The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  Prowse sat there smiling, showing his prominent, gapped, gleaming white front teeth; Prowse whom Fielding had once loved. And perhaps still did.

  “Fielding the turncoat,” Sir Richard said, “bent over a saw-horse, all the boys of Bishop Feild threatening to whale away on her with her own cane. I want you two to write a letter to the editors of all the papers about this. Make it clear you never laid a finger on her and never intended to. Just so long as her humiliation comes across. And then say that she’s making up lies now, writing lies now, just like she did at school; writing lies for a newspaper just like she did at school. There’s a lovely irony for you. Say that nothing’s changed, she’s still the same old Fielding, conducting her smear campaigns against men like us, men of action whose courage and accomplishments she envies.”

  It was clear that Prowse had already agreed to write this letter and that if I did not help him and co-sign it, I would fall in Squires’s estimation and he would conclude that I did not have the stomach for politics. When he saw my reluctance, he acted almost hurt, as if, after such a promising start, I was turning out not to be the man he had thought I was.

  “Of course, if you’d rather leave it all to Prowse,” Sir Richard said, smiling at Prowse, who smiled back as if he had often done this sort of thing on Sir Richard’s behalf.

  “It might turn the public against you,” I said. “A band of boys ganging up on a girl.”

  “If it were any other woman, I’d agree with you,” Sir Richard said. “But this is Fielding. People know Fielding. She’s twice the size of most men. Are you telling me you won’t do this, Smallwood?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I will. I will. It’s just that — ”

  “I don’t just want to win this election, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said. “I want every vote, every polling station, every riding I can get. I want to pay them back for what they did to me in ’23.”

  “Of course, but — ”

  “You’re the one whose future this Fielding woman destroyed,” Sir Richard said, apparently oblivious to the possibility that I might be embarrassed by this bleak assessment of my prospects. I could not help wondering what sort of post-election victory reward he had in mind for me if he considered my future to have been destroyed.

  “Is there something between you and Fielding that could damage us?” he said. “Are you afraid that if you write this letter, this something might come out?”

  I shook my head and looked at Prowse. It occurred to me, for the first time, that Fielding might have confessed to protect Prowse, that it might have been Prowse who wrote the letter to the Morning Post. Fielding might have thought, when she saw him accusing me, that he had panicked, and might have confessed to prevent a controversy that could have ended badly for him. It was possible; it was the kind of thing he would let someone do for him. Whether it was the kind of thing that she would do I wasn’t sure. In one way, I would rather have been wronged by him than by her. But it was unbearable that she would have been willing to sacrifice so much for him.

  “Why did you hire that woman to work for your paper, anyway, after what she did to you?” Sir Richard said.

  I thought about telling him that Fielding had saved my life, but I could not bring myself to do it, for it seemed to me that the more people there were who knew of Fielding’s heroism, the more indebted to Fielding I would be. I not only felt indebted to her, I felt, for reasons I could not understand, that her having saved my life rendered me morally inferior to her. Perhaps it was our keeping it a secret and not even speaking of it ourselves: she, it seemed to me, so affectedly noble, humble; and me so begrudging with my gratitude. Or perhaps it was because we both doubted that I would have risked my life to save hers.

  I told Sir Richard about organizing the sectionmen’s union and Fielding’s refusal to join and how I felt “indirectly” responsible for her losing her job.

  “It served her right,” Sir Richard said. “She had no business working on the railway anyway, but she should have joined the union. She’s anti-labour, anti-working class.” My list of champions of the working class would not have had Sir Richard at its top, but I said nothing, and in any case what he said was true, if only because Fielding was anti-everything.

  “Why in God’s name would the daughter of a doctor want to be a sectionman?” he said. “Maybe you could play that up in your letter. There might be an angle there. This is your chance to get even with her, Smallwood. Getting her fired from one job doesn’t make you even, not after what she did to you.”

  In the end, I agreed to write the letter with Prowse. We wrote it on the table in the front room of my house. Clara and the children — my second son, William, had just been born — were visiting her parents in Harbour Grace. On entering my house, Prowse looked about at its cramped dinginess as if it to say that it was more suitable for skulduggery than his posh place on Winter Avenue.

  “There are a lot of people out there who know that what you told Sir Richard isn’t true,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, Smallwood,” Prowse said. “You just write the letter and leave the rest to me.”

  I wrote drafts that Prowse critiqued. He kept telling me I was leaving too much out, going too easy on Fielding. I remembered how he had been willing to flog the “truth” out of me, to cast me off as a friend as abruptly as he had Fielding, but I held my tongue about it, as I had done throughout our meeting with Sir Richard. I remembered his last words to me when I refused his attempt to patch things up after I had been exonerated by Fielding’s confession: “Go join the Lepers. They’re the only ones who’ll have you now.” Eventually I wrote a draft that he thought was good enough. We brought it to Sir Richard, who said he could guarantee publication of every word of it in every paper, the Telegram included.

  We wrote that our letter was an answer to an anonymous letter written long ago and never published, though attributed to me by Headmaster Reeves, who was genuinely unaware that I was not its author, having been led to the conclusion that I was by the letter’s postmark. Fielding, we said, when threatened with a caning, had confessed to writing this letter to the Morning Post. I was every bit as graphic in my description of Fielding’s humiliation as Sir Richard insisted I should be. I then revealed how the letter controversy had affected me, how I had been “blackballed” by the faculty and streamed commercial, after which, my hopes of a college education dashed, I was forced to quit the school and get a job to help support my family.

  The letter was printed verbatim, as Sir Richard had promised, except that it was signed not only by Prowse and me, but by all the boys, now men, who had been at the Feild that day. Prowse, at Sir Richard’s behest and unknown to me, had gone round to all of them and got them to sign it.

  In no time it was the talk of St. John’s. Letters to the editor in defence of the ganged-up-on girl-Fielding poured in just as I had predicted and were printed in the Telegram, but in the other papers, both Tory and Liberal, there were gleeful editorials and letters, the gist of which was that Fielding had been revealed to be the hypocrite people had all along suspected her of being.

  There was now an explanation for Fielding, a history her enemies could point to that explained the way she wrote, her irony, her sarcasm, her cynicism, her misanthropy. To the riddle of Fielding, her school days were the answer; the freakishly tall girl, the bitter loner, the doctor’s daughter who, because of her unpopularity and because she could not live up to her father’s expectations, had written to a newspaper a letter falsely smearing the school and had framed another student for it, a poor student for whom Bishop Feild was his one chance for advancement and whose improbable popularity Fielding envied.

  I suppose if Fielding had been a writer of the sort of earnest editorials that appeared daily in all the other papers, our letter might have done even more harm than it did.

  The Telegram ran beside her next column a picture of Fielding from her schooldays; Fielding at thirteen, looking almost like a send-up of the disdainfully embittered girl we made
her out to be in our letter; Fielding layered in petticoats, standing sideways to the camera but looking straight at it, two hands clasping the knob of her cane, eyes scowling out at the camera from under some sort of bonnet, which she had never worn at school, something she must have been cajoled into wearing, by her father perhaps, just for this portrait; Fielding before her confession, before her days as a reporter at the courthouse, before New York, before the San and Bonavista.

  Field Day, March 17, 1928

  Excerpt from Hooligans Seized Her, by Sheilagh Shakespeare:

  Her father begged her not to go to school that day. He had had a dream, he said, in which eight who once had called her friend did set upon her, and tore her clothing from her body strip by strip and sent her forth into the street, where horses at the sight of her did neigh, and grown men groaned and boys did shriek and squeal.

  “You have misconstrued this dream,” said Fielding. “This signifies my greatness, which, though I were stripped of all my earthly power, all my wealth, would still shine forth, for I am Fielding.”

  Her father, bowing his head, replied: “I pray you again, my dear, go not to the school today.”

  “What say the augurers?” said Fielding.

  “Lady Squires sends this letter,” her father said. “ ‘Plucking the entrails of my husband forth, I could not find a heart within the beast.’ What can this signify?” her father said.

  “That Fielding would be heartless did she not venture forth,” said Fielding.

  “Your wisdom is consumed in confidence,” her father said. “Stir not from this house today.”

  “What can be avoided whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” said Fielding. “Fielding shall go forth.”

  “Say you are sick,” her father said.

  “Shall Fielding send a lie?” said Fielding. “Give me my cane, for I shall go.”

  And so Fielding went to school and, surrounded by her worshippers, did survey the Feild.

  “Let me have men about me that are fat,” said Fielding. “Yond’ Smallwood has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

  They, on some pretext, did entice her to the Annex and she did there confess to falsely accusing the school in a letter to the Morning Post of feeding the boys of Bishop Feild spit-roasted rat and withholding from them toothpicks so that with rat ribs were they forced to pick their teeth.

  One Porter did goad the other boys, including Prowse, who, in former days, had been her friend of friends, into caning her. The eight of them did bend Fielding over a saw-horse and, lifting up her skirts, did reveal to all what heretofore none but Fielding in a mirror had admired.

  “When buggers lie,” said Fielding, “there are no backsides seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the breadth of Fielding’s.”

  “Speak, hands, for me,” said Porter and with her own cane was Fielding flogged while Smallwood watched, once by each of them until only Prowse was left. Et tu, Prowse. Then bawled Fielding.

  They left her there, by eight abused, by eight forsaken; friendless Fielding, fanny-flayed.

  The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones. The noble Feildians have told you that Fielding was malicious. If so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Fielding answered it. If not, the Feildians lie.

  Fielding’s answer mystified even those of us who knew our Shakespeare. Sir Richard was nonplussed and stared at the column and the picture of Fielding beside it as though he had been outdone by their sheer inscrutability.

  “She’s hiding behind that cleverness of hers again,” Sir Richard said to Prowse and me. “What kind of answer is this to being called a liar and a cheat? And she says you caned her, caned her with her bloomers down around her knees. Is that true?”

  “She’s lying,” Prowse said.

  “A lie for a lie,” I could not resist saying.

  “What’s that?” Sir Richard said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Prowse is right. She was never caned.”

  “You shouldn’t have provoked that Fielding woman,” my father said, the next time I saw him. “You shouldn’t have written that letter. Nothing good will come of writing letters to newspapers.” All the while I was at the house, he walked about reading Julius Caesar, searching out the allusions to it in Fielding’s column, reading the most portent-ridden, fatalistic passages aloud.

  “If not, then Feildians lie,” my father said, shaking his head. “She says she wrote the letter, yet she accuses you of lying. ‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ ”

  “What evil does she think you’ve done?” my mother said to me. “If you ask me, she’s the evil one, talking in riddles and circles just like the devil does.”

  “Were there really eight of you?” my father said.

  “No,” I said. “More like forty.”

  “Five times eight,” my father said. “I’ve never liked the number eight. Eight men to kill one man. All you boys and just one girl. That’s the kind of thing that stays with you all your life.” I wondered if he meant Fielding’s life or mine.

  Throughout the campaign, I received telegrams from Sir Richard from all over the island. YOU ARE MY MAN IN HUMBER STOP REMEMBER THAT STOP AM COUNTING ON YOU STOP SRS.

  It was obvious that Sir Richard was going to take Humber with a massive majority, but he could not stop fretting about what his margin of victory would be. DREAMT LAST NIGHT BARRETT SHUT OUT STOP NOT A SINGLE VOTE STOP SRS.

  I travelled, as I had throughout the winter, to every household in the district. Sir Richard took a swing through Humber near the end of the campaign, spent two days there, but by that time he was so exhausted that his speeches were almost incoherent. In one town hall, he five times reminded the audience that he was the man who had brought to Humber district the country’s second pulp-and-paper mill. I sat on the platform behind him, leading the applause, and when I saw that the audience was growing bored, scuffed my shoe on the floor, our signal that he had talked long enough and should start summing up. He nodded his head, mumbled some closing words, then staggered off the stage. Anything more than a public lapse into unconsciousness would have seemed to them a triumph, so completely had I convinced them of his virtue.

  Sir Richard was swept back into power, taking 83 per cent of the vote in Humber district, and across the island twenty-eight of thirty-six seats. I was in Humber and he was in St. John’s when the votes were counted.

  “We are back in power, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, when I called him by telephone. “For four years, they have been dancing on my grave, the bastards, and now my turn has come to dance on theirs. In return for everything you’ve done for me, I’m making you a justice of the peace. What do you think of that? Not bad for someone who never finished high school, eh?”

  I was so disappointed I could barely speak, and when I did manage a few words, I was on the verge of tears.

  “I was hoping for something … political,” I said. “Hoping to work with your … administration, with … you.”

  “A successful politician has many debts to pay,” Sir Richard said. “My list of people whose generosity I feel I should — reciprocate — is long, Smallwood, very long.”

  Justices of the peace travelled in pairs throughout the island, accompanied by a bailiff/bodyguard, trying cases too insignificant for the higher courts to bother with. I had seen them conducting their proceedings on fishing wharves, using wooden crates for benches and weighting down their papers with beach rocks so they would not blow away. I could see myself in itinerant exile from St. John’s, could see before me years spent wandering the outports of Newfoundland, prosecuting people driven, out of poverty and boredom, to petty crime, sending to jail and fining and making lifelong enemies of people whose vote I might be looking for someday. It would be like a life spent at the wretched courthouse, only worse, less grand, without the pomp and circumstance of courtrooms; like becoming a modern-day fishing admiral.


  I knew Squires wanted me out of the way to spare himself the embarrassment of having to acknowledge my existence from time to time. I knew it, but told myself I did not resent him for it, for it was what I would have done in his situation. A politician had to do what was expedient. I somehow had to show him that I was not what he was fully justified in presuming me to be. As well, I assumed that all ambitious young men went through some such phase of exploitation by the politicians they helped to get elected.

  I wrote to him, telling him, with thanks, that I was declining his offer and returning to “my first love,” writing for newspapers. He wrote back, tersely wished me well and, for a long while, that was that. It was not until I learned that Prowse had been hired on as Sir Richard’s executive assistant that I vowed I would never speak to either one of them again.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Eighteen:

  SIX CLEAR-SIGHTED PROTESTANTS

  In spite of Cochrane’s painstakingly-arrived-at objections, a local legislature is established on June 7, 1832.

  In the first election, ten of the fifteen seats are won by Protestant Conservatives, five by Catholic Liberals. Governor Sir Henry Prescott notes the obvious inequity and suggests measures to decrease the number of Catholics.

  He proposes, among other things, that only those occupying property valued at ten pounds or more per year be allowed to vote. But his suggestions are rejected by the Colonial Office, with the disastrous result that after the next election, Catholics outnumber Protestants nine to six.

  Luckily for Newfoundlanders, and owing to the foresight of Governor Prescott, there is a non-elected, governor-appointed Senate-like council consisting of six clear-sighted Protestant opponents of self-rule, with absolute powers of veto. By sending back all bills sent to it by the House, this council brings the business of government to a standstill.

  What a debt is owed to these six men who stood alone against the enemies of Newfoundland, and whose only support consisted of the governor, the Colonial Office, the Privy Council, the British Parliament and the king of England. If not for them, the 1830s would have seen the Poor Relief Bill passed in spite of the opposition to it of the poor themselves, on whose behalf the merchants marched in protest through the streets.