On the morning of November 19, 1929 the men of High Beach pulled their coat collars tight and pointed their heads to the gale that swept into their village. Just west of Lamaline, their homes faced the French islands, where they often travelled to trade wood and caplin for rum. Theirs was a prosperous community; everyone had at least thirty dollars cash in a jar in their kitchen cupboard, some had as much as $150. A few families had bank accounts with sums of one hundred dollars or more salted away. Their larders were full, as they always were. The Bank Crash was a far off thing that had affected those poor fellows in New York and London, maybe even St. John’s, but not anyone here in High Beach.
Thirty-two-year-old Stanley Hillier was one of the men who emerged from his house that morning. He couldn’t believe that just yesterday it had been bright, almost spring-like, and the tall grasses in the meadow had been straight as arrows in the still air. After the great rumbling, his wife, Jessie, had remarked on the glow of the moon on the water. “How lovely it is!” she had said. That afternoon she had stood over the pansies and violas that still bloomed in her garden, their puckish little faces pointed at the azure sky. So small they were, but always the hardiest of her flowers. Still, she noted, she had never seen them make it halfway into November before…
Now Stanley smiled ruefully at the memory of the deceptiveness of the day before. He saw that the pansy heads were drooped, the violas flat under snow. As he walked to the waterfront he met other High Beach men. They were on their way to inspect their property. A few of them had done so after the last wave had receded and they couldn’t quite believe their luck, the damage was so minimal compared to what they expected. Now, as the snow flakes thickened, they wanted to be sure they hadn’t suffered hallucinations. It was that kind of night, Stanley thought.
When he reached the beach, he stared at the foam of the waves where his stage had been. Only a few broken sticks sloshed against the rocks. His dory was gone, too. He had no idea where it was.
“I found mine inland, in the meadow,” old Robert Pittman said, his eyes wide as he pointed to a large clearing behind the small collection of houses that made up the tiny village. “She was tossed there, the first wave, I think. She was thrown so far in the second wave never picked her up.”
“Is she hurt?” Stanley asked.
“Not much,” Robert smiled this time. “Just needs a little care, that’s all. And to be hauled back here.”
“We’ll do that shortly,” John Purchase said. Like Stanley’s, his stage had been swept away. Four stages were gone altogether, as were two dories. But every store remained standing, as did every house in High Beach. If the wave had a kind face, it showed it here. Stanley thought of the thousand-dollar life insurance policy he had and counted himself lucky.
Jessie Hillier and the other women of High Beach had begun packing pickled cabbage, bottled rabbit, and tea buns for the men to take to their neighbours in Lamaline. Jessie was worried about them, she had kin there and elsewhere along the coast and no immediate way of knowing how they were.
“You take William Pittman and go over there,” she suggested to her husband. “As soon as there’s a break in the weather. I’m afraid they’re worse off than we are here.”
Stanley nodded.
“I’m inclined to agree,” he answered. “I wonder if they all got up to the high ground. I wonder if there was any loss of life. God, I hope not.”
“And those poor people in Taylor’s Bay,” Jessie said, pouring her umpteenth cup of tea. “Them on the flattest of land. And Point au Gaul. You know those waves had to take some of them.”
“We’ll go as soon as we can,” Stanley said.
“I hope the food will be some comfort to them,” Jessie said. “And if they need more, we got plenty of it. This was a great year for cabbage. I got all kinds of it in the store. Everyone does. Some people got dozens of heads of it—more than they know what to do with.”
In the fall of 1928, Dorothy Cherry left her native England to nurse in Lamaline. She was recruited by the recently established Newfoundland Outport Nursing and Industrial Association, more commonly known as Nonia. Nonia recruited nurses for their leadership skills and ability to work independently of physicians, since most of the regions they were going to lacked doctors. They had to be quick-thinking and devoted to duty. Nonia also insisted that they exhibit “missionary zeal” of the Christian variety.
Nurse Cherry met the requirements.
She came from Bolton, in the grey northwestern corner of England. The city of almost 200,000 was only ten miles from Manchester but, like most English, people in Bolton regarded this as a substantial distance and few ever went there. There was no need to, really, for Bolton itself had everything you needed. Straddling the wet and wild Lancashire moors, Bolton grew up as a cotton manufacturing city. It was one of the leaders of the Industrial Revolution, especially when the railway came, linking it to the other smokestack sites in the north and the rest of the country. There had been mills here, too, and mining, but these were beginning their dying days even in Dorothy Cherry’s youth. Bolton’s boom time was in the ninetenth century—everybody knew that, though no one wanted to admit it. The last great thing that happened in Bolton, Dorothy’s father often said over their Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, was the creation of the Bolton Wanderers, the city’s soccer team, in 1888. Seeing them play was just fantastic, the highlight of Dorothy’s childhood.
Much of the rest of it was darkened by the cries of Bolton women who had lost their husbands and sons in the Boer War. Dorothy was only a child with a tiny Union Jack flag someone had placed in her hand when the soldiers marched off. She waved her flag and shouted “Hurrah” because everyone else on the street did, but she didn’t understand why.
Dorothy was a married woman by the time the next great tragedy happened. Her husband Lloyd was over there, in the trenches with the other Bolton men, fighting “the war to end all wars.” It was October 26, 1917 and, like most young wartime brides, Dorothy lived with her parents. Her younger sisters were looking forward to Guy Fawkes Night in a couple of weeks. They would collect pennies for the dummy and have a big bonfire. That afternoon Dorothy entered the crowded post office and heard the postmistress say, “Oh, the most awful thing…” The nurse-in-training looked at the other customers and waited for more. “There’s been a lot of our men killed in battle,” someone spoke up. Women let out loud sobs and old men looked at each other bewildered. No one moved. Dorothy thought of Lloyd and wanted a cup of tea.
Hundreds of men from Bolton, almost all of them volunteers, had died in the Second Battle of Passchendaele. Members of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, they had trained for three years for this battle, which lasted just a few minutes. The two Bolton battalions were on the front line trenches with mud that came up to their waists and was almost liquid. They could not advance properly under these conditions and almost immediately all their officers became casualties. In the end, thirteen officers and 173 men from the two Bolton battalions were killed, with hundreds more wounded. Most of the bodies sank in the mud and were never found.
Lloyd Cherry’s body was among them.
After Lloyd’s death, the war seemed interminable. It was there when Dorothy baked a cake for her little sister, when her father carved the roast beef at Christmas dinner, when she went to her grandmother’s for a summer holiday. Her ears were numb now when she heard “Harry Calderley, you know, from Seattle Street, he's been killed,” or “poor David Knott’s mum’s got the bad news today. He used to work at Hulton Colliery, remember? She's in an awful state, his mum…” Dorothy tried to drink her tea. That’s what they all tried to do. That was the way of the Northern English. What could you do but just get on with it? As Granny always said to her, “Enjoy the flowers while they’re out and the rest of the time, just make the best of it.” By the time the war ended, more than 2,500 people from Bolton were dead.
Dorothy had come to Lamaline in January of 1929 when snow was general, carpeting the marshes and the beaches with a white stillness that held God’s presence. She had never been outside England; she hadn’t been much beyond Bolton and the Royal Bolton Infirmary where she trained, so she hadn’t really known what to expect, but she felt ready for anything. And now she was delighted at what she saw. In a rare unguarded moment, she let herself fill with the peacefulness of it; it was a welcome change from the smoky air and street noise of Bolton, she thought. Like all the nurses, she had signed a two year contract with Nonia. Now as she unpacked her belongings, she wondered if her life here would ever get busy. She certainly hoped so, she murmured, letting the peacefulness evaporate; above all, she wanted to be useful.
Then, on the night of November 18, Nurse Cherry found herself in the Catholic church in Lamaline, on the high ground with most of the local people trying to make sense of what was happening. After the first wave people continued to stream into the church, drawn to the fire that was kindled. There they peeled off their clothes, leaden with salt water, and tried to dry them. The paleness of their faces bespoke their terror. Young girls shrieked and children cried in confusion.
Nurse Cherry nodded at each group that entered the church. Her steel grey eyes looked them up and down, taking in every detail. She looked for glassiness in their eyes, for stillness and silence, for anything that would betray shock. She gave only the briefest of looks to those who howled and sobbed. They’ll be all right, she thought—they’re letting it out. She looked at the men and the boys who were almost men. Keeping it all in, most of them, she thought. But it’ll come out later, in a drunken rage in the spring after a trip to St. Pierre, or a heart attack in twenty years time. Thank God they weren’t all like that. She gave no thought to herself and which group she was like. She only observed.
Hannah Lake came in with her skirts dragging on the floor with sea water.
“Get them off,” Nurse Cherry ordered. “And whatever else is wet.”
“How can I do that?” Hannah asked, shifting two-year-old Leslie on her hip. “I’ve got nothing else to put on.” She turned her head to indicate that there were men in the room.
“Hannah, there are women on the way with blankets,” Nurse Cherry said. “You get out of those wet clothes the minute they get here. In the meantime, you get up by that fire and get your boots and stockings off. I don’t care who sees your legs, lovely though they may be. All your little ones need is a mum with pneumonia going into winter.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hannah answered.
“Good girl,” Nurse Cherry said. Then she turned to the next arrivals. “What have we got here now?” After the second wave hit Lamaline, a great rush of people scurried up the hill to the church. One of them was a woman whose screams rose to the heavens. She had been one of a group of people trapped on one end of Lamaline between the great waves. They had been trying to get into a dory that was already stuffed with twenty people. They saw this as their only hope of escape from a third wave that they knew was coming, and did. Getting into the dory, the woman tried to carry a kerosene lamp with her and it spilled onto her forearms, severely burning both of them. She then fell into the frigid sea water and somehow waded to safety, followed by some of those who had been in the small boat. Then they ran up the hill, away from the wall of water that was heading for Lamaline.
Now Nurse Cherry ordered men to fetch a bucket of cold water as fast as they could. As soon as the men laid it on the church floor in front of her, she pulled the woman’s arms into it. The great cries that followed sent children to their mothers’ skirts, their hands clapped tightly over their ears.
“Hold her there,” Nurse Cherry told the two men who happened to be closest. “Never mind the screams. Go on.”
Then she set to work rooting salve out of her black bag and preparing a dressing. She knew she had Demerol, too, and she would give the victim a shot of that to ease her terrible pain when her charred skin had been soaked enough.
When the people left the church and the others left the Orange Hall where they had gathered for the uneaten supper, two men rowed Nurse Cherry over to nearby Allan’s Island. They waited until nearly midnight, when they were certain the seas were angry no more. As they hauled the boat onto shore, a group of women were waiting.
“Nurse Cherry, come to Mrs. Lockyer’s, quick!” they said.
Inside on the kitchen day bed was eighty-two-year-old James Lockyer. His seventy-five-year-old wife, Monica, stood over him.
“We had twenty dozen heads of cabbage and it’s all gone,” she said.
“She’s going foolish,” someone whispered to Nurse Cherry.
“She’s in shock, that’s all,” Nurse Cherry answered. “Mrs. Lockyer, please sit down and this lady here will get you a cup of tea. I’ll see what I can do for Mr. Lockyer here.”
As a young woman led Monica to an old pine chair at the table, Nurse Cherry pressed her stethoscope to James’ chest. His heartbeat came slowly and reluctantly. It was irregular, too. She opened his eyes and moved her long fingers in front of them but the old man’s stare did not waver. Nurse Cherry ran her hands down his arms, legs, and trunk. He’s broken most of his ribs, she thought.
“Tell me again what happened to him,” she said to the small crowd in the room.
“Our fence is down, too,” Monica offered.
Nurse Cherry smiled kindly at her.
“Well, ma’am, the first wave shifted his store,” someone said. “Pushed it up toward his house and he got caught between the two of them.”
He’s been crushed then, Nurse Cherry realized. Probably has massive internal injuries.
“Is there anything you can do, Nurse?” a young woman asked.
“Is he still alive?” said another.
“Yes…” Nurse Cherry began.
“Is he going to live?”
“Well, he’s in no pain,” Nurse Cherry said quietly. “People in his state can’t feel anything.”
“What do you mean?” asked the young woman, her face blackening. “What’s his state? What’s…”
“I mean,” said Nurse Cherry. “I mean, he’s between this world and the next. I’m very sorry—I can’t do anything for him.”
The girl stared hard at her, her young face a mixture of anger and pain. Monica’s eyes narrowed quizzically. She looked as though she might say something but her lips stayed pressed together.
“He’s going to die,” another woman said. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Well,” said a little girl with curly black hair. “There’s something we can do. We can pray.”
As the High Beach men set out for Lamaline the morning after the tsunami, Nurse Dorothy Cherry began her journey by horseback to Taylor’s Bay. East of Lamaline, Taylor’s Bay lies open-mouthed to the Atlantic Ocean. It first appears on French maps from 1744, where it is identified as Baue de Tailleur. For many years afterwards it was frequented by French fishermen on a seasonal basis.
By 1881, it had a year-round population of twenty-one, most of whom were adult men. Knowing they couldn’t rely solely on the fishery to keep hunger at bay, they cleared twenty-five acres of land, tossing rocks, pushing boulders, and pulling tuckamore off the earth so they could plant potatoes, turnips, carrots, and cabbage. In the meadows that surrounded the bay they put their one horse, seventeen sheep, fourteen cattle, and fourteen milch cows. Ten years later, there were thirty-six people in Taylor’s Bay, including more women.
Most of the settlers were nominally Church of England, but when did they ever see a minister? They didn’t have a school but one of the women could read well and she gave seven children lessons in her home during the winter. A few years before the tidal wave, Taylor’s Bay was home to eighty-two people; the men fished and the women cured fish on a flat beach that was ideal for such an enterprise. The total value of fish products was at an all-time high. The future looked bright for Taylor’s Bay.
All that ended on the night of November 18, 1929, with the first of the great waves that rushed in on the low-lying lands of the village. The next morning Nurse Cherry set out just after dawn. Her breath turned into almost imperceptible ice crystals as she mounted Thomas Foote’s mare. Thomas, twenty-seven, walked alongside her, carrying a package of warm bread and tea buns his nineteen-year-old wife, Eva, had baked while it was still dark. “For the livyers in Taylor’s Bay,” Eva had said as she pressed it into her husband’s hands. The mare carried Nurse Cherry’s kit and a load of blankets. The Footes had been lucky. Thomas had lost only four quintals of fish and a half ton of coal, substantial, to be sure, but nothing compared to the losses of many of his neighbours whose dories, wharves, stages, and stores were smashed or gone altogether. Albert King, a twenty-three-year-old bachelor, followed Thomas and Nurse Cherry on his bay horse. From the East Side of Lamaline, he, too, had fared comparatively well last night, losing only some fishing gear. He’d have to make it up before the fishing started next spring, but he went to bed counting his lucky stars; things could have been much worse.
Nurse Cherry had an inkling that Lamaline was better situated than some of the neighbouring villages to withstand a tsunami. She had often been to Point au Gaul and Taylor’s Bay to deliver babies and diagnose bronchitis and even the dreaded tuberculosis. But it was Albert and Thomas who came to her last night and impressed upon her how vulnerable to strong waves these settlements really were. She gulped as she listened to them.
“Then we must go there,” she said.
“Yes, Nurse Cherry,” Thomas said. “First thing in the morning.”
“We’ll come by with the horses around dawn,” Albert said, sealing their plans. In the meantime, Eva Foote had gone from house to house gathering whatever blankets she could, just in case any houses had been swept away. Now Albert’s old horse was loaded down with them, too.
Nurse Cherry licked the snow flakes as they travelled, reminiscent of a game she had played with her brothers and sisters when it snowed back home in the northwest of England. The snow had so rarely stayed on the ground there. It seemed only to come in whispers, like a romance. Here it was as heavy as stew and so thick that it seemed to block the rest of the world out. Already she could see that these little flakes would cling to the gelid ground and lay there till the earth began to warm many months from now.
As they walked the road from Lamaline to Point au Gaul, the little group found long splinters—from wharves and flakes that the waves had broken. They came across shards of buttercoloured pottery and sliced heads of cabbage.
“It’s as if God had a temper tantrum,” Thomas said.
Nurse Cherry laughed, but he was right, there was so much destruction. As the wet snow thickened, the ground turned slushy and the horses’ hooves fought with it. The travelling was so difficult Nurse Cherry thought she’d get seasick on Thomas’ mare. Her stomach turned even more and she couldn’t get it to stop when she thought of the Bolton men in the muddy trenches at Passchendaele.
“I’ll walk!” she said finally. It was slow going and the wind stung their necks as their scarves blew and exposed bits of skin. As they reached the top of the hill alongside Point au Gaul, Nurse Cherry said, “From what you’ve told me, I think we ought to go on to Taylor’s Bay first. I’m quite worried about the people there.”
Albert and Thomas nodded their assent. She was a quick learner, their English nurse. Albert stared at her, all eyes ahead under her scarf. How old was she? She seemed middle-aged to him, though she couldn’t have been much more than thirty-five.
The trio halted abruptly when they finally reached Taylor’s Bay. The whole village was now one sweep of ocean. Where there had been a necklace of stages, flakes and boats around the harbour, there was nothing. There was not even a harbour. All the waterfront property was gone. Even worse, so were most of the houses.
Thomas tried to picture them where they should have been. One side of the harbour was known as the Bonnell side, while the other was called the Hillier side. Jacob and Julia Bonnell’s house should be there, he thought. Gus and Dina Hillier’s should be over there. The houses must have been swept away. Where were Jacob and Julia, Gus and Dina? And their children? Were they all dead? He had known it was going to be bad, but now his stomach flopped and he struggled against the retching.
Albert’s breathing had grown heavy and loud. His eyes scanned the horizon for any sign of the missing houses. But instead he saw boulders, strewn all around the meadows. Some of them looked like they had come up from the bottom of the sea. Boats and fragments of stages lay scattered around. There were no people. My God, I hope they’re not all dead, he thought.
Nurse Cherry stole a look at the young men by her side and paled. This was bad. The sea water seemed to be high, or maybe it was just that there were no stages and flakes in the harbour, and, in a sight she never thought she’d see, no boats afloat in a Newfoundland village. Something was really wrong here in Taylor’s Bay. Something in her chest hardened.
“Dear me,” she said. “Shall we get to work, boys?”
Albert and Thomas were like statues coming to life.
“Look at that,” Albert said. “The saltwater comes right into the pond.”
The Bonnell side of Taylor’s Bay was a disaster. A collection of dwellings looked like they had been hit by heavy shellfire, thought Nurse Cherry. She remembered the bombs that had hit Bolton in 1916. A gigantic German airship had dropped five bombs on Kirk and John Streets, destroying six terraced houses and killing thirteen people. Even a horse was killed, Dorothy had realized in horror. The sounds of fire trucks had filled the air all day and night as the airship kept going, dropping more bombs on Washington Street and the Co-op Laundry on Back Deane Road. Would it hit them next… Nurse Cherry shook her head and fixed her eyes on the sight in front of her. The small party knocked on the door of a house that remained standing and then entered. It was the home of William and Catherine Bonnell, a couple in their twenties with four young children. Nurse Cherry’s nose wrinkled at the smell that greeted her. Then she saw a calf and six sheep in the kitchen.
“There’s nowhere else for them, Nurse Cherry,” said William. “The waves were so high they blotted out the stars.”
As soon as he spoke, the nurse’s ears tuned into a loud, erratic rattle.
“Who’s sick?” she asked.
“It’s Catherine, my wife,” William answered. “And John, our second youngest. Both of them had a cold and they got fierce wet last night. Now they’re real sick.”
Nurse Cherry noted the dampness of the linoleum floor and the hooked mats. The house must have been flooded, she thought. She instructed William to remove the damp mats. Then she bent down and folded up the one at her heels and tossed it outside. William followed suit, assisted by the Lamaline men.
“My store is gone,” William said as he worked. “And all our potatoes.”
“Leave some of the bread here for Mrs. Bonnell, Albert,” Nurse Cherry said. She dug her fingernails into her palms as she realized how little food they had brought. There seemed to be people all around her. Besides William, Catherine, and their four children, William’s parents and his two siblings were staying in the little house, along with the animals. With William’s waterfront property gone, the animals were the only bit of potential income the family had, Nurse Cherry knew. Thankfully, he still had forty dollars in his pocket. But the money didn’t mean much now. The Bonnells’ inside clothing had been ruined by seawater and there was no merchant nearby.
Meanwhile, Nurse Cherry wanted to make sure Catherine and young John were kept warm and dry. She examined mother and child, both saucer-eyed and weak. She peeled two blankets off the pile Albert had brought inside the house.
“Heat up a large beach rock or a brick,” she told William. “I’m going to wrap Catherine and John in these. They’re to stay in them, away from the rest of the family. They’ve both got bronchitis and you don’t want anyone else to get it. They’re to stay warm and dry as best they can. There’s to be no smoking in the house, and no woodsmoke either.”
Then she turned to William’s mother, sixty-eight-year-old Jane Bonnell.
“Have you got any wild cherry for an infusion, a tea?” She asked.
Jane shook her head. “You know I got nothing, Nurse.”
Nurse Cherry frowned. Bronchitis could kill a small child under these conditions.
“But I’ll see if anyone else has something,” Jane added. “Some of them still have their houses standing. Well, a few do anyway.”
Nurse Cherry smiled and closed her bag. There was nothing else she could do here. She cursed the helplessness that she had always regarded as her enemy.
Nurse Cherry swallowed hard many times that day. She forgot to eat as she went from one remaining house to another, even neglecting to get herself a cup of tea. She did her best to reset a seventy-two-year-old man’s ankle, though bone setting was never her favourite aspect of nursing. She listened as the man’s wife, Martha, talked of her six drowned hens and her root crops all washed away. Martha’s predicament was a mean one; her losses meant hungry months ahead and no apparent way around it. The boot of the Burin Peninsula wasn’t like Bolton, Nurse Cherry reflected, where you could pop down to Spencer’s green grocers on the High Street and buy a head of lettuce or a bunch of carrots.
Also on the Hillier, and less affected, side of the harbour, Nurse Cherry treated an entire family for exposure. Kenneth and Amelia Hillier barely got their four children—Lancelot, Louis, Laura, and baby Leslie—to safety as the waves rushed in. On the way out the door, Kenneth grabbed fifty dollars in cash that Amelia kept in a jar on a high shelf in the kitchen. At the time, he feared it was all the family would be left with.
Now, as Nurse Cherry examined each child in turn, Kenneth explained how, like everyone else, they lost their stage, landing slip, and wharf, as well as his dory.
“How is he going to fish?” Amelia cried out, her eyes wide. She hadn’t slept with worry since the waves had taken her husband’s boat.
The children shivered as their mother listed off the food that the tsunami stole: no less than five barrels of potatoes, three barrels of turnips, three barrels of flour, and a half barrel of salmon.
“There’s barely enough flour left in the barrel to make three loaves of bread with,” she said frantically. “I can’t feed them.” Her arms waved wildly at her children.
“And we got no coal left either,” Kenneth said. “And we’re among the lucky ones in this harbour. Our children are safe and our house is still standing.”
With the two Lamaline men standing like sentries in the Hilliers’ doorway, Nurse Cherry stood to face the couple.
“The immediate problem is that every one of you is suffering from exposure,” she said. “Now, my fear is that it could turn into something worse if you’re not careful, especially with the little ones.”
She paused while a dark silence descended in the room.
“You must keep giving the children hot tea and give baby Leslie warm water. This is very important. They’re cold to the bone and we must warm them up from the inside out. You see how drowsy Laura is? That’s not a good sign. So keep pouring hot tea into her. Don’t give any of them hot toddies or anything alcoholic, that’d be very bad for them. Cover them in blankets and heat up some bricks or large beach rocks and put them in the blankets with the children. They should warm up with a little time. I know you’re fretting about the future, but turn to the children now, and take care of their exposure.”
Amelia began gathering her little flock to her. They were dressed in their inside clothes in a frigid house, covered only by sweaters. She would take Nurse Cherry’s advice, Dorothy could see that. She needed only to be pulled out of the shock that shrouded her. The nurse moved to the stove and began boiling the kettle. She would start them off before moving on.
“Can one of you men fetch a few beach rocks that we can heat for the children?” she asked. Albert nodded and disappeared through the doorway. Nurse Cherry’s eyes scanned the house for blankets. Amelia knew what she was looking for and she ran upstairs to get them. Together, she and Nurse Cherry peeled the woollen sweaters off young Lancelot, Louis, and Laura. Nurse Cherry held baby Leslie close to her, rubbing the child’s pale skin to warm it up. Meanwhile, the kettle started to boil and Albert returned with an armload of beach rocks.
“Thank you,” the young mother said. “We’ll make sure they won’t get sick. I’ll get the hot water into them right away.”
Her husband, Kenneth, pulled a roll of bills out of his pants pocket and handed five dollars to Nurse Cherry. The nurse shook her head.
“I’ve no need of it,” she said. “Give it to one of your neighbours.” As Nurse Cherry, Albert, and Thomas walked through Taylor’s Bay, they trod over clapboard, shards of glass, scraps of felt from roofs, and torn children’s clothing. They shuddered at each new find. The head of a doll sent Thomas jumping again as the face of his own little girl appeared before him.
He gagged again when the trio entered the small home of twenty-four-year-old Hannah Bonnell, her husband, Leo, and their two little girls, Louisa and Ellen. One of the waves had dented the house, but it still stood. Now it sheltered fourteen Bonnells made homeless by the tsunami.
The unmistakable sound of a woman’s sobbing reached Nurse Cherry’s ear as Hannah Bonnell showed them into the kitchen. Elizabeth Bonnell clutched her daughter, Bessie, to her chest, so tightly that the nurse feared for the girl. Elizabeth’s cries were as primal as those of a screech owl in the middle of the night.
Her twenty-seven-year-old husband, Bertram, paced across the damp floor, his quick feet making the only other sound in the hushed room. His eyes were dark brown and wide, unblinking as he stared at a distant point. In his arms were two stiff little bodies. He held them as tightly as his wife held their daughter. But Nurse Cherry could see they were as lifeless as two birch junks. Her heart swelled for the man.
In the face of such grief, Albert and Thomas felt like intruders rather than escorts and looked at the floor. Also in the room stood Bertram’s parents, whose house had also been swept away, and their four other children. Herbert and Ellen Bonnell were here, too, with their three young children. Their one storey, two room house had been destroyed; like the other Bonnells, they had absolutely nothing left. Now there was nowhere to move in Hannah’s packed little house.
As Nurse Cherry looked at Bertram’s ceaseless pacing, trying to think what to do, Hannah said of the dead children, “Their names were John, called after his brother, and Clayton.”
At that, the boys’ mother let out another wail.
The little bodies were dressed in their winter clothes, with woolen caps on their heads and mittens covering their blue hands. The nurse wondered if they might have survived if they’d had less clothes on. She had no idea of the fate of the Hipditch children of Point au Gaul, who had drowned in their pajamas, or the Rennie children of Lord’s Cove, who died in their day wear when the first wave crashed into their home.
Dorothy Cherry spoke directly to Hannah.
“Has someone told Bertram the children are dead?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Hannah answered quietly, releasing a sigh. “He knows they’re dead but he can’t accept it yet. We think he’ll accept it if we just give him a bit of time.”
The English nurse reflected on their wisdom. There’s nothing I can do for him, she thought. It’s his kin who will help him, not me. She remembered how one of her teachers at the Infirmary had told her that part of being a good nurse is knowing when to step back. For the first time, she realized that this wasn’t the same as helplessness.
Suddenly there was a thud. Bertram had accidentally dropped one of the stiff little bodies onto the floor. He sank to his knees and laid the other child beside his brother. Then he prostrated himself and sobbed. His brothers and sisters surrounded him, placing their hands on his shoulders, back, legs.
As Nurse Cherry moved toward the door to leave, Hannah stopped her.
“Have you got any food?” she asked quickly. “We’re famished and we’ve got nothing.”
The nurse handed her a jar of pickled cabbage, all they had left after many hours in the stricken village.
“I’m sorry,” Nurse Cherry said, but Hannah had already turned away and was opening it.
Sidney and Deborah Woodland were among the few whose houses remained standing. Set back from the harbour, their little dwelling was entirely unaffected by the waves. Sidney’s biggest problem was facing an upcoming spring with no stage, dory, moorings, or lines. But, as he took in the sight that daylight brought on November 19, he was grateful for all that he did have.
Now the Woodlands’ house, home to their own five children, was filled with no less than thirty-two homeless people. They were crammed into the low-ceilinged kitchen, where a dozen children sat on the floor and an old lady slept on the day bed. In the two bedrooms, rows of people perched on the beds, their eyes looking at nothing. The little parlour was blocked with still more of their traumatized neighbours. Goodness, thought Nurse Cherry, if just one of them gets the flu… She realized that they had lost all their winter clothing and could not go outdoors. In most cases, their indoor clothing, too, had been drenched by sea water and had dried out while still on their backs through the dark hours of November 18.
Among the Woodlands’ boarders was thirty-five-year-old Robert Bonnell whose wife, Bridget, had drowned the night before. Bridget had been mother to seven-year-old Gilbert, fouryear-old Alice, and Cyrus, a toddler. The child she had carried in her arms had been swept away, too. Now, his face buried in his hands, Robert was mad with grief.
Albert and Thomas, the Lamaline men, turned away from him. They had seen so much tragedy this day, more than they had ever seen in their entire lives. Only minutes before they had learned that another Taylor’s Bay couple, George and Jessie Piercey, had lost one of their four children to the waves. Thomas was glad that Eva, his teenage bride, was not with him, though he admonished himself for the twentieth time that day for bringing such a small quantity of food. Albert wished they had brought more blankets.
“We should have brought more horses and men,” he muttered to Thomas.
Nurse Cherry had called the Woodlands to her side for a talk.
“What have you got in the way of provisions?” she asked them, her brow furrowed.
Sidney drew his breath in, but Deborah answered before he could.
“We were fortunate, Nurse,” she said. “We lost no food. And it was a wonderful year for cabbage, all along the coast, I believe. This was the year of the cabbage. I’ve got ten dozen heads in the store. I’ve got three barrels of potatoes, a barrel of turnips, two barrels of flour, I made bread this morning—it was gone in five minutes. I’ve got a barrel of tea, twenty pounds of pork, and a barrel of salmon. The flour not lasting long is my worst fear.”
“There’s some fish, too,” Sidney added, referring to the three quintals of cod that he would feed to his neighbours now rather than sell.
“We picked a lot of berries, too,” Deborah smiled. She pointed to the rows of jam jars in the pantry. “I put up blueberry and partridgeberry jam. And I’ve got some pickled beets, too.”
“It’s a relief,” Nurse Cherry said. “I don’t know how long you’ll have to feed everyone. I’m sure the telegraph operators are trying their best to get help from Burin and perhaps even St. John’s, but the weather’s not the best, as you know.”
“The crowd over at Hannah Bonnell’s have no food,” Thomas piped up. “The poor things are half-starved.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Nurse Cherry nodded. “If you think you can spare anything at all, Deborah, please do. I know you will.”
“Of course,” the young woman said. “I’ll send Sidney over by and by.”
“In the meantime, let’s make sure everyone keeps drinking hot liquids, even if’s just hot water, including the little ones,” said the nurse. “I know you’ll have to spare the tea along.”
“I think I’ll just use it ’til it runs out,” Deborah said. “No one prefers hot water over hot tea. I think help will be here before we run out of tea.”
Nurse Cherry smiled at her optimism and the pink in her cheeks.
“Let’s get started,” she said. The two women boiled pot after pot of water and made tea. They went from room to room giving the hot mugs to adults and children alike, who drank it greedily. Between them, Deborah and Nurse Cherry persuaded Robert Bonnell to drink a few sips between his incessant sobs. His young son, Gilbert, too, had some tea, while his little sister Alice napped on her father’s lap.
“You’re a brave boy,” Nurse Cherry told him, almost coaxing a smile. Then she turned to the still energetic Deborah.
“Keep the house warm but not hot,” she said. “Give the children a spoonful of jam twice a day to keep their resistance up. When help comes, people will have to move out of Taylor’s Bay. It’s a health hazard having this many people in close quarters. If one gets sick, everyone will. I’m very sorry.”
Deborah pressed her lips together. During the silence that followed, it seemed as if everyone in the house, even in the other rooms, was waiting for her to speak. When she did she said, “I wonder if Taylor’s Bay will ever be the same again?”
Nurse Dorothy Cherry spent the night of November 19 drifting in and out of sleep, sitting on one of Deborah Woodland’s pine kitchen chairs. Her companions, Thomas and Albert, lay curled up at her feet, part of the human mass that covered the linoleum. Dorothy dreamed of England. She was in her grandmother’s garden, rich with July violets and smiling pansies. “Enjoy the flowers while you can,” Granny said, her blue eyes sharp and lively. Swifts and swallows glided in and out of her dream, then darted across the garden this way and that, as thick as black flies in the Newfoundland woods. In her chubby childish fingers was a ha’penny with Queen Victoria’s image on it. It was one of her favourite things, something she kept in her “precious box” under her bed. But now she threw the coin in the air and caught it as it flopped back down…
“Shush, John!”
“Shush, Margaret! You’ll be all right now. Be a good girl and you can have some more jam tomorrow.”
Mothers were comforting their children and she was in a black, draughty kitchen in a remote village in Newfoundland and her grandmother was buried in a hill in Farnworth in the southwest of Bolton. She pulled the thin flannel blanket over her shoulders and stretched her back a little. From one of the bedrooms she thought she heard a low rattle, a signal that someone had the beginnings of bronchitis. “Oh no,” she muttered. Again she cursed the helplessness that dogged her. She wondered if the quake and the fierce waves that came after it had affected the telegraph wires. Goodness, she hoped not. If the cables were broken, there would be delays in getting messages out. This, of course, would postpone the arrival of any ship that might bring much needed medicine, clothing, and lumber to rebuild fallen houses.
As the first light of day began to show, Dorothy Cherry thought of these things and could not fall back to sleep. Besides, Deborah Woodland was up now and fastening her apron around her slim waist. She went into the long pantry and plunged a metal scoop into her flour barrel, emptying the flour into a large bowl. Then she tiptoed back into the kitchen and began the age old task of making bread. This day, too, the comforting smell of rising bread would awaken the mourning people of Taylor’s Bay.
The journey to Point au Gaul, which involved backtracking over familiar ground, was made arduous by the frozen mud on the road. Thomas’ mare and Albert’s bay horse hesitated and then slipped and stumbled over large ridges of earth encased in ice, shaped by the tsunami and then the snowstorm of the day before. This time the animals carried no food or blankets; they had all been distributed at Taylor’s Bay.
In Point au Gaul, Nurse Cherry ministered to Jessie Hipditch, still prostrate in her sister Nan Hillier’s bed, and hysterical with grief over the deaths of all three of her children, Thomas, Henry, and baby Elizabeth. Nan’s eyes were rimmed with deep creases, betraying her own lack of sleep as she tended to Jessie. Nurse Cherry ordered Nan to bed and delegated a neighbour to stand in for her at Jessie’s bedside, at least for a day.
The nurse sat with Jessie and spoke to her.
“Jessie, do you remember me?” she asked. When there came no answer, she repeated the question, not once but three times above Jessie’s babbling. Finally Jessie calmed.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Jessie,” Nurse Cherry said, “it’s terrible, what’s happened. It’s so very sad.” She stopped while Jessie stared at her, the young woman’s eyes great with grief.
“Your little children are all angels in Heaven now, dear,” Nurse Cherry continued softly. “You’ve got to cry for them and then you’ve got to help your husband, David.”
Jessie continued staring at her and then released a new flood of tears. She began to babble again but suddenly stopped and sobbed. Dorothy held her. By now, Nan’s eight-year-old daughter, Ruby, had joined them and she sat on the bed and crawled into her aunt’s arms. Huge tears slid down Ruby’s face.
“I miss my little cousins, Aunt Jessie,” she said.
“Oh Ruby!” Jessie cried. “I don’t know how I can go on without my babies!”
Jessie sobbed from the bottom of her gut till she flopped back down on her pillow, utterly spent. Her dark hair spread out behind her, damp with tears and sweat. As she fell into a deep sleep, Nurse Cherry stood at the foot of the bed and Jessie’s husband, David, tiptoed into the room. He eased in behind Nurse Cherry, saying nothing. Dorothy turned and smiled at him. She noticed the wet shine on his eyelashes.
“I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she whispered.
David nodded.
“Will Jessie be all right?” he asked quietly, his eyes full of fear.
Nurse Cherry nodded quickly.
“With time, with a lot of time,” she said. “And she has the love of her family. That’s so important.”
“Will we be able to have more children, Nurse Cherry?” David asked almost in a whisper, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Nurse Cherry smiled and looked at Jessie’s sleeping body.
“I think Jessie will want more children, with time. She’ll always mourn her lost children, but give her time, David. Don’t worry. There’s no reason you can’t have more children.”
David looked at his wife. Then he walked alongside the bed to her side, sat down, and stroked her long hair as she slept.
After a night in Point au Gaul, Nurse Cherry and her escorts travelled to Lord’s Cove. By now, they had heard of the miraculous rescue of toddler Margaret Rennie, whose mother, Sarah, had drowned in the family home with three of her children. Margaret had been given up for dead when Lord’s Cove men retrieved her from her house, which the first wave had thrown into an inland pond. The whole village had rejoiced when the little girl had awakened after being plunged in a tub of hot water. All along the coast stricken people were taking some comfort from this story.
The road between Point au Gaul and Lord’s Cove was all beach now. Instead of earth, it was filled with round grey, blue, and white rocks, smoothed by centuries of wave action, pitched there by the tsunami. Albert had borrowed a carriage from a Point au Gaul man and hitched his horse to it, but the animal could not stand the strain of hauling the carriage over the rocks. Before long, Albert unhitched the carriage and abandoned it. Thomas turned around and brought his mare back to Point au Gaul. When he returned to the beach road, he and Albert had to pull the horse over the rocks til they got to Lord’s Cove. Although it was a cold November day, sweat ran down their faces and backs.
In Lord’s Cove, Nurse Cherry tended to baby Margaret Rennie who, she was glad to see, was in fine shape. Alberta Fitzpatrick had taken great care of her and doted on her. The child kept asking for her mother, though, and she wanted to go home. Her father, Patrick, was in shock, having lost his wife and three children as well as their home. Nurse Cherry was a little worried that the remaining family members were split up, with Patrick staying at one home, his surviving sons, Martin and Albert, with other friends, and little Margaret with the Fitzpatricks. They needed each other now, she worried, but it was hard for a man left on his own with no house. Here again, she would have to give in to that feeling of helplessness and trust in the ways of the people, who certainly seemed to be doing everything possible for the Rennies. Letting go went against her nature, but she had already seen how their wisdom worked.
She reminded herself of this as she tended to a man’s crushed finger and treated several lingering cases of shock. At night she went back to Alberta Fitzpatrick’s, where people had gathered once again to retell the tale of little Margaret’s rescue. They told it like a prayer and as they told it, a much-needed feeling of serenity settled upon them.
Albert and Thomas, Nurse Cherry’s companions from Lamaline, turned back toward home after a night at Lord’s Cove. Thomas was eager to see Ada and their daughter, Mary, and to make sure they were all right after his absence. Albert, too, wanted to see his relatives and ensure they were well. Both men were desperate to see that communications with Burin and St. John’s were established and ongoing. Above all, they wanted to alert the telegraph operators to the devastation in Taylor’s Bay and the urgent need for provisions of every kind. Nurse Cherry impressed on them that it was necessary to evacuate people from the village lest an epidemic develop.
So it was men from Lord’s Cove who accompanied Nurse Cherry on the long journey to Lawn, the next community to the east. The road to Lawn veered away from the sea, so it contained less debris deposited by the tidal wave. But without the moderating influence of the water, the air was cutting and their faces hurt when the wind blew. The horses were irritable and sluggish. The men had to push them to move on. Nurse Cherry again had visions of her grandmother’s violets; she wondered why she was thinking so much of them now. And that ha’penny with Queen Victoria’s profile on it? She bent her face to the ground and pressed on toward Lawn.
Most of the time she walked since the animals were so contrary. It made the time go faster, too, she reasoned, by giving her something to do. But sometimes she rode on one of them to give her aching legs a rest. When she stopped her calves throbbed and her feet swelled in her boots, so much that she worried if she’d be able to get them off.
The old wooden bridge that led to Lawn was down. The men called across and got some Lawn men to fetch a dory, one of the few that hadn’t been smashed to bits. They carried it from the beach to the bridge and then rowed it across the narrow river, breaking the thin ice in places. Then Nurse Cherry got aboard, laughed at her situation, and helped row across. The horses, more unpredictable than ever now, plunged their legs into the frigid water.
“They’re spooked by the tidal wave,” someone said.
“You’ll never be able to predict how they’ll act around water now,” another added.
At least there are no flattened homes in Lawn, Dorothy Cherry consoled herself as she fell asleep her first night there. And, thankfully, no one had died. She was exhausted; she had travelled at least twenty rough miles and spent another day treating people for shock, exposure, injuries, and even septic inflammations. She was relieved that some who had suffered damage here had substantial savings. Michael Tarrant, who was fifty-six, and his wife, Emma, thirty-six, gave up much of their fishing gear and rooms to the waves, but still had two thousand dollars in the bank. Even young Ernest and Loretta Connors, both thirty, had two hundred dollars saved; now they and their little Gerald would need it, and more. Other families, though, had nothing.
Nurse Cherry was in a bed under a thick quilt this time, her head lying on a pillow stuffed with the feathers of an eider duck. The last thing she saw before the blackness of slumber was a giant violet from far away England. The visions of German bombs dropping on the Co-op Laundry in Bolton had left her in Taylor’s Bay. Maybe she had seen the worst of the tidal wave’s fury.
The smell of butter smeared on fresh bread drifted into her morning dreams, only to be interrupted by a knock on her door.
“The priest wants you to go to St. Lawrence, Nurse Cherry,” said the little girl of the house in as authoritative a voice as she could muster.
Suddenly the cold, fast waters of the tidal wave washed into Dorothy Cherry’s memory and she saw the white face of Jessie Hipditch and the arms of Bertram Bonnell, swollen from carrying his dead children. She saw the first wave pull houses from their foundations and throw them inland in a thousand pieces. She saw the second wave haul away from villages, taking houses filled with women and children with it. The wrinkled telegram announcing the regrettable and heroic death of her neighbour, twenty-twoyear-old Private Harold Kettle popped in front of her eyes until she squeezed them shut to banish it. She tried to focus on the aroma of the fresh bread but she had to hurry to get to St. Lawrence. She had no idea what awaited her there. She still did not know if the outside world knew what had happened to the people of the boot of the Burin Peninsula. Or if help was on its way. Or when it would or could come. She had no bright news to bring the people of St. Lawrence. Her arms were heavy as she pulled them into her dress. My clothes need a good wash, she thought.
Nurse Cherry’s legs ached and swelled as she travelled over the road to St. Lawrence, named centuries ago by Channel Islands fishermen after a Jersey Island parish. Although the town was the largest on the lower part of the peninsula and something of a service centre, life in St. Lawrence still revolved around fishing. Nurse Cherry’s little party reached there not long before nightfall, just in time for supper and to administer some basic medicine to a few livyers alongside the priest’s house, where she was staying.
As soon as Nurse Cherry finished her breakfast of tea and hard-boiled eggs the next morning, Grace Reeves, a slip of a thing at fourteen, rushed into the priest’s kitchen to tell her that “poor Joseph Cusack’s house is all destroyed, Nurse.” Nurse Cherry let her china cup fall onto her saucer as the maid backed into the dark mahogany doorway to listen to Grace.
“Yes, Nurse,” she nodded. “’Tis true, only I forgot to tell you that.”
“Oh dear,” sighed Nurse Cherry. She knew that Cusack was a widower with three children, the older two in their early teens. Even worse, Joseph suffered badly from high blood pressure. Dorothy swallowed the last of her tea and determined to visit the Cusacks right away. This would not be good for Joseph’s health, she knew, and he was all the children had.
She glanced out the window at the snow that was still falling fast. It had been a wild night with the wind emitting war cries hour after hour. Over and over Nurse Cherry woke from the dreams that took her back to the Bolton Wanderers soccer pitch. She was a tiny girl on her father’s shoulders, clapping as the Wanderers beat mighty Manchester United. “We’re an older team than they are!” her dad called up to her. “You remember that. We’ve got four years on them.” Later that night the Burin Peninsula wind pulled her out of a Wanderers game with Ipswich Town. This time she was even smaller, not yet in school, and it was her first game. The Ipswich players came all the way from southern England—so far away!—her father had showed it to them all on a crinkled old map. Their town was on the Suffolk coast, right across from Holland in Europe! Dorothy’s heart beat with excitement as her family went through the gates for the match, surrounded by thousands of other Boltonites. She wondered about the players from Ipswich. Would they look like people in the North or would they be different? She could hardly breathe with… Then the wind pounded on the roof of the rectory, nearly tearing it off, and Nurse Cherry sat up in bed, a mess of confusion.
Nurse Cherry bundled up and faced the gale, with Grace by her side. She found the little family at James Cusack’s house, snowdrifts piled high on its side. James was in St. Pierre but his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Elizabeth, was doing her best to tend to Joseph’s three children as well as her own brood of four. Joseph had gone to look for whatever building supplies he could find. Nurse Cherry was pleased to hear that he was active and doing something about his situation; pressing on was always the best medicine, she told herself.
“We’re the lucky ones,” Elizabeth told Nurse Cherry. “We’ve lost nothing but the breastwork on our wharf. Most in the harbour have lost much more than that.”
“There’s a great deal of damage in St. Lawrence then?”
“Oh yes!” Elizabeth answered, putting bowls of porridge in front of a row of quiet children. “The businesses are in a terrible state and almost all the wharves are gone. Most have lost food and many have lost boats and coal. I don’t know what will happen the winter and next spring when they have to go fishing.”
“I suppose I thought it wasn’t that bad when most of the houses were still standing,” Nurse Cherry said.
“Well, yes, Nurse, you’re right there,” Elizabeth nodded. “Most of us have our houses and no one died, thanks be to God. I hear that’s not the case farther down the peninsula and we’ve been praying for those people and lighting candles in the church.”
“Yes, it’s the saddest sight, Taylor’s Bay,” Nurse Cherry said. “The Bonnell men, Robert and Bertram, losing their children, and Robert losing his wife, too. Bertram was driven mad with his loss when I saw him. His wife, Bessie, too, she was heartbroken, of course. And then poor Jessie Hipditch and her husband David in Point au Gaul—they lost all their children, all three of them. Jessie’s mother, too. And her sister Jemima’s daughter, Irene.”
The Cusack children stared at Nurse Cherry, trying to take in the gravity of her words. They were catatonic, like statues.
Elizabeth was silent.
“I know Jessie Hipditch. I’ve met her and she’s a good woman,” she said finally. “It’s not nice to lose your mother. But, you know, losing your children is never supposed to happen. It’s against nature.”
Nurse Cherry nodded. She could understand this. She had delivered many of them and she had closed the eyes of many old people. This was as it should be. In the past few days, everything had been upside down or backwards, just as Elizabeth Cusack had said…
“You’ll have to visit poor Michael Fitzpatrick, too,” Elizabeth said, as she cleared the dishes off the table and shooed the children away. “His house is gone, too. And his flake and that…Are you all right, Nurse Cherry?”
“Well, I’m a little woozy to be honest,” Nurse Cherry answered. Elizabeth paused and looked the nurse up and down.
“Lie down here on the daybed,” she said kindly. “Perhaps you’ve been working too hard or not eating enough or most likely both.”
“I’ve got work to do,” Nurse Cherry protested.
“Well, you can’t do it right till you rest,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Now lie down.”
Nurse Cherry moved slowly over to the daybed. Elizabeth pulled a thin woollen blanket over her legs.
“Just have a little rest now,” she said gently.
Then one of Joseph Cusack’s sons rushed back into the kitchen.
“Aunt Elizabeth!” he said urgently. “There’s a rescue ship in the harbour! The SS Meigle. Can I go see it?”
“Of course you can, child,” Elizabeth said. “Just don’t get in the men’s way, but offer to help if they need it. Off you go.”
Elizabeth smiled when she saw that Nurse Cherry had fallen asleep in spite of her nephew’s gleeful news. Her guest woke up only when the dark shadow of a broad-shouldered man standing over her hauled her from the quagmire of her dreams. Two hours had passed when Dr. Mosdell, Chairman of Newfoundland’s Board of Health, appeared in Elizabeth Cusack’s kitchen.
As Nurse Cherry blinked her way to clear vision, the doctor introduced himself.
“Nurse Cherry, on behalf of the government of Newfoundland I thank you for your efforts. Now you are coming with us,” he said firmly. “We shall take you to Burin on the Meigle for a well deserved rest.” He nodded and looked at Elizabeth as if for confirmation. She nodded quickly in return, delighted to be of service. By now the narrow little daybed was surrounded by a gaggle of Cusack children as well as some others who had wandered in to see what was going on. They shook snow all over the linoleum floor as they came in but Elizabeth ignored it, so focused on Nurse Cherry was she.
Nurse Cherry looked up at Dr. Mosdell and straightened her hair as best she could. “Oh no, I can’t go with you—I have work to do, sir,” she said weakly.
“Nurse Cherry…” Mosdell began.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Nurse Cherry interrupted. “I have to respectfully decline your kind offer.”
Two days later Dr. Mosdell dipped his pen in an inkwell and began a letter to the Honourable A. Barnes, the Colonial Secretary in St. John’s. He wrote:
On board Relief Ship Meigle Burin Nov. 25 the Florence Nightingale of the earthquake and tidal wave disaster on the Southwest coast is Nurse D. Cherry of the Nonia Centre at Lamaline. At every point the Meigle has called we have heard stirring tales of her courage and devotion to the interests of the survivors. Starting her work of mercy immediately after the occurrence of the catastrophe she has known no rest day or night since then and has been without assistance of any kind until the arrival on the coast of the Doctors and Nurses of our relief expedition.
It must have been almost superhuman effort for Nurse Cherry to make her way on foot all through the stricken area from Lamaline to Lawn a distance of twenty miles. Roads and bridges were swept away and she had to wade many of the streams en route. The weather was intensely cold with snow falling all the time. Her ministrations proved nothing less than providential to terror stricken and frightened women and children. She got through the District as quickly as possible sparing herself not at all and after rendering first aid in one settlement she moved on along until something had been done everywhere to help and to cheer the stricken.
Courage and devotion were required for the journey which was made right after the woeful destruction of the tidal wave with miles of desolation to be traversed at night and nobody just sure that the catastrophe would not be reenacted.
All day yesterday the Meigle sheltered at Lawn a Southeast storm with high seas and driving rain rendering communication with the shore almost impossible.
Toward evening the rain turned to sleet and there was nothing to do except wait until the dark and tempestuous night had passed. During a lull in the storm of the morning Nurse Cherry was taken onboard. She was almost in a state of collapse after her strenuous and self-sacrificing efforts. Despite her objections the expedition kept her with them and have taken her as far as Burin to enable her to recuperate. She returns to her District by the Argyle tomorrow…