Working

We’d get to go to school in October. That’s when they’d take us berrypicking up through the woods there, up on the side of Nain. We went on Sundays sometimes, Sunday after dinner, before church-time. All the girls and boys go berrypicking. We had just them old steel buckets. There was no plastic buckets back them days, just steel ones. We never used to see any black bears them days; they were too wild. Now they wants to be amongst the people instead of staying in the firs.

We’d have to fill up a barrel with blackberries. We didn’t used to put redberries in the barrel, though, just the black ones. The barrel was the kind with the hoops around. Little half barrel we used to fill up, little tiny one about that high, half barrel. We had different kinds of barrels them days: the big

Reflections from Them Days one was called a puncheon, then a tierce, then the barrel, then the half barrel.

The barrel of blackberries went in the cellar. They had a place under one of the rooms, to go right down in the frost. It would keep stuff from spoiling. Sometimes we’d have blackberries for supper. We didn’t used to get too much, you know. One half barrel for all the kids.

Katie Hettasch could do a lot of beautiful drawings. We used to have to do a lot of embroidery, with that kind of work. Only it was a different stitch to what I uses now. You used to have to work it all around with black thread first and then fill it in. She made us work a skirt right around once. It was broad

Nellie Winters

cause she had it full of pleats at the waist. We must’ve had about 150 inukuluks, I guess—that’s true, right around. She had this for a gift for the minister’s wife, Mrs. Peacock. I was 11, I think.

We had to do a lot of knitting too. The sweater I knitted was almost like if someone came out of jail, striped, eh. I knitted him so big he fitted the biggest boy in school! We used to do that every Wednesday, knit.

The boys would haul water on Saturdays. They’d fill a 45-gallon drum. They’d have a different lot of boys each Saturday to haul the water. About three or four small ones, but you’d always have one older boy with them there. They used to go up to Nain Brook. The small boys hauled the barrel on a sled. And the older boy do nothing, only just make sure they’re pulling the Kamutik. He’d be holding it in back and making sure it’s not slopping too much. The lines in front, that’s where they haul it. With the bucket they tips the water out of the brook, pull it up, and fill the drum. And the little boys used to wear skin trousers in the daytime. Good job they did,

Reflections from Them Days

because the older fellow used to pound the little ones with a bough when they’d get stuck.

On the outside of the boys’ boarding house, where it was also the kitchen downstairs, they’d go up the ladder, drip out the water and pour it into a pipe in there, and then it will go in another drum in the kitchen. In the summertime, they gets water from the well. There was no water and sewer back then. A lot of little boys though, eh. On Saturday one bunch, and then next Saturday another bunch.

Same way with wood. We had to do all that on Saturdays, lugging the wood. Some fellow from the community used to saw it up with the bucksaw—no chainsaw them days. When it wasn’t Saturday they’d ask someone else to haul the water. There were workers there too, see. The boys were seven and eight, like that. Brother Harold used to be one of them.

The girls had to scrub all the floors, porches and stuff, bathroom places, what was froze with ice. The schoolhouse porch used to be full of wood. When we were going to scrub up the porch, we had to move all the wood outdoors again, and then scrub the porch and put all the wood back in.

We had to work hard, I tell you. There’s things we had to do I wouldn’t even say. We had to clean up so much, do so much work, eh. We had to work hard, but I didn’t really find it too bad.