YOU’VE WRITTEN THEM already? Given up your position?” Lily “ stood across the parlour from Grace; she wore a brown wool skirt and a beige linen blouse but in her mind’s eye Grace saw a breastplate over her mother’s bosom and imagined donning her own armour for this fight.
“I did. I told you I would.”
“And I told you not to! Not without your father’s permission, without mine. Now you’ve given up an excellent teaching position, and for what?”
Grace had taught school here in Catalina for two years now, ever since getting her second-class certificate from the Methodist College in St. John’s. The best she could say about teaching was that she didn’t hate it. In fact there were parts of it she liked very much: she liked the children themselves, especially the ones who had trouble in school, who came barefoot from the poorest homes and huddled close to the stove for warmth. She wanted to follow those children home, put shoes on their little cold feet and cook a good dinner for their sick, overworked mothers, instead of staying in the schoolroom and dragging the rest of the class through one Royal Reader after another.
“I’ve told you what I want to do,” she said.
“And we’ve told you it’s not possible.” Lily was a formidable sight when laying down the law, which as far as Grace could see was all she ever did. She ordered the Sunday School teachers to stop letting the children run wild; she told the WPA their quota of socks for soldiers was unsatisfactory; she scolded the maid for burning the roast and explained how to cook it properly; she told Grace there was no possibility of her going overseas as an army nurse.
Two months had passed since the news of Charley’s death. For the first fortnight Grace had thought her mother was broken. Lily spent hours, even whole days, barred in her room and Grace found the house empty and cold without that fierce energy she had spent her whole life battling against. Now, at the end of June, the WPA and the Sunday School still sailed on without Lily’s firm hand on the tiller, but here in the house the iron had returned to her spine with the news that Grace intended to leave off teaching, go to St. John’s, and train to be a VAD nurse.
“I want to do my part!” Grace said—shouted, really. Lily never raised her voice, which made Grace sound hysterical when she wanted to sound firm and brave. Jack Perry had gone off to St. John’s to enlist: it was his turn, he said, to take Charley’s place. Before Charley died, Lily used to rally the WPA women whenever there was word of a deadly battle in France or a ship lost at sea. Send out the word: more men are needed to carry on the fight! Grace would enlist if she were a boy, but girls were going overseas too. She pictured herself on a battlefield, wiping the feverish brow of a wounded boy with a clean white cloth. The soldier in her dream had Jack Perry’s blue eyes.
“You will do your part here at home. That is a woman’s part—to keep the home, to preserve the values the men are fighting for.” Lily sat down and picked up her embroidery, as if to illustrate how to preserve those womanly values, though she used her needle to point at Grace for emphasis rather than to stab the cloth. “Nursing is no job for a lady. You have romantic ideas about it—in real life it’s dirty and dangerous too, if you go overseas. It’s not a profession for a well-brought-up girl. Nursing is not what you imagine. Nothing is. If you don’t want to go on teaching you can help me here at home, but I don’t want to hear anymore foolish talk about nursing.”
Lily’s needle pierced the thin cotton stretched over her embroidery hoop: the red thread of the roses she was embroidering looked like drops of blood on the white cloth. Her attention to her work was meant to signal the argument was done. Grace turned for the door, ignoring her own bag of work, which contained yet another pair of sturdy military socks.
“Where are you going?”
“Up to the church to see the Reverend.”
“It’ll do you no good. We’ve discussed this. He and I are in agreement. Don’t think you can go behind my back and get a soft answer out of him.”
Grace knew this was true. She had talked with her father last night but the Reverend was no good if Lily got to him first. He toed the party line and said that nursing was too difficult and dangerous. Anyway it was a lie. She wasn’t going to the church. Outside, in the clear summer air, she felt better as soon as she started walking over the road to Catalina South.
A year ago, the south side of Catalina Harbour had been a quiet, grass-grown spot, empty of houses, stores, or stages. But then William Coaker, head of the Fisherman’s Union, had bought up most of the land on that side of the harbour. Fishing and the war occupied the minds of most Newfoundlanders this summer of 1917, but here in Catalina there was another obsession and another source of paid work: Mr. Coaker was building a model town. He had built himself a new home and a headquarters for his Fisherman’s Protective Union; now, a Union store, a fish plant, row houses for the workers were under construction. Every time Grace walked down by the harbour she could hear the ringing of hammer and axe.
Her father was a great admirer of Coaker’s work and since the man himself had landed almost on their doorstep, Reverend Collins was found over at Coaker’s premises nearly as often as he was in his own church. Port Union, as Mr. Coaker was trying to get people into the habit of calling it, would have electric lights and every modern convenience. It would be the finest town in Newfoundland because, as Reverend Collins explained to Grace, instead of being built like every other town in the world—for the rich to become richer—Port Union was being built from the ground up by the workers themselves, for fishermen and their families to have all the blessings a new century could bestow.
Even the war was supposed to be only a temporary interruption in the grand plan—young men like Charley were meant to go away, fight for King and country, then come home to build the new world that would rise from the ashes of the old. And even with Charley gone, buried somewhere in France, Grace felt a little of that old excitement pushing through her loss, like the buds that were just beginning to open on the trees. This was where she belonged—in a new world, a new century, of action and serious work. Even if her mother was determined to try to keep her in the last century, dutifully sitting at home knitting socks or embroidering pillowcases.
Jack Perry was going overseas: Grace had promised him she would write. But she was determined to be more than the girl at home writing letters to a soldier. Perhaps she could get Grandfather and Aunt Daisy to invite her on an extended visit to St. John’s. Grace and Charley had both lived with their grandfather and his second wife while they were at school in St. John’s; Grace liked her cheerful step-grandmother, who preferred to be called “Aunt Daisy” and who softened the edges of Grandfather’s austere house. Perhaps, if Grace came to visit with her own hard-earned savings in her hand, Grandfather and Daisy would overrule her parents, let her train for the VAD after all. If she could get to St. John’s anything was possible. Port Union was a stepping stone.
Her father was not at the FPU headquarters but Mr. Coaker was. Her father had introduced her to the great man months ago. Now she walked up to him boldly, like a brave girl who would defy her parents’ wishes and make her own way in the world. If I play the role well enough, Grace thought, someday it just might be truth.
“So you’re not going back to teaching, Miss Collins?” Mr. Coaker said when Grace had explained what she wanted.
“No, sir, I want to do something for the war effort. But I need to earn money this summer. I can take dictation, I have my second-class certificate, and my penmanship is excellent.”
William Coaker sat behind his desk and looked out over the FPU office, at the busy hum of people coming and going with messages, articles being written for his newspaper, the Fisherman’s Advocate, work orders going out for the new construction, shipping records for all the things coming in to Port Union, and the salt fish that would go out from there into the markets of the world. From the muffled ladylike stillness of her mother’s parlour to this humming place, this masculine busy world—this was exactly the journey Grace wanted to make.
“I may have something for you here in the office,” he said. “Just temporarily—during the fishing season. Let me see what I can do for you.”