After a hard winter settling at Cormack, Newfoundland, Iris Shears got over her nervousness at being isolated. She then looked to the spring and the clearing of the land. It was difficult, with little money and little equipment. She was lucky that the farm was on a main road. By growing the right things, she could sell them at the roadside and in Deer Lake and make a living.

WE HAD TWO ACRES CLEARED around the house site, and then there were eight acres in on the back, cleared, but it's all grown over now.

We were supposed to be farming, but there wasn't anything to do farming with. We were given a couple of pieces of horse equipment, but no horse. I think in the next year they allotted you a few dollars for a horse, if you wanted.

We bought a little Cub tractor in 1948, with some little plows and things like that on it.

There was nothing cleared in '47. Our land was cleared the next year, in the spring of 1948. It was 1949 when we got the $800, two years after we got here. We were growing a few vegetables by that time.

A lot of the hard times I've blocked from my memory. I don't want to remember. I can't remember because it was too harsh. Some of the things I survived made me stronger for it. There are a few other things I wouldn't put down on paper anyway.

We didn't know any different. It was a thing where ignorance is bliss. But it's only in these late years that I look back and see what happened. For four and a half years that Roland went overseas he got $800. And this land, that was nothing.

Government cleared this ten acres of land with a bulldozer. They took all the topsoil off and pushed it all in the back. Beautiful raspberries grew there, but there was nothing left on the land but the sand and the pug. Now, build it up and try to get something growing in it!

Britain wasn't very nice. I've learned what the Canadian government did for their servicemen and it just makes me boil. We were here for eighteen years without electricity. We had kerosene lamps.