A Collection of Stories by Otto Tucker

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

A collection of stories by Otto Tucker is part of the Seventh Wave Newfoundland Writers Series and includes stories previously published in A Yaffle of Yarns and From the Heart of a Bayman. Tucker is a Newfoundlander, an educator, and a Salvation Army officer, whose love of his region and its people is clear in these anecdotal reminiscences of his own life experiences as a pupil-teacher in wartime Newfoundland, and as a citizen, teacher, and man of religious conscience in the years that followed.

Tucker’s voice is humorous and humanistic, and his reflections full of local colour and dialect, customs, events, and attitudes. The reader discovers, for example, the hitherto unknown profession in Canada of Newfoundland roof-warden during the Second World War. Having served as such, constantly alert and on guard on Newfoundland roofs for the German enemy, Tucker concludes his story, tongue in cheek, with the possibility of Ottawa pensions and positions for the members of the soon-to-be-formed Newfoundland Roof-Wardens’ Association. Tucker explains, “As we in Newfoundland say, ‘Tidden no harm to as’” (p. 14).

There is a modest amount of interesting regional social history in these stories. Subjects such as the tearing down of the Southside of St. John’s, the raising of gulls and goats, the celebrating of Christmas in the outposts, the preparing for death and burial (coffin trimmings are extremely important to the Newfoundlander), and the questing of English ancestry are presented with nostalgia and humour and as Tucker’s lived experiences, with the appropriate oral / aural sensibility that characterizes Newfoundland folk culture.