A Writer's World (45 page)

Whatever has happened to you, destiny has not dealt you such a bad hand in bringing you to this city by the lake. You are as free as we mortals can reasonably expect. Street cars will stop for you, there are dumplings on your dinner plate and a TV in your living room, if not classic fluted columns in a sunken conservatory. Your heart may not be singing, as you contemplate the presence around you of Toronto the Good, but it should not be sinking either. Cheer up! You have drawn a second prize, I would say, in the Lottario of Life.

All Canada, of course, is reserved, undemonstrative, unassuming. I put it down variously to the size of the country, the generally daunting climate, the lingering influence of the British and their debilitating traditions, and the presence of the marvellous, mighty, and terrible neighbour to the south. In Vancouver, however, decorum assumes a new dimension, and gives the whole city (to a stranger's sensibility, anyway) a peculiarly tentative air.

Consider the Smile Test. This is the system I employ to gauge the responsiveness of cities everywhere, and it entails smiling relentlessly at everyone I meet walking along the street – an unnerving experience, I realize, for victims of the experiment, but an invaluable tool of investigative travel journalism. Vancouver rates very low in the Smile Test: not, heaven knows, because it is an unfriendly or disagreeable city but because it seems profoundly inhibited by shyness or self-doubt.

Pay attention now, as we put the system into action along Robson Street, the jauntiest and raciest of Vancouver's downtown boulevards. Many of our subjects disqualify themselves from the start, so obdurately do they decline eye contact. Others are so shaken that they have no time to register a response before we have passed by. A majority look back with only a blank but generally
amenable
expression, as though they would readily return a smile if they could be sure it was required of them, and were quite certain that the smile was for them and not somebody else. A few can just summon up the nerve to offer a timid upturn at the corners of the mouth, but if anybody smiles back instantly, instinctively, joyously, you can
assume it's a visiting American, an Albertan, or an immigrant not yet indoctrinated.

Thwack!
Despite it all the personality of St John's hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

The moment you arrive they take you up Signal Hill, high above the harbour, where winds howl, superannuated artillery lies morose in its emplacements, and far below the ships come and go through the rock gap of the Narrows. Within an hour or two they are feeding you seal-flipper pie, roast caribou, partridge-berries or salt cod lubricated with pork fat. They show you the grave of the last Beothuk Indian and the carcass of the final Newfoundland wolf. They remind you that they, alone in continental North America, live three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.

They chill you with tales of the corpses lying in Deadman's Pond. They warm you up with Cabot Tower rum. They take you to the site of the city's first (hand-operated) traffic signal. They show you the house into which the Prime Minister of Newfoundland escaped from a lynch mob in 1932, and the field from which the aviators Harry G. Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve failed to cross the Atlantic in 1919. They guide you down higgledy-piggledy streets of grey, green, yellow and purple clapboard. They explain to you in detail the inequities of the 1948 Confederation referendums. They tell you repeatedly about their relatives in Boston, and involve you in spontaneous and often incomprehensible conversations on street corners.

Such is the nature of this city; windy, fishy, anecdotal, proud, weather-beaten, quirky, obliging, ornery and fun.

I start with ‘despite it all' because St John's is undeniably a knocked-about sort of town. Economic slumps and political hammerings, tragedies at sea,
sectarian bigotries, riots, fires, poverty and unemployment have taken their toll, and make the little city feel a trifle punch-drunk. The very look of it is bruised. The outskirts of St John's are much like the purlieus of many another North American city – malls, car dealers, airport, duplexes, a big modern university – but its downtown is bumpily unique. Set around the dramatically fjord-like harbour, overlooked by oil tanks and fort-crowned heights but dominated by the twin towers of the Catholic basilica, its chunky wooden streets clamber up and down the civic hills with a kind of throwaway picturesqueness, suggesting to me sometimes a primitive San Francisco, sometimes Bergen in Norway, occasionally China and often an Ireland of long ago.

‘Either it's the Fountain of Youth,' said a dockyard worker when I asked him about a peculiarly bubbling sort of whirlpool in the harbour, ‘or it's the sewage outlet.' St John's is nothing if not down-to-earth, and the best efforts of the conservationists have not deprived the town of its innate fishermen's fustian. The first dread fancy lamp-posts and ornamental bollards, the first whiff of novelty-shop sachets, the arrival on the waterfront of that most ludicrously incongruous architectural cliché, mirror-glass – even the presence of Peek-a-Boutique in the premises of the former Murray fishery depot – have so far failed to make St John's feel in the least chichi. It remains that rarity of the Age of Collectibles, an ancient seaport that seems more or less real.

I hear some expostulations. ‘Fishermen's fustian,' indeed! For all their hospitality, I get the sensation that the inhabitants of St John's may prove prickly people to write about, and there is a prejudice I am told among some of the grander St John's persons against the city's association with the fish trade. Yet even the loftiest burghers' wives could hardly claim that this is a very sophisticated place. It is like a family city, meshed with internecine plot, but still somewhat reluctantly united by blood, history, and common experience. It is the poorest of the Canadian capitals; it has little industry and few great monuments; its responses are those of a permanently beleaguered seaport on a North Atlantic island – which is to say, responses altogether its own.

Actually within the city limits of St John's there are pockets of the Arcadianism that Newfoundland picture postcards so love to show. Small wooden houses speckle seabluffs, dogs lie insensate in the middle of steep lanes, and here and there one may still see the fish stretched out to dry, as they have been stretched for 400 years, on the wooden flakes of tradition. Almost within sight of Peek-a-Boutique I met a hunter going off to the hills
in search of partridge, buckling his cartridge belt around him, hoisting his gun on his shoulder, just like a pioneer in an old print. And immediately outside the windows of one of the city's fancier restaurants (‘Step Back in Tyme to Dine') one may contemplate over one's cods' tongues the whole rickety, stilted, bobbing, seabooted, genial muddle that is the classic image of maritime Newfoundland.

It is a community of cousins. It happened that while I was in town St John's was celebrating its centenary as a municipality with what it called a Soiree. The festivities closed with a public party at the St John's Memorial Stadium that powerfully reinforced the familial sensation, and suggested to me indeed an enormous country wedding – everyone someone else's in-law, everyone ready to talk, with no pretence and no pretension either. Jigs and folk songs sounded from the stage, miscellaneous bigwigs sat stared-at in the middle like rich out-of-town relatives, and when people seemed slow to dance the jolly Mayor of St John's took the floor alone, offering free booze coupons to any who would join him – ‘You have to get them half-tight,' he remarked to me as he handed out these inducements, jigging the while himself.

I puzzled, as every stranger must, about the mingled origins of this pungent civic character, and the first strain I identified was undoubtedly the Irish. The simplicity of St John's is streaked, I came to sense, with a particularly Irish reproach, wit, and irony – sometimes I felt that Ireland itself was only just out of sight through that harbour entrance. The prickly pensioners and layabouts who hang around on Water Street, ‘The Oldest Continuously Occupied Street in North America', look pure Cork or Wexford. The instant response that one gets from nearly everyone is Ireland all over. And the complex of buildings that surrounds the Basilica of St John the Baptist, episcopal, conventual, didactic, societal buildings, is a reminder that here Irish values and memories, however dominant the British colonial establishment of the place, proved always inextinguishable.

But that establishment too still flies its flags – literally, for at city hall they flaunt not only the ensigns of the city, the province, and the Confederation but actually the Union Jack too, for reasons defined for me as ‘purely sentimental'. As a sign reminds us on the waterfront, The British Empire Began Here – when Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first permanent settlement of New Founde Land in 1583 – and the city is appropriately rich in heroic memorials, commemorative plaques, royally planted trees or dukely laid foundation stones. Newfoundland was a self-governing British possession within my own lifetime (no school stamp collection of my
childhood was complete without the 1¢ Caribou of our oldest colony), and within the city centre it is still easy enough to descry the old power structure of the Pax Britannica. The governor's mansion is recognizably the social fulcrum that it was in every British possession. The garrison church is spick-and-span. The Anglican cathedral is authentically unfinished, like all the best Anglican cathedrals of the Empire. The old colonial legislature is properly pillared and stately.

The general view seems to be, all the same, that the British Empire never did much for its oldest colony. Most people I asked said that emotionally at least they would prefer to enjoy the island independence signed away to Canada in 1949, but a good many told me that if they had the choice they would opt for union with the US. This did not surprise me. In some ways St John's is very American. It does not feel to me in the least like Canada, being altogether too uninhibited, but I can conceive of it as a half-Irish, half-Empire Loyalist backwater of New England.

A century ago the Newfoundlanders were all for free trade with the Americans, at least, and would have got it if the British government had not intervened. Today half the people I met seemed to have American connections of some kind or another, mostly in Boston. When I suggested to one elderly lady that closer links with the United States might in the end mean more corruption, exploitation, and general degradation, she seemed quite affronted. ‘That's only the fringe of things down there,' she said. But I looked her in the face as she said this, and I rather think I detected in it, through the patina of the years, the bright eager features of a GI groupie of long ago. ‘I can assure you that at heart the Americans are very good people,' my informant firmly added, and as we parted I swear I heard, as in historic echo, a giggle in the shadows of McMurdo's Lane, and a distant beat of ‘In The Mood'.

These varied inheritances and associations save St John's from any suggestion of provincialism. History does it, one might say. The fateful gap of the Narrows is like a door upon a world far wider than Canada itself, while the city's particular kinds of expertise, to do with ships, and fish, and ice, and seals, and perilous navigations, make it a place beyond condescension. Memorial University of Newfoundland has a formidable reputation, the Marine Institute is world famous, and ships of many nations and many kinds, perpetually coming and going through the harbour, give the town a cosmopolitan strength – rust-streaked fishing vessels from the deep Atlantic grounds, hulking coastguard ships, coastal freighters, ocean research vessels, container ships and warships and ships
bringing salt for the winter roads – ships in such ceaseless progress that each morning of my stay, when I walked down to the waterfront before breakfast, I found that some new craft had come out of the night like a messenger while I slept.

The historical continuity of St John's, too, allows it a status beyond its size. The world has been passing through St John's certainly for a longer time, and perhaps with a greater intensity, than through any other Canadian city – from the Basques, Dutch, French, and English of the early years to the GIs of the Second World War and the Russian and Japanese seamen who are familiars of the place today. All their influences have been absorbed, in one degree or another, into the city's persona. No wonder St John's, though long reduced to the condition of a provincial capital, remains so defiantly itself. There is no false modesty here. ‘You're right, but it isn't true of St John's,' a man told me when I remarked that the citizens of most Canadian cities wanted to talk about nothing but themselves – and he went on to rehearse in loving and elaborate detail all other superiorities of the civic character.

In fact the people of St John's are irresistible talkers about themselves, and their peculiar accent, which strikes me as a cross between Irish, Devonian and Atlantic Seal, makes the flow of their infatuation all the more unguent. Since everyone seems to know nearly everyone else, throughout my stay I felt myself encompassed within a web of overlapping reminiscence, amusement, and complaint. Gossip flows lively in St John's; images of scandal, joke, and mischief passed before me like figures on a wide and gaudy screen. The moneyed dynasties of the town were dissected for me in richest idiom whether living or extinct; politicians suffered the sharp sting of Newfoundland iconoclasm; as I was guided around the streets one by one the pedigrees and peccadillos of their structures stood revealed. Here was the store which was all that was left of the Xs' fortunes, here the mansion where the wildly successful Ys resided. One of the less estimable of the lieutenant governors lived in this house, a whiz-kid entrepreneur had lately installed eight bathrooms in that.