Allan Square: A St. John's Memoir.

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

Not especially well-written, and having only minimal interest beyond family and friends, Allan Square nevertheless depicts a side of St. John’s society not often seen through the clear eyes of someone who actually lived (endured) it. Shirley Murphy’s was a rough upbringing, living in Newfoundland’s pre-Confederation era (without the benefit of the baby-bonus), in a poor run-down St. John’s tenement, with an unloving mother and an alcoholic step-father, she nevertheless survived, by guile and wile, to now laugh at the strategies of survival which she (and, doubt, many others like her) employed in her efforts to do so. Attending wakes for the food, kissing ushers for free admission to the movies, snitching a little here and there were all part of the survival mode. Her memoir is not, as the blurb suggests, a “laugh out-loud tale of childhood antics”—it is far too oppressive for that. But it does have some funny moments which relieve the boredom, some of which have no doubt been stretched (like the proverbial fish tale), and which do kept the whole from being too maudlin.