The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Page 40
In 1943, Smallwood became bored with being the Barrelman. He became bored with life. The Commission of Government was still in power. There were no causes to espouse or oppose. A friend observed that “you are not yourself these days.” To make you understand just how far from being himself he was, we need only point out that he started to resort to repetition. He of whom it has been said that there are not in the English language enough synonyms to get him through a single day began to repeat himself. He rewrote old programs, hoping no one would notice, then wondered what the implications were when no one did. He sat down and, using a pencil and paper, calculated that he had spoken two million, five hundred thousand words on the air in the past six years. He had had enough. It was time for a change.
Unlike most broadcasters, who switch to swineherding in their fifties, Smallwood did so at the age of forty-two. He went to Gander and started up on the Royal Canadian Air Force Base what became known as the perpetual motion piggery. Under Smallwood’s scheme, swill from the mess rooms was fed to pigs to keep the mess rooms in pork to keep the pigs in swill. In other words, the airmen ate the same pigs over and over again.
He was referred to in Gander as the “Pork Barrelman.” One writer asserted that, should Smallwood ever make it into politics, the nickname would become “doubly apt,” a phrase to discover the meaning of which we have puzzled for hours without success.
IN GANDER IN 1945, when I heard that Whitehall had announced that self-rule was to be returned to Newfoundland, I was at first crestfallen, for I foresaw a return to the old system under which, if you were not a member of some merchant family, you had no chance to get ahead in politics. An image of Prowse as prime minister flashed through my mind and I felt sick with envy and resentment.
But instead of handing back independence immediately, as had recently been done in Malta, Whitehall ruled that Newfoundlanders should first elect forty-five delegates to a National Convention, which would debate and recommend future forms of government to be voted on by the public in a national referendum. I did not see immediately the purpose of this deviation from the 1934 promise to give us back our independence when we were once again self-supporting.
But I was elated about the National Convention, for I was certain that none of the established “names” would come out in favour of Confederation with Canada, which I intended to do. I decided I would be its champion in part because it was the one cause that, far-fetched and unlikely to succeed, had no champion.
While away from St. John’s, I had thought a lot about the time I had spent on the south and southwest coasts, and I had begun to wonder if independence really was a luxury that Newfoundland could not afford, a prideful dream, a vain delusion impossible to sustain if you lived anywhere in Newfoundland except St. John’s.
That fisherman in 1936 when I tried to unionize the southwest coast, slumped over his oars, embarrassed to have me see him so exhausted. The sealers of the S.S. Newfoundland, the survivors with their bandaged frostbitten hands and feet, and the pairs and threesomes of men who embraced, not for warmth, but for fellowship in death and were found and brought back home that way. The trout-subsisting families in those little section shacks strung out along the railway.
I believed in the cause I had decided to fight for. I believed any decent person who had seen what I had seen would do the same. But I recalled, too, Sir Richard’s assessment of socialism as the “politics of poverty” and therefore the only means of gaining power that was open to a man like me. I fancied I had at last found the version of socialism that Newfoundlanders might accept — confederation with a country that some thought of as a social welfare state. I would do what no politician in Newfoundland had ever done. I would make as my constituency, not the merchants or the hordes who voted as the merchants told them to, but the poor who were greater than the others in number if in nothing else.
Here was the something commensurate with the greatness of the land itself, which I had so often felt was just beyond my understanding. The paradox of this permanent imminence was solved at last.
All this, of course, was as much of a pipedream in 1946 as getting rich from The Book of Newfoundland had been ten years before. But it was not long after I announced my support for Confederation with Canada that what I can only describe as the “interventions” began. Without my lifting a finger, the obstacles that had always stood between me and doing something great began to fall.
There was, for instance, the announcement that candidates for the National Convention must run in the ridings where they normally resided. I would therefore stand as a candidate in the Bonavista riding, which included the Gander air-force base where I had spent the past two years — as unlikely as it already seemed to me — farming pigs. I had gone there to get away from Prowse and Fielding. Had I stayed in St. John’s, I would have had to run there, where a confederate would not have stood a chance.
At exactly what point Governor MacDonald and the Commission of Government began to keep their eyes on me is hard to say. Some would later claim it was so I could run in Bonavista that the new residency requirement was imposed, that that was the first sign the British had singled me out as their champion of Confederation.
I very much doubt that they thought, or that it was possible for anyone to think, that far ahead during those times. But the residency requirement was, I think, intended to keep anti-confederate merchants in St. John’s who did not want to lose to Canadians any portion of their Newfoundland monopoly from running in outport districts — and by extension, to give outporters who were more likely to be in favour of social programs, and therefore proconfederate, a chance to win seats.
I ran and was elected by a landslide in the riding of Bonavista, the only declared pro-confederate to win a seat in the National Convention. Nothing much was made of this. Barely one-fifth of the province turned out to vote in the National Convention election. Few people believed that any result but a return to independence was possible. My victory was put down to my popularity as an entertainer, which it was presumed I would not get any real political mileage out of — I would never be anything more than a backbencher if by some fluke I should ever get myself elected to the legislature.
The National Convention opened on September 11, 1946, in the Lower Chamber of the Colonial Building. A week before that, while I was preparing a speech in the house I had rented in St. John’s, I received a phone call from Prowse, who said that Governor MacDonald would like to meet me. At first I refused.
“You’re not still sulking about getting thrown out of Government House are you, Smallwood?” Prowse said. “I was just doing my job.”
“It’s who you were doing it for that bothers me,” I said.
“Look, no hard feelings, all right?”
I said nothing.
“I’ll come by and pick you up in my car,” Prowse said. I wondered if I could stand to be in his company and not mention Fielding. I assured him I could make my own way to Government House, which was barely half a mile from where I lived, but he insisted that we use his car.
“I’ll just wait at the curb until you come out,” he said. “We don’t want to start any unfounded rumours.”
Reluctantly, I agreed and at eight o’clock that evening a car that I knew was not Prowse’s but that he was driving stopped in front of my house. I went out and got in the front seat.
“Hello, Smallwood,” Prowse said, extending his hand, grinning in that same collusive, aren’t-we-a-pair-of-rascals way of his. I shook his hand perfunctorily.
Prowse was still working for the Commission of Government. In spite of the fact that new commissioners from England were appointed every few years, he had survived each transition and was now deputy minister of something under Commissioner Flinn. He had run for the National Convention in one of the St. John’s districts and been defeated, having campaigned as neither a confederate nor an independent. He had been one of the few candidates to declare himself in favour of the status quo, a continuation of the commission. He
had won the civil-service vote in a district where a minority of people were, one way or another, employed by the Commission of Government, for which he had argued throughout his campaign, dispassionately, regretfully — he wished he could say Newfoundland was ready to resume its independence, he hoped he would one day be able to say it, but he could not, in good conscience, do so yet. He had seemed during his campaign to be going through the motions, expecting to lose, running only so as to demonstrate his loyalty to his employers, perhaps even running at their behest, an apologist for the record of the commission since its appointment in 1934.
“Since when do you run errands for the governor?” I said. Prowse laughed, but looked as though he would have liked to reply in kind. “When you work for the commission, you see the governor a lot. He knows I am someone he can trust.”
“You have somehow fooled him into thinking that,” I felt like saying, but didn’t.
Prowse drove up in front of Government House and parked his car off to the side, in the shadows of some overhanging fir trees. We got out, walked to the front of the house and up the steps. Prowse rang the doorbell, the door soon swung open and standing there was, I was fairly certain, the same liveried fellow whose sincere solicitousness I had mistaken for condescension the night I arrived at Government House years ago for the press reception.
“Good evening, Mr. Prowse, Mr. Smallwood,” he said. There was a trace in his voice of an English accent now.
“Good evening, Rodney,” Prowse said.
“If you would follow me, gentlemen,” Rodney said. A butler’s name, or footman’s, whatever he was. We followed him through the stucco entrance, then right, off the lobby, past a curved flying staircase inlaid with marble. A navy blue runner spilled down the staircase onto the oak floor, where it branched out through the house in all directions. We proceeded through a maze of gloomy, wainscoted, portrait-hung hallways until at last I saw ahead a room in which a light was on and the fireplace was lit.
“Your excellency,” Rodney said grandly, “Mr. Prowse and Mr. Smallwood have arrived,” as though he were announcing some visiting heads of state.
Crimson-faced, I walked into the room and before I could see the governor I heard him rise from his chair, an emphatic but unhurried commotion, a faint grunt of exertion, an exhalation of breath that it seemed betrayed a touch of impatience or exasperation, as if he was about to perform one of the more tedious tasks he was obliged by his office to perform.
I was barely inside the room when I found myself face to face with him. Prowse introduced us and we shook hands. He was dressed businessman fashion, in a dark blue, faintly pinstriped suit, a plain red tie and a white shirt. He was quite a large man, though how large I had not until this moment appreciated, never having been this close to him before. His hairline was receding, and as if to compensate, he had let his hair grow slightly, and shaggily, at the back. His eyebrows were black and bushy, protruding almost awning-like above his eyes; resting almost on the tip of his nose were a pair of thick, black-rimmed bifocals, over the top of which he looked at me as he held out his hand for me to shake.
He motioned us to two chairs that were angled towards the one in which he had been sitting — the red plush was still faintly imprinted with his weight, and as he settled down, he emitted the same sort of spirit-weary sigh as before. Directly overhead was a three-pronged, cod-jigger-like chandelier, three bulbs burning lowly. I crossed my legs and put my hat on my knees, feeling somehow responsible for the fact that I was still holding it, though I was fairly sure that Rodney should have taken it from me.
Governor MacDonald, in the instant before he spoke, looked me up and down. I was wearing my best clothes — the best clothes of a man who had spent the last two years farming pigs, his expression seemed to me to say, for I had no doubt that Prowse had filled him in about me.
“You wouldn’t like a drink, would you?” he said, as though he was assuring me that I would not. I wondered if this was a veiled reference to my ten-years-past encounter with Hope Simpson. But I knew MacDonald to be a teetotaller. There had been much grumbling in St. John’s lately about how no tedium-relieving liquor of any kind was served at Government House parties.
“I don’t drink — at all, your excellency,” I said, wondering if it was proper for me to refer to him as Rodney had. It was true, I had recently sworn off liquor completely, though it would not last. He raised those conspicuous eyebrows of his, whether out of surprise at the fervour of my declaration of abstinence or because of the gaffe in protocol I had just committed and that he must, loath as he was to do it, ignore, I was not sure.
“Laudable,” he said. “Very laudable.” I knew him to be a Welshman, as was Commissioner James, while Commissioners Flinn and Neill were Irishman, all appointed since Whitehall’s call for a national convention in 1945. The lack of Englishmen among the foursome had been widely noted, though what if anything it portended no one was certain. Irishmen and Welshmen would find favour with the outporters and the urban poor, so many of whom were descended from Irish and Welsh settlers, whereas most of the “ruling” families of St. John’s were English.
Governor MacDonald’s accent was as English as Hope Simpson’s had been, but that did not matter, since it was only those whose favour he did not need to curry who ever heard him speak. I knew he had once been a coal miner, and after that the leader of the Welsh Co-operative Movement and the Welsh Miners’ Federation, then a Labour member of Parliament and ultimately a Labour Cabinet minister. It did not seem to me there was much of the coal miner or Labour Party member left in him.
“You may smoke if you wish,” he said. Thinking his abstinence might extend to smoking; I was about to decline when he took out his pipe, at which point I took out a cigarette and accepted a light from him.
“Thank you,” I said. He nodded his head and winced as if it pained him to be thanked, or as if he could not stand the thought of having to spend the evening pretending not to notice or not to mind my social clumsiness. He exuded a sense of weary exasperation that it was not as obvious to others as it was to him what was wrong with the world. He sighed continually, shifted in his chair, ran his hand over his face, leaned his head sideways on his hand as he looked at me as if he had long since despaired of making himself understood to anyone and therefore believed the only hope for the world was if people contented themselves with doing exactly what he told them to without understanding what purpose they were serving.
His origins, rather than making him feel sympathetic towards me, must have allowed him to foresee all too clearly the tiresome lengths someone of my social standing would go to not to seem gauche in front of him. Perhaps I reminded him of some younger, intolerable-to-remember version of himself.
“Let me first assure you,” he said, “that by inviting you here this evening, we are not attempting to interfere with the proceedings of the National Convention or the upcoming referendum. We are bound by our office to neutrality in such matters, as I believe we should be. But like anyone else, we have our own opinions about what would be best for Newfoundland, and though it would not be proper for us to tell you what they are, we are naturally curious to hear from such people as you. Mr. Prowse tells me that you believe it would be in the best interests of its people if Newfoundland were to confederate with Canada.”
“Yes,” I said, “I — ”
“The problem, I suppose,” he said, in the tone of someone taking a polite interest in the technical aspects of a profession he was not much familiar with, “is how to get Confederation on the referendum ballot paper?”
This was close to being the very sort of impropriety he had just assured me he had no intention of committing. I resented it, yet at the same time felt euphoric at the possibility that however improper it might be, he was about to, implicitly or explicitly, pledge me his support. It must have been only the trace of resentment that he noticed, for he sighed wearily as if to say, “I’ll wait while you give your high horse a token trot around the room.”
“Yes, that is the problem,” I said. “But I think I can convince a majority of delegates to agree to put it on the ballot paper.”
MacDonald smiled broadly, looked at Prowse as if this meeting had been his idea. Prowse beamed back at him. No doubt about it, I had been recruited at Prowse’s urging.
“Mr. Prowse tells me,” MacDonald said, “that you are quite popular in Newfoundland, especially in the outports, because of a radio program you once hosted called ‘The Barrelman.’ ”
“For that and for other reasons, I suppose,” I said.
He nodded his head emphatically, as if to say he had no doubt that I was a man of many accomplishments. He seemed to have taken to me now that he knew that boorish scrupulosity was not among my faults.
I wondered when he would commit himself more explicitly. I assumed that what I was hearing was a prologue to some plan he was about to unveil and wanted me to implement. But he went on in the same vein, and I wondered if the resentment that I was sure had fleetingly crossed my face when he said the word Confederation had put him off, as if he saw before him someone too naive or loose-lipped to be trusted as a partner in impropriety. Then it occurred to me that he might be planning to have Prowse fill me in later in his absence.