Son of a Critch Read online

  Poor Uncle Frank was helpless as the German U-boat sank the SS Saganaga and the SS Lord Strathcona. Armed with only a whistle and a First Aid course, all Frank could do was blow and point as the enemy ship slipped back under the water like a seal off an ice pan. Four ships were sunk that year. Years later, the U-boat captain’s daughter donated some of his personal items to the Bell Island Community Museum, including his commendation certificate signed by Adolf Hitler and a picture of his U-boat posed next to an iceberg. Even Nazis couldn’t resist those Newfoundland tourism ads!

  My father had it pretty easy during the war years. He worked for the Americans at their bases in Newfoundland and Labrador. He was once even assigned to give a visiting Frank Sinatra a tour. Apparently, back then the GIs weren’t too pleased to get a visit from Old Blue Eyes. This was long before “My Way,” and he was known only as a washed-up bobby-soxer singer. Imagine you were a big burly man stationed God only knows where and you were told your one night of entertainment would be Justin Bieber. So, as the story goes, the men complained loudly. So much so that the commanding officer stacked the jukebox in the mess hall with Sinatra records to win over the future Rat Packer. One Bing Crosby record was accidentally left in the machine. When Sinatra sat down to eat, the men lined up one after another to play Bing’s “Swinging on a Star” over and over again until Sinatra got up and stormed out of the mess hall. Dad followed him out of the room, in quiet admiration of the GIs’ dedication to trolling the famous singer. In a way, it was the invention of the Internet comments section.

  After the war, Dad went to work at The Daily News as a reporter. He was the last living reporter to cover Confederation with Canada. When the former pig farmer who eventually became our first premier, Joseph R. Smallwood, got his way and Canada joined Newfoundland in 1949, Dad officially became a new Canadian. I guess that makes me second-generation Canadian, but my family has assimilated well despite the obvious language barrier.

  In 1960, during the Cold War, Dad got an offer he couldn’t refuse—or talk about. He went off to Greenland to work on the top secret “Project Ice Worm,” a U.S. Army program to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. Dad worked on a system of tunnels four thousand kilometres long and with the ability to deploy six hundred nuclear missiles. The underground complex housed a hospital, a store, a theatre, and a church—all made of ice and snow. He was basically one of the henchmen you’d see in a James Bond villain’s mountain lair. The whole thing was secret until 1995. True to his word, the old man never spoke about it until the month before he died, and only then because dementia made him think I was a colonel.

  When Dad returned to Canada, he traded a radioactive life for one active in radio. He got a job at VOCM as a news reporter, and this would be where he’d stay. It was more than a job or a career. For him it was everything, and he would never look for another job again.

  At this time, he also met and married my mother. Mary Bell was born on a farm in St. John’s. Her great-grandmother Joanna O’Connell had been born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1839 and had immigrated to Newfoundland in 1845. She’d left behind a hard life of poverty, farming bad Irish soil and comforted only by fiddles and accordions, for a new life of poverty, farming bad Newfoundland soil and comforted only by fiddles and accordions. Her daughter Elizabeth married William Bell, and in 1912 they had my grandfather, Edward Bell.

  Mom’s parents divorced when she was young. This was no small feat back then, as divorce wasn’t even an option in Newfoundland at the time. To get unhitched, you had to petition Parliament. A news item from July 4, 1955, read, “Notice is hereby given that Gertrude Earle Bell will apply to the Parliament of Canada for a bill of divorce from her husband Edward Bell, labourer, on the grounds of adultery and desertion.” My family had made the society page! Finally, a mention in the paper that didn’t involve drowning.

  Mom found work as a secretary at a local law office. Dad’s best friend, Andy Richards, also worked there. When the old man saw Mom he launched a charm offensive. Mary Bell also happened to be a model and beauty pageant winner who was often seen wearing the latest fashions. (The clothes would have been long out of date in Montreal. Trends took a while to hit our little rock in the ocean. Acid-wash jeans didn’t get popular here until the very late 80s and should fall out of fashion sometime in early 2032.) She was thirteen years his junior, but Dad was a master winker and nodder with a great singing voice, and he eventually won her hand.

  Soon my older brother Mike came along. And then me—just eight years later. I wouldn’t say I was planned. Very few people space their kids eight years apart. But we were Catholic.

  Dad’s radio station moved way out to the city limits, but the job came with cheap rent in a small cottage next to the station. Dad had grown up in what was known as the Central Slum. The area is now long gone, but it consisted of ramshackle houses with water supplied by community wells. The area housed about 6200 people with 2.5 people per bedroom. So for a guy who lived day to day on a street that was so bad it was later demolished, the new digs were a slice of paradise. Years later, when I moved into an apartment with my brother a stone’s throw from the neighbourhood where Dad had grown up, he said, “I fought tooth and nail to get up out of there and you move right back in.”

  Our tiny house was on Kenmount Road, which in those days was part of the Trans-Canada Highway that cut through rural farmland. Newfoundlanders have long been divided into baymen and townies. It’s been said that to live “beyond the overpass” means you’re a bayman. The overpass linked Topsail Road to Kenmount Road, and while I did indeed live beyond it, I was no bayman.

  When I looked out my window I did not see a lighthouse. There was no bright beam offering comfort to sea-tossed sailors. I could see only a radio tower blinking its beacon to offer light rock and used car ads to frustrated commuters. At night, I wasn’t lulled to sleep by foghorns and the far-off spray of a breaching humpback whale. I was woken up when the house shook as a convoy of 18-wheelers rumbled past at three a.m. to deliver beer and frozen McCain super-fries like manna from the mainland. Baymen didn’t need to lock their doors at night because they knew and trusted their neighbours. We didn’t need to lock our doors because there was no one else around for miles.

  When I stood on my front porch and looked around, I saw a four-lane highway right in front of the house, an old-age home across the street, and VOCM radio to my left. The station had a huge compound filled with a fleet of vehicles: bright yellow Chevy Blazers, bright yellow motorcycles, a bright yellow sports car, a giant yellow trailer made to look like a boom box. The newsmen like my father all wore bright red blazers with a golden VOCM crest sewn onto the front. The colours they used were bright enough to shine through the radio and blind the listeners. This was a strike force ready to attack at a moment’s notice to cover any story no matter how big or small, though usually it was quite small.

  In back we were surrounded by kilometres of forest. Occasionally a moose would wander down and startle Mom by looking in the kitchen window. Between us and the woods was the no-man’s-land of a gravel pit. This was a great place for throwing rocks and other pastimes of youth. It wasn’t the middle of nowhere, but it was the edge of nowhere. One time, long before I was born, my brother had been playing in the gravel pit when he saw a car drive up off the highway and onto a dirt road that led to the transmission tower. Mike, not used to seeing other humans, ducked in behind a boulder to spy on the strangers. Two men in suits and fedoras got out of the car, looked around the way gangsters on a heist do in movies, and opened the trunk, removing a shovel. This might have been the most exciting thing to ever happen to Mike at this point in his life. He lay in wait to uncover their secret. He’d almost dozed off when the two men emerged from the woods carrying something wrapped in a muddy rug. They popped the trunk and quickly deposited their excavated treasure, and when they did, Mike saw a human arm pop out of the blanket. The car drove off back down the dirt road to the highway
and Mike found himself at the start of an episode of Law & Order.

  He waited until the mystery men were long gone and then ran with the speed of a child who’s just seen a corpse fall out of a soiled rug. He told my mother, who did what all mothers do upon hearing such a horrible story from their son—she ignored him. Imagine your child telling you, “Mom! Two gangsters just dug a body up out of the woods and I saw it!” Now, imagine that for eight years this child had had nothing but his imagination and some rocks to keep him company. She probably thought, “Interesting. That’s how long it takes a freerange kid to lose it,” and went about her housework. But Mike didn’t give up. He demanded a second opinion and Dad was called home from work, a feat that took him all of four minutes.

  Dad could tell that Mike had seen something that truly terrified him, so he called one of his buddies on the force. When the cop spoke to Mike he believed him, and pretty soon a second car was driving up the road to the transmission tower. But this time it was a Royal Newfoundland Constabulary squad car. They found what looked like a recently disturbed shallow grave. They took a soil sample, and as Newfoundland cops did with just about every piece of forensic evidence in the early 70s, they sent it to the mainland. A lab test there showed that the soil did indeed have human remains present. The police immediately put up roadblocks looking for the car Mike had seen, but by that time the vehicle had probably long since crossed over on the ferry to the mainland. Knowing that Mike could identify the suspects, the RNC actually sent a cop to school with my brother for protection. How badass must that have been? “Oh, him? He’s just my bodyguard cop. I saw some stuff. Stuff an eight-year-old should never see. But, I’m sorry—you were saying something about long division?”

  Now that was a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to give you an idea of where I lived. My house was so far out of the way that it was the kind of place where you would drive to DUMP A BODY. So, no, there were not a lot of other kids to play with.

  Until I attended school, the only kids I saw were at St. Teresa’s Church and at the Avalon Mall. Neither of those places was a good spot to form lifelong friendships. So, I was left with the people in our little bungalow: Mom, Dad, Mike, my grandmother, and our cat, Misty. I remember the house as giant, but in reality it was quite small. If you walked into it from the back door you’d find a little green porch, home to the family’s wringer-washer and the cat’s litter box. Leaving the porch, you’d enter a bright yellow kitchen. Against one wall was a vinyl kitchen table with two chairs. This was where Mom and Dad ate, where millions of tea bags were drowned, and where Dad sat to smoke while he listened to VOCM on the radio. Across from the table was a window from which you could actually see the radio station you were listening to. We basically had a flat-screen 3D television in the 70s. The kitchen was decorated with a picture of the Pope, a calendar of Newfoundland scenes, and a complete collection of the little nursery-rhyme figurines you used to get in a package of Red Rose tea. King Cole, the cat and his fiddle, Humpty Dumpty, Puss in Boots, Jack and Jill, and more were all lined up atop the fridge. One or two would fall every time the old man opened the fridge to get the tin of milk for his tea, inciting a fresh vow to get rid of the “bloody things.”

  Proceeding counterclockwise, you’d enter the dining room, where another vinyl table with six chairs was reserved for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and visits from priests, Aunt Alice, or Uncle Frank. Along one wall rested our family’s old TV. It was a large floor model that I’d never seen working and is still in the basement of my mother’s house to this day. Next to that were a wicker love seat and two more wicker chairs that were among my grandmother’s last possessions. These were the flotsam and jetsam of the wreck of her old life before her husband died, and as such inspired a solemn reverence. Dad would give them a fresh coat of paint every year, meaning they became more dried paint than wicker.

  The next stop was the living room. This was the downtown of my childhood. This is where it all happened. Everyone had a place to call his or her own. Mike would take the long orange couch. Mom would sit in the matching chair. Dad had his own brown faux-leather recliner. Nan had a creaky wooden chair that had been stolen from Newfoundland’s former seat of power, the Colonial Building, during the riot of 1932. Ten thousand angry townies had rushed the legislature to express their displeasure with the way the government was administering the affairs of the oldest colony. Every window was broken, or “beat out” as we might say, a piano was dragged into the adjacent park and destroyed, and furniture was thrown out windows. The prime minister of the day escaped with his life only by disguising himself as an old woman. Nan had somehow managed to get her hands on one of the chairs from the House of Assembly, and she would only ever sit on her pirated perch. My place was on the floor in front of the TV. I spent so much time there that I’d worn down the carpet. My indelible arse-print was forever ingrained in the floor like a dinosaur fossil.

  The biggest piece of furniture in the room was the enormous wooden stereo console. It was the size of a coffin and even had a lid like one that you’d lift to play a record or an 8-track. Whenever a song was played it looked like the music was being waked.

  Sometimes Dad would bring friends from the radio station and they’d stand there playing record after record into the wee hours. Noted commentator and author Rex Murphy was just a young man getting his start then, and sometimes Dad would invite him over to the house if he knew Rex didn’t have another spot to go for a meal. Rex spent more than one Christmas dinner at the Critch house. As he napped on the couch, his Art Guthrie–style mushroom cloud of curls swayed with his snores like the seeds of a dandelion globe. Oh, how I wanted to sneak up on him, make a wish, and blow his hair away until there was nothing left but an empty turtleneck.

  Dad would often send DJs down to the house if he suspected they were low on cash or still drunk from a night partying. Many a morning I’d wander into the kitchen in my pyjamas to find some guy with a thick moustache and transition sunglasses nursing a hangover while Mom cooked him breakfast.

  Past the living room was a short hallway that ran from the kitchen to the front door in one direction and to the small bathroom in the other. In the bathroom closet was a large cardboard box that held my toys. This presented a hell of a problem if I wanted a certain toy when the bathroom was in use. To the left was the bedroom my brother shared with my grandmother. To the right was the bedroom my parents shared with me. Mom and Dad had separate beds like Lucy and Ricky on the I Love Lucy show. Maybe that’s why I had only one brother.

  I never thought their sleeping arrangement was strange until I was on the playground at school one day. Two boys were talking about “walking in on their parents” and “hearing weird sounds coming from their room at night.” I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, but I wanted to fit in. “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. “Parents are so annoying in their bedrooms. Like when you want them to get up and you’re there standing between their beds going ‘Mom, get up’ and she rolls over so you turn to your Dad’s bed and you say ‘Dad, get up’ but he rolls over. So stupid.” The kids looked at me in silence, trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about, until one of them said, “Wait. Your parents sleep in separate beds?” and they both had to sit down from laughing so hard.

  Growing up with older parents aged you. I had the interests and cultural references of a man sixty years older. To make matters worse, my brother went through a big blues phase. I was completely ignorant of current popular music, and would struggle to keep up when other kids talked about Michael Jackson or Mötley Crüe.

  Hey, fellas! Music fans are ya? Why don’t you lads pop by the front parlour and I’ll break out some of my 78s. You look like a Jolson fan. Or are you more an Eddie Cantor man? No matter, I’ve got ’em all. What’s that? Like something more modern, eh? Well, how about some Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee? What do you say, gate? Are you in the know or are you a real bringer-downer cat?

  Eventually, I bo
ught AC/DC’s Who Made Who cassette. I kept it in my book bag just in case anyone ever asked what kind of music I liked. At birthday parties I’d wave it around like a fake ID. “Look, gang! Nothing to see here, for I too am a youth. I also enjoy rock music and denim dungarees. If you don’t like Michael Jackson you’d best Beat It around me, chums. He is no longer performing with his brothers as the Jackson 5 records are not the same thing as Thriller at all and anyone who accidentally bought one of their records would surely have wasted his allowance.”

  The centre of communications for my house was, unsurprisingly, right in the middle. That’s where you’d find the small table where the family’s lone rotary-dial telephone was kept, along with a phone book. The Yellow Pages were the only data plan my parents ever knew. The phone table was chiefly the domain of my mother, where she made sure the operators at Newfoundland Telephone earned their paycheque.

  Mom spoke on the phone like a character in a sequel to the movie Speed. She spoke as if she knew that if she stopped speaking at a frantic pace for even a moment, a bus full of innocent people would explode.

  MOM: Hello! Who​Is​It? Not​That​It​Matters. My​God​I’m​Run​Off​Me​Feet​Here​Today! I​Woke​Up​And​It​Was​A​Fine​Day​On​Clothes​So​I​Did​The​Wash​But​Now​It’s​Raining​And​The​Whole​House​Is​Covered​In​;Soaked​Drawers…Hello?​Hello!​They​Hung​Up!

  My mother spoke on the phone in a kind of “I’m a little teapot” pose. She’d hold the mouthpiece up by her forehead with one hand on her hip, her body tethered to the telephone table by the cord like one of the ships down at the waterfront. The phone was nowhere near her mouth, making her shout so that the person on the other end of the line could hear her. She’d raise her voice ever louder with each “What?” from the listener. (I say “listener” because nobody else got to talk much during a phone call with Mom. These were soliloquys and, as in all theatre, it was rude for an audience member to interrupt.)