Mealtimes

When we be having meals, one of the ministers used to walk round and round the tables to make sure no one had their elbows on the tables. And sometimes, I suppose, we’d forget, and he’d grab them and bang them down on the table. Long ones, long old tables.

One morning we went over for breakfast. We always only had molasses and porridge, molasses all the time, never sugar or milk. Only Sunday morning we’d have tea and milk, and it tasted really bad because we got used to the molasses. And one morning we went over, and all the porridge were white. Oh, we were so glad! We must be going to have white porridge with milk. But when we took a spoonful....They had barrels with different things in: flour, oats, sugar, everything

Reflections from Them Days

else. Whoever was helping the cook—might have done it for badness, for all I know—they been put all salt in the porridge. And we had to eat it. We had to eat what we didn’t like. It was okay for us bigger ones, but the small ones was having a hard time.

That was bad enough, and then when you finish your breakfast you had to line up for cod oil. We had to line up every morning for a spoonful of cod oil. Hold our nose and down with it, and then next one, all with the same spoon. It’s a wonder I’m not healthy because of that cod oil I drinked. They say it’s healthy for you, they says. It doesn’t taste very good. Specially when they had the old buckets of frozen cod oil. In the winter it would freeze. Melt in your mouth! It wouldn’t be so bad when they come from the bottle.

Dinnertime we had dinner. Sometimes we’d have pea soup with a little chuck of beef in it, most all fat. We’d have no lunch between breakfast and dinner. They’d come in with the trays full of enamel mugs, full of cocoa and hard bread. We’d have a cake of hard bread. And the teacher, Aunt Katie, used to say, “Now yous got to chew your hard bread 60 times.” I used to be there, my hard bread gone, and I was still chewing,

Nellie Winters

make her believe I’m doing it 60 times! That was all we get then till six o’clock. We never used to have supper back then till six. Sometimes we’d only just have blackberries and a cup of molasses. All we had was hard bread, hard bread. Never must’ve had much bread. We never used to have much caribou meat or seal meat, like that. Partridges sometimes. Soup. I can’t hardly remember sometimes what we eat. Our families used to bring a lot of stuff to the school too from Nutak, them places. Like dried capelin and pipsis, good stuff like that. I don’t know where that food all went, but it didn’t go on our plates. If we did have a taste it might have been for supper. I can’t remember having vegetables. For Christmas we’d get an apple, ’cause we went to church to get it. The ministers had wonderful gardens, real good. They were for their own use. Auntie Katie and all them didn’t used to eat in the same room as we eat. They eat somewhere else.