The Victoria Community Development Corporation
Reg and Emmie Clarke

"We had to go in early because there were no street lights."

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I had seven brothers and three sisters. My wife Emmie had two brothers and one sister. My father was Alfred and my mother was Clara. She was a Wareham. My grandparents were Samuel and Agnes Wareham and John and Emily Clarke. My grandparents lived with us when I was growing up.

All the girls would do the work in the house such as wash the dishes, clothes and spring clean. The boys would bring in the wood and water.

Every day you would have to get your wood and kindling. We had a beef barrel that would have to be filled up with water from the well across the garden. After we got our chores done, we would be longing to go for a swim.

The girls would make bread, cookies, and pies, wash dishes, clothes and do the spring cleaning.

Monday was wash day. There was always a day for cleaning. During the week there was certain days for certain meals. We'd have fish on Fridays, cooked dinner on Thursdays. Sunday was a cooked dinner, too. There was no such thing as not eating your dinner. There was steamed pudding and duffs and there was no junk food - that's why half the people are sick now.

We would plant our own vegetables such as potatoes, carrot, turnip, parsnip, garlic, rhubarb, Brussels sprouts and beets and onions.

We also kept animals such as goats for milk when we were growing up.

Sometimes we had cow, but not very often. Now there were people around that did have cows and would sell the beef. Uncle George Ed Butt from Flatrock would bring beef around in a cart and sell it. We also kept hens for eggs.

When I was 16 years old, I went to work at the CN. My father was foreman at the time. I worked until I was 60 years old and retired in 1988. Emmie worked at W. J. Moores in Carbonear. It was a general store where they sold clothes and dry goods. Her father was a fisherman and would go to the Labrador and he would also work part time at W. J. Moores in Carbonear. Both of our mothers stayed home with the children and kept house.

When I was growing up in Victoria, I lived in a two-story house with four bedrooms upstairs. We had no running water at the time. We only had a sink where water could run out, but not into the house. There was a well across the garden and we would carry water into the house in buckets. We wouldn't throw away much water then unless we had to because it was so hard to carry water in.

We never had a television until we were married in 1951. We also had our own house then. We never had no lights then either. We had a kerosene lamp with a reflector on the back of it. Our house was heated by a wood stove.

I used to play baseball. We never had a glove and we used a sponge ball rather then a hard baseball like we have today. For a bat we would use a stick that we would cut.

There was all gravel roads then and when the road was graded we would make a top. We would tie a piece of line onto a stick and we would spin the top and whip it with the line. It would go for hundreds of feet. The spin tops would have a flat bottom and we would colour them with different colour crayons. We would put a nail in the top of then so we would not wear out the road.

When we did go out for a game, we had to go in early because there was no street lights like we have today.

We also had to go to church every Sunday and Sunday School.

We would do our lessons at home to the light from a kerosene lamp. We never had math as such, it was called sums.

We used slates and chalk. Later we used scribblers and lead pencils. As we got in higher grades we used exercise books and fountain pens.

In the buildings there was a pot belly stove, everyone would take turns lighting the fire and bringing the wood.

There were no paved roads. We used a horse and cart or horse and slide in the winter. In the summer we would use a pedal bike if we were lucky enough to get one.

I never got my driver's license until I was married. When I worked on the CN, I would get a pass for traveling. The price of gas was about 50 ¢ a gallon.

We would call a doctor in from Carbonear and that's about all we had. When a woman went into labour, we would have midwives. There were probably three or four in Victoria. The doctor couldn't get in every time you called. In the winter we would have to bring him in on horse and slide because the roads weren't plowed.

We had some home remedies such as coco-malt, senna tea for laxative, we had hot toddies with brandy in it, and we had Minard's lineament for colds.

We would keep hens for eggs and once we had a hen that we used to tie a reel of sewing cotton to it. The hen would always run away up in the woods and we couldn't find it. So we found her in the woods with nine eggs under her. She would go away to lay her eggs.

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Power Plant | Victoria's Birth | Prison Camp | Midwifery

Special Memories

The Victoria Community Development Corporation Reg and Emmie Clarke

Stories

Special Memories

The Victoria Community Development Corporation
Reg and Emmie Clarke