A Winter Evening

My mind goes back these winter evenings to when I was a child on Green Island, and I compare family activities after supper activities, and cannot but help stand in awe of the difference the years have wrought.

After the light was lit and was swinging its glaring white beams in a clockwise rotation that would take in the breakers on the Southern Point and the Western Shoal. The two beams would then sweep the north part of the island, and the cycle would be repeated; supper would be served.

The evening meal could consist of anything from lunch time leftovers, or perhaps cooked from scratch. If salt herring was on the dinner menu, let us say, then supper might be cold roast beef with hash brown potatoes, or perhaps baked beans, or potato scallop.  Whatever was
served, the large plate of home made white bread was ever present, and the home-churned butter to spread on it.

If had been a day when a very large dinner had been cooked and eaten, supper could be simply “preserves” (bottled fruit or berries), served with bread and butter and copious amounts of tea. My mother was a “forager”  a name often heard around the villages years ago to designate someone who could provide well and amply for their families. Back in the early 1940s the island provided a variety of wild berries; dew berries in July, raspberries in August, fox berries in September and in November the king of them all; the marsh cranberry. Every berry was picked and bottled against the coming winter, except the fox berries which were kept  in a water filled half- barrel and cooked as needed.. 

Beside the berries so bountifully provided by nature, Dad would always buy a crate of strawberries from John Clyburne, who had a truck and would go “ back in the country “ to procure the berries he peddled.  These berries came from an exotic land in the days when a trip to Antigonish  was a major expedition.  Mom would make a shortcake and the remainder would be “preserved.”  The shelves for these viands were in the cellar near the base of the chimney. The potato bin was there as well , and wooden packing crates held parsnips and carrots buried in the fine white sand brought in burlap sacks from Soldiers Sand Beach. Turnips and cabbage would be hung from the floor joists.  Sauerkraut, in its barrel was kept in the western oil house along with salt Pollock and/or hake, a half -barrel each of salt herring and mackerel.  A barrel of Western Plate Beef, the best salt beef obtainable rounded out the stores. We ate well.

After the table was cleared, the dishes washed and put away, most evenings a card game would ensue;  while Mom did the dishes, with help from my sisters, Dad would lay down on the couch that had its head against the sideboard that ran along the west side of the kitchen. A kerosene lamp (which I still  own)  sat on the end of the sideboard  just above his head.  He would lay there to read, and he read avidly.

That couch was a story telling venue. I would crawl in behind him, and Rex, the Donut-eating water dog would follow me, resting his head on Dad’s thigh. Many of the stories were fictional, centered on a brother and sister with the generic names of Johnny and Mary, who lived a life
of high adventure. I loved those stories. I’m sure that he could have become a published children’s author had it behooved him to write.

When the card game began, I would listen to my programs on the radio, an RCA Victor cabinet model that sat against the north wall of the kitchen, which was twenty six feet in length, sufficient to ensure that the radio could be heard above the tumult of the game in progress at the table at the other end of the kitchen. I would listen to Jack Armstrong the All American Boy, the Lone Ranger, and a couple of more whose names I now forget.

That RCA receiver was a wonderful  piece of technology to us. It had three knobs on the front of the cabinet (tuning, volume and tone); a small toggle switch on the left hand side of the cabinet was the power on/off switch. When my dad first bought it, the power source was two lead/acid  6 volt storage batteries housed below the chassis on the floor of the cabinet. Charging was a problem; the batteries had to be transported to the mainland for recharge.  Finally dad got some
electronic genius of the time to convert it to use a dry cell pack, which only weighed in at about twenty pounds.

Some nights all hands would listen to such programs as The Lux Radio Theatre, Dragnet or the Green Hornet, and of course that wartime classic L for Lanky, the  serial exploits of a Lancaster bomber and her crew making nightly raids over Nazi occupied Europe from a British airfield.
This was an excellent CBC production, and of special interest to us on the light, for it was almost a daily occurrence for a Lancaster on anti submarine patrol to fly over the light, as well as the queen of the sub hunters, the PBY flying boats.

Sugar was rationed during the war, but there always seemed to be enough for Ardie to make molasses taffy or fondant or perhaps even chocolates or fudge. We didn’t have an ice cream freezer, but Ardie used to make it (mostly coffee  or maple walnut) in enamelware pans set in a larger container of chopped ice, stirring it a wooden mixing spoon, until it reached the consistency of Swedish ice-cream.  Our cow of that time was a  Jersey so there was always lots of cream for this purpose.

The dwelling was notoriously cold, to the point that bricks wrapped in newspapers was the norm for warming the feather beds (sea duck feathers) that we all slept in. There was a cook stove to heat the kitchen as well as cook the food, and a square upright wood and coal burning space heater in the living room. On a cold winter night it didn’t do the job, because the door, the light room, and thence to the lantern, was kept open so that the light could be heard, and during the evening activities in the kitchen, someone was always opening the living room door and sticking their head through it to listen to the roar of the light which told the experienced listener just how the light was doing (shortly after WW II began, the supply of kerosene was stopped due to defense priorities and coal oil was supplied in its stead). The apparatus would often malfunction on the coal oil resulting in some spectacular fires.

Those were the evenings spent on the island long ago, in the light house that Ai built. The island stands forlorn now, swept by the Atlantic gales. The dwellings have been burned and the only structures are the concrete tower and the wooden fog alarm building; the mighty twin beams of the old light extinguished forever, replaced by solar powered bulbs of little significance. The remains of Rex, the donut-eating (thieving) water dog has by now gone back to the elements in his grave near the site were my sister Ardie had her tar papered camp, where she would write to her many pen-pals by the light of a dim kerosene lamp, her only companion the little brown bat that liked to hang upside down from a rafter. The only thing remaining would be the glass top my dad put on his ( Rex’ s ) coffin.

Time is a nebulous thing. We try to measure it; our short sojourn here is governed by it. We eat, sleep, and our periods of relaxation are ruled by time, a thing that, when it comes down to it, has no meaning, for when I look over the island that was the home of my childhood, and realize that I am the last survivor of my immediate family and see such little physical change in the topography of the island, it makes me more convinced than ever that as we hurtle through the infinity of the universe that we will all morph from one dimension to the next...travellers in time.