said, under six feet of snow. He’ll be in the shelter of trees in his tent with a fire, his snares set; he’ll be ready to go ice fishing on a nearby pond.

  I told him about the shelter of trees I had found the Newfoundlanders buried under at Beaumont-Hamel, trees taller and bigger than they would be here because these Newfoundland trees had grown up in the climate of France. My father knew that I was writing this book about war, so he told me then that he’d had the chance, when he was eighteen, to go for national service. He’d deferred until he’d finished his apprenticeship at the shipyard. National service was for two years and everybody had to do it if they passed the medical exam. My father was a borderline case because of his eyes. The doctor asked him if he wanted to go and he said yes. He served from February 1956 to February 1958.