CORMACK,
NEWFOUNDLAND
PART ONE

Iris Shears

Iris Shears lives in Cormack, Newfoundland. In November of 1947, Iris, her husband and their little baby left Rocky Harbour to drive to their new home. Cormack is eighteen kilometres north of Deer Lake.

MY HUSBAND WAS an ex-serviceman, navy. Royal Navy. When they came home from overseas, veterans had choices. There were different projects that each one could choose. Cormack was built up as a farm settlement for veterans. Some more went fishing.

There were three of us in the cab of the pickup truck. And the road snowed in behind us as we were coming. The next day everything was snowed in. You couldn't get through the country. That was the last time we could have gotten through that winter. From here to Deer Lake the road was plowed. It was a dirt highway and icy as old heck. We came here the eleventh of November.

What they did was build up the shell of a house. Clapboard on the outside. There was nothing else done inside. No insulation. No basement. There were windows, but no storm windows, nothing like that. As a matter of fact you wouldn't even call it a cabin. A log cabin would have been a whole lot better.

They were shells, clapboard on posts. There was a cement chimney which cracked. There was no basement under the house. It used to heave, and of course, the chimney would crack and the flames came out through the sides. There were quite a few houses burned up here the first years that we were here.

The baby was six weeks old when we came here. And we had this little wood stove that burned only birch rind. I had nails in the ceiling. I would hook the quilts in them and I would enclose the stove and get inside the quilts. That was the only place warm enough to give her a bath or change her diapers. Outside of that, it was cold. There was frost everywhere. But the thing was, she didn't have a cold the whole winter. That was the surprising part about it. Because she was so used to the cold. When she would wake up at night her hands would be blue.