M
Y DELIVERANCE FROM
life at my father’s came when I was twelve. The new bane of my father’s existence, his brother, Fred, who became manager of the family boot-and-shoe factory when my grandfather retired, offered, at my grandfather’s urging, I’m sure, to send me to Bishop Feild College, a private school attended by the children of some of the city’s better families. The idea was that I, the oldest of the family, would drag us Smallwoods out of poverty by one day getting the kind of job you could get only with a diploma from “the Feild.” My father declined the offer, saying that he would not be known as Charity Charlie, that Methodist College had been good enough for him, and dismissing Bishop Feild as “a training ground for snobs.” He claimed to know a man who had sent his son to Bishop Feild, only to have that same son, who was with a group of his schoolfriends, pass him in the street one day as if he didn’t know him.
“I will not be snubbed in public like poor Baker was,” he went around saying for weeks. This became the subject of his midnight soliloquies.
“Don’t leave me, boy,” he roared while he stomped about on the deck. “Don’t leave me in my dotage, I beseech you.”
“You’re thirty-nine years old,” my mother said.
“Do not forsake me, boy, I beseech you,” he shouted. “Will you leave me, boy, will you leave your poor father and me in my condition?”
I tried to explain to him that Bishop Feild was barely two miles from where we lived. “It’s not like you won’t be seeing me for years,” I said. “I’ll come to visit every Sunday, and I’ll be back home at Christmas and in the summer.” But he would not be consoled.
“You’ll never come to visit,” he said. “Once you get in with that crowd, you’ll never come to visit. You’ll be too good for me, too good for Charlie Smallwood; you’ll be like Baker’s boy, snubbing me in public. This is the start of it, now, someday soon they’ll all be gone — Marie, David, Ida, Isabel, Sadie.”
“Sadie is six months old,” my mother said.
“They’ll all be gone and, God help me, I’ll be left alone with Minnie May Devannah, with no one to keep me company in this God-forsaken city, on this God-forsaken rock, but an Irish Huguenot named Minnie May.”
My mother prevailed, however, and I went to Bishop Feild with Fred Smallwood one sunny morning in September, walking away from the house with my suitcase in my hand while my mother and brothers and sisters stood on the steps, shouting and waving goodbye, my mother weeping freely, my father nowhere to be seen at first, but then the upstairs window opened. He had been sleeping one off and had been awakened by the shouting from below. He leaned out the window in his undershirt, running his fingers through his hair. Suddenly, with my father looking at me, I felt very much the dandy in my short pants and stockings and my gleaming white Eton collar, which looked impeccably starched though in fact it was made of celluloid so it could be cleaned with a wet cloth and would not need laundering. Up to now, I had dressed as all boys did on the Brow, like a little man, in a tattered
peaked tweed cap, a half-length coat and woollen trousers, my unparted dark hair slicked back from my forehead. I had the eyesight of someone who’d been reading books by bad light for twenty years. I wore glasses, behind the almost opaque lenses of which my eyes were tiny blue beads.
“Are you off to Bishop Feild, boy?” he said, grinning sheepishly.
“Yes,” I said, my voice quavering.
“Will they take good care of him, Fred?” he said.
“Oh yes, Charlie,” Uncle Fred said. “They’ll take good care of him, don’t you worry.” There was something in Fred’s voice that made me feel sorry for my father and resentful of Fred, a dismissive tone I did not think he should have used in front of me. I felt like a traitor, abandoning my father’s camp for Fred’s, and was acutely aware of how badly my father came off in comparison with his brother, who was even better dressed than usual that day in his waistcoat and his vest and his gleaming top hat. I was ashamed of not having woken up my father to say goodbye. I walked a few steps away from Fred and looked up at him.
“I’ll be back this Sunday,” I said quietly, pointedly excluding Fred from the conversation. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”
He smiled down at me. “All right, boy,” he said. He clasped his hands, for a moment hung his head between his arms, his throat convulsing as though he were about to cry or be sick. Then he looked up and smiled again. “I haven’t been everything you might have wanted me to be,” he said. “But I promise you this. I’ll be a better father to the other children than I was to you.”
“OK,” I said, determined not to cry. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”
I walked with Fred to his two-horse carriage and we climbed up onto the plush leather seat.
“Be careful with those horses on the hill, Fred,” my father said. Fred smiled and nodded.
We started off down the Brow towards the city. My father kept up a steady stream of promises of self-reform to me and
admonitions to Fred as we made our way down the winding gravel slope. Long after I could make out what he was saying, I could hear him shouting, until at last he either stopped or we passed out of earshot.
Bishop Feild, named after himself by the Church of England bishop who founded it, was a Tudor-style brick building at the corner of King’s Road and Colonial Street. It was modelled on the English public school, with students advancing through forms rather than grades. Sons of outport merchants, doctors and magistrates stayed at the dormitories, while the students from St. John’s went home after school.
A series of stone steps led up to the turret-crowned entrance-way of the main school. On either side of the steps were a pair of almost identical mature oak trees, oaks as large as oaks could get on the east coast of Newfoundland. You could see the harbour and the sea between the Narrows, and feel and smell the wind when it blew off the water, as it seemed it always did.
I was the only townie boarding at Bishop Feild, which marked me as odd right from the start. It had been decided that I would board at the Feild, to reduce by one the number of children my mother had to care for and so that the sight of me, a Feildian, would not be a constant provocation to my father. I was not about to explain my circumstances to the other dorm boys, who spoke of how much they missed by having to board at school, and who were so well-to-do that, to them, life at Bishop Feild seemed unbearably rough and they couldn’t wait to get back home. To me, the relatively Spartan accommodations at Bishop Feild seemed luxurious, so much so that I felt guilty about living so high while my family was still stuck in its dreary existence on the Brow.
The three fireplaces in the dorm were kept burning all night long, an unheard-of luxury. Each of us boys took turns replenishing the fires with coal in the middle of the night. About every three weeks it was my turn to be the “scuttler,” as we called it, but even that I didn’t mind. As I fed the fires, I would look down the line
of beds at the dozens of boys sleeping cozily beneath their blankets, marvelling that it was not so cold that I could see their breath, as it was in the house on the Brow at night for ten months of the year.
As for the food, I vowed I would never mention it to my father, who managed once or twice a month to snare a few rabbits in the woods behind our house so we could have our meal of meals, rabbit stew, our only fresh-meat meal. My mother sometimes cobbled together “shipwreck” dinner or jig’s dinner, boiled cabbage and potatoes and salt beef, along with pease-pudding made from peas boiled in a cloth bag. Mostly we ate salt cod and potatoes. My father often came home with a board-stiff plank of salt cod beneath his arm. Even after days of soaking, the fish was so salty I was never able to eat more than a few forkfuls of it. The potatoes, boiled in the same water to save coal, came out the yellow colour of the cod and tasted not much better. When we had flour, my mother made damper dogs, or toutons as my father called them, balls of dough fried in lard on a skillet. In the spring, my father would buy seal flippers at dockside, and my mother, after soaking the flippers for days, casting off the oily water every morning for a week, made flipper pie.
I had my first taste at Bishop Feild of food that was neither pickled nor preserved with salt, nor cooked in the same pot with food that was either pickled or preserved or food that did not to have to be boiled for days to be made edible. At the Feild there was fresh meat but never fish, fresh or otherwise, for though many of them were salt-cod merchants, the fathers of the boys at Bishop Feild would have considered it an abomination that their sons be served salt fish. There were bowls of beef and vegetable soup, steak and kidney pie, on special occasions slabs of roast beef and fat-browned potatoes in thick gravy and treacle-drenched suet or trifle for dessert.
I arrived at my new school even thinner than was warranted by my degree of malnutrition. It was as if my body, because it
received so little food, had altogether lost the knack of absorbing nourishment. My forearms were of the same thickness from my wrists to my elbows, my legs the same thickness from my ankles to my knees. There was a slight thickening in my upper arms and legs, but not much, which is why I always wore an undershirt and longjohns, even in the summer.
There were three factions at Bishop Feild. The elite faction called themselves the Townies, though one did not qualify for membership simply by being a townie. The Townies were Prowse-picked; Prowse, who eventually went on to be the captain of the school, was the grandson of Judge Prowse, who had written the eight-hundred-page opus,
A History of Newfoundland
. He did not feel the need and was never called upon to explain his often arbitrary, seemingly random picks. Many was the townie who believed he deserved to be a member of the Townies on the basis of his social standing but was passed over by Prowse.
The second faction, known to the Townies as the Baymen, called themselves the ’Tories because they stayed in the dormitories. The ’Tories were more democratic than the Townies. To be a ’Tory, you had to stay in the dormitory, that was the lone requirement except where I was concerned. Their leader, a huge boy named “Slogger” Anderson because of his prowess with a cricket bat, declared that despite being a dorm boy, I could not be a ’Tory because my family lived in town. This was all right with me. They seemed to me an odd lot. They spoke with such heavy accents that they were all but incomprehensible, and their parents seemed to have scoured the Old Testament in search of their names: Azariah, Obadiah, Eliakim.
Outcasts and misfits at Bishop Feild eventually settled for one another, falling into a third faction cruelly called the Lepers. They were a close-knit group, the Lepers, kindred misfits who were at once shunned and regarded with a kind of patronizing affection by the other boys. For a while it seemed that I was destined to be one of them, until Prowse, exercising his God-like, arbitrary powers, and
knowing, no doubt, how much it would irk those he whimsically excluded, invited me to join his group, an invitation that I, of course, accepted.
Prowse, though in the Lower Third, was one of the school’s best athletes and had risen to his present status partly by beating the school boxing champion, a Sixth Former named Croker. He was also at the top of the Lower Third academically and was a favourite of the masters, who seemed to think that the presence at Bishop Feild of a boy of his quality somewhat mitigated the terms of their existence. He had eyes like those of the judge, whose photograph comprised the frontispiece to
A History of Newfoundland
, bright blue eyes, all the more startling because his hair was jet black and his complexion dark. He was taller than most of us and displayed a relaxed, self-confident posture and demeanour, as if he knew you would agree with him that everything that came his way was no more than his due.
I had often seen him standing amidst his Townies with his feet widely planted and his hands behind his back, smiling and listening as the others carried on in efforts to impress him. While standing so one day, he looked about the playing field and caught my eye, stared at me. I was in dread of what he had in mind for me and could not believe my good fortune when he off-handedly informed me that I could join his group if I wanted to.
Bishop Feild had a sister school named Bishop Spencer, an all-girls’ school that backed onto the Feild, separated from it by an iron fence at the end of our playing grounds. At lunch-time and after school, the boys of the Feild and the girls of Spencer would meet at the fence, talking and teasing. But there was one girl who would go up onto the street and come back down on the Bishop Feild side of the fence. This was forbidden, but she would stay out of sight of the mistresses of Spencer and the masters of the Feild.
She seemed to be a kind of honorary member of Prowse’s group, a visiting wit, his Spencer counterpart, or so his manner in her presence seemed to say, though the instant she was gone he
was making jokes about her. “Old sculpin-puss,” he called her, which made me wonder if he had ever seen a sculpin, for I found her quite appealing. He also called her old good-for-a-feel Fielding, always grinning knowingly when he was asked how he knew what she was good for.
Fielding was considered something of an exotic for having estranged parents. Her mother lived in New York, her father, a well-known doctor, in St. John’s. This was almost never mentioned, not even in her absence, but it was common knowledge. The boys of Prowse’s group gathered round whenever Fielding — her name was Sheilagh Fielding, but no one, not even the girls of Spencer, called her anything but Fielding — showed up on the grounds.
“How are things at Spencer, Fielding?” Prowse said one day.
“Much as they are here, I should think,” she said. “Except for the classes in embroidery and needlework, of course, but we hope to have them soon.” We all laughed.
From a distance, even with no one standing beside her by which to gauge her stature, she looked like a fully grown woman and carried herself like one; a well-off, disdainfully composed woman, out to take the air, walking exaggeratedly erect, pointing at this and that with her purely ornamental silver-knobbed cane. That she was just thirteen was easy to forget. She wore full-length dresses tightly belted at the waist, with flounced sleeves and tight lace collars. Close up, however the elegant look she affected did not come off, partly because of her size — not even the clothes she wore could conceal the fact that she was athletically built, large-boned — and partly because of her almost perpetual expression, which was at once self-ironic and humorously scornful of others. Only rarely, and for no apparent reason, did this expression vanish and her face relax, and she would look, suddenly, tenderly, wonder-struck. I was always on the lookout for this sudden, fleeting transformation, this other Fielding, who for an instant would peep out from behind her veil of scorn.