Yes, Dear, I Saw Hitler

1

He lives now on a wondrous small island in the North Atlantic Ocean. The community has about 500 residents and is a place where women come to shops in the afternoons still wearing pyjama bottoms. On Saturdays, when the weather permits, a large sort of wheel with numbers on it is set up right on Main Street, and a raffle is held, with lobsters or hams or turkeys as prizes. The profit goes to various worthy causes, such as the Recreation Committee, the Anglican Church Women, the Lions, the Tourism Committee—someone once counted all those noble organisations and announced that there were 27 of these in the town. Of these, a few are clearly very active, and others are obscure; but what is certain is that anyone who would like to feel somewhat important and have a title like Director or Vice Chair or Marshall can find a group that will welcome him and provide him with such a title.

The island community is a place where if two elderly ladies are engaged in a conversation right in the middle of Main Street, drivers will respectfully stop their vehicles and wait till the dames have exchanged reports of their various ailments and have decided just what is necessary for the betterment of the world. The police is in the next community, which can be reached only by ferry. Since the island is out in the open Atlantic, the ferry ride can become quite rough. And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officers stationed in that nearest other town are generally from Prairie provinces and prone to seasickness. They don’t like to make the trip, and the people of the island do not like to make a fuss.

So when a young man who is generally not offensive drives in a hillside curse too fast and knocks down about 30 feet of guardrail, the police detachment across the water is not informed and really does not want to be informed.

The island is the sort of place where on good Sundays you can see a third of the whole population at the 11 o’clock services in the Anglican church. But there is also Bingo four evenings a week, and it is even better attended than the church Of course, Bingo also raises funds for local organisations. It is especially nice to be able to report that Bingo in and for the benefit of the Roman Catholic St. Patrick’s Hall is as well attended by Anglicans and indeed Orangemen as is Bingo in the LOL Hall. No one among the Protestants makes an issue of recent unfortunate events in the Catholic church, which would have led to a sale of St. Patrick’s Hall and the small local R. C. Chapel if the Protestants would not spend so much money at Bingo in St. Patrick’s Hall.

The local Anglican church itself achieved financial stability since it rid itself of the last minister. But that is another story, which discretion forbids to tell in detail. Of course, that minister was not a Newfoundlander, but a woman from Ontario who declared loudly on Main Street that she would not do any shopping in the community because prices were too high—which seemed to be not the right thing to say since the community provided her with a house and a quite generous stipend. It is true that the most interesting and wonderful gossip has to do with the antics of individuals who came to the island from somewhere else.

As a rule, such newcomers have a very clear notion of how the island community ought to be improved. They join organisations and make speeches and are told that they are an asset to the town, and they tend to become flushed with the notion that they are doing important things. But gradually they are worn down by ever so many meetings in which the same issues are discussed in pretty well the same terms, with evidently very little being achieved. The newcomers then withdraw and sulk to a lesser or greater degree. Yet money is being raised in one way or another for such things as repairs on the roof of the Anglican church, or new windows for the LOL Hall, or new chairs for the Seniors’ Club. Most remarkable, well over 2000 dollars are raised annually for what is called scholarships.

These are cash rewards for highschool students who are the best in a subject in any given grade, or best overall in their grade, or have achieved the highest marks in the school altogether. There is also money for runners-up. The top awards can amount to $500, in a school which has only about 40 students. And make no mistake, these students perform remarkably well, as well as the students in the provincial capital city of St. John’s. That is borne out by province-wide tests, but local teachers report that at school district meetings they have been accused by teachers at less brilliant schools of having raised the level of scholastic achievement in their school by dishonest means.

For some reason, the island school seems to contain an exceptional number of highly intelligent and well motivated students—and of pretty girls.

The island, being out there in the ocean, has strange weather. That is, the winters are generally relatively mild; often there is no snow about on Christmas. But a snow storm in early May is nothing unusual, and snow flurries have even fallen on some early June days. And anyone who has lived in the community for some years can attest to that the official opening of the community swimming pool at the beginning of July happens at times in thick and chilly fog, with people eating hot dogs and drinking hot chocolate and wearing winter parkas to keep warm. On such days, the scene veers into the surreal, as though it were part of some weird independent movie. One shivers and expects a giant squid come crawling out of the fog to beg for a hamburger, while some children, and not the most stupid ones and not all of the most intelligent ones, are actually in their bathing suits and are splashing in the pool and make the sort of noises that people in Hollywood pool scenes make.

The island life has more surreal aspects. Imagine a group of girls in their teens, clever students, spending time to assiduously collect curses in various languages. Then, on a very windy day, they ascent the rocky elevation that is called Man ‘o’ War Hill, and from up there shout those juicy forbidden nasty words into the gale, wondering whether they can be heard in China half an hour later. Imagine a fishing community in which the fishermen do not complain! Imagine a community if the early 21st century in which it is still deemed safe to let 6 and 7 years old to walk to school by themselves and to let them play on some hillsides by themselves!

You must also consider that the island community is in the surreal grasp and care of a provincial government. That government has for instance handed out more than half a million dollars in funds to maintain a wooden walkway along the shore of the small island, from one end of the settlement to the lighthouse and back to the town on the other side. Every year a section of that walkway is repaired, and by the time the work has arrived at the end of it, it is time to start the repairs again at the beginning. Some well-meaning newcomer form Ontario or Michigan or Scotland might conclude that it would be much more sensible to build a gravel road, and to permit local residents to do some farming alongside that gravel road, in a time of constantly rising food prices, especially since food has to be shipped to that island from far away. It was mentioned that not only would a good supply of fresh vegetables and eggs be good for the health of the island residents, but a few neat red barns and a few pastures with sheep or ponies in them would be something that both tourists and children growing up on the island might enjoy seeing.

Yet the response from the provincial government, from ministers and senior officials, has been that they must protect the land for future generations, and therefore cannot permit any such developments. Perhaps you have the education to understand how to build a solid gravel lane in place of a forever rotting wooden walkway, and to turn a few acres of bog into vegetable gardens and pastures, can endanger future generations.

What else can be said about the small island community? Two painters live in it, that is, painters in the sense of that they actually are able to sell now and then a work to a tourists, for $100 or even more. Each is utterly convinced, in his heart and soul, that he is by far the better artist, but each proclaims courteously that the other one is the better one and he is learning from that other one. There are singers and musicians who perform at various occasions and whose CDs are sold in local stores. Someone makes and sells DVDs which depict the wonders of the island, such as a few tiny pale flowers of which a visiting university professor said that they are highly unusual in this location because they are really Alpine flowers—they do in truth not look very inspiring.

There are actually two students at the local school which have announced that they plan to write books when they are older; when they are older and wiser they will probably discover that their chances of success and prosperity are greater in buying lottery tickets. There is also a child who announced in an essay that his aspiration is to plant an apple tree—for whatever reason, only roses and gooseberry bushes do well on that island. There is a lady of whom it is said that she actually likes classical music, and there circulates a DVD of a ballet called THE MYSTERIOUS HOUSE OF DR. C.—at least three local ladies have said that they will watch the item when they have the time, when they get around to it—but so far none of them has gotten around to it.

2

Rowan is not his real name. But he likes it. So why not give it to him! He never liked his German name. Yet you have to bear in mind that he is still in many ways a German, stubborn, opinionated, difficult. He was for instance the person who became most upset about the matter of the walkway; the locals tend to think of it in terms of one of the many government programs that provide work which will enable people afterward to collect unemployment insurance cheques for several months. He was the one who felt strongly that there should be vegetable gardens or small farms on the island; for the older residents of the island the growing of vegetables and keeping chicken and sheep is part of a memory of much poorer, harder, backward times.

Rowan was the one who kept on talking about rose hedges. The island community is very unusual in Newfoundland in that it has several rose hedges in one section. These are mostly Victorian roses, white, meant to speak of the beauty of purity. When they wilt, they turn brown and look much like what one is apt to find in baby diapers; and that was for the Victorians a sentimental reminder of the Vanity of Beauty and the Decay Of All Flesh. Rowan did not care much for those stern lessons, but he urged in the fashion typical of newcomers that more rose hedges be planted. Red roses, whose petals wilt beautifully. He envisioned a town in which most properties are enclosed by rose hedges, a town which could be advertised at The Town Of The Roses. His hubris went so far as to argue that the little island in the cold North Atlantic can be turned into a sort of foggy Isle of Capri.

After all, so he said, a couple of dozen or more yachts visit the island already every summer, and two or three cruise ships come, too. Capri is steep and rocky, so is this island. Capri has fishermen, so has this island. Capri has a few small farms, this little island could readily have the same. Capri has the ruins of the villa of the Emperor Tiberius, which was once grand but is now only a not overly awing remnant of rock walls. The little island has 100 feet up on a hillside a concrete wall which once enclosed a fuel tank for the fish plant. The tank has been removed; why should it be difficult to construct within the concrete wall a small stone tower, and paint the wall white, to suggest a castle?

He went so far as to assert that it would be better for the local ecology to have sheep which keep lawns neat, rather than the noisy stinking lawn mowers. There is probably still too much German in him, in spite of his very sincere effort to purge himself of it.

When he has an idea which seems great to him, he has decided difficulties understanding why not everyone else becomes enthusiastic about it. Perhaps there is somewhere a small island community in which it easier to persuade people that they should plant a lot more rose hedges, and that they should paint an old concrete wall white and built within it a stone tower so that the thing can be called a castle, and to have grazing sheep of which some can actually be sold in autumn to a slaughterhouse, rather than pay for lawn mowers and the gas to operate them and spend a good part of sunny days pushing these noisy brutes. But things are not done that way on the little island where Rowan lives now, or in the province as a whole.

There was a meeting of a regional tourism association. Rowan was asked to represent the island community in which he lives at that meeting, and his expenses were actually paid for in a generous way. The event was attended by a senior civil servant from the provincial government Department of Tourism. The province has about the population of a respectable big city suburb, not quite half a million residents, but the government asserts a Third World type bureaucratic control, and it is fair to wonder how much of the working adult population is not employed by the provincial government, or the federal government, or one of the innumerable organisations and institutions that are government funded, such as universities and hospitals. Then there are those who draw pensions, and those who draw unemployment insurance benefits.

The idea prevails that the government should do everything. That senior official from the Department of Tourism announced that the provincial government had decided to double income to the province fro tourism by supporting projects which might induce tourists to stay a day or two longer. Those attending the meeting were asked to come