The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (62 page)

On the morning of the 24th June 1897, four hundred years will have rolled away since John Cabot first sighted the green cape of Bonavista; four centuries will have elapsed since the stem of the
Mathew’s
boat grated on the gravelly shore.… May we not confidently hope that when the morning sun shines out again on the anniversary of the great Baptist’s day in 1897, evil times will have passed, and our Island, closely united with her prosperous younger sisters, will once again become a happy and contented New-found-land?

— D. W. P
ROWSE
,
A History of Newfoundland

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Thirty:

BOND: SCOUNDREL, SCOURGE

A name never spoken by Newfoundlanders except as part of an expletive is that of Sir Robert Bond. As colonial secretary under Whiteway in 1889, Bond almost effected a reciprocity agreement between Newfoundland and the United States without consulting Canada. This was clearly in contravention of Clause 6(b) of the British North America Act, which states that “the interests of one part of British North America may not be sacrificed to those of another except when the phrase ‘one part of British North America’ is defined as ‘Newfoundland.’ ” Luckily, the Canadians heard of it in time to complain to Britain, which vetoed the agreement as it was obliged to do under the above-mentioned clause.

In the colony, Bond managed to convince Newfoundlanders that their interests had, for the umpteenth time, been sacrificed by Britain to those of the Canadians. It was because Bond was among its members that the delegation of 1894 pulled a Whiteway and turned its back on the generous terms of union offered by Canada to Newfoundland — and because of the failure of that delegation
that for the next fifty years Confederation was as dirty a word in the colony as Bond is today.

It is nearly twenty years before Newfoundlanders realize what a scoundrel Bond has been, before they realize he was almost single-handedly responsible for hardening the terms of the already granite-like agreement with the railway-building Reid family.

Bond so fools his countrymen in 1900 that they elect him prime minister by the largest majority in Newfoundland history and re-elect him in 1904.

We Let the Old Flag Fall

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, M
ARCH
31, 1949. T
WELVE
M
ILE
H
OUSE
.

Dear Smallwood:

There are not as many sectionmen on the Bonavista as there were in 1925. Soon the branch lines will be closed. They tell me no one has lived in Twelve Mile House for seven years. It’s mine for as long as I want it. I haven’t decided yet how long that will be
.

I dare say you are celebrating somewhere now. Discreetly celebrating in St. John’s while your bodyguards keep watch outside your house. It said in the
Telegram
that at midnight, you planned to have a glass of rare champagne. What is there to do tonight but write to you and every few lines look up at the clock? I measure time in sentences, counting down the page. I dare say the whole country is clock-watching. People who would otherwise be asleep at this hour are up and waiting for the moment to arrive
.

The moment. “Immediately before the expiration of March 31, 1949.” A phrase added to the terms of union at the last minute, when someone noticed that otherwise our transformation would take place on April Fool’s Day. How immediately? How small a fraction of a second? That which we are we were. Though the moment of our transformation never comes, we are transformed
.

Someone out there is playing the “Ode to Newfoundland” on the bagpipes. In protest or in celebration? I can only faintly hear it. It sounds like it’s coming, not from anywhere along the line, but from far out on the barrens. Perhaps he thinks he’s out of earshot and is playing only for himself. Which makes the gesture no less inscrutable. Someone who voted against Confederation bidding Newfoundland goodbye? Or some confederate piping her into the promised land? Impossible to tell, the ode being what it is
.

The bagpipes. A single instrument but it sounds like fifty. I didn’t know that anyone along the line had a set of pipes. I’ll ask the sectionmen tomorrow if they know who it was. It rained today but now it has stopped. There is still snow on the ground, snow with the texture of ground glass, which would not bear a man’s weight. What a walk he must have had across the barrens. He must have a light with him to see his way and his watch, but I can’t see one, and a light out here on a night like this should be visible for miles
.

“
As loved our fathers, so we love.” But not you, Smallwood. You did nothing as your father did it. Nor did I, when I could help it
.

It all began here, Smallwood, on the Bonavista. This is your district, and you were the first confederate. They still remember that you walked across the island for them or their fathers in 1925. And Cabot made his landfall twenty miles from here
.

I like to think that Cabot came ashore at what for me is bedtime, the sun just up. June 24. Three days past the summer
solstice. The
Mathew
at anchor, he rowed into Keel’s Cove in a dory that he dragged up on the beach, having reserved to himself the right to first set foot on any land that he “discovered.” Nineteen forty-nine. Your name will be paired with that year as Cabot’s is with 1497. Your year. You have brought about Judge Prowse’s devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation
.

The piper is into the last verse now, unless he plans to play all night. “It was patriotism versus pragmatism,” Cashin said, “and God help us, but pragmatism won.” I don’t know. I still don’t know. I could not bring myself to vote. Me and more than twenty thousand others. And the margin was just seven thousand votes. Since that day you came to my room to confront me about Hines, that day I fooled you into thinking that at last you knew who sent that stupid letter, I have felt even more unresolved than usual. Unresolved about everything
.

We have been in limbo for the past nine months, neither country nor province. Only a few would understand that this is just the old abiding limbo made manifest, that we have always been in limbo and perhaps always will
.

I wished, on referendum night, that it could be all over with by morning. I wished your side had no time to gloat, the other side no time to brood. It was the nine-month interval, which ends tonight, the interval between the referendum and actual Confederation, that I dreaded most, not because I thought bad things would happen, but because I knew that nothing would. Nothing. A step had been taken that could never be retraced
.

For months, I thought, even the winners, knowing that nothing new can happen now, will think about the past. And though they will deny it, even to themselves, and though they will not understand it, they will feel guilty, as I do
.

Nationality, for Newfoundlanders a nebulous attribute at best, will become obsolete, and the word country will be even more meaningless than it was before. The question that has been
there from the start, unasked, unanswered, unacknowledged, will still be there
.

We have lost something we would have lost no matter which side won
.

The bagpipes have stopped. The ode is over. On the clock midnight passed while I was looking out the window
.

The piping came from the east. Somewhere out there, five hundred miles away perhaps, the sun is up already; a line of light is making its slow way across the water, encroaching slowly; daylight’s journey across the ocean from the Old World to the New is nearly done, while behind me, westward, the island, the gulf, the continent that will always be that far away, are dark
.

I
COULD NOT STOP
looking at the old constable, standing at the back of the drawing room of Government House with tears streaming down his cheeks. It was April Fool’s Day, 1949. The old man, who, for decades, had worked at Government House, stood rigidly at attention, fists clenched. In the huge marble fireplace, a heap of white birch blazed. Beneath the chandelier, on a table spread with cloth of blue and gold, scrolls tied with red ribbon were unrolled and signed. I was sworn in as interim premier, an office I would hold until the first election. The new lieutenant-governor was given by the secretary of state a mahogany-framed certificate of Canadian citizenship. Newfoundland the country ceased to be.

There was something splendidly sad about it, as there was about the placard at the base of a flagpole I saw later that day that read We Let the Old Flag Fall, something that had nothing to do with partisanship or bitterness. By contrast, there was a man who on the same day, in a gesture of protest so excessive that it did not ring true, hung his whole house in black crěpe.

Weatherwise, April 1, 1949, was exactly the kind of day it should have been, it seemed to me. Cold. Foggy. Light rain. The kind of day that makes you forget St. John’s ever looked otherwise and that makes you prone to pointless reflection.

I could tell by looking at them that the people on the streets understood at last. I met with a lot of people that day, some for the first time, and tried for their sake, and the sake of appearances, to seem exultant, anticipatory. “It’s a great day for Newfoundland,” I said, and meant it. But I grew tired of saying it.

Nine months it had been, with half the population acting as if it were under sentence of death and the other half, for all their outward bluster, not much better. I tried not to dwell on my part in it all. I was unsure how significant a part I had played. Britain had found in old Mackenzie King a face-saving way to cut us loose. He had put on his career the final flourish of Confederation and completed the long-dreamed-of dominion that would truly run from sea to sea. Perhaps it would have happened, sooner or later, with or without me.

I lunched in a restaurant from which I could see the city, opposite my father’s deck-house on the Brow. Everything seemed unbearably detailed. I remember the row houses, the grain of the wood beneath the paint on the clapboard of the house across the street, the wood wet through with rain. The street signs bearing the names of governors all born and buried elsewhere.

There were no protest demonstrations, no parades, though many had been planned. By late afternoon, the streets were all but empty.

There lay over everything the guilt that accompanies the doing of a terrible but necessary thing.

We moved into Canada House, the former residence of the Canadian high commissioner, a now obsolete office, and the former home of Peter Cashin’s father, Sir Michael Cashin, who for a short time had been prime minister of Newfoundland. It was on Circular
Road, two houses down from the house in which Fielding grew up. From it, you could see Government House and the Colonial Building and Bannerman Park, where for years I had given speeches while standing on a kitchen chair and once while hoisted on the shoulders of two fishermen.

It was a large white wooden house with three wings and six chimneys with two pipes apiece. With all fires going, twelve columns of smoke rose from the house. There was a stone fence and a large iron gate made of two halves that opened inward like the gate of Sir Richard’s house. “Canada” was written on one gate and “House” on the other.

The house came fully, lavishly, furnished, which was fortunate, for we could not, with all our belongings, have filled a single room. There was a threesome of housekeepers who vacuumed sofas never sat upon, aired out rooms never occupied, beat rugs that, had they been stolen from us and recovered, I could not have sworn were ours. There were mahogany desks and dining tables, gleaming chandeliers, theatre-curtain-like drapes with drawstrings as fat as belfry ropes. Our bed was elevated so far from the floor I felt while lying in it that I was levitating.