dollars a month up there, and she’d send this money home to pay off the debt. And then when she had the debt all paid up she’d come home, and she’d stay home for a couple of years till the debt run up again. Then she’d go back to Boston... . That’s how the thing was run here.

They wanted to keep [Victor and me] together. Now, he came to a Malcolm Finlayson’s, about a mile up the road from here. And he had an accident there. This Malcolm Finlayson, he was an elder in the church. It was in July 1910. See, [we] came out here the 9th of June 1910... . Well then, they were having a sacrament at the church, and they left him home in charge of a sister. That was Malcolm Finlayson’s daughter, it was. And she was sickly, she was in bed. He went out, he got playing with matches, and the first thing he knew, the hay on the ground caught fire and went to a stack and then went to a barn.

Some of the neighbours said that it wasn’t his fault — he was only six: I was nine; I’m three years older than him — some of them said it was. So they shipped him back to the orphanage in Halifax and they shipped him to a family in Cape Breton. I didn’t see him then till 1917 when I joined the navy. He had shifted then from Cape Breton to across here to Malagash [Nova Scotia]. He went with a family in Malagash. I’d get a weekend and I’d go up to see him. It was seven years after he left Finlaysons.

Oh yes, I used to get letters and cards from people in England. I don’t know, today, I don’t know who they were... . I have an aunt, she calls herself an aunt, but she was my nurse when I was born. She was up in Hamilton, Ontario... . And I had another one, another sister of hers, down in Pennsylvania. [They] used to write to me, give me the news, what’s going on... . Now, John Ernest, they told me about him being [killed in India]. He was dead then over a year. This’d be in 1933. And then when my father passed away, they told me about that. I had the three in 1932. I had my own son George, 10 years old; and John Ernest; and my father.

New School

Yes, I went to school there. But oh, it was quite a difference. When you went to school in the morning they marshalled you in on the playground. It was all asphalt... . But then I came here and went to this little school at Eldon here and all the grades was in one school and one teacher... .

I was in Standard Five. Well, over here they call it grades. When they sent me up to the school up here I couldn’t get that teacher to understand the difference between the standard and the grade. So she put me back into the primer class with a little bit of a slate. And over there we had pencils

George Davies 105