There is one sure thing that can be said about Newfoundland, it is unforgettable. Anyone born there remains a Newfoundlander, first and foremost.

It’s said that Newfoundlanders are always easy to spot in Heaven. They’re the ones who keep nagging God to let them go back home. Who could blame those disconnected spirits for wanting to return home? Where else will they find a stranger who feels like family? Where else will they find a stranger who often turns out to be family?

Sometimes entire families wound up leaving lives in Europe, heading across a treacherous ocean to a place where the only life thriving was in the waters teeming with fish. Settlement was not allowed on the Island of Newfoundland way back in the early days. The fishermen gave their labour and made merchants richer. Some intrepid souls literally “took to the hills” and began new lives in a hard new land. Some were rooted out and punished; some kept right on clinging to the rocks.

My mother’s people started their new lives in Red Rock, Bonavista Bay. It was a far cry from poverty-stricken lives in Ireland to poverty-stricken lives clinging to the rocks of Newfoundland.

My father’s family also came from Ireland. They went to St. John’s and clung to those rocks until they packed up lock, stock, and barrel and moved to New York in the 1920s. My father went with them but came back to Newfoundland. He was on board the boat again intending to go back to his family when he suddenly decided he really didn’t want to leave my mother. He jumped from the boat to the dock and never saw his family again.

So my parents began their married life in the Dirty Thirties, the age of the Great Depression. Newfoundland’s society before Confederation was one of the “haves and have-nots.” The Depression was almost an equalizing force in that it slightly narrowed the gulf between the two sets of society. Poverty was rampant all over the world, and the great Island in the Atlantic was no different.

Before Confederation with Canada in 1949, there was no social safety net available. The dole, at not even ten cents a day, is almost laughable, but there was nothing funny about it at the time. It was all some souls had to help them survive.

My parents were very good people, good people living in bad times. As my mother used to say when coming out of a particularly rough day, week, month, or year, “Live hard, die hard, and go to hell after all!”