The bright August sun  coupled with just a slight breeze made it the perfect day for which Fred had been waiting. Looking at the roof of his two story house, he though of the rain of the past two days and of the several leaks.  The roof, he knew must be tarred today. Fred was 68 years old that summer’s day in 1947 when he climbed the rickety ladder carrying the bucket of hot tar and the mop that he would use to spread it. He remembered well when he had first built that house in Guernsey, some six miles away from where it now stood on Middle Point. He had just married a few months earlier and with their first baby on the way  he and Augusta, or “Gussie” as he had always called her, very much wanted a place of their own. He was determined to have a two story house with a brick chimney and was very pleased on the day they had moved in with their few meager pieces of furniture.  It was early April of 1907 and the baby was due the following month. Standing on the roof now he looked across the meadow at his son’s house, his firstborn, now married with a family of three boy, one just a few weeks old and Ellen, an adorable little girl of three, the apple of her father’s eye and idolised by her grandfather.

Tarring the roof that day as he had done hundreds of times before, his mind kept wandering back over the years.  There were few nurses in Newfoundland in these years and even fewer doctors and women about to give birth had only the services of a midwife and many women died in Childbirth as the markers at the cemeteries could attest. Gussie had given birth to four children by 1914, two boys and two girls but in 1916 shortly after the birth of the couples fifth child, complications arose for which the midwife had no training, and Fred was left a widower at the age of 37. The baby, another boy who he had named Archibald also died a few days later. Returning home from the funeral for his young wife, he was greeted by four hungry young children. The whole thing was too much for him and he had to sit and rest for a few moments. Determined that his children would not go hungry, he soon prepared a lunch of fresh codfish with bread and milk, for he was fortunate enough to own a cow.  For the next four years, he fished from home and took care of the children’s needs.   In the fourth year he would marry again, this time to Aggie, a widow with one daughter. Together they had another six children, though one would die in infancy.