The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (42 page)

“Let go of me,” we heard her say. “Let go of me, I’ll not be carried from the House by a handful of Tory backbenchers, let me go.…”

By the sound of it, Emerson and the others had to lift her from the main chamber by the arms and legs. “If they hurt one hair on his head, you Tories will pay for it,” she shouted between grunts of exertion. “The country will know, the world will know who’s to blame for this.…”

“Helena, I’ll be all right,” Sir Richard managed to say, his voice breaking as if it was himself he was trying to convince. I suppose the thought that it might have been more appropriate to assure her that
she
would be all right did not occur to him.

“Richard, be careful,” she said, though we could barely hear
her now. “Don’t make a move without Inspector Hutchings. Inspector Hutchings — ” Before she could admonish Hutchings, the chamber doors came to with a bang.

“Miss Fielding goes next,” Hutchings said. “As soon as they get back.”

Fielding lit up a cigarette. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “They won’t want to murder me unless someone tells them who I am.”

We stood about in silence for a while. Whenever the furniture-fuelled bonfires outside flared up, we could see a faint flickering of light beneath the door and were better able to see one another. Sir Richard was wide-eyed with alarm and kept looking about appealingly, almost resentfully, at the rest of us, as if it was not fair, or was even somehow our fault, that in this roomful of people, he was the only one the mob was after, as if he had been randomly singled out for persecution.

Another volley of rocks and bricks clattered against the Speaker’s door and a cheer went up that I feared might signal some new development. I wondered aloud when it would occur to the mob outside to scale the building with the ladders of a fire truck.

“Thank God they’re so drunk,” Hutchings said.

“Speaking of which,” Fielding said and took her silver flask from the inner pocket of her overcoat, drank from it, then passed it to Inspector Hutchings, who, after drinking from it, passed it to Sir Richard, who regarded it, as he was regarding everything now, as though it were a confirmation of his doom.

“Take a drink, Sir Richard, sir,” Inspector Hutchings said, and Sir Richard looked around as if he was trying to read in our faces what we thought his chances were. Sir Richard took a drink, tipping the flask back too quickly, so that the Scotch went down the wrong way and he gagged and sputtered. Byrne looked away, embarrassed. Sir Richard dropped the flask and some of its contents spilled onto the floor. Fielding recovered the flask and, after offering Byrne and me a drink, which we declined, put it back in
her pocket. Hutchings slapped Sir Richard on the back. After a while, Sir Richard nodded to indicate that he had recovered.

“I don’t think Emerson will get back inside again,” I said. “We’ll have to get Sir Richard up in some disguise.”

“Sir Richard and the constable here could switch clothes,” Hutchings said.

“But Byrne is twice his size,” I said.

“Then Byrne can give Sir Richard his helmet and his constabulary jacket,” Hutchings said. “They should at least buy us some time.”

Byrne had not spoken a word since we had locked ourselves in the Speaker’s room. He was about my age and was awed into silence, I dare say, by his close proximity to the prime minister and Lady Squires, as well as Hutchings, at whom he kept darting nervous glances.

“It’s worth a try,” Hutchings said. Byrne took off his helmet and his jacket, wordlessly handed them to Hutchings, who gave Sir Richard the jacket first after Sir Richard had removed his own. The constabulary jacket was much too big, less obviously so with the sleeves tucked in, but even then the corporal’s chevrons, which should have been at Sir Richard’s upper arms, were almost at his elbows. The helmet was an even worse fit. It was a London bobby-type helmet and all but enclosed Sir Richard’s entire head, the front of it well down past his nose.

“All you need now is a suit of armour and a horse,” Fielding said.

“We need to line it with something,” Hutchings said. I gave him the sweater I had been wearing inside my jacket. Hutchings stuffed the helmet, then put it on Sir Richard. It was still too big, but at least he was just able to see out from beneath the brim.

It was decided that Byrne, Fielding and I would lead the way. Fielding gave Byrne her overcoat so he would not look conspicuously underdressed for the time of year, and so there would be no doubt even in what was left of the rioters’ minds what gender she
was, and put on Lady Squires’s cape. Hutchings and Sir Richard followed close behind us. Hutchings unbolted the door, peered out and, satisfied there was no one in the chamber, motioned the three of us ahead of him and Sir Richard.

We left the chamber by way of the cloakroom, and the building by the cloakroom door, which opened only from the inside — it was the one Fielding and I had pounded on with our fists — onto a set of steps that faced the park. To our advantage, it was dark and we were a good distance from the nearest bonfire.

The men who were jammed up against the steps begrudgingly made way for us, though we were jostled and sworn at.

“Where’s Squires?” they said. “Where is the bastard? Is he still inside?” They recognized Hutchings first; several men shouted his name. They must have assumed that he and the “constable” were escorting three minor functionaries from the building. Then they recognized me as the man who had hours earlier spoken in Sir Richard’s defence.

“That’s Crackie Smallwood, how did he get in there?” someone said, and someone else speculated that I was short and scrawny enough to have crawled beneath the door. Byrne and Fielding stood on either side of me. I was barely able to resist the urge to look back to see how far behind Sir Richard was.

We had moved beyond the mob and were almost to the fence when Sir Richard, his vision impaired by the helmet, tripped over an iron gate that had been torn down. The gate clattered loudly on the pavement, and as Sir Richard stumbled and fell forward, the helmet toppled from his head.

“There he is, the bastard,” the cry went up from the mob. “It’s Squires dressed up like the ’Stab.”

They came after us with a roar, wielding clubs and rocks and torches.

“Hutchings,” Sir Richard said despairingly as he tried to disengage his feet from the bars of the gate. Fielding, Byrne and I went back to help them. Fielding raised her cane above her head
and some of the men stopped in their tracks. But most did not, and all five of us were bowled over by the mob.

Sir Richard, now free of the gate, was first to his feet. “Run, Sir Richard, run,” Hutchings said. Sir Richard, helmetless, with the now-unrolled sleeves of Byrne’s jacket flapping at the ends of his arms, did as he was told. He dodged the leading edge of the mob and lit out across Bannerman Park with the mob behind him, our prime minister surreally pursued by his constituency. Had there been only five or six in pursuit of him, they would have run him down in seconds, but as every man in the mob wanted to lay hands on him, they moved as one for a while, impeding each other’s progress, and the bottle-neck at the gate was such that Sir Richard got a good head start.

Field Day, April 7, 1932

We were cheered to see such a marvellous turnout this past Thursday afternoon for what may well become an annual event. The Nones, once a widespread custom in Newfoundland, has regrettably all but died out, though it persists in the more remote outports, where it is held on what I am told is still referred to in such places as “the Nones of April,” April 5.

According to Judge Prowse, the earliest mention of the Nones in the literature is in a book published by one Wiliam Douglass in 1755: “The custom is called the Nones [pronounced like bones] after the day in April on which it is held. Likewise the person chosen to be pursued throughout the settlement is called the Nones. In some places the leading citizen is chosen, in others the fleetest of foot male adult, who repeats as the Nones from year to year until he is caught. One old gentleman boasted to me, whether truthfully or not I cannot say, that in his young manhood he had been the Nones six years running. (I believe the pun was not intended.)

“Everyone chases the Nones, shouting at him all manner of abuse, calling him names and even threatening to murder him. On the night of the Nones, once the chase is over, a kind of anarchy prevails throughout the settlement, with citizens wandering the road and setting one another on to acts of mischief, while consuming great quantities of liquor. It is a strange custom and a strange spectacle to witness.”

Prowse refutes Harvey’s theory that the Nones has its roots in the English fox-hunt. Harvey believed the Nones to be a kind of poor man’s fox-hunt, saying that Newfoundlanders unable to afford horses or hounds had to settle for chasing one of their own on foot. But Prowse argues, convincingly, in our opinion, that the Nones is a form of scapegoating, “which was a ritual communal cleansing whereby the sins of the tribe were laid upon a blameless goat who was taken to the wilderness and there released, never to return. (See Leviticus, XVI.)”

The Nones fell out of practice in St. John’s in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time the city had become so large that it was simply impossible, in the judgement of the authorities, to conduct a chase involving the entire population. The Nones is still practised in some of our more remote outports, however, where a ballad perhaps no longer known to those of us too long in cities pent is still sung. By way of augmenting Sir Richard’s attempts to revive a custom unique to Newfoundland, and like so many such customs on the brink of extinction, we here repeat in full the nineteenth-century ballad “The Nones of 1823”:

He hid himself beneath the wharf,
’Twas in April, on the Nones.
On April 6 found they his scarf,
In ’33 found they his bones.

Before nor since was there a chase,
Like that which took Pierce Fudge.
He coopied down, he hid his face:
“From here,” swore he, “I will not budge.”

They searched the bay, they searched the shore,
No sign found they of Pierce.
Back home that night they paced the floors
Their grief ’twas something fierce.

A week went by, a month went by,
The Nones went on and on,
Till even Mary Fudge did sigh,
“ ’Tis sure, poor Pierce is gone.”

In six months all were of one mind
’Twould be pointless more to search:
“His body we will never find,
For his soul we’ll pray in church.”

On the Nones in eighteen thirty-three,
In the morning at low tide,
A woman from her house did see
Poor Pierce, where he did hide.

Ten years, you say, by kelp concealed
Looked they not beneath that wharf?
His secret now can be revealed:
Pierce Fudge, he was a dwarf.

He hid himself beneath the wharf,
’Twas in April, on the Nones.
On April sixth found they his scarf
In ’33 found they his bones.

All this is by way of preamble to yesterday’s events, and to an advertisement that ran a week from yesterday in all the papers, surely one of the most unusual advertisements to appear in this country in quite some time: “Sir R. A. Squires, P.C., K.C.M.G., K.C., prime minister of Newfoundland, invites the citizens of St. John’s to a revival of the old Newfoundland custom the Nones, which will begin at the Colonial Building on the afternoon of April 5. Sir Richard Squires himself has volunteered to be the Nones. All are welcome to take part in what, it is hoped, will become an annual event. (Participants will be encouraged to make a small donation to charity.)”

We must admit we were concerned upon first seeing this ad, given that Sir Richard is fifty-two years old and surely not capable, we assumed, of running at the speed expected of the Nones without doing himself harm. To the extent of our underestimation of Sir Richard, the following attests.

The enthusiasm shown by the crowd of ten thousand that turned out was remarkable. Who would have blamed them had they all stayed home, given how careworn they must be in such troubled times as these.

“We want Squires,” they chanted, outside the Colonial Building. When a spokesman for Sir Richard came out onto the steps and told them that the fee for participating in the Nones would be one day’s dole, every man present flung six cents at him and seemed unanimous as to where Sir Richard should keep the money before dispersing it to charities.

How tickled they were when they realized, some time later, that Sir Richard had tricked them by sneaking past them in disguise, slipping through the crowd dressed like a member of the ’Stab, his hat pulled low, his glasses off, his collar turned up to hide his face. Not until he intentionally tripped over an iron gate did they recognize him, and then the cry went up. “There he is, God bless him, it’s Sir Richard.” And the Nones was on!

Merrily they set out in pursuit of him, shouting jestful imprecations, hurling stones. Was ever such a sight seen before in the Commonwealth, the citizens of a country chasing their elected leader through the streets? What a pleasant diversion it must have been for men who have been unemployed for years to chase Sir Richard through the city shouting, “Drown the bastard!” “Down to the harbour with him!” “Lynch him for the thief he is!” as if they meant it.

So completely did Sir Richard get into the spirit of the Nones, so determined was he to lighten the hearts of his pursuers, if only for one day, that a member of the Newfoundland Constabulary was later heard to say he could not keep up with him on horseback. If you could have seen, dear reader, the expression he wore as he went by me, his eyes fair popping with delight, on his face a smile of mischief so pronounced that a person not well acquainted with him might have mistaken it for a rictus of despair. He ran, dear reader, your prime minister ran so fast that soon the heels of his shoes were bouncing off his backside. You could see in him the boy he must have been, running flat out for the joy of it, all inhibition cast aside, his knighthood, King’s Council membership and law degrees forgotten. He dashed across Military Road and onto Colonial Street, then further incited his pursuers to delight by ducking into a house uninvited and sending out the other side a decoy dressed like him, who was pursued and caught by the crowd. When they realized he was not Sir Richard, they gave him a mock thrashing, then set after the real McCoy, who by this time had left the house, jumped the fence behind it and begun a successful dash for “freedom” down Bannerman Street.