The Strangers' Gallery (19 page)

It was the first time he had ever been inside its doors. The occasion was a “revival meeting” of the Newfoundland Historical Society, of which Miles was, or had been, a member. The society had been dormant for four years, and at this meeting Smallwood was elected its new president. Right then and there, Miles told me, the idea of an alternative historical society occurred to him—not an alternative to the Newfoundland Historical Society so much as to King Joey Smallwood himself, to the society, the political culture, that he had created, to
L'État c'est moi.
This was to become the Prowse Society, though it didn't really see the light of day until Miles's own retirement eleven years later.

Nineteen sixty-six was another eventful year, officially designated Come Home Year to coincide with the opening of the Newfoundland section of the Trans-Canada Highway. An attempt had been made to “Finish the Drive in '65,” but construction was a year behind schedule. Smallwood had conceived of the idea of the Great Return in 1964: a tourism extravaganza disguised as a patriotic appeal to the estimated two million expatriate Newfoundlanders and their descendants, about four times the Island's population, to return to the fatherland, the old homeland. The idea was not new. Newfoundlanders had been emigrating from the homeland in large numbers for a long, long time, and an Old Home Week had been organized by a group of expatriates in the Boston States in 1904 to, as they put it, “bring together the exiled sons and daughters of Terra Nova, that they might meet again.”

The highlight of all the 1966 events was the official opening of the highway on July 11. A motorcade with Premier Smallwood and Prime Minister Lester Pearson left Confederation Building and drove out to the provincial halfway point of the Trans-Canada Highway, about ten miles west of Grand Falls, where the prime minister unveiled a 60-foot shaft made of granite from Smallwood's Confederate hometown of Gambo. This granite shaft, Miles said, couldn't have been a more appropriate symbol of Confederation, and of our entire association with Canada in general, past, present, and to come, than if he had conceived of it himself. Not that we hadn't been complicit, he added, in providing a welcoming anus
mirabilis
. Seventeen years later, in 1983, the year of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert quatercentenary, Miles was inspired to write a letter to the editor proposing the erection of a 120-foot obelisk—“The Great Shaft”—on the site where Gilbert had formally claimed Newfoundland for Britain.

In 1977, a tide of Newfoundland nationalism was on the rise, though misguided, meretricious, and a bit late, in Miles's view. The “Newfoundland Renaissance” had been proclaimed the previous year in the pages of a mainland magazine, albeit by a Newfoundland journalist in exile. Strangely enough, though maybe not, as this nationalism was a-building, monarchism began to rear its ugly crown. Smallwood had left the political scene only to be replaced very quickly by another Harnett nemesis, Lady Jacqueline Barlow, head of the Newfoundland Monarchist League, a devotee not only of the Royals but also of Labrador retrievers—“Little Newfoundland” dogs, as they were called. On the surface, this was an odd boxed set of devotions, but they seemed perfectly compatible to Miles.

According to an interview in her vertical file in the Research Library, Lady Barlow and her husband, British architect Sir Christopher Barlow, moved from the mainland to Newfoundland in Come Home Year, and she must have thought that she was coming home. Born in Cheshire, England, in 1929, she had been presented to the King and Queen at court when only a teenager. Upon her arrival in Newfoundland, she quickly noticed that almost every house had a portrait of the Queen. The idea for the Newfoundland Monarchist League must have occurred to her right then and there; ironically, the same year the Newfoundland Historical Society was revived and the idea for the patriotic Prowse Society occurred to Miles. She formally founded the league four years later, and was crowned chairperson in 1973.

The league went quietly about its business until the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. Well, not that quietly. Lady Barlow refused stamps at the post office if they didn't bear a picture of the Queen, drove around town with a large Union Jack flying from the antenna of her car, and held festive dinners on the Royals' birthdays. The league marked the Silver Jubilee by collecting over four hundred thousand signatures from all over Newfoundland on a Declaration of Loyalty to the Crown. It was a Declaration of Independence in reverse, signed by four-fifths of the population, formally claiming Newfoundland for Britain all over again, a fitting prelude to the 1983 Gilbert celebrations. Assembled in red, white, and blue binders, bound with a gold cord and packed in a box weighing fifty-five pounds, the declaration was presented to the Queen at her summer residence at Balmoral by Newfoundland veterans of both world wars. The Queen sent Lady Barlow a Little Newfoundland dog as a reward for “a jolly good effort.”

“Here's something for your vertigo files, best read supine,” Miles said to me one day in the Research Library Reading Room, showing me the report in the
Evening Telegram
of Lady Barlow's loyalist coup, the first major inflammatory initiative in a campaign that would drive him to complete distraction. He would, quite literally, be “vexed to nightmare,” in the words of his favourite poet, Yeats.
“
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last…?”

That same evening, on Miles's personal invitation, I attended my first meeting of the Prowse Society and became the unofficial secretary—very unofficial, and certainly not on his invitation—of an organization that Miles said had existed, at least informally, for more than ten years. It had no official membership, no officers, no dues, no constitution, no publications, and no meetings as such, but if you happened to be at the Travers Tavern when the spirit moved him…well, you could sip your drink and listen to “President” Miles Harnett rant and roar, like the “true Newfoundlanders” of traditional song. A full forty verses on almost every occasion. But I'm being unfair. Sometimes there were good reasons for his roaring: new torments, old indignities, enormous provocations. Nightmares.

Besides Lady Barlow's Declaration of Loyalty, there was the twenty-eight by forty-two-foot Union Jack, second-largest in the world, made in Hong Kong and raised on a specially built flagpole in Cupids, Conception Bay, by the Newfoundland Monarchist League in 1981 to honour Prince Charles on the occasion of his marriage to Lady Diana. Whether the site was chosen for its auspicious name, with all its cute romantic connotations, or, more likely, because it was the site of Britain's first colonial plantation in the New World, founded by John Guy in 1610, the newspaper report in Lady Barlow's file did not say. The flag was large enough to be wrapped around an entire house in St. John's in 1983, during Queen Elizabeth's official visit on the occasion of the Gilbert quatercentenary.

Miles was not joking about the nightmares. As he was asthmatic, they usually left him gasping for air. One night he dreamt that his own house had been wrapped in something heavy and dark. He couldn't see and he couldn't breathe, both in the nightmare and when he woke up. Awakened by a loud noise in the middle of the night, he found himself in complete darkness. He always slept with a night light on, but a car had struck a utility pole nearby, cutting off his electricity.

In another dream, he was lying in an open casket, wrapped like a mummy in Union Jack bunting, and people were filing by, himself included, in a long, long line. “Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions,” he heard someone behind him saying—he was sure he knew who it was, but he couldn't turn around—as they were going up the steps of a ransacked building that looked like the old House after the Great Riot of 1932. Someone was playing a funereal air on a piano beneath a tree in Bannerman Park next door.

But the worst one of all was “the Old
Dawg
,” as he called it, a version of the Old Hag, I guess: a recurring nightmare in which he seemed to be awake and pinned to the bed by an old woman sitting on his chest, an old hag with the black face of a Newfoundland dog. Not even a crucifix, apparently, could deal with that one. The only cure for it, he'd been told, was to drive nails through a shingle and lash it, nails up, to his breast.

These days Miles is known less as an anti-monarchist and more as a Newfoundland nationalist, though
patriot
is what he prefers to be called, when he consents to being called anything at all. On September 13, 1946, when Anton was just in swaddling clothes and I hadn't even been born, the twenty-three-year-old Miles Harnett drank his first bottle of Dominion Ale, brewed practically next door at the Bennett Brewery, at the Travers Tavern, where the Newfoundland House of Assembly had first sat, though not at its present location. It had moved from Duckworth Street east to Water Street west that same year. He sat at the bar by himself, for he didn't know a soul in the place and was very shy. He listened to a radio broadcast of that afternoon's speeches from the floor of the National Convention. He sat at the bar for hours, stayed late into the evening, and drank many more Dominion Ales.

Miles had just begun working as a proofreader at the same Water Street printing establishment where his father had worked all his life. He had already worked for three years at a clerical job in the Commission of Government civil service, in Home Affairs and Education. The Travers was just up the street from the printing plant, and Miles would go there almost every day after work, which usually ended around six o'clock. Being a young bachelor—perhaps even an eligible one, though he would remain single all his life—
he would often stay on and have his supper at the tavern, then listen to the speeches from the National Convention, meeting to decide Newfoundland's future. Forty-five members had been elected in June 1946—the first general election in Newfoundland in fourteen years—and began sitting on September 11.

The radio broadcasts were on the government station—vonf, the Voice of Newfoundland frequency—whose home was on the top floor of the Newfoundland Hotel. The radio voice people began to hear with the most frequency, however, was that of Joey Smallwood, who used the broadcasts to promote his dream of Confederation with Canada—“pimping for Confederation,” as Miles put it. Joey knew how to use the airwaves better than anyone else. Before and during the war, his radio show,
The Barrelman,
also on vonf, had been the most popular radio program in Newfoundland. Joey's voice, his mesmerizing oratory, would go on to become
the
Voice of Newfoundland, drowning out practically all other voices after 1949.

The National Convention was a smokescreen, according to Miles, which had been preceded by the smokescreen of the Amulree Report of 1933 and followed by the National Referendum smokescreen of 1948. Behind all the smoke, he believed, Britain had conspired to determine Newfoundland's political future.

Hot on the trail of the historical Recognitions to which he'd been alerted by Anon. more than two years previously, he asked, at a meeting of the Prowse Society at the Travers Tavern on the evening of September 13, 1986, exactly forty years after he'd first “dared to darken its doors”: Was it just a coincidence that the British general who invented the smokescreen, Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, had actually moved to Newfoundland in 1925 and lived among us for forty years?

It was an offhand rhetorical question, but one that gave increasing support to my rapidly developing belief that his political philosophy was neither a politics nor a philosophy, but the sort of impenetrable and unstable rhetorical ideology that, when all was said and done, would be more amenable to a poetics rather than a politics or an ethics.

Displayed behind the bar of the Travers Tavern, enshrined in a sort of bell jar or tabernacle, was a glowing amber bottle of cod liver oil, whose illustrious provenance the barkeeper had filled him in on during his first evening there—the original bottle from the Great Exhibition of 1851, no less. On the wall above it was a painting of the young Mary Travers, whose face had a sad but determined look. It had been painted, the barkeeper said, when she was just a chambermaid, by the original owner of this inn-cum-tavern, which she would eventually own and run in a most businesslike manner.

The spunky, inimitable innkeeper Mary Travers—about whom very little is known, but who
flourished
, as the encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries are wont to say in these instances, around 1833—had, with a great flourish, kicked our first legislators out of her establishment for neglecting to pay the rent. She petitioned the Assembly for payment in July 1833 and, when payment wasn't forthcoming after the second session ended in August, she seized all the House's furniture and regalia—the Speaker's chair, gavel, desk, books, and papers; the mace, sword, cloak, and cocked hat of the sergeant-at-arms—and put an ad in the newspaper advertising them for sale at auction. They were sold, apparently—accounts vary, to say the least—but it seems the Government was able to get them back.