BOOK EXCERPT:
Reels, Rock and Rosaries: Confessions of a Newfoundland Musician
The following an excerpt from a book by Newfoundland author Marjorie Doyle. She is the author of two books: A View of her Own and Newfoundlander in Exile. She has been a columnist with The Globe and Mail and music columnist for the Evening Telegram.
For five years she hosted the national CBC Radio program That Time of the Night. Other CBC work included guest hosting Stereo Morning and The Arts Tonight and appearing regularly on Gabereau and Morningside. She won two CBC Radio Awards for programming excellence.
Her most recent book is titled Reels, Rock and Rosaries: Confessions of a Newfoundland Musician and is published by Pottersfield Press under ISBN 1-895900-73-5. The following chapter from her book is called “The Silent Harp.”
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"Get up ye devil and play the fiddle,
St. Patrick' Day is daaawwwwwning"
I've heard my brothers say that in the old days, before I was born, there was a ritual in our house on March 17. The first boy (there were seven) to get up in the morning, rush to Dad and sing, “Get up ye devil and play the fiddle, St. Patrick’ Day is daaawwwwwning,” would collect a nickel or a quarter.
My father died before I was old enough to sing an Irish ditty – or anything else – but St. Patrick’s Day was still kept. On our flagpole we raised an Irish flag, a gold harp on a green background, and we broke our Lenten fast with glee, eating all the chocolates we could stuff in during the one day reprieve.
The weather was probably wintry, but my memory has preserved it as spring-like, probably clinging to one warm St. Patrick’s Day. It’s relative: in the midst of Newfoundland’s lean and hungry month of March, St. Patrick’s Day in some years possibly did bring that first whiff of warmth in the wind, and the sight of stiff straw-like grass and frozen earth.
It was a holiday, breathing onto the town that idle comfort of timelessness, lost forever since Sunday shopping arrived. We would go to Mass as a family, grateful to see drab winter brightened with colourful banners and flags streaming from the Basilica of St. John the Baptist and from the Benevolent Irish Society (B.I.S.) across the street.
At home, there were visitors. At night we sang around the piano from thick Irish songbooks: contemporary collections and a red hardcover of Moore’s Irish Melodies. Latter-day inventions such as the sobriquet Paddy’s Day and dyeing your beer green were not part of it, although we did wear shamrock brooches and pins. Given that I’ve never had a similar Ukrainian or Chinese experience, and my family has never marked Polish feasts or Robbie Burns day, you might think me Irish.
On both my parents’ sides of the family, the heritage is Irish, Irish, and then some. But am I Irish? My foremothers and forefathers have been in Newfoundland for so many generations and Newfoundland as a society has existed for so long that surely we are Newfoundlanders.
I can kneel and say an ave at the grave of my great-great-great-grandfather, but it is not in Ireland: he lies in Newfoundland, at King’s Cove, Bonavista Bay. My personal connection to the old sod is remote, yet how is it that when I read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, the territory is so familiar – the language and expressions and sense of place? How is it that Brian Moore’s novels The Luck of Ginger Coffey and Answer from Limbo feel like my literature?
The startling discovery of my childhood was that the pope was Italian. How could that be, when the Church was Ireland incarnate? The dominant force in my childhood was church and convent school and in school, too, my world was truly Irish.
The Presentation Sisters had arrived here in 1833. I fell in with them more than 125 years later, but only close sociological examination could tell if, in 1960, they were more Irish or more Newfoundland.
Most of the sisters who taught me were Newfoundlanders but the convent they had entered at 16, just out of school themselves, was closed. They went to work every day – teaching us – but did not go out for much else. They spent their lives in the order, moving around the network of convents scattered throughout the island. Visits home were rare, granted with dispensation if, for example, a family member were dying.
Part of our school was joined to the convent, and part was housed in the B.I.S., a five minute walk over the hill. Every morning a small flock of nuns crossed down. If one of them had to return to the convent during the day, we were sent along. Nuns did not go out in ones; they went in twos, or were accompanied by us, little girls whose only thought was what a privilege to walk Sister So-in-So up to convent square.
Perhaps the sight seemed normal enough to passers-by. As it is winter for most of the school year in Newfoundland, our school days were plagued with blustery winds and blowing snow. The convent square and church yard were windswept ice-fields, with no place to hold on.
Turning the corner of the Basilica you were smacked with that familiar serum – wind, sleet and hail. This was before the Gap takeover of children’s wear; kids march to school now in colourful clothing and funny hats, laden with bulging Barbie or Caillou backpacks, like soldiers in some curious army.
We were bundled in drab woolen or cloth coats, woolen mitts, scarves, outside scarves, and brown gaiters that went over our shoes. A familiar sight would be two short old crones (us) anchoring a tall old crone – about 35 years old and wrapped in black – holding her down lest the St. John’s winds and the laws of aerodynamics play upon her shawls and wimple and carry her out the Narrows. We felt responsible.
Our daily speech was filled with non-standard expressions. We didn’t say, “I’ve told her,” we said, “I’m after telling her.” We said “ye” as the plural of you: “Are ye coming along?” “Did he say that overright her?” we would ask, meaning did he say it in her presence.
It was “minding youngsters,” not babysitting children, and “we’ll see ye after tea,” meaning supper. We used words like “rostrum,” and when we were scolded, we were called “bold impellers,” which seemed to mean we were a bad force.
There was constant talk of “mortification.” Our sentences were filled up with “poor soul” and “God rest his soul.” If, on a sunny day, we saw a hearse in front of the church, we’d cheerfully mutter, “Happy is the corpse that the sun shines on.” The same sight on a rainy day brought an equally cheerful “Happy is the corpse that the rain rains on.”
I haven’t done the research, but I suspect these sayings came from Mother Ireland via Mother Redempta, Mother Borromeo, Mother Ursula. Like it or not, we were miniatures of old Irish women.
And was it President Kennedy’s Catholicism or his Irish background (or perhaps the potent combination) that made him the hero of home and school? On that November day in 1963, we were in a large classroom after school, at glee club practice. The door flew open and our director appeared, flushed.
“On your knees, girls, President Kennedy’s been shot. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” and within seconds we were well into the Rosary, my crazy childish Catholic mind relieved that it was a Friday, allowing us to say the Sorrowful Mysteries.
What if he’d been shot yesterday, a Joyful Mysteries day? Would we have said them, or would there have been a dispensation? Likely, Sister would have made the decision and worried about the consequences later. There was some relief in being a kid.
“The first Sorrowful Mystery, The Agony in the Garden: Our Father...Sister Olivette intoned, and we fell into the well-known ritual. “Give us this day our daily bread.”
We were wriggling through childhood under a heavy Irish shroud, but we never heard the word Ireland. I squint through the endless corridors of childhood memory; I squeeze my body tight trying to recall a reference.
I block sound around me, trying to hear what Mother Aloysius is saying in front of the class, trying to read her lips, but Ireland is not there. No talk of County this or County that, no talk of north and south. The Troubles? They appeared much later in stark images in news magazines, but not in connection to us.
Charles Stewart Parnell and his struggle for Home Rule? I learned of him later in ballads and songs. What of the famine – the failure of the potato crop that depopulated Ireland and drove the desperate to the new world? We knew about hungry children, but they were in pagan lands; if we saved enough mission money, they’d get food and a chance at eternal life.
It’s been more recently that St. John’s has filled up with talk of Ireland. Local and imported scholars study the links between Newfoundland and Ireland: the immigration patterns, the dialect and accents, the traditional music of here and there.
I went to school in a building owned and operated by the Benevolent Irish Society, and I was taught by nuns whose links to Ireland were real and recent, but of Ireland itself I knew nothing – except that many local boys went there to train as priests or doctors.
Was there a single Irish story in all our readers? Did we discover Daniel O’Connell and his efforts for the repeal of the union? Did we know about Robert Emmet’s speech from the gallows, given as he died for Ireland? What of James Connolly storming the Dublin post office in 1916 and proclaiming the Republic of Ireland? Nada.
What I know of Ireland I learned from literature, from Sean O’Casey’s many volumes of memoir, from James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, from Yeats’ Autobiographies, from Brendan Behan and Edna O’Brien, from the masterful storyteller William Trevor.
From school, I recall dreary talk of Canada – reciprocity and car manufacturing and a town called Sault Ste. Marie. I remember a book with colourful child-heroes from many countries and continents, beginning with an African boy named Bunga, but I can’t picture an Irish colleen, poet or patriot.
The curriculum, likely beyond the control of the nuns, was barren of Ireland. I was 20 years old before I sat in a classroom and heard a single fact of Irish history, and that was in a university course on Irish literature.
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