by Alan Doyle
I loved hockey and watching The Tommy Hunter Show on the CBC. I fantasized about big cities like Toronto, and especially about Montreal. I longed to speak French like those people from Quebec. I knew I was officially born in Canada, but where did I really belong?
I can still hear my grandmother’s voice in my head as I ask that question: “Now, honey,” she says, “Tom Best may be from Petty Harbour, but he is not belong to Petty Harbour.” Is not belong. That’s the way we say it. And that was always the distinction. If you came to our town from anywhere else in the world, you’d be part of the community, but you could never expect to belong to it. So did Newfoundlanders come to Canada? Did we belong there? I was not sure.
The day after my birth, I was brought home to the town where I belong—the fishing town of Petty Harbour, on the Southern Shore of the Avalon Peninsula. Petty Harbour itself had a population of around five hundred people. It still does. Originally, it was called Petit Havre, but that was when the French occupied the Southern Shore. They had named it well. This tiny town sheltered on three sides by tall hills was a perfect launching point for a small-boat inshore fishery. To the east is a narrow opening in the hills to Motion Bay and to both the bounty and the terrors of the North Atlantic. Two artificial breakwaters jut out on either side of the harbour, leaving an opening only a few metres across for small and medium-sized boats to pass through. The result is a protected port, a safe haven where in older times small boats holding one, two or three fishermen could row or steam out to fertile fishing grounds in a matter of minutes.
Me and my dad, Tom Doyle, 1969. I was one month old. You’ll notice two cribs in the photo. My sister, Kim, slept in one while Bernie and I slept in the other. Mom tells of how I was so eager to get out of there that I jammed my head between the rails and my dad had to use a hacksaw to set me free.
My father, Tom Doyle, is belong to Petty Harbour. He was born on Skinner’s Hill. When I was a kid, there was only one way to get there. As you enter the town from the higher hills to the west, from the farming town of the Goulds, you’ll drive along a long run of straight road called the Long Run. Then, as you make your way around the turn on the south side of the river and harbour, you’ll drive onto a road that winds all the way down to the ocean on the south side. This is called Southside Road. The main road (conveniently called Main Road) turns north of Southside Road and then crosses New Bridge over the river that splits Petty Harbour in two. New Bridge replaced the Old Bridge long before I was born. Even though it was older than me and most of my friends when I was growing up, we still called it New Bridge. (There is now a new New Bridge, built in 1986, but it is still just called New Bridge.) It serves as the only connection between one side of the town and the other.
This bridge served an even bigger function for me. It’s where I stood, hundreds if not thousands of times in my young life, wondering what the Protestant crowd on the other side were up to, waiting for a school bus, hitchhiking to the neighbouring town, watching boats come and go as they had for centuries and, most of all, daydreaming—daydreaming about what else was out there beyond the hills and harbour. When searching for a title for my first-ever solo CD in 2012, I discovered I’d had an acting credit from the late seventies, when I stood on that very bridge as an extra in a made-for-TV film, Whale for the Killing. “Boy on Bridge, Alan Doyle,” the Internet Movie Database read. I could hardly believe I’d been officially called “Boy on Bridge,” as that’s how I’ve always pictured myself in my most formative years in the town I call home.
On the other side of the bridge you can take a detour up Skinner’s Hill (named after Bishop Skinner; finally, a landmark named after a person, a rarity in Petty Harbour), which, as I said before, is where my dad was born, the second of ten children.
He and his siblings inherited a love of singing from my grandparents and great-uncles. If you grew up in Petty Harbour, chances are you could sing. That’s just the way it was. And the Doyles were known all over town as particularly good singers. Just ask anyone in Petty Harbour and they’ll tell you, “Oh, the Doyle family? All the Doyles in Petty Harbour sing. The Doyles are the best singers in the world. No better singers than them anywhere.”
It is a long run into Petty Harbour.
Skinner’s Hill is named for Bishop Skinner. To this day, there are many Doyles up that hill.
The road on the south side of town. We really were not great at nomenclature.
When my father was young, like all the boys of his age, he was bused to St. John’s to attend high school at a Catholic boy’s college, under the close eye of the Christian Brothers. And soon after finishing high school and a trades course, he faced the daunting task of finding work in a province that had very little of it. After a few stints on delivery trucks, he eventually found steady employment, not in the fishery like almost everyone else, but as an orderly and nursing assistant at the only psychiatric hospital in St. John’s. Whenever I was asked as a kid what my father did, I would say, “Fadder works in The Mental,” and naturally, everyone knew exactly what this meant.
My mother, Regina “Jean” Pittman, is belong to Marystown on the Southern Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland, about three hundred kilometres from Petty Harbour, the youngest of seven children. She was schooled and learned to play piano and piano-accordion under the careful watch of Catholic nuns. Like many girls her age, she finished high school when she was sixteen. Then, like almost all girls from rural Newfoundland, she got on a bus in June and was shipped off to St. John’s to the Sisters of Mercy Convent to train as a nun, a nurse or, Mom’s vocation of choice, a schoolteacher.
Yes, Mom is belong to Marystown, and you can’t belong to more than one place so she never quite belonged to Petty Harbour. She once told me how lonely and isolated she felt in the town when she was posted there to teach at the tender age of only eighteen, far away from her home in Marystown. My maternal grandmother, Charlotte, was a very strong and sensible woman. She believed in duty and honour, and when my mother began a contract to teach in the one-room schoolhouse in Petty Harbour, she made my mother stay right to the end of the school year instead of quitting at Christmas like Mom wanted.
Mom and Dad cutting their wedding cake while the photographer cut off their heads. Most Newfoundland wedding pics from pre-1970 must have had the same photographer because there is an overabundance of such half-headed shots from this era.
And so, my grandmother Charlotte made her youngest daughter go back to Petty Harbour and without knowing it led my mother to my father. She and Dad became acquainted in town. I asked my mom and dad about how they fell in love. “What was it you saw in each other?” Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dad. “Alan, dear,” Mom said, “now that’s a really good question.” Then Dad shrugged his shoulders and replied, “It was simple, I s’pose. She could play and I could sing.” And that was that.
Mom’s main instrument is the piano. I remember being in my crib at home and hearing her play. I remember her teaching some local kid to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” as she reached her long arms around to lay her hands over theirs on the keyboard.
Mom became the town’s choirmaster and the go-to musician for weddings, funerals, christenings and community concerts. Dad and his brothers were the singers in town, and I guess that meant Mom and Dad were a good match. To hear them talk about it, their entire social life when they were young revolved around music. Weeknights: choir and concert practice. Weekends: singing and masses, and then kitchenparty singalongs with the neighbours. They were married in November 1965, and in perfect Catholic form, Mom was pregnant by January. They quickly started building a small two-storey house on a dirty, rocky, inhospitable precipice on Skinner’s Hill, right across from my grandparents’ place.
It was impossible ground. It still is. Any sensible person from a farming community would have taken one look at that hill and walked the other way. But not my folks. They started by pouring a concrete wall on the lowest side of the property to create a level surface, and against al
l laws of physics and gravity, they somehow managed to build a solid structure and keep a house standing on a ninety-degree bend in the road. My father and a few of his friends spent weekends and evenings shelling up and roofing the modest little house, about three hundred square feet per floor. That’s the way it was in rural Newfoundland. You didn’t call professionals to build you a house or put a roof on it. You called the boys, and you got a few cases of beer and you did it yourselves.
The houses back then in Petty Harbour, and most every house in Newfoundland, actually, were made of wood—clapboard on the outside. The way most North American lumberyards manufactured clapboard was with one smooth, sanded side and the other rough—full of cracks and splinters and grooves. The rough side was meant to face inward, while the smooth, finished side was supposed to face out. But us Newfoundlanders, being unique in our ways and far more practical than most, would often nail the clapboard rough side out because paint would stick to it better. Come to think of it, that’s the way most Newfoundland houses and Newfoundlanders themselves are built: rough side out.
The Doyle family home, circa 1975, where I grew up on Skinner’s Hill. None of the cars pictured belonged to us. If you look closely, you can see some blurry kids scampering across the rocks on the top left. I’m most likely one of those kids.
Our house was painted white. That’s how you knew it was ours. White place. Green trim. On Skinner’s Hill. There was no front stoop, or “bridge” as it is often called in Newfoundland, just a front door and a back one, and you never came in the front one, except if you were special … like my Granda. I can’t remember a time when I went into the house through that front door.
My older sister, Kim, was born in September 1966, and the day before Christmas Eve, as soon as the first floor of my folks’ house was complete, they moved in. “Complete” in this case meant the house had a kitchen with an electric stove and a fridge, and interior panelling covering all the studs. The living room at that time was not yet “complete”—just a rough board floor and no wall coverings to speak of. That was it. The second floor remained undeveloped, without even so much as stairs leading up to it.
Perhaps you’re thinking that I’ve missed something. Maybe you’re wondering, “Wouldn’t them Doyles require a bathroom? After all, there were three of them, and they had a new baby to mind.” Well, it’s true that a bathroom would have been quite a handy thing for my parents to have, a useful thing indeed. But they did not have one, so they made do without. That’s how they both had been brought up. Spend exactly all of your time making the most of what you have and exactly none of your time whining about what you don’t have. After all, both my parents had lived with much less. They’d lived before the telephone, and before flush toilets, and before rooms with more than one light bulb, in houses with no running water or electricity, where seven or eight siblings would all sleep in one bedroom. As sparse as their present accommodation was, it was their own, and they were prepared to make it a home.
With no bathroom in their house, they would bathe my sister Kim and themselves with water that Dad would retrieve from the river behind our house and heat on the stove. An old plastic beef bucket with a handmade seat made a fine toilet, and the river behind our house served as a septic line that carried the effluent away into the ocean.
Mom and Dad say they were quite content with this arrangement, though Mom admits to noticing the vast differences of farm poverty versus fishing poverty.
“Back in Marystown, we had very little. Sure, you could starve to death in February. But we had a cellar and a garden and cows to milk and chickens to get eggs from. Those few things could get you through the winter. But living though the winter on the bare rocks of Petty Harbour, with not a barn to be seen—that was a whole different kind of starving.”
They waited to develop the second storey of their house until they made some extra money. But as these things go, kids came quicker than money, and in a few short years, my parents, along with Kim, my older brother, Bernie, and me, all lived in that main-floor kitchen and one unfinished room in that little house on Skinner’s Hill. Did I mention there was no plumbing? No water line in the house at all. And still no bathroom by the time I came along. No bedrooms. No cupboards or closets. I realize this arrangement sounds fairly poor, and I suppose in retrospect it was not lavish, but my siblings and I were always warm and fed and happy.
Most of my memories kick in around age five. I remember my new little sister, Michelle, coming home from hospital. I remember that upper floor finally getting developed so the empty space gradually became three small bedrooms—boys in one room, girls in the other, parents in the third. And a real bathroom down the hall, with running water … except for the four or five months in the dead of winter when the pipes would freeze and stay frozen till spring.
Me, Kim and Bernie in matching new PJs at Mom’s family home in Marystown. Kim looks tidy and classy (typical). Bernie and me took off our pants for the photo op (also typical). Bern’s chin is taped from a hard fall he took just minutes after we arrived. I’m sure our relatives were delighted to see us bruised-up, pantless boys.
We had an oil furnace in the basement. We frequently ran out of oil in the winter, which, of course, was cause for much celebration. We’d stay in the kitchen; we’d all play cards, and often some of my aunts or uncles would come over for an impromptu “out of oil” party, and after a warming drink or two, the adults would invariably start singing and playing guitar. It was on those nights that I learned that adults love it when kids sing, and if you do it well enough, you’ll get to stay up later.
Before bed on “out of oil” nights, my folks would put heavy blankets across the doorway to the kitchen. They’d take the oven door off its hinges and heat up the room by turning the oven on. Then we’d warm home-sewn blankets in that room and bring them upstairs at night. Those heated blankets were enough to get us warm and falling into a cozy sleep before the real cold crept in. (To this day, my folks leave the heat off in their bedroom at night, and I cannot sleep with either heat or air conditioning in my bedroom.)
We had no car. My father hitchhiked twenty kilometres every day to get to his job at The Mental. And if he could get a ride for only part of the way, he’d walk the rest. But before leaving, if our plumbing was frozen, he would always go to the river behind our house. And in two or three trips with a five-gallon bucket, he would fill the sinks and kettles with water for our mother to feed and wash us for school.
We had a tab at the local convenience store that almost never got zeroed. We’d go there to get bologna or bread to have for lunch. “Tell Maureen at the store to mark it down,” Mom would say.
With the exception of one new school outfit every September and maybe something at Christmas, I wore my brother’s hand-me-down clothes till I was a teenager. The first time I ever slept in a room by myself was when I moved to St. John’s to go to my second year of university. I was nineteen years old.
When my wife, Joanne, who was then my girlfriend, came to Petty Harbour for the first time in our early twenties, I showed her around the house I grew up in. I shared some of our stories, like the “out of oil” parties. On our way back to St John’s, she casually mentioned she was not aware I’d come from a poor family. I had no idea what she was talking about. I honestly thought she was joking. It had never occurred to me that my family may have been less well off than most other Newfoundland or Canadian families.
Perhaps I should have clued in to our relative poverty when we visited my cousins in Marystown, as they had hot and cold water and even a shower in their house. I took a shower there for the first time in my life when I was about ten years old. It would have been around 1980.
It all seemed more than enough to me and to all of us at the time. Our little place on Skinner’s Hill was all I really knew until I was a teenager. I’d never been in a house in St. John’s and I certainly had never been on a plane or on a holiday to experience anything different. We were no worse off than most famili
es in Petty Harbour. It was a childhood where we made something out of nothing. We always had three meals a day. Often, the slim pickings were bolstered by Mom’s amazing homemade bread. And just about every supper had some meat or fish or chicken next to potatoes covered in some kind of rich and delicious gravy. Somehow, on a budget of a few thousands of dollars a year, my folks managed to house, clothe and feed themselves and four kids, bringing them up in a safe home full of music and love. I’ll never understand how they did it. And I’ll never be able to explain to them how grateful I am that they did.
The Doyle kids—Kim in the middle, with wee Michelle on her lap, me (left) and Bernie (right)—sitting in front of the only posh thing we owned, Mom’s piano.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
What’s in a name? A lot, as it turns out.
Before our band settled on its current name, we were briefly called Best Kind. (I know, pretty bad name, right? Worse, it was my idea.) We had been performing under the name Best Kind for a couple of months. Fortunately, Bob Hallett talked us out of keeping that name.
“It sounds like we’re bragging,” he said. “Or worse, it sounds like it’s supposed to be funny. Our band is not a joke.”
This was right around the time we were producing our first record at Piper Stock Studios. The term “studio” only loosely applies, since it was just a couple of rooms in a basement—but that basement happened to be Dermot O’Reilly’s, and Dermot was in Ryan’s Fancy, an awesome traditional band (with a really good name, I might add). After the week-long crash course of teaching ourselves to play and sing on beat and in tune, at least periodically, we were out of session time and out of money. That meant our record was as finished as it was going to get.