Proper Gander
by Ron Pumphrey

“Take heed, children, and bear this in mind for the rest of your lives: Whatever your circumstances are today, they won’t ever be the same again,” mother said in truthfulness but in innocent prophecy, while inserting the key to lock us out forever from that ridiculous house which had been home to us for not fully a year.

My sister Mary and I stood back by the truck packed with the last of our furniture, Mary holding little Monica, me coddling baby Anita who had the croup. Mother should never have allowed Father to move the family from that wonderful mansard on Victoria Street in Harbour Grace to come to what was tantamount to a foresty summer home in Jim Jackman’s yard on Bell Island. For in those cramped quarters, cringing shamefully at the end of a line of attached look-alike bungalowettes, Little Gerald, my young brother, died without ever having really lived, the perpetually swollen glands around his upper neck having finally choked him.

Because mother believed Poor Gerald’s “little spirit” would continue haunting the place and find no rest until we vacated the whole East End neighbourhood, Father had found a fantastic temporary rental behind the Chinese fish ’n’ chip store, at the bottom of Town Square.

The huge house with its steep A-framed roof was only minutes’ walk to St. Kevin’s boys’ school, the Immaculate Conception girls’ school, and the new, concrete Church of St. James, under the foyer floor of which the parish priest had given written instructions he was to be buried. He had been given something akin to papal permission to remain on Bell Island for as long as he lived an active life, for without him the schools, arena, sports fields, churches, and church halls could never have been built and made solvent.

I don’t know how long we lived on the Square, but it was great being “downtown” every day, learning brand new things about the island. On and about Town Square there was nothing but daily excitement from the mining Company and its coal yards and trestles, its haulage of ore from the mines, its daily dumpings of waste rock separated from the unique cubic iron ore, its medical clinic, horse and cart and auto-truck activities, and its Company store where lumber and nails and hammers and saws could be had by any employee wanting to sign for them in handwriting or an X mark.

World-imported goods were bought from stores owned by Newfoundland entrepreneurs, some of them island-born and -bred, but more especially those who’d come from towns in Conception, Trinity, and Bonavista Bays, or were immigrant American or Middle and Far East Jews, Orthodox and other kinds of overseas Christians, and Muslims and a few Hindus. Not a few of them read their religious and various other books from back to front, the pages from right to left, with strange lettering incomprehensible to us. It seemed everybody got along, except those who wanted to marry outside their religion.

The unfolding mysteries of mankind kept me joyous all the time we lived in that great house behind the Chinese restaurant with its fish ’n’ chips smells forever coming in our open windows. Part of my delight was my Saturday morning forays at the rock dumps down around Number 2 mine area, looking for some evidence of the petrified Mystery Bird I’d heard about from some old miners, and though I was always disappointed, I kept the flame burning: Some day, some way, I’ll get what I want.

My enjoyment was always under a cloud of Father sometime finding out that it wasn’t he who broke the lock on his private metal box of secret memorabilia by letting it fall sometime during our moves from one house to another, that the fault was mine, for having forced the lock to find out what was inside. The contents had shocked mother and moved her to tears. She would never tell Daddy she’d seen the contents, and having made me promise I’d never breathe a word about it, I felt my secret was safe . . . but only precariously so.

And of course there was Pug Sweeney, living on Bennett Street, halfway up off the Square. Since my near poisoning of him with two tins of Ex-Lax which I’d pretended to be chocolate, the bully was still to be avoided by me, even though it was said he was somehow a better boy for his terrible illness, which one of the nuns told him was caused by God’s Holy Revenge against his wicked ways.

When our lease was up, Father found a wonderfully constructed mansard-roofed house at the Front, where the vacated milliner, Mrs. Rees, had, “of all things!”, my seamstress mother enthused, “a sewing room.” The new place was a mile or so from the concrete dynamite building where Father spent most of his employment time as an iron ore Company policeman, and miles from my school, St. Kevin’s on the Square.

Since I’d been having a hard time getting over the death of Poor Gerald, and of the earlier demise of Uncle Bill whom I’d thought would always be with us, I’d consequently become so “quite sickly and reserved” that Father dismissed my nightly lunch-packing for the next school day, and made a deal with my Grade Six teacher, Mr. Al Pittman, to let me eat a hot dinner each school day in the latter’s hotel dining room. The Pittmans’ “Central Hotel,” a great, furnace-heated, red, warehouse-styled place with indoor toilets, off the bottom of Town Square. It was also to be my place of refuge during blizzardly winter late afternoons, when it would be too worrisome for Father and mother, knowing I was trying to get home from somewhere, anywhere, on the roads, paths, or iron ore car tracks. “Ya see, Mr. Pittman,” Father said, rather imperiously, me by the hand, “Ronnie’s mother also fears the boy is developing appendicitis. Or he’s making excuses to get his own way. Doctor’s not sure.” He looked down at me severely. “The lad is always doing something to make a few cents, and I’m sure his shelter during the rare times there’s a storm will therefore be of no real strain to the family.” True, especially since Mr. Pittman would provide my lunch at no profit to himself, and if I really were in need of a room, he’d find some little corner for me, even if visiting commercial people from St. John’s were held over if taxis and the vessel weren’t running.

Al Pittman, a medium-tall though athletically built man with black, wavy hair, who hoped I’d grow up to be a priest, a writer-priest, had caused quite an island-wide sensation earlier in the year after he’d had me read to his classes a composition I’d written on “New York—The Big, Little City,” big with its millions in population and its great skyscrapers, but little in its relative size.

Fortunately I’d read it aloud at home, following my father’s command to do so with proper emphases, for when I finished reading it in school that day, Mr. Pittman sidled off his high stool, applauding. When some of the class began higgledy-piggledy following suit, and when he demanded they clap more appreciatively, they did, with Charlie Coxworthy, Jimmy O’Brien, and Frank Brown, all squat in two-seat desks, giving some tentative yells.

Whereupon Mr. Pittman, to my great surprise and puzzlement, told me to take my books out of my desk, and “Leave Grade Five forever” and “Cross the room to take a seat with the higher orders, the Grade Six class.”

I’d been in Grade Five only three weeks, and there I was, sitting with the Grade Sixers.

My Grade Five chums Blair and Eddy Kennedy were similarly promoted because, as Mr. Pittman put it, “Like Ronnie, Blair and Eddie work hard at their lessons every day and night. And . . . they’re thinkers. You all should take example from them and learn to think. T-H-I-N-K.”

Blair and Eddy weren’t writers. For their age, they were enviable mathematicians, excelling even in geometry and algebra. In math, I always managed unimpressively to scrape through.

Our poor teacher was deluged by parents insisting their sons be advanced too, but Mr. Pittman held fast. When a querulous Rev. Father George Bartlett arrived at the school authoritatively to demand what in the name of Saint James was going on, school principal Vincent Barry, who the town said spoke precise English, and who liked to talk with his hands fondling themselves at mid-chest, stood toe to toe with the priest. Pausing in his hand-rubbing to lift down from his forehead his rimless glasses to cover eyes widely spaced over a fine, patrician nose, Master Barry announced in that throaty voice of his, fine white teeth showing in a needless smile—all thirty-two teeth, we liked to say—“When the Kennedy brothers and young Pomphrey”—as with Mr. Pittman, Mr. Barry always spoke my surname with an “o”—“grow up and find their place in the world, their classmates and parents will understand why two or three weeks in Grade Five were quite enough for them.”

“That’ll get me off the hook,” said the priest, who laughingly told how “All the Mrs. Murphys on the island were after him to take everybody out of Grade Five and put them in Grade Six. Like, Yawmouth Mrs. Murphy. Beach Hill Mrs. Murphy, East End Mrs. Murphy, West End Mrs. Murphy, Blindy Mrs. Murphy, All Eyes Mrs. Murphy, and on and on and on, like, well, Big Bust Mrs. Murphy, Small Bust Mrs. Murphy.”

The prelate linked his arm in the principal’s as they walked to the front door of the schoolhouse, and it is said they both laughed at how there were so many islanders with the same Christian name and surname that even the mailed letters and parcels coming to the island were precisely addressed to “Dan Dwyer of John and Maggie,” or “Dan Dwyer of Vince and Betty.” And there was Big Jack Dwyer, Small Jack Dwyer, Fatty Dwyer, Slim Dwyer, Hawknose Dwyer, Ears Dwyer, and so on.

The priest walked down to the bottom of the steps on the way across the school grounds to his church on a little rise of ground, when Mr. Barry called prophetically. “We’d better get all our laughing in now, Father, because if Al Pittman is right, we may have some years before we’ll laugh again.”

“You think the Germans and the Japanese will take us over? Ridiculous!” shouted the priest.

“I’m not so sure about that,” whispered the headmaster, turning to tell me to be off to the classroom.

It was a sad Saturday when mother came home from a visit to the post office in a front room of Cahill’s house near the R.C. cemetery at the Front, and read us a letter from Aunt Kathleen in Harbour Grace to the effect that Uncle Red had forever given up his northern sea forays at the seal hunt, whale chase, and cod catches, to take up residence in Brooklyn, New York, to live with mother’s twin sister, Monica. We might never see him again. It was another bullet impact to my heart, to be followed some weeks later by the further news that he had been called into service by the United States Army. Every morning when I knelt at the “praying side” of my bed—the chamber pot having been placed some inches underneath on the side opposite—and prayed to Jesus and His “Blissid Mudder,” to keep him safe, and to hurry me on to age sixteen when, free to make my own choices, I’d join the British Navy and get out of the Colony and see the whole, wide, exciting world.

I wrote Grandmother Fleming and Aunt Kathleen, addressing the envelope “Water Street, Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, The World, The Universe,” telling them how I missed not having my dear uncle Red who used to sail in the sunset, far over the sea. I thought that old favourite song was about him. “Leastwise,” I wrote, “I’m sure glad Uncle Red is alive, not like poor ole Uncle Bill who is probly rotted in his grave by now, and Poor Little Gerald who is all by hisself down in the graveyard here on Bell Island waitin’ for Father and mother to jine him.”

My note ended with the words, “Mommy thinks the Nazi men in their You-boats is going to kill us all one of these nights soon. I think so too.”