Scarborough Seniors Write Anthology 2017

village on the south east coast of Labrador during the summer and shifted to Frenchman’s Island for the winter. It was a fish collection station (a room, really) where my father worked as a boat pilot and labourer for the summer. It was nestled in a flat area of a rocky, treeless hill with hills and cliffs all around it. It consisted of a salmon store, an icehouse, a shop (grocery store), a clapboard (cook) house, and the big house. The manager of the station and his family lived in the big house for the summer. Up the hill above the salmon store was a warehouse. A wharf ran along the shore below the buildings. Boats docked at the wharf where fresh salmon was collected and put on ice in big boxes. Salt cod and cod liver were unloaded and stored for shipment.

An RT (radio telephone) was put in the big house in the early fifties, and messages could be sent and received. We lived in the cookhouse in winter, where some of the staff stayed during the summer and a cook prepared meals for all of the workers.

During the fall of 1951, my father, mother, younger brother Calvin, and I shifted over to Frenchman’s to live in the new cookhouse.

Our older sister Shirley was away at the time.

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