by Ed Kavanagh
I’m sorry if I’m rambling—another apology!—but I want you to know that what I’ve written is more about people than it is about the Depression. I guess I’m a typical Newfoundlander—got to turn everything into a story. So I think I took the personal touch a little too far. Reading this over, I see that a lot of it is about Annie Foran. But she was what I needed at the time: a lamp in the dark. And she gave me a great gift.
So I hope your professor doesn’t fail you in your assignment. Actually, if you’re reading this now, professor, it’s not Marcia’s fault! She tried to get more out of me. She really did. It’s just that I’m a stubborn old woman. When I was in school the nuns were always after me to stay on topic. “Avoid digressions!” they used to say. And here I am, all these years later, still guilty of the same sin. Well, what odds. What’s the point of being nearly ninety if you can’t commit a few sins?
Anyway, Marcia, I hope things are going well for you up in Nova Scotia. Please God, I’ll see you and your mom when you’re home for the holidays. Don’t forget my birthday get-together on the 21st. And if you think this is only fit for the fire when you’ve finished reading it, you go right ahead and strike a match.
It was fitting that I first met Annie Foran during Christmastime, because she brought a light into my world. God knows I needed it. They call them the Dirty Thirties, but to me they were always the Dark Thirties. It’s the darkness I most remember: I used to wear it like a cloak.
In December 1932, six months after my father and I had moved to Kilbride, our parish priest visited my grade five class at St. Joseph’s. Father Walsh told us all about the Christ Child and what his coming into the world meant for us. As he spoke, his gaze often lingered on me. Perhaps he’d heard that my mother and baby sister had recently died. Maybe he suspected that he had a doubter on his hands. Well, he would have been right. Father Walsh was a cheerful, pleasant man, and a passionate speaker. But I couldn’t believe what he was saying. To me the story of the Holy Family and the Magi and the Star in the East was just that: a story. Perhaps the loveliest story. But I couldn’t see what it had to do with me.
After he’d left, Sister Katherine took us over to Corpus Christi to see the crèche. Every year the men from the Holy Name Society constructed an elaborate crèche—real spruce and fir boughs, real hay, a hand-built lean-to sheltering the manger. No, they didn’t bring in live animals like you sometimes see these days, but it was quite well done. You almost expected the alabaster cows to moo. The fresh fragrance of boughs mixed with the peppery scent of incense. Everything lit by candlelight. I remember sweet Sister Katherine being charmed and moved, smiling and saying that the Baby Jesus looked “otherworldly.” I knew what she meant, but for me “otherworldly” held a different meaning: despite the manger and swaddling clothes, the serene, adoring animals, the Baby Jesus was clearly not of this world. My world. The scene, even though it spoke on the surface to the farm where I was living, was also foreign. I couldn’t picture Joseph and the Three Kings kneeling in Uncle George’s damp, smelly barn. But what struck me most was that Jesus didn’t at all resemble my sister Margaret when she had lain in her crib.
I don’t know when the dark times started for my parents, but for me they started with Margaret. I remember long periods when she would screech herself into a knot, my mother picking her up, singing to her, waltzing her around our poky flat, her thin shoulders rising and falling with each of Margaret’s cries. The crying would be followed by equally long periods of silence when Margaret would flail and grimace and stare at the flaking ceiling in a kind of elaborate mime that only she could understand. Then the shrieking would begin again, followed by more silence. But, gradually, the silences grew longer. And one morning the silence kept on. Then it was my mother who was shrieking, startling me from whatever dream I had drifted into, and John and Mary, the neighbours below us, came rushing up the echoing stairwell. And when we looked into the crib, a shadow moved across Margaret’s still face.
Later, I saw my father taking Margaret away in her own sad swaddling clothes. It was a scene far removed from the crèche in Corpus Christi with its posed figures kneeling amongst the flickering votive candles.
When Margaret was alive we lived in the top flat of a rickety-thin row house on Queen’s Road. I remember the musty, clattering stairwell. The cold. Margaret’s crib. My father staring out the back dormer window at the harbour.
Like my sister, he was also prone to periods of silence. But somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered better days: Father heading off to work as a longshoreman, plenty of coal for the fire, my mother singing in her sweet soprano voice, more laughter and lightness in the flat. But as things grew worse—no work, no money, the dole—my father’s silences also grew longer. One thing he would talk about, though, was that hated dole order. I read somewhere that between 1931 and 1933, 90,000 people in Newfoundland were on the dole: one-third of the population. When we first got it, it didn’t even include milk. I still remember the monthly allotment for an adult: 25 lbs. of flour; 1 qt. of molasses; 3 3/4 lbs. of fatback pork; 2 lbs. of beans; 1lb. of split peas; 2 lbs. of corn meal; 3/4 lb. of cocoa. Father was convinced that the dole had helped kill Margaret, and that it would probably kill all of us if something didn’t happen.
He certainly tried to make something happen. Like hundreds more, he went out every morning, in all weather, wearing a steely, determined look, the collar of his short jacket pulled high, his salt and pepper cap pulled low. But there was usually nothing. Maybe a few hobbles in winter clearing streets and steps. So he marched in the parades of the unemployed (when I first heard of them I thought they were like the Christmas parades) and he always attended the organizing meetings. Then, in April, he came home with a broken nose from the riot at the Colonial Building. I think now that the riot must have been the last straw for him. That and the death of my mother. Because, not long after Margaret had slipped into silence, she also died—died, as they used to say, of her lungs. Or grief. Or lack of hope. Perhaps all three.
And when she was buried next to her daughter, high in Mount Carmel cemetery, I remember standing a little apart from the others—John and Mary, Uncle George and Aunt Winnie—a biting gale whipping my thin coat and tam, and looking down at the patterns the swirling wind was conjuring on Quidi Vidi Lake. Then my father coming and crouching before me and saying, quite simply, “Ivy, we’re getting out.” It was a cryptic thing to say to a child because I couldn’t think in metaphors. What could “out” possibly mean?
“Out,” I soon discovered, was five miles away—into Kilbride with Uncle George, Aunt Winnie, and my cousins: Ruth, a year younger than me, and Sean, a year older. Just five miles, yet it seemed a different world. St. John’s was small then, but it was still a city with crowds and shops, streetcars and carrier carts. Tall, black-coated constables. Schooners and steamers bumping in the harbour, many flying exotic foreign flags. All my life I had breathed the city’s earthy aromas: the tangy-salt reek of the busy harbour with its shiploads of fish and seals. Clouds of acrid cigarette smoke engulfing the foreign fishermen on Water Street. Coal dust on the damp, foggy air. I had stared at bands of Portuguese sailors in their jaunty berets, their jackets slung around their shoulders like capes. I had darted amongst the shabby poor, the gaudy rich, the shadowy in-betweens. I had seen Government House and the post office and the museum. Slums and boarding houses. Chinese restaurants and laundries. Mangy dogs, streetwise cats, blinkered, patient horses. I had listened to the city’s sounds, its noises: cars and cartwheels, horseshoes on cobblestones, train whistles, ships’ horns, screeching starlings exploding into the sky like fireworks.
And I had my friend Barbara, who lived around the corner from me on Victoria Street. Many mornings, whether stormy or fine, we had set off together to Presentation Convent; and many times after school we had run down to the harbour, and for five cents dragged home cod almost as big as ourselves.
Like my father, St. John’s was what I knew.
We set out fo
r Kilbride in June, as soon as school was over. Father had somehow engaged a taxi to take us and our few belongings as far as Corpus Christi, which was as far as the driver was willing to go. It had rained heavily in the previous week and he was afraid the roads farther west would, as he put it, “tear up my car.” I’m sure Father hired that car, despite the cost, for me: that he doubted I could walk five miles.
As we drove out Waterford Bridge Road the world grew greener. To the south the Waterford River meandered, glinting in the morning sun. The large houses that I couldn’t believe held but a single family grew farther apart. We pulled up in the churchyard and my father paid the driver and stared west up Bay Bulls Road. Then he pointed to a long, narrow building a little to the east. “St. Joseph’s,” he said. “That’s where you’ll be going in September.” He arranged my knapsack on my back, picked up our two suitcases, and we began to walk.
When we reached the turn-off to the mile-long road that led to my uncle’s farm, I realized why the driver had been so adamant about turning around where he did. The road, so built up now and paved, wasn’t much more than a potholed track. There were few buildings, just ragged woods melding into fields or meadows dotted with dandelion and sectioned off by riddle fences, many collapsed or askew from the winter storms. After St. John’s and the roaring motor of the taxi, it was strangely quiet, just the rush of water in the ditches, the eerie call of invisible white-throated sparrows.
Like my father, I wasn’t used to rural landscapes and the quiet unsettled me. Father didn’t say much, just brushed away the black flies, shifted our suitcases from hand to hand, and contemplated the woods and meadows as if he were staring into some heart of darkness. Whenever I pointed out something he just grunted and shook his head. It sounds odd, but I know now that in a way he was seasick. If we had gone to an uncle who was a fisherman and he had taken us out in his boat, it’s likely that we would have become ill. And that’s how Father looked to me that morning: green around the gills—as if the ground were splitting open, shifting beneath his feet. St. John’s may have been riddled with poverty, complicit in the death of his wife and infant daughter, but the old city and the dock had been his life. He was a Townie through and through. He missed the waterfront—the men, the camaraderie. And so much of farm work was solitary. In the years to come, when I would watch him ploughing or picking potatoes or milking, he always seemed such a lonely, bent figure. He found the quiet and the long days oppressive.
But he found something else much more difficult. Father was a man who had supported himself since childhood. So while he could argue that farming and clearing land was good, necessary work, and a help to George, there was a part of him that looked at our move as an imposition. Charity. I think now that he made the move for me, that if he’d been on his own, “out” would have meant the Boston States or Canada—perhaps even Europe. Not that things were better there, but I think he would have taken the chance. He told me once that as a longshoreman he had an affinity for boats, envied the sailors the exotic places they’d visited. Instead of adventure, though, he had me to look out for: skinny, solitary Ivy, who probably wouldn’t be much help on a farm. But our family was down from four to two, and we had to stick together.
Winnie and George were friendly enough, and neither was prone to silence: both loved to talk and gossip. But from the beginning I noticed a stiffness between my father and uncle. Did George blame his sister’s death on my father? Were we an imposition? I never knew. But there was always an underlying tension between them that made Father even more silent than usual, that made him work all the harder.
What I remember most about that first day was the food—boiled eggs, brown bread with partridgeberry jam, barky tea with milk. Ruth and Sean staring at me from the daybed in the low-ceilinged kitchen. I had met them before, of course, but rarely on their home territory. We were all shy, but when prompted they led me out to the barn and outbuildings, showed me the chickens and new calf.
Winnie had made space for me in the attic. It was claustrophobic but there was a small window that allowed the sun and the moon. But I missed my mother and baby sister. I missed Barbara. For the next few weeks, whenever I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling that I could touch with my fingertips, I was often giddy and lightheaded and found it difficult to sleep. Despite being tossed up on dry land, I was, like my father, a little seasick.
When September came, my cousins and I, plus Robbie Murphy, his sister Brenda, and two or three other children who lived on the farms below us, walked to school. Down the mile and a half of steep, rutted road. Down to the Waterford River and Corpus Christi and on to St. Joseph’s where I struggled with my arithmetic and writing. Then the long, slow walk back in the afternoon, uphill, peering into the woods and meadows, saying little. And I was always the one straying behind, kicking at stones, slinging my bookbag this way and that. I felt like the empty slate some of the nuns said I was. For what was there to fill me? A displaced, widower father, an aunt and uncle who still felt like strangers, and cousins who regarded me as a curiosity. Ruth and Sean didn’t have much more than I did in terms of toys or clothes, but I was always aware of the one thing they did have: their sense of belonging, of family and place.
There weren’t a lot of photos taken of us in those years, and fewer that have survived. But in those that remain, me often wearing a lopsided grimace, you can see that I was a grave, watchful child. I was certainly the quietest— always separate from the other children as we played on the road or worked in the barns or explored the thick, tangled woods. In summer, we were dry and grubby; in winter, we were wet and grubby. We were like poster children for the South American missions. The nuns at St. Joseph’s were always asking us to bring pennies for the poor foreign boys and girls, but we needed those pennies as much as anyone in Bolivia or Peru. I remember standing in the porch at Corpus Christi one Sunday morning, staring at a poster featuring a wide-eyed South American girl in her traditional dress and cap. But except for her costume, I could see little difference between us. We all shared that vacant but somehow observant look, the deep, mournful eyes, the severe, brooding expression.
I know why I seldom smiled: I was too cold. I was always cold back then, and especially so during those freeze-and-thaw winters when the damp was like a ghost planting its clammy hands all over me. In school, I coveted Sister Katherine’s habit just because it looked so warm. And, as much as he frowned on it, there were nights when the cold drove me to my father’s bed, where I much preferred his snoring to my frigid sheets and blankets. Then, in the morning, the race to the kitchen to huddle around the stove, where the older people (my God, how old were they, compared to me now?) smoked and coughed and drank endless cups of tea. Hearing stories of the poor in St. John’s cutting up their tables and chairs for fuel. My father smoking his pipe and nodding. I didn’t doubt any of it. We’d been close to that point when we had left. Even my uncle Wayne, who would sometimes come in from St. John’s to help with the haying or ploughing, always looked gaunt and thirsty, biting or sucking his lips like he wanted to spit out his teeth. Like he wanted to spit out something—his life perhaps. When I was very young, he was always chatty and smiling. Always with a bag of peppermint knobs to bestow. But now his smiles were few and, like my father, he rarely talked at all.
December 1932 was mostly cold. But it didn’t start out that way. Beginning in late November we were treated to the typical Avalon freeze-and-thaw. By the end of the first week of December, the November snow was melting, huge drops falling from the skeletal birch, everywhere the clean, bracing scent of sodden spruce and fir. The air steamed with fog. The road was pocked with potholes like the craters of the moon, the rims flaking shards of ice, the water a dirty mustard or a dark beige. And sometimes a racing moon would appear in my bedroom window, lighting the shrinking snowbanks and throwing the black trees into eerie relief. Walking home from school or church, I often pushed the heavy, wet snow from the tree branches, just to hear that singular, lonesome sound as it fell a
nd hit the ground—something between a swoosh and a thump. A half mile up the road, the ice on Handy Pond was rocking and creaking, unravelling, fraying at the edges.
And then the temperature would plummet and another freezing blizzard would blow in.
That winter the land and sky were restless, refusing to stay cold or damp for long, but constantly changing, though the stars stayed the same: at least that’s how it seemed. The other seasons also had that restless quality. Still, it was most pronounced in winter, and more pronounced again when it occurred in the lead-up to the solstice, the dying days. But for me it seemed that in the midst of such constant change, nothing in my life would ever change: that I was destined to circle in my own narrow orbit.
When my father and I had trudged up the road on our first day in Kilbride, I had noticed an old house not far from George and Winnie’s. It was set back and down from the road, in the middle of a large meadow, and I remember thinking it curious that there were no outbuildings or trees around it. The house, completely exposed to the howling winds, looked sadly isolated and lonely. In a blizzard it would disappear completely. Most of the houses on the road were saltboxes, but this one was distinguished by its mansard roof. At first I thought it might have been a barn. Whatever it was, it looked long deserted. The roof was bowed and bevelled, the shingles peeling and curling. Cardboard and brin bags were stuffed behind some of the cracked windows. Other windows were boarded up. The clapboard was a greyish black, its original colour impossible to even guess at.
I had walked past that house every day without giving it much thought. But when the first snow arrived in November, Ruth and Sean bolted to the barn, grabbed their slides, and raced down the road. I quickly learned why: the meadow behind the deserted house sloped steeply to Bay Bulls Road, making it an exhilarating sliding hill. That’s also when I first heard the property referred to by name: Foran’s Meadow or Foran’s House, but, mostly, “Foran’s.” Whenever the snow was suitable (and often when it wasn’t), and we weren’t in school or working, Foran’s was where most of the children could be found. Some, like Ruth and Sean, had store-bought slides with steel runners; others, like me, had makeshift affairs. Father had sculpted my slide from an old car fender.