Eli and Mary no longer worried about their youngest son, in fact they now wondered if he might not surpass anything they had imagined. As for Adam, he was taking it all in stride and delved even more deeply into his books.  His focus now was on passing grade nine and the thought that he still had more than two years at home was in some ways comforting. Despite what Dr. Adams had said, Adam knew that he had more growing up to do and wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world. He liked listening to stories of bygone days and soon found that even Ghost stories  didn’t frighten him anymore. He now saw that such stories were added to, each time they were told, and the telling of them was more of a pastime than anything else, in communities starved for any kind of entertainment.

Dr Adams had settled in Petersview some fifty-three years earlier and was the only doctor serving more than eighty communities. During these years there were also three nurses stationed along the coast but often two of these clinics were vacant, sometimes for months at a time. Only one nurse, a Mrs Deering, appeared as determined as Dr. Adams himself, in fact travelled much more than the doctor, who in recent years worked almost entirely from the government operated clinic.  Mrs Deering or Nurse Deering, as the local people called her, had done her training in London before setting out for Newfoundland as a young woman of just twenty-one years. It was the same year that Dr. Adams took up residence in Petersview and neither showed any sign of wanting to retire. The nurse had fallen in love with and married a young fisherman from Herring Cove and had remained to serve these gentle people, whom she had also come to love like family. The Commission of Government however, who had already built ten Cottage hospitals in rural Newfoundland were now planning three more, including one in the area of Petersview.

Life had always been uncertain here and little had changed over the years. Tuberculosis was rampant, as it was in most of the island. Almost every community along the coast had at least one person in the Sanatorium, or “the San” as many called the hospital in St. John’s, that housed those suffering from TB.  There was rarely any contact between those patents and their families at home as few could read and write. It was not compulsory  for children to attend school, although recently the government had been trying to enforce a law that children must remain in school until they were fourteen years of age. This wasn’t easy to do however as many parents still felt that a girl didn’t need an education, and boys were often needed in the fishing boats.   To his credit, Father Ryan, during the nine years that he had served the parish, had done his best to discourage this attitude, consequently most children of both sexes, who were under his care, had at least the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.