My grandfather, Lawrence Howard, was an Anti-Confederate who was elected as a representative to the National Convention for the district of Bay de Verde, he would die of cancer one month before Confederation came into effect. He got his wish, to live and die a Newfoundlander. My grandmother was left a widow in her early sixties. She was more than glad of the Old Age Pension that allowed her to live on her own, although I don’t know how she survived on less than a hundred dollars a month. Women her age had never had any money of their own.   My grandfather Griffin, ‘Swearing Jim’, didn’t like Mr. Smallwood for his own reasons having to do with working on the American bases for less money than the Americans were willing to pay because the NL government wouldn’t allow them to pay Newfoundlanders the same wage. Not to mention the conditions in the lumber woods and the Badger riot. My story is true, told the way my grandfather always spoke of hard times – with humour. It’s now 75 years since Confederation. I can’t compare conditions before, because I was born September 2, 1949, five months after it came to be, in the same house where my Anti-Confederate grandfather Howard died on February 5, 1949. I was the first Canadian born into our family – my three older brothers were born Newfoundlanders, my two younger sisters Canadians like me.   Hope you like my story. I understand the ending is harsh, but I have to remain true to Swearing Jim.  

Picture on the Wall

My grandparents lived across the road from us. They lived alone because by the time I came on the scene their family was already raised and had families of their own. Most of my cousins on my father’s side also lived on the same road up or down from us. Now, my grandparents had been together for a very long time and were committed to each other. One might think they had a lot in common, which they did, but they were very different in other ways. The house they lived in wasn’t the same one where they raised their children. No, this was a much smaller place though it was two stories.   You walk into a small porch maybe no more than three square feet. The door facing you when you entered was the door to the pantry, which was under the staircase. The door to the left led into the kitchen which wasn’t really big. There was a wood and coal stove on the right, a wood box with a cover so you could sit on it beside the stove. The kitchen table was on the left. Grandmother didn’t have cabinets, just a sideboard next to the table. There were two windows in the kitchen, one over the table and the other just above the daybed where grandfather usually sat and took naps. He would eventually die there with a lit cigarette still in his hand. He could see everyone and everything that went up and down the road from his vantage point.   Grandfather worked many years in what they called the ‘lumber woods’, where he cut pulp wood by the cord for the big paper mills in Grand Falls and Corner Brook. Times were hard in those days up in the lumber woods. You stayed in work camps, which were really makeshift log structures with dirt floors and a woodstove for heat and cooking sometimes. Bigger camps had a separate cookhouse. The men would cut boughs to put on the floor. There was no hot water to wash yourself or your clothes. Men often wore the same clothes for weeks. The food was simple – salt beef and potatoes, beans and pork, homemade bread if the cook knew how to make it.   Grandfather would tell stories about life in the lumber woods, most of them would make you laugh. Like the one about the cook who could mix bread but didn’t know how to roll it for the pan. This guy would cut a chunk off the risen dough in the mixing pan, throw it onto the roof and catch it when it fell, perfectly rounded and ready for the bread pan. As you might imagine, it collected a lot of dirt and pitch as it rolled down the roof. He told another story about another cook who made buns for the men’s lunches in the woods. They were so hard you had to chop them with your axe and soak them in your tea before you could eat them. Grandfather said one time, a tree fell on his lunch can and flattened it, but never made a mark on the buns. He last saw the buns bouncing off a tree fifty feet from the crushed lunch can – they killed two blue jays who got caught in their flight path.   The loggers went on strike in Badger one year. There was a lot of bitterness, all the men wanted was better pay, better food and a decent place to sleep. The government of the day came down on the side of the paper companies and logging contractors, not the workers. There was a riot, a policeman was killed and the government outlawed the union the men had formed. There was a joke going around at the time that said the NL alphabet was three letters short of any other because the government did away with IWA. Now, I guess it’s time to get back to the picture on the wall, seeing as that is the subject of my story.   My grandmother was grateful to the ‘Father of Confederation’ because he had brought in the old age pension that allowed her and grandfather to live out their lives independently. That’s why she placed his picture on the wall above her sideboard directly in front of the daybed. Grandfather hated the man with a passion. If he had been prone to the use of firearms, the kitchen wall would have had a very large hole in it. Imagine, lying on your daybed, trying to relax, with that man staring at you all the time. You’d just wish he’d walk in the door so you could strangle him with your bare hands. Then the old woman could be buried with the man himself, not just his picture.   Cyril Griffin New Perlican, NL