Chapter 9
The Poor House

William sat in a park near Angel Place. He looked in the paper for jobs. He did not want to sit long. The few people in the park were old men and young mothers. Behind bare trees stood the most dismal place in St. John's—the Poor House. It was a gloomy, three-storey building, crowded with beds and lit with oil lamps.

William had heard the place called names. Some called it the Pauper's Rest, or the Pest House. The government built it after the second last great fire—the one that burned St. John's in 1846. People who could not build new homes lived in sheds until it was built. Lettie Duggan had been inside. She worked for a charity that sent people there. She told Iris what it was like. Iris told William one night as they drank cocoa by the fire.

Iris said the place had eighty men and forty women in it. They slept on separate floors. Some slept in beds shoved in closets. The women ate in a dark, damp back room.

You got four kinds of people in there: old people who went there to die, middle-aged people who were down and out, people everyone called demented or idiot, and alcoholics. They had to wear uniforms. They could not leave. The gates were locked.

They did not get many visitors. The rooms were cold. Residents clung to heaters at the ends of the halls. People like Lettie who had been inside called it the saddest place in Newfoundland.

William unrolled his paper. People he knew had been in the news ever since the strike. A drunk cooper was arrested on Poor House Lane. That was just behind the park. Another cooper had found a drowned baby in the sewer. Today he read of another cooper's misery:

"A SAD STORY.
SMALL BOY ALMOST PERISHES"