Chapter 3
The Golden Dream

On a Thursday morning in February, 1905, William Pender drew back the kitchen curtain his wife Iris had edged with lace. He looked past the oil factories, past the docks, and beyond Job's Bridge. There lay the city dock and workshops, and all the factories of the west end. There was the planing mill, the biscuit factory, and the gas works. A half mile farther west stood the rope walk. On Job Street above the train station was the boot and shoe factory. Near that was the Imperial Tobacco Company, where hundreds of women and youngsters rolled cigarettes for the local shops.

Hidden among the factories were the little workshops. Tinsmiths made by hand the tins, buckets, lamps and kettles everyone needed. Small furniture workshops hired joiners, upholsterers, polishers, painters and mattress makers.

Other workshops made parlour suites and fancy rockers of mahogany and rosewood. Iris wanted to try and get some upholstering work. She could sew the finest hand of all her friends, William thought. But he worried about Alice Maud, their nine-year-old daughter. She was the only one left at home. She was frail, and she needed her mother.

He looked past the bridge and St. Mary's steeple and the North Side's factory roofs. Beyond all that lay streams, and woods, and farm land. At least the government claimed it was farm land. William laughed into his tea. This was all part of the golden dream, like the factories.

For twenty-five years the government had been saying too many men were in the fishery. It started the railway and sent men on trains to dig buckets of soil. It hired experts from England to look at the soil in summer. The experts said Newfoundland was tropical. You could grow anything here, they said. Corn and mangoes and apricots.

William had seen the government trying to get men out of the fishery. It gave them farming grants and train tickets away from the shores. It hired more experts to figure out what breeds of sheep could live on the farms. There would be wool for all the clothing factories. There was a new government department of farming and industry. The mangoes and corn and apricots and factories were bound up with the sheep's wool in the same golden dream.