The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers by Choyce Lesley; Swan Julia;

Author:Choyce, Lesley; Swan, Julia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pottersfield Press

Siol Na Fear Fearail

(The Breed Of Manly Men)

An excerpt from Going Over: A Nova Scotian Soldier in World War I

David Mossman

While my father, Titus Milton Mossman, lived, our family never really learned how he earned his medals during World War I. It was as a twelve-year-old stowaway on board a schooner in Lunenburg that I learned a bit about those particular actions. The vessel had just returned from an early spring fishing trip to the Grand Banks. I went down to the waterfront to see him, for even in those late days of the cod-fishing business it remained a hub of activity. The place was always of high interest to men and a magnet to young boys – especially this one – for whom a big feed of gingerbread aboard ship was always a bonus, as were any old comic books left behind in bunks by the sailors.

The following dramatized retelling of a conversation I was privy to on that occasion provides some flavour of those times. That conversation was, of course, thickly accented because Titus and his friends were most comfortable lapsing into the “deutschy” South Shore dialect. After all, Titus, a sixth-generation Canadian, was among the last locals who could speak the old German dialect of Lunenburg County. Nevertheless, when the occasion demanded, he could manage quite proper English. Picture it then: four fishermen, two of them, Henry and Titus, former soldiers of World War I; Eli, also on the far side of middle age, was saved from army life by virtue of two irredeemably flat feet. The fourth, Freddy, is a thirty-five-year-old veteran of World War II. All relax in the forecastle of a vessel moored at a Lunenburg wharf. It is very late on a day in mid-April 1950.

“Any coffee left, Cook?” asks Eli, a big fellow slouched at the head of the table nearest the peak. Titus, the cook, getting up slowly, makes to roll up his sleeves only to discover they already occupy a position high on his brawny forearms. With a grunt, he leisurely makes his way back to the galley stove. No need to hurry now, his cleaning all done. The trip is over, they are in port, and their catch of “green” salted cod – the result of a two-month-long “frozen baitin’” trip to the Banks – safely discharged ashore.

“For good measure,” Titus mutters to himself as he throws an extra handful of ground coffee into the huge coffee pot. Usually he allows coffee grounds to accumulate in the pot for about twenty-four hours. Good puritan that he is, the very same procedure is followed for tea. “Waste not, want not,” his mother Letitia taught him. Arriving from the dories after setting or hauling at the tail-end of winter on the Banks, hungry men drank the cook’s brew scalding hot – likely more for heat than for the taste. In any case, contests of any sort with a ship’s cook on a Grand Banks schooner were generally not the healthiest pastime for the instigator.

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