Mary Downey was born in Mt. Carmel. When she married George Downey in 1939, she moved to Colinet, where she still lives today. Mary enjoys reading, knitting and playing cards.

FAMILY TIMES

There were six of us in family – two boys and four girls. Being the oldest girl, I helped mother look after the house. We were up early every morning and after breakfast we;d go to school. Once school was over, we picked up potatoes from the gardens, cut and made the hay. There were no boys jobs or girls jobs back then. Everyone in the family helped out. We fed the animals and sheared the sheep. I helped to card and spin the wool and we'd have to wash and pick it. Then the wool would be used to knit socks, vamps, mitts, sweaters and so on. We would send some of the wool away to Condons in PEI and they would give us blankets for it.

We would go berry picking – myself and Marion and Jim and Tom. We'd have to cross from Mt. Carmel to the St. Joseph's side in a dory and go way in to where they called it the 'stairs'. We'd go up over steps (stepping stones in the cliff down in Newbridge/Little Harbour area), and pick the full of a flour sack of partridge berries in Newbridge. We'd get back around 7 o'clock in the evening, from 9 o'clock in the morning. We'd have a lunch with us – bread and molasses or whatever we had. We'd also cut the wood, bring water in buckets and heat it on the old wood stove, scrub the clothes on the scrub board and tubs. Everything was washed by hand, no machines.

I got married in 1939 to George Downey and came to live in Colinet from Mt. Carmel. His father built the house. We had one child. She died – I was only 7 months pregnant. We baptized her Betty. I never worked outside the home after I was married. I helped George with the wood and hay. I'd keep the fences limed.(1) We had six sheep and hens, so I always helped out there too. George worked in the lumbering woods in Colinet country. He would stay in there for up to three months even though it wasn't that far away. But they worked from daylight to dark every day. He worked in the mill at Hughie Simmons' and then on the base (Argentia). I looked after George's father for eight years before he died. After that I took my own mother for two years in her later years. I had two other sisters who moved to Colinet. They followed me.