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The Victoria Community Development Corporation

Jean Stephenson

"The doctor lanced my thumb but he never used anything for pain."

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There were ten members in my family. My parents were George and Sophie Snow and my brothers and sisters were Job, Max, George, Fred, Reg, Mary, and I. I grew up living next to Harold and Leah Clarke's store which is now Llewellyn Butt's store. I myself had four children, Shirley, Donna, Mary, and Rosalie.

I worked out to Aunt Ethel Clarke's as a servant girl and did such things as dusting and washing. The women mostly stayed home but they also went in over the hill picking blueberries. Then they would take them to Carbonear to sell them or make blueberry jam. The men would go away to work. My father went to work on Bell Island.

When I was growing up, I lived in a two-story house with no bathroom or electricity. We never had a television but we had a small radio.

We did the same chores from day to day. My chores were to collect the eggs from the hen, rake the hay, and weed the potatoes. But all of us did the same chores. Monday was washday and I and my sisters would stand on back of our house and take turns washing the clothes in the iron broiler. There was no washing on Sundays. My mother would make the pudding with Sunday dinner and the pudding bag would be washed on Monday.

We grew our own vegetables such as carrots, turnip, cabbage, and potatoes and kept hens and goats for a source of food. I would milk the goats and then scald it on the stove. We also had a pig one time and it came up on the step when my mother was washing clothes and took a bar of Ivory soap and we never saw the soap again.

We never had much time to do much, but when I did, I played marbles, skipping rope, and ball. We only saw musical instruments in church and when we went jannying someone would have an accordion. We really enjoyed church. We used to go every Sunday when the weather was suitable. There were no community organizations for us children to be involved in but my father was part of the Orangemen's Society.

I went jannying at Christmas time but there wasn't too much on the go back then. There was no tree. We had syrup and we baked Christmas cakes in the bake pot, which was a pot with a wire hanger on me for hanging it up and holding on to it. We also had apples and fruit as a treat.

There were no paved roads when I wanted to go to the store for example, I would have to go on a slide and bring groceries home that way.

There were no doctors in Victoria, but if you needed one, there was one in Carbonear. His name was Dr. Stanford. There was a midwife who delivered babies. Aunt Eliza Gear was my mother's midwife when she was having me.

I remember one time working for Eliza Clarke as a servant girl, and something was stuck in my thumb. Either a piece of glass or something and Dr. Stanford had to come in one Sunday morning and lance it. He never used anything for the pain. I just sat there and watched what he was doing.

Click here for a PDF version of Victoria: Recalling Our Heritage.

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