It was Deborah's mother who got the biggest shock. The land did not look at all like it did on paper. The house backed onto a steep slope. She thought of her level vegetable garden in Grole. How could she put a garden on such a hill? This hill was to make a big change in how the family got their food. Deborah remembers how the hill changed their lives.

When we lived in Grole, see, that was how we lived—we lived off the land. And when we moved to Harbour Breton, slowly Mom stopped all that. Stopped the vegetable garden. She had little ones [gardens] after a while—she'd grow radishes and potatoes. But it was nothing like it was in Grole. In Grole, she had rhubarb, cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, greens. She got more into flowers in Harbour Breton.

Every family has its own economy. This is the way the members of the family work to meet their needs. When the Jackmans moved from Grole to Harbour Breton, their family economy changed. They went from growing vegetables to buying them. There was a supermarket close by. Of course, this cost money.

To earn that money, Deborah's father changed the way he made his living. He switched from fishing to working on construction projects.

My father was a fisherman and he worked in the lumber woods when we lived in Grole. When we moved to Harbour Breton, he worked on a barge. Then he worked on the highways, and then in a fish plant. But he never went fishing in a boat after that.

All of a sudden, money became important. The children now needed uniforms to wear to school. There were more things to buy, and more places to buy them. Where would the money come from? How could you make enough? The problem of money was talked about in the house more than ever in the past. Who you were, and what your position was in the community, was now tied to money.

I remember living in Harbour Breton and all the talk was of money. Money, money, money. And I remember feeling really guilty as a kid—thinking, we're poor, we have no money. If Mom sent us to the shop, I'd feel guilty about taking a penny to buy a candy.

When Deborah talks about money this way, she points to something that happened to many people in Newfoundland after Confederation. For a long time, many people had lived in a world where cash was a rare thing. Families produced a lot of what they needed. They traded fish and other things for goods. But Newfoundland was going through a great change. It was moving away from an economy based on the work of a family. It was moving toward an economy based on cash. For many people, this change was not an easy one.