Into the Blizzard (29 page)

Across from what was the railway museum is a memorial plaque commemorating Tommy Ricketts and his pharmacy. He sold comic books and candy to kids. Ricketts travelled to London once, in 1929, to attend a dinner given by the British Legion at the House of Lords. He met General Hart, the oldest living Victoria Cross winner. Ricketts was still the youngest.

There is a story that, when King George VI visited St John’s in 1939, Tommy Ricketts declined an invitation to join him at an event. So the King had his car stop in front of the pharmacy until Ricketts ventured out to shake hands with him.

The last photo I’ve found of Tommy Ricketts in his pharmacy shows him holding a magazine from off the rack, opened to a story called “How to Fool Smart Ducks.” This is
True—The Man’s Magazine,
and the ducks story was written by Ted Trueblood. It’s the October 1954 issue. Ricketts was fifty-three.

True
’s masthead reads “ ’Tis strange, but true; for truth is always strange—stranger than fiction.”—Byron.

Ted Trueblood had been the editor of
Field & Stream.
He was a conservation leader and led the fight to preserve salmon rivers from hydro dams. He popularized catch and release methods. He fished, in the 1950s, for salmon in Newfoundland. He was similar to Lee Wulff, whom I saw perform when I was a boy at the Arts and Culture Centre in Corner Brook. Lee Wulff and his wife, Joan, practised spey casting and I watched, with my father, as Lee Wulff cast his line with a red bow on the end, cast it across the stage and then changed direction and flipped that line out into the audience. The red bow landed daintily on the top of a bald man’s head. We all stood and applauded. It was my first time in a theatre, and for a long time I associated theatre with the practice of fly-fishing.

Lee Wulff, on catch and release: Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.

Tommy Ricketts, who was captured by the Newfoundland people, died in February of 1967. He collapsed on the floor of his shop, right here, on this spot, in this store that no longer exists, but the space exists, the land where last he stood and where I now stand. He was buried with full military honours, a state funeral in the graveyard near Quidi Vidi. A red cushion held his medals. The coffin placed on a gun carriage. There was snow on the ground as there was when he came home from the war, when he was carried on men’s shoulders.

If you keep walking west from Ricketts’s old pharmacy, up along Waterford Bridge Road, you’ll come to Bowring Park. Here is Basil Gotto’s
The Fighting Newfoundlander
and the replica of the Beaumont-Hamel caribou. The caribou was a gift of Major William Howe Green. Green served as a musketry instructor during the First World War and was a cousin to Edgar Bowring. It’s a strange thing to see this same statue in a different place. The sculpture of Peter Pan is here too, the one Bowring had made when the
Florizel
broke to pieces.

The caribou, over the years, had been damaged.
The kids swing on the antlers, a deputy city manager said. Morgan MacDonald removed the caribou and took it to his foundry. He cut the caribou open and installed a structure inside to reinforce the antlers. Morgan MacDonald is in the memorial business. He has created several recent war memorials for Newfoundland outports. There is the sculpture of two modern Newfoundland soldiers in Conception Bay South, a man and a woman, modelled on soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. He dreamt up the idea of making half-size models of the caribou for local monuments. He built one for my hometown—and his—in Corner Brook. That’s how I got to know of him, walking past the old Co-op grocery store, where the new City Hall is, and seeing his caribou
in the same posture as the Beaumont-Hamel caribou. The caribou, while half the size of the original sculpture, is about the same size as a real, living animal—something monumental brought back to normal dimensions.

That fall I drove west to hunt with my father. I had a caribou license. I passed the turn-off to many bays and coves where the men of the Newfoundland Regiment had been born. Halfway across the island I darted into Lewisporte, for I wanted see the wreck of a ship that had trained the Newfoundland sailors for the British Navy. The
Calypso
was built in 1883, and was one of Britain’s last sailing ships. There are engravings of her in full sail, and she looks like something that fought during Napoleon’s time. She had steam engines, but could be propelled entirely by sail, which allowed her to serve where coaling stations were rare. She had been used by the British in fleet exercises and war games, where the fleet was divided and one side protected England while the other attempted to invade. This was back in the late 1800s.

And there she is, you come around a corner and look for her bow and she’s there, near the shore in Embree. A calm sea, her masts cut down, but there is the bow of the
Calypso
jutting out of the lowtide water. I got out of my car and marvelled at this quiet deck of wood and iron. It would be nothing if you did not know her story. But when you are informed, it is easy to slip into the danger that Nietzsche outlined: over-attention to the past turns men into dilettante spectators.

The ship was named after the nymph Calypso, who kept Odysseus hostage for five years. Calypso, daughter of Atlas, lived on the island of Ogygia. Plutarch wrote that Ogygia is five days’ sail west of Britain. Which, when you think about it, suggests Newfoundland. The Newfoundland sailors who trained on
Calypso
were kept from home for the duration of the war, from their island home, for five years. The word “calypso” means to conceal knowledge.

See, Nietzsche said, the great thing is already here!

I got back in my car and headed for my father.

It’s a long drive—eight hours—but soon I was motoring along the Humber River, past the hometown of Hugh McWhirter, to the area of Newfoundland I hunt in and know well. There is a woods road and a marsh that cuts across the road near Big Falls. You can hear the water rushing although the falls is too far to see. It is like some big battle rumbling in the distance. I hunted with a rifle
my father found for me. It is a Lee-Enfield, from 1943, but pretty much the same rifle they used in the First World War. My father knew I wanted a bolt action: the gun that built the modern British army. James Paris Lee, who invented the Lee-Enfield, moved from Hawick to Canada at the age of five. The family lived in Galt, Ontario, which is near Waterloo. I had a reading in Waterloo a few years ago, and drove into Galt just to stop and take in Lee’s childhood home. There is a plaque there much like the plaque at the site of Tommy Ricketts’s pharmacy.

We hunted near territory that the Beothuk roamed over. I have canoed, with friends, down the Exploits and slept in a tent on land where you knew the Beothuk had once built a mamateek. Natural points of land that provided good views of game and places to fish and shelter from the prevailing wind. They dug a round shallow pit for their mamateek and we set up our tents in one of these cavities. I carried a shotgun and crept up on some ducks. I shot six but there was one duck I’d only wounded and I had to track him down the river. He hid himself beneath the dead roots of a tree overhanging the riverbed. I bent down to get him and he turned one terrible, innocent eye to me. I pulled him out from this overhang of earth and felt I was involved with events of the grave. I wrung his neck. We dug a hole and built a fire and plucked the ducks. When the fire was rendered to coals we put a pot with the ducks in the hole and buried the
pot. Again, cooked in their graves. Then we unearthed the pot and ate the ducks. They tasted gamey: fish-eaters. We slept in our tents on the Beothuk site and I thought of the sculpture of a Beothuk that stands someplace in the woods near here, a memorial to a people now extinct.

We were on the river for three days, deep within the heart of the island, and it felt like we had returned to an earlier, pre-industrial time. There was a sharp turn in the river that almost switched back onto itself, and there in the distance was a glint through the trees of something metallic and fast. Then you heard it, above the noise of the river: the Trans-Canada Highway.

The Beothuk used to build fences to corral the caribou to openings where they lay in wait with bow and arrow. The Germans did much the same with the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel that morning of the Big Push. They waited for the men to climb out of their trenches and allowed them to be funnelled down to the gaps in the barbed wire and permitted them to walk through these gateways before opening fire with their machine guns. Mown down in heaps is the way Arthur Hadow described it in the regiment’s diary. The Newfoundlanders had met their Red Men. And, when their bodies lay open to each other, through gunshot and shrapnel, Ivor Gurney’s red wet thing was made evident to them. They had become, to each other, their own red men.

I did not fire a shot that hunting season with my father. We saw nothing alive in those woods and across that yellow marsh, a field very much the size of the field at Beaumont-Hamel. And as I emptied the magazine from my Lee-Enfield I remembered that not one member of the regiment fired a shot that day.

We spent the night in the log cabin my father had built when I was a child. I had noticed, in the trunk of my father’s car, a portable tent. I asked him about that. He said in winter he doesn’t trust the roads. If there is a blizzard, he said, and I can’t get through, I want to be able to abandon the car and hike into the woods. You won’t find me trapped in a car, he said, under six feet of snow. He’ll be in the shelter of trees in his tent with a fire, his snares set; he’ll be ready to go ice fishing on a nearby pond.

I told him about the shelter of trees I had found the Newfoundlanders buried under at Beaumont-Hamel, trees taller and bigger than they would be here because these Newfoundland trees had grown up in the climate of France. My father knew that I was writing this book about war, so he told me then that he’d had the chance, when he was eighteen, to go for national service. He’d deferred until he’d finished his apprenticeship at the shipyard. National service was for two years and everybody had to do it if they passed the medical exam. My father was a borderline case because of his eyes. The doctor asked him if he wanted
to go and he said yes. He served from February 1956 to February 1958.

I thought of those years, and clicked through the wars the British had been involved in. The historian Will Durant calculated that
“only twenty-nine years of human history have not been marked by war.” I asked my father if he had been worried about the British in Kenya or the war in Korea. He said that none of his entry got posted abroad, which was a big surprise. Every entry before his—about a hundred and twenty men—had been posted to Cyprus where there were terrorist bombings. But just about all of the men in his entry were given home postings. He went to the Royal Air Force in Driffield, the Yorkshire Wolds country. It was a great camp. The first words my father heard when he arrived were, “Food’s good here.” And it was. Food was lousy in every other camp he was at. He was an engine mechanic working on all-weather night-fighters—jets. They would refuel, fit starter cartridges, do preflight and after-flight inspections. Check oil. He also got to run up the engine after a bigger servicing. He got to sit in the cockpit, start up the engine and run it up gradually until it was screaming. He also guided pilots to their parking stations using batons, like you see people doing at airports today. But most of the time he and the others were just playing darts, waiting for the planes to come back. It was pretty boring. Being near home, he got a lot of forty-eight-hour
passes at weekends, so he was able to see my mother quite often. They were engaged before he went away.

After his service, my father went back to his old job in the shipyard.

I drove back to Western Bay without a caribou. But before leaving Corner Brook I took a turn up Elizabeth Street towards what I used to think of as the Old Age Home. I wanted to see a house where Arral Tuff had lived. Arral Tuff was the widow of George Tuff. George Tuff lived in Old Perlican, near our place in Western Bay. He was the second man to sign up for the Newfoundland Regiment. He was a commercial traveller. He had sandy hair and grey eyes and for a while I confused him with a sealer who had survived the
Newfoundland
disaster of 1914.
But that George Tuff was from Bonavista Bay. My Tuff had been left a parlour organ in his father’s will. I wondered if that had spurred him to become a
commercial traveller. Sassoon once wrote that there was something attractive in the “idea of being a commercial traveler, creeping about the country and doing business in drowsy market towns and snug cathedral cities.”

I had gone to Old Perlican to find where George Tuff had lived but no one remembered him. Maybe you mean
New Perlican, an elderly man told me, which is along the Trinity side down near Winterton. Sometimes people get tangled up, he said. It was, in fact, the anniversary of the sealing disaster and I’d already been tangled up with that other Tuff.

I’d been tangled up a few times. At The Rooms I had discovered that it wasn’t at Sandringham at all that Tommy Ricketts had met the King, but at York Cottage which was on the Sandringham estate. I was close, but the entire scenario I had conjured up was wrong and I had to pull up stakes and reset the event in another building. What odds, I thought. How accurate can we be about the past? I had stood in the footprints of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who shot Francis Ferdinand and his wife, in Sarajevo. The footprints are artificial impressions in a cement sidewalk and a plaque on the wall explains them. But are they genuine? Did Princip stand exactly here? Even the meticulously kept trenches at Beaumont-Hamel, so often declared the only stretch of the Western Front preserved intact, have filled up with soil and grass. The archaeologists have to dig down several feet to find vials of morphine and belts of cartridges.