The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (56 page)

“I don’t drink — at all, your excellency,” I said, wondering if it was proper for me to refer to him as Rodney had. It was true, I had recently sworn off liquor completely, though it would not last. He raised those conspicuous eyebrows of his, whether out of surprise at the fervour of my declaration of abstinence or because of the gaffe in protocol I had just committed and that he must, loath as he was to do it, ignore, I was not sure.

“Laudable,” he said. “Very laudable.” I knew him to be a Welshman, as was Commissioner James, while Commissioners Flinn and Neill were Irishman, all appointed since Whitehall’s call for a national convention in 1945. The lack of Englishmen among the foursome had been widely noted, though what if anything it portended no one was certain. Irishmen and Welshmen would find favour with the outporters and the urban poor, so many of whom were descended from Irish and Welsh settlers, whereas most of the “ruling” families of St. John’s were English.

Governor MacDonald’s accent was as English as Hope Simpson’s had been, but that did not matter, since it was only those whose favour he did not need to curry who ever heard him speak. I knew he had once been a coal miner, and after that the leader of the Welsh Co-operative Movement and the Welsh Miners’ Federation, then a Labour member of Parliament and ultimately a Labour Cabinet minister. It did not seem to me there was much of the coal miner or Labour Party member left in him.

“You may smoke if you wish,” he said. Thinking his abstinence might extend to smoking; I was about to decline when he took out his pipe, at which point I took out a cigarette and accepted a light from him.

“Thank you,” I said. He nodded his head and winced as if it pained him to be thanked, or as if he could not stand the thought of having to spend the evening pretending not to notice or not to mind my social clumsiness. He exuded a sense of weary exasperation that it was not as obvious to others as it was to him what was wrong with the world. He sighed continually, shifted in his chair, ran his hand over his face, leaned his head sideways on his hand as he looked at me as if he had long since despaired of making himself understood to anyone and therefore believed the only hope for the world was if people contented themselves with doing exactly what he told them to without understanding what purpose they were serving.

His origins, rather than making him feel sympathetic towards me, must have allowed him to foresee all too clearly the tiresome lengths someone of my social standing would go to not to seem gauche in front of him. Perhaps I reminded him of some younger, intolerable-to-remember version of himself.

“Let me first assure you,” he said, “that by inviting you here this evening, we are not attempting to interfere with the proceedings of the National Convention or the upcoming referendum. We are bound by our office to neutrality in such matters, as I believe we should be. But like anyone else, we have our own opinions about what would be best for Newfoundland, and though it would not be proper for us to tell you what they are, we are naturally curious to hear from such people as you. Mr. Prowse tells me that you believe it would be in the best interests of its people if Newfoundland were to confederate with Canada.”

“Yes,” I said, “I — ”

“The problem, I suppose,” he said, in the tone of someone taking a polite interest in the technical aspects of a profession he was not much familiar with, “is how to get Confederation on the referendum ballot paper?”

This was close to being the very sort of impropriety he had just assured me he had no intention of committing. I resented it,
yet at the same time felt euphoric at the possibility that however improper it might be, he was about to, implicitly or explicitly, pledge me his support. It must have been only the trace of resentment that he noticed, for he sighed wearily as if to say, “I’ll wait while you give your high horse a token trot around the room.”

It crossed my mind that I might be in over my head, that he might be planning to use me as Sir Richard had and afterwards discard me. I wondered if I ought to politely take my leave of him, but it also occurred to me that if I did, he and whoever he was taking his instructions from would find someone to replace me. (Since the convention had been elected, a handful of other delegates had come out in favour of Confederation.) I knew in that instant that no matter what happened at the National Convention, Confederation was going to be on the ballot paper, and I would accomplish nothing by walking out now besides cutting myself out of whatever the spoils of a confederate victory might be. By asking me this seemingly innocent question, MacDonald had given me the choice of playing along or ending my newly resumed career in politics. The real question he had asked was “Are you or are you not our man?”

“Yes, that is the problem,” I said. “But I think I can convince a majority of delegates to agree to put it on the ballot paper.”

MacDonald smiled broadly, looked at Prowse as if this meeting had been his idea. Prowse beamed back at him. No doubt about it, I had been recruited at Prowse’s urging.

“Mr. Prowse tells me,” MacDonald said, “that you are quite popular in Newfoundland, especially in the outports, because of a radio program you once hosted called ‘The Barrelman.’ ”

“For that and for other reasons, I suppose,” I said.

He nodded his head emphatically, as if to say he had no doubt that I was a man of many accomplishments. He seemed to have taken to me now that he knew that boorish scrupulosity was not among my faults.

I wondered when he would commit himself more explicitly. I assumed that what I was hearing was a prologue to some plan he was about to unveil and wanted me to implement. But he went on in the same vein, and I wondered if the resentment that I was sure had fleetingly crossed my face when he said the word
Confederation
had put him off, as if he saw before him someone too naive or loose-lipped to be trusted as a partner in impropriety. Then it occurred to me that he might be planning to have Prowse fill me in later in his absence.

After about half an hour of asking me small-talk-provoking questions, he said it had been a pleasure meeting me, and he had Rodney show Prowse and me to the door.

As Prowse was driving me back to my house, I kept waiting for him to say something, but all he did was grin; Prowse, now forty-six years old, grinning as he had when he confessed to not having shown his father my father’s book — or so I thought at first, until I realized he was grinning as though he had caught
me
out in something, caught me down on the ground with the rest of them, my high horse nowhere to be seen. Nothing had been said at my meeting with MacDonald, but something had been agreed to. I was their man. I wondered what, in the long run, that would mean.

Were invisible hands at work in the months that followed? Almost certainly. But they were invisible even to me. It was not necessary that I know when my efforts were being facilitated. It was better that I didn’t. I would often feel I was making my way along a path that was being cleared by someone who was always just out of sight.

MacDonald had needed to meet me to size me up. It seemed that I would do. I suppose he could tell just by looking at me that I was powerless to cause him any trouble, and that I was desperate to make something of what in all likelihood was my last chance for success. He himself was sixty-one years old, this his last posting before retirement. Newfoundland was all that stood between him and
a peerage in the House of Lords, for which he was known to have an un-Labour-like craving.

I had read somewhere that there were once more than two hundred structures in the British Empire that went by the name of Government House. The scuttlework of empire having been under way for years, there were not that many now.

I understood, without having been told in so many words, that I had a new mandate: either to cause Confederation to be included on the ballot paper by parliamentary means, or to drum up sufficient support for putting Confederation to a vote that Britain would seem justified in flouting the National Convention if it had to.

It was not hard to reconcile this with my conscience. I told myself it did not matter how it came about that Newfoundlanders were given the opportunity to consider Confederation, since Confederation would not happen unless a majority of them voted for it. As for the interference of the British, once they were clear of us so would we be clear of them. A mutual good riddance.

I lay awake most of the night in a state of great excitement, my only nagging concern being that when and if the referendum was won, I might, having done the legwork, be pushed aside or thrown a bone as had happened when I helped Sir Richard win in 1928. Prowse’s involvement was especially disconcerting. Now it was an image of Prowse as premier, the first premier of the newly created tenth province of Canada, Newfoundland, that nagged at me. Prowse, premier.

Soon afterwards, Fielding wrote in her column: “Smallwood does not really want Confederation. He has come out in favour of it only because he believes this is the best way of ensuring its defeat. He is our truest patriot.”

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty-Seven:

SIR CAVENDISH

Governor Sir Cavendish Boyle writes a quartet of quatrains that, when set to music, become the official anthem of Newfoundland, “The Ode to Newfoundland.”

Six musical settings are written to “The Ode to Newfoundland,” the first by German bandmaster E. R. Krippner. Boyle so dislikes the Krippner setting that he buys the rights to it to prevent it from being published.

Newfoundlander Charles Hutton writes two settings in 1906, and Newfoundlander Alfred Allen another in 1907.

What Hutton and Allen were hoping to accomplish remains a mystery, since the Newfoundland government had, on May 20, 1904, adopted as the official setting one written by Boyle’s friend, the famous British composer Hubert C. Barry.

Tradition in Newfoundland has it that Allen’s version was superior to all the others, Barry’s included. But this is typical in a country where the animating myth is that the true king is always in exile or in rags while some pretender holds the throne.

The Night of the Analogies

A
LDERDICE AND
S
QUIRES
were dead, the more prominent members of their cabinets dead or retired. What well-known figures there were left over from the pre-commission days opposed the idea of a National Convention and, even when reconciled to it, assumed the convention would decide not whether we would have independence, but merely what form of independence we would have.

They intended to use the convention as a way to advertise their prime ministerial and ministerial qualifications. They considered Confederation a “crank” option, the latest in a long line of hopeless causes by which I vainly hoped to rise to power. That they did so did not bother me, for I hoped that by the time they began to take me seriously it would be too late.

All that was left of Sir Richard’s old Liberal Party was Gordon Bradley, one of the two Liberals who had managed to get elected in the Conservative landslide of 1934. Bradley, a sad-faced man with raccoon-like rings beneath his eyes, was the closest thing to a “name” I was able to win over to my cause to give it some respectability.

He had been elected to the National Convention and I persuaded him to “lead” the confederate movement, which, as I expected, he was loath to do.

“All you have to do is what I tell you to,” I said, though I doubted that any movement even putatively led by Bradley could succeed. Bradley professed himself willing to comply if only he could find the energy, his search for which usually proved fruitless and exhausting.

Bradley ascribed his phlegmatic enervation to being swaddled for days as a child while ill with scarlet fever. “They never should have swaddled me,” Bradley told me, over and over, convinced that whatever it is in the body that produces energy was stifled for good by that marathon of swaddling. I literally dragged him from place to place and wrote speeches for him which he delivered in so languorous a fashion that sometimes even I fell asleep.

The National Convention began. The Commission of Government installed microphones in the assembly and allowed the proceedings to be broadcast throughout the island, disingenuously denying the other members’ accusations that its purpose was to get the voice familiar to all Newfoundlanders as that of the Barrelman back on the air again.

A motion was passed to send a delegation to London to inquire as to what sort of assistance an independent Newfoundland might expect to receive from Britain.

Governor MacDonald secretly preceded the delegation to London and spoke with dominion secretary Lord Addison about it, “just so his lordship would be properly informed,” MacDonald said later, when his actions were discovered.

Lord Addison told the delegation that, exhausted by its war efforts, Britain could afford to carry Newfoundland no longer. Peter Cashin, the unofficial leader of the independents and the head of the delegation, reminded Lord Addison that Newfoundland became bankrupt in the first place by helping Britain win the
First
World War.