The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (63 page)

For a while, I basked in the glory of having done what Reeves at Bishop Feild had assured us all could not be done. I had not only climbed to the top of my little ladder, I had leapt across to the larger one beside it and climbed to the top of that as well.

Or so I hoped it seemed to outsiders, anyway, for though I could see the point of having and wielding power, I could not see the point of wealth. My new house had thirty-two rooms, twenty-five more than any other house I had ever lived in, that many more than I knew what to do with.

Fielding came back not long after the first provincial election, which occurred just months after I was acclaimed premier. I opened the
Telegram
one morning in my office in the Colonial Building and there, on page three, was her column, Field Day, with not so much
as a note of explanation about her eighteen-month absence. Nor did she allude to it in her column.

She had either not left Newfoundland, or she had been getting newspapers sent to her abroad, for in that first column she showed herself to be not only fully up to date, but also attuned to the mood of what I was calling the new Newfoundland.

I had won the election by a landslide. I was already ruling the province with such an iron fist that most people were afraid to speak out against me. Newspapers especially were under my thumb. I blacklisted newspapers that criticized my administration, refusing them government advertising and refusing any companies who advertised in them government contracts. Squires, Alderdice, the Commission of Government had all done this; it was legitimized by tradition as far as I was concerned.

But Fielding vowed she would be “an atom of dissent beneath my mattress,” and I knew she meant it. I could imagine her brooding at a distance for eighteen months about all the wrongs, real and imagined, I had done her through the years. That was a long time to brood. That she had come back after so long was the measure of just how resolved, how determined she must be.

There was no one close to Fielding whose job or reputation I could threaten. She put forward in her column so unflattering an image of herself that no rumours I could leak could make it worse. It would hardly do her any damage for me to reveal that she was the reprobate she claimed to be.

I knew I could silence her if I could silence the
Telegram
, which was the only hold-out, all the other papers having fallen into line, but there were just enough businesses owned by Roman Catholics and with Roman Catholic clientele, and just enough townies whose bitterness at losing the referendum and hatred of me were still at fever pitch, to keep the
Telegram
in advertising.

The
Telegram
’s main rival newspaper, the
Daily News
, quoted me at such length that I practically had a column of my own with which to counter Fielding’s.

I said that at a time when her readers had needed her most, she had deserted them, first by not having had the courage to take a stand on Confederation and second by literally running away. I challenged her to explain her sudden disappearance. I said that she had spent her time “brooding and sulking somewhere.” It was obvious, I said, that now that she knew nothing could come of it, now that she knew the cause was forever lost, she had decided she was an independent and obviously intended to carry out against me some sort of personal vendetta.

Fielding wrote in her next column: “The number of Josef Stalin’s enemies who still draw breath and the number of Joey Smallwood’s who still draw pay cheques is about the same.”

It was understandable that I be enraged but stupid of me to let it show. I phoned the publisher of the
Telegram
, threatening to sue him for libel and slander if he published one more word from the “poisoned pen of Fielding.”

Fielding’s next column included a mock “editor’s explanation.”

“Miss Fielding,” Fielding wrote, “was not directly comparing Mr. Smallwood with Josef Stalin, who murdered twenty million of his countrymen just to keep himself in power, an act of which Mr. Smallwood is obviously incapable, since his countrymen number only sixteen million. Rather, the foregoing is a simile in which irony is — we hope you will agree — wittily employed to make a point. If we may say, for one too modest to do so on her own behalf, how clever.”

“Is this how it will be from now on?” I countered. “I for one don’t plan to spend my time decoding Miss Fielding’s columns. If she has something to say, she should come right out and say it. She can try to hide behind that cleverness of hers all she likes, but we see through it, we plain-speaking Newfoundlanders who say what we mean and mean what we say. We see through it.”

My colleagues assured me that Fielding was harmless and ought to be ignored. I tried to ignore her, but the constant sight of Prowse would not let me, Prowse whom I had for a while thought
of banishing from my administration altogether, but who, as a prominent confederate, had important allies whom I was not yet certain I could rule without. And so I appointed him deputy minister of finance.

Whenever we met, I tried to rub it in that, unlikely as it would have seemed to either one of us ten years ago, he was my subordinate, working for me, taking orders from me. But there was always in his eyes, in his manner, something subversive of my authority, as if we both knew that I was not the premier but the “premier,” both knew how I had come by the position and how long I was likely to retain it. I wished Prowse had not been in the room with me that day I met MacDonald at Government House. MacDonald, of course, had needed a witness in case I had more scruples than anyone who knew my history had reason to expect.

And I was unsure of how Fielding would react if I treated Prowse shabbily. It might, I supposed, be one way to get at her, but how close they were or had ever been I was not exactly sure, despite what I had said to her when we last met about her having loved him all along. She had certainly seemed worried that I would do something that would damage his reputation. But I doubted her affection for him because the more I thought about the explanation she had given me for confessing to writing the letter to the
Morning Post
, the more it nagged at me that there was something wrong with it. I had only her word that she was telling the truth. The supposedly Hines-incriminating book proved nothing. That Hines had been involved I had no doubt, but his hasty departure from Newfoundland shed no light on exactly
how
he had been involved.

It unsettled me that she seemed to have contrived a way to exist outside my world, not only beyond my influence, but also beyond my comphrehension. I had no idea if anything she said was true. And she did not seem to want anything. She had no ambition, she had nothing she would find intolerable to lose, Prowse included, I suspected, telling myself that this was not just
wishful thinking. It was not just her criticism of me that rankled, it was the mere unaccountable fact of her relentlessly being there, dogging me without apparent motive and with what ultimate purpose I doubted even she could say.

I pretended to be unable to “get” her columns, knowing that most people did not “get” them. I could not understand, I said, the popularity of a writer so given to “romancing,” which in Newfoundland simply meant not talking or writing about things as they really were.

“It’s all very clever, I suppose,” I said. “At least, I’m told that some people think so, but the fact is that none of it is true. And if it’s not true, then what’s it worth?”

I phoned her once and dismissed her work as “booze-inspired cant,” her as “booze-befogged,” “booze-hazy,” “Scotch-besotted.”

“There’s no analysis here, Fielding,” I said. “There’s no constructive criticism. I suppose you have to be sober to analyse and criticize.”

She let me have my say, saving hers for her column, I supposed. She said little more to me than hello and goodbye, but, ridiculous as it made me feel to admit it, it was good to hear her voice.

We are on a different footing now, her silence seemed to say, not just because of the station you have risen to in life, but for other reasons, too. But it seemed to me her relentless attacks were out of all proportion to what I had ever done to her, or even what she thought I had done, namely, put Prowse at risk by threatening Hines.

Field Day, September 19, 1950

“Got a phone call from himself yesterday. I made a suggestion. He made, and offered to help me carry out, a suggestion of his own. Said on the record I was off my rocker. Off the record a good deal more. The words
Scotch
and
bitch
came up a lot.”

(Editor’s explanation: Miss Fielding and Mr. Smallwood, though they have never met, chat frequently by phone, often sharing a chuckle over the unaccountable rumours that there exists between them some sort of animosity. The words Scotch and bitch came up frequently in their most recent conversation because Mr. Smallwood had phoned Miss Fielding with the happy news that his terrier had just had a litter of puppies, three of whom were female. Miss Fielding, who had been promised the pick of the litter and who has followed with much interest and concern the course of Pokey’s pregnancy these past few months, could not have been more pleased. As for the exchange of suggestions, it demonstrates perfectly the deep-seated friendship that exists between these two, which no amount of professional rivalry can undermine.)

She began calling me by a variety of nicknames in her column: himself and, because my initials were J. R. and I was still so small, so scrawny (130 pounds at the age of fifty), Junior. She even resurrected the nickname she had coined for me at Bishop Feild and referred to me as “Splits.”

I worked too long, too hard, too frenetically to gain weight, never putting in less than eighteen hours a day, weekends and holidays included. I was like a one-man company whose business was running Newfoundland.

This was partly because I trusted no one, believing that the quality, the first chance they got, would try to edge me out and put one of their own in my place, if not Prowse then someone like him. I could not delegate responsibility without also dispensing power, and I was therefore unwilling to trust any task of any importance to someone else. I was unofficially a minister of all portfolios.

How could I not have made mistakes? Fielding devoted a column to the four men who, at the height of a blizzard, knocked on my door and explained that they were “Icelandic herring fishermen”
who had come, they cryptically said, because “Iceland is going down and Newfoundland is coming up.” Newfoundland could go “high up,” they said, if I were to buy herring boats for them. I think I did it because I could, because of the sheer novelty of being able to fulfil such a ridiculous request. I had only to say yes and the boats were bought.

The Icelanders left Newfoundland weeks later with a contract, came back the following spring with four dilapidated boats that were not worth a fraction of the $400,000 I had doled out, spent nine months fishing (during which time they caught six barrels of herring), then disappeared and were never seen again. When I worked this out, I found that each single fish cost the province seven hundred dollars, or about fourteen hundred times what it was worth.

Someone convinced me there was no better place in the world to manufacture gloves made entirely from the skins of gazelles than Newfoundland. Into this scheme went half a million dollars; out of it came not so much as a single pair of gloves.

There was the International Basic Economy Corporation, which charged my government $240,000 to assess the prospects for a third pulp-and-paper mill in Newfoundland, almostly instantly on payment declared that there were no such prospects, then disappeared.

Fielding wrote about all these blunders, for which I otherwise escaped chastisement, in her column.

I replied with a press release.

“How are we to attract the great businessmen and industrialists of the world to Newfoundland when people like Miss Fielding are casting doubts in their minds about everything we say and do? Perhaps Miss Fielding does not understand the effect these columns of hers have on potential investors who come here. How much money, I would like to know, has Miss Fielding scared away from Newfoundland? Perhaps her readers should ask themselves that question.”

Fielding replied that far from scaring “investors” away, her columns, which showed what an easy mark I was, were in all likelihood what attracted them to Newfoundland in the first place.

I decided that what I needed, what Newfoundland needed, was a specialist in economic development, a one-man brain-trust, someone who would not be a mere consultant, but a civil servant, a member of my staff.

I phoned Ottawa for advice on the matter and, after speaking to several dozen persons, had recommended to me a man who sounded like the very thing I was looking for, a professor and a consultant for the federal government on immigration and economic development.

His name was Dr. Alfred Valdmanis. At a press conference, I introduced him as someone to whom we would one day build a monument.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Thirty-One:

THE PEOPLE’S PARTY

In 1907, Bond’s lieutenant, Sir Edward Morris, crosses the House to sit as a Conservative. In 1908, invited to lead the Conservatives against Bond in the election, Morris, to whom the Reids lend their moral support (having by this time been so Wintered by Bond they have no other kind to lend), declines.

Instead, he converts the Conservative Party to the People’s Party. Bond absurdly suggests that it is clear from what he calls the Pee Pee’s manifesto that the People’s Party differs from the Liberal Party only in having Morris as its leader instead of him. In other words, says Bond, the election is a contest between the Liberals and the Liberals and he claims to be unsurprised when it ends in a deadlock, with both parties winning eighteen seats.