The United Church heaves into sight as our minivan rounds a curve in the road, and I am drawn to the heavy white double doors that my mother, uncle, and grandparents passed through so many thousands of times over the decades that they lived in Nipper’s Harbour. These days a well-maintained road winds its way from the community wharf, around the Harbour, over the Blow In Hole, and all the way out to the Cove and the graveyard beyond. But during my mother’s childhood in the 1950s, only rough, rocky, narrow footpaths through the juniper connected the houses and stores and churches and schools of the community to one another. 

The United Church was on top of the Blow in Hole between the Harbour and the Cove, where it is today, but, instead of a gently-sloping road, seventy-five wooden steps provided access to the church and its one-room school. This staircase, known simply as Seventy-Five, was one of the longest flights of steps in Newfoundland at the time.

The children who attended the United Church school scrambled up and down Seventy-Five twice a day on school days, and church-goers braved the staircase three times a day on Sundays, regardless of the weather. The church itself was large and elegantly designed, with white-painted walls, polished wood trim and matching pews, and simple stained-glass windows with white edges and red corner squares. It was quite a new building, as the old church that had stood on the spot had burned down before my mother was born, when my grandfather, Walter Andrews, and his much older brother Gus were living with their mother in the family home on Cramn’s Island. 

Great-Uncle Gus was a quiet rebel who remained a bachelor his whole life. He was a respected cooper and clever and knowledgeable about the outside world, but he never went to church or to times or to anything else that was going on in the community, and my grandmother, Gladys, never found him clean enough for her liking. He wore the same few clothes over and over again, and Gladys would eventually throw them into the wood stove and say, “Gus, go on down the ‘arbour and buy yourself a new suit of long underwear, ‘cause I’ve got yours burnt.”  Every year, though, he’d take a trip to St. John’s. He’d have a couple of nice suits, a tie, and some polished shoes, and he’d look like a fancy businessman when he left Nipper’s Harbour in the fall.

The story of the fire that destroyed the old United Church illustrated very nicely Uncle Gus’s attitude toward life and death. It happened in the 1930s, a few years before my grandparents’ marriage. Early one morning in the house on Cramn’s Island, just before dawn, Walter woke up and gazed out his bedroom window across the water toward the old United Church over the Blow in Hole. The sight that greeted his half-open eyes jolted him into action: the sleeping community was bathed from end to end in a bright–almost supernatural–orange light. Walter ran to his brother Gus’s room and pounded on the door.

“There’s some wonderful light shining out in the cove,” he cried.

Gus peered sleepily out through his own bedroom window. “What do you think it could be?” 

“I can’t tell,” admitted Walter, “unless it’s the Judgment Day.”

“Are you ready, Walt?” asked Gus, his eyes shining in the light from the window.

“I think so,” replied Walt, thinking furiously over his sins of the past two weeks. (My grandfather, unlike his older brother, was always a very religious person.)

“Well, then, let ‘er rip!” decreed Gus.

In the new United Church, in the 1950s, my mother, Patsy Andrews, shared a pew by the middle left-hand window with her mother, Gladys, after her brother, my Uncle Roy, had grown up and moved away. My grandfather was the organist and choir director. Mom told me many times how Gladys used to pinch her when she fidgeted in the pew, hissing, “You’ll get more of that when we gets ‘ome.” 

As for the seventy-five steps, they were shovelled only when someone died and a heavy casket needed to be carried, on the shoulders of a group of strong men, up to the church for the funeral service. The old people used to mutter, “If someone doesn’t soon die, we’ll all be killed on them steps.” 

Snowstorms were layered one on top of the other on Seventy-Five, and trampled, over the long, cold winters, into a treacherous, icy bluff. And every Sunday evening in the winter, after the seven o’clock evening service was finally done, a human chain could be seen snaking its way down the steps from the church toward the safety of home.