The Way It Was

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

Any attempt to preserve “a little of a lost culture and an extinct
community” is laudable. Now, a quarter of a century since the tiny
settlement of Flat Islands, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, was abandoned,
Hiscock reminisces about life there during the 1940s and 1950s—when
Newfoundland society was emerging into the full light of the twentieth
century, and old lifestyles were fading. His memories range over a wide
variety of incidents; weddings, Christmas festivities, duck hunting,
wood hauling, jannying, fish making, squid jigging, and schooling—all
typical of many small Newfoundland outports of that era.

It is all quite pleasant, but fairly antiseptic. These general
descriptions lack vivacity. We just do not get a real sense of
community; there are no idiosyncratic features; we do not meet “Aunt
Jane” or “Uncle ’Lisha”; there is little of the peculiar dialect
and none of the peccadillos that are part of any closeknit society. To
readers who haven’t experienced a Newfoundland upbringing, and perhaps
to some future readers, this book will undoubtedly be interesting. But
to anyone who has been a “bayman,” it will be like a nice bit of
whitewash on an old picket fence: what’s underneath is far more
interesting that what’s on the surface.