Excerpt 1:  Taken from Chapter 3 - "School Days To Remember" 

...... junior grades, more awareness was being placed on health and hygiene. It wasn’t long before it became a part of the curriculum. Our teacher would check our hygienic habits without warning us; it was always a surprise attack! Before our class began, after our morning prayer, the teacher would ask all the students to spread our hands on our desks, palms down. No one was permitted to move their hands until they were inspected for cleanliness. Each classroom had a wooden pointer about a yard long, with a thimble-sized rubber tip on the end of it, usually used for pointing at whatever was written on the blackboard. The teacher would start at the first row of desks with the pointer in her hand and walk down one aisle and up the next. She would peer to her left and then right until she had inspected every student’s hands. Then we’d be asked to flip our hands over so the teacher could examine the other side. A thorough inspection was then made of the fingernails. And if there were any cuts, marks, or any areas of concern, she wanted to know the truth about what had happened to cause them. If a child appeared unkempt, the teacher would whack that kid on the fingers with the pointer and tell him or her to get those fingernails cleaned and manicured properly before coming back to school the next day. God help him — usually it was a him — if he couldn’t scrub them hard enough with lye to get them clean enough to please the sadist of a teacher! If that whacking didn’t work, and one fleck of dirt was found, there was always the “or else,” the feared Leather Strap. The Leather Strap was a serious weapon, all right. This is how we were taught that hygiene was a very important aspect of our lives. Anything less than perfection in all things would not be tolerated.

At the beginning of the school year, there was, of course, always the regular school visit by the Public Health nurse. She would come into each classroom and ask the teacher to send every student, one at a time, into the hallway and/or go into an empty classroom to visit the nurse. Most often, we had to go to the end of the hallway with only a privacy curtain to protect our pre-pubescent dignity. We had to sit on a chair while this mangy-looking woman checked our heads for cooties (head lice.) If a student did have cooties, the poor fellow or girl would be given a note and told to go home… pronto. During a nurse’s visit, she would look into our ears and our mouths with those flashlight-tipped viewers. Then, the best treat of all would come. Finally something was free! ……Cod Liver Oil! It was used in the fight against malnutrition among school-aged children, which was all too prevalent, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods of North America. Cod Liver Oil was recommended because it was rich in vitamins A and D, and was used as an essential vitamin supplement. The administering of Cod Lover Oil was a tradition carried on well into my school years. Each student was given a free bottle of the vile stuff to take home and drink. But first, we had to sample it at school before bringing it home. We had to mask the smell and drink it! I quickly learned the trick: fill the cap, close my eyes, hold my nose with two fingers, and swallow it in one nasty gulp. It was hard not to throw up in the process. Besides policing our fingernails, teachers emphasized the importance of supplementing our diets, suggesting to the class that we ask our parents to buy Maltlevol, a liquid vitamin supplement to add to our diet because of its nutritional value. We bought one or two bottles, and then our parents didn’t have the funds to continue with it. None of us noticed a huge improvement in our health from that stuff anyway. Perhaps once a year, a dentist visited our school to check everyone’s teeth. The Public Health nurse would come back again later in the school year, and this time, she would only check our eyes. Hygiene and nutrition was right up there next to religion! We would not dream of going to school without a full breakfast in our bellies, nor would Mom allow us to leave the house without one, no matter how financially challenged we became.

School was not all reading, ‘rithmetic, and religion; we had other responsibilities, too. Every student had to contribute to the heating of the school by bringing one or two “junks” of wood (junks, just as the word suggests, means wood not useable for building, but very useful for heating our homes), each and every day of the colder Newfoundland months, which was longer than the average season. Otherwise, there would simply be no heat in the school. If we arrived without our pieces of wood, chances were we would either be sent home to get some, or we would be expected to bring two junks the following day. Frequently, our parents had no wood to give us, so we would have to pull off a piece of fencing from the garden gate and cut it up to feed to the classroom’s potbelly stove to avoid being consequenced. I wonder if God saw us....

Excerpt 2:  Taken from Chapter 4 - "The Reality of Life In The Bay"

Every household had a clothesline in the kitchen. Ours stretched the entire length of the kitchen. The wet or still-damp clothes that wouldn’t dry outside had to be lugged in and hung to dry on the kitchen clothesline. The longer clothing — pants and bed sheets were hung furthest from the stove, so they wouldn’t get scorched by its heat, and the shorter items were hung directly over the stove, where Mom had to keep an eagle eye on them, lest they’d fall to their fiery deaths. Just walking from here to there in the kitchen meant ducking under wet, billowing clouds of laundry. It was eerie, like ghosts lived there, but we’ll get to that soon enough…. If the clothes did hang outside in the sun, once in a while (regardless of the season), the wind blew stuff off the clothesline and onto the filthy, mucky ground, and then it started all over again.

 My mother ironed everything — sheets, towels, socks, rags — adding unnecessary work to her already overloaded workload. Here lies the definition of tedium. This task, Mom delegated to the girls. Many an hour Ginny and I spent yearning to be outside, not in the kitchen ironing endless miles of wrinkled fabric. And the iron we had might as well have been a toy — a toy that could burn our hands and arms or burn a triangle right through our clothes — damn thing, burned myself more than once with it — compared to the Teflon® miracle I have today. Before we even began the ironing chore, we had to heat it up on top of the blasting stove for at least half an hour. Of course, there was no temperature control. The test whether the iron was hot enough to start ironing, I had to wet my forefinger with a bit of saliva and dab it onto the iron’s base. Ow! If I heard my finger sizzle on impact, the iron was ready. My mother always hung the small stuff, our “step-ins” — underpanties — directly above the stove. In her prim, religious-good-girl modesty about such things, and to prevent the boys from snickering at the sight of such items — somehow related to the even more verboten subject…sex, covered up our girlish lingerie with facecloths and socks, so no one could see it. My mother, the epitome of modesty, would never display our under garments, especially not on the outdoor clothesline, to be viewed by any outsider, or a male member of our family. Totally unacceptable! Something she never did, nor did she allow us to do. It didn’t matter about the boys’ underwear. Boys were always the exception to the rule. Our step-ins were light, flimsy, and of course, dried quickly, so as soon as they were even close to dry, Mom yanked them off the clothesline so fast, her hands were a blur as she clutched them and scurried to put them away, safe from curious eyes, in our dresser drawer, or gave them to us to put away.  I was maybe twelve. It was almost suppertime and my mother was cooking a pot of split-pea soup and dumplings on the stove. The cover on the pot was slightly ajar so the steam could escape. Suddenly, a pair of my step-ins dropped into the pot of soup. Splunk! Oops! Faster than a flash, Mom rushed to yank out those green, soupy panties, so none of the boys, nor my Father could see. But oh yes, I saw what happened! I was the first one to say, “Oh, my God, I mean, my goodness! That’s it! I’m not eating that soup!” And I refused to eat one mouthful, and only we knew why. “They didn’t touch the soup,” Mom was quick to reply, alluding to something the rest of the family knew not what, “They only fell onto the edge.” Later, she took me aside and looked me in the eye and said, “Your big brown eyes, they miss nothing, do they?” The rule in our household was that we had to eat whatever was put in front of us, or not eat at all. The choice was ours to make. If someone didn’t like what was being served, too bad. There were no substitutes. Despite my resolute refusals, she made sure I ate that panty-poisoned, split-pea soup. Once again, I heard the all-too-familiar syllables, Mom’s favourite words still resounding in my head: “Waste not, want not!” I relented. What else could I do? I really didn’t want to miss out on the dumplings.

Excerpt 3:  Taken from Chapter 6 - "Ghosts, Myths, and Dreams"

.....was in bed long before midnight, but once in a while, when I couldn’t sleep anyway, I’d come downstairs to be with my Mother while she was making bread. When I stared out the window on moonless nights, there wasn’t very much to see, only an occasional lamp still lit on the Flat or maybe a flashlight on the beach before the black vastness of the ocean. I stayed up late one particular night with my Mom to keep her company. But this particular night was a beautiful, calm, brightly moonlit night in the summer. The sky was crazed with stars. Everything was so quiet and peaceful. I went over to the kitchen window and looked out. And I saw a very unexpected sight: “Mom, there are two women coming up the road. And they’re walking in our direction, too.”  “Who are they, dear? “I don’t think we know them, Mom.” I reported. So curious, she came over to the window, placed both of her hands on her face to block the little bit of light coming from the kitchen that might interfere with her view, and peered out beside me into the starlit night. “Move over a bit, dear. Let me see if I know who they are? I can’t see anyone.” I continued to stare at them from where I was standing, but she couldn’t see anything. Suddenly, as the two had gotten even closer to our house, they both disappeared — right in front of my eyes! Vanished! Just like that, before I could blink in disbelief! “Where did they go?” I asked, incredulously. I waited for them to come to the door. But, no knock came. There were certain things about their appearance that just didn’t make sense to me. They were dressed exactly alike, wearing colourless clothing — and by colourless, I don’t mean white exactly…. They were similarly tall, stately, vigorous in gait, but there was absolutely no colour to their clothes. Not that I could see through their clothes to the flesh of their bodies, or that they weren’t wearing any — but, they were. I couldn’t see their feet; their legs just kind of faded into nothing. My eyes seemed purposefully and involuntarily distracted from their faces, as though I wasn’t allowed to see them. The women were moving very quickly, and very close together. I noticed that their coats were flapping open to one side, as they seemed to hover along, rather than walk, making no direct contact with the Earth. There was something very peculiar about this…sighting. I’ve wondered, in retrospect, whether this might have been another ghost sighting, or perhaps an alien sighting. Maybe, they were ghosts who seemed to be attached to this place, this house, or the people in it. Could they have been real people who simply came to visit in the middle of the night and then changed their minds and decided to run away. Absolutely not! I know that’s a ludicrous explanation, and besides, there was nowhere they could have gone in this wide-open space, without Mom and me seeing them. This was not a figment of my imagination. I have no doubt in my mind that they were ghosts. Or aliens. But probably ghosts. Mom just stared at me and didn’t say one single word. I think I’d forgotten to breathe. I felt a chill go up and down my spine. My hair felt like a “birchbroom in the fits,” standing on end like it had been zapped with static electricity. Mom blessed herself and said, “God bless us and save us! There!” she announced, rubbing her hands together in criss-cross motion like her hands were glad to be rid of these whatever-they-were’s, satisfied she’d done what was necessary to protect us from the possible evil these ghost-women might otherwise have inflicted upon us. “Okay,” she added, as if everything were fine and dandy, “Let’s just go to bed.” So, we both went to bed. 

Mom waited all through the whole next day without saying a word to me about this sighting. Like it was going to remain our secret that even we could not divulge to each other. Finally, two days later, we were alone together in the kitchen preparing supper when she quietly admitted to me that those two women I saw were probably ghosts. She also told me that I should not be looking out of windows late at night. Now the floodgates opened and the rest of the secret spilled out. The part I had not been privy to prior to this incident. She told me she had seen these same two women lots of times before, and that my Dad has seen them too, for most of his life. Even a few of our neighbours were well acquainted with......  

 Excerpt 4:  Taken from Chapter ........