Writing, recording & remembering

A large Belgian training ship named The Mercator, with four masts, a big, old sailing ship, floated into L'Anse au Loup, the Cove of Wolves. The Belgian navy practiced in the cove for three or four days.

The ship's first officer gave a local boy a black-and-white postcard featuring a picture of the ship. The first officer then traded a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes for two groundhog skins. Later the boy sold the cigarettes to his uncle.

On the back of the postcard the first officer wrote: 'To John, a clever boy I met in Wolf Cove. Signed, R. Ghys.

The boy was John Earle, who recently wrote a book chronicling his experiences growing up on the Labrador coast, entitled The Straits in My Heart. The above was paraphrased from his recollection of chapter five, which he called 'Hauling Bows'.

"I just want the book out so that this generation can know what it was like back 50 years ago or 60 years ago when I was growing up," he says. "That's the whole purpose."

The 73-year old forgets the incident as he glosses over the words during a phone interview from Lewisporte.

Mr. Earle has been keeping a diary since age 11.

"I don't know exactly what prompted me to write a diary," he says. "Actually, I started in the fall of 1946. I do have the original exercise book that I kept the diary in at the time. It was a little bit intermittent at that time, not every day I'd do it, but most every day. From 1950 it's been continuous, and I still keep it. I got a pile of books, of diaries, here, about four or five feet high I guess."

It's funny what the mind remembers and what falls to the wayside.

"I remember how I won the exercise book," he says. "It was the 24th of May, it was a holiday, it was at school, and we had races, and I won the prize in the bag race, where you get in the bag and go from point A to point B and back. Well, I made it and I won an exercise book and a pencil. And I think that's the only thing I ever won in a race," he laughs.

He's since copied the writing from the original exercise books into proper diaries.

Now his life is stacked tall in 20 books.

He has kept a secondary diary entitled 'Key Events', from 1950-2007.

Mr. Earle puts the phone down a moment to grab a Key Events diary.

"I'm going to look up this day in history," he says over the flipping of pages. "Okay, January 8th, 1950, there were lots of blullbirds," he laughs, "if that's a key event."

He pauses and flickering through the pages finds what he's looking for.

"In 1963, a baby boy, born to Mina, nine lb., seven oz.; and that baby boy is Irving Barney. He's now living in Pasadena. Yep, okay. In 1970 we saw a Johnny Cash movie at the theatre, m-hm. My brother was around in 1978, he left for Moncton. On this day in 1991 I bought a 1985 skidoo," he laughs. "Yeah, on this day in 1998 I saw a moose on the harbour ice, right out in front near the water...I was expecting any minute that he would fall through but it didn't. And also on this day in 1998 there was an ice-sleet storm over Ontario and Quebec for the past two days. That's my key events for January the 8th."

Mr. Earle was born in L'Anse au Loup in 1935. He left the Labrador coast for radio school in St. John's before returning to Point Amour as a radio operator in 1957.

"I was always interested in writing," he says. "I had family away on the mainland, four boys, they're still on the mainland, Ontario or Nova Scotia, and at that time, when I started, I used to write a paper called the Seaside Sun, and I would write, print it out, the news of the day, maybe have two or three small sheets, ordinary size typing paper, I would print that out by hand and then I would take copies off and send each one a copy. And they used to appreciate that; if they didn't get one for a while: 'Well what happened to the Sun?'"

Mr. Earle got the idea of writing about his childhood in the Labrador Straits from people asking him about the experience, without light, power or phones.

He's contacted Breakwater Books in St. John's by e-mail. That publisher had the book for three months before Christmas and ultimately didn't buy the book, saying they publish just five per cent of the manuscripts they receive.

Now Mr. Earle is going to contact Flanker Press.

"I ain't gonna give up, eh," he says. "You will find, when you've been around as long as I have, that the first response, most of the time, I say 90 per cent of the time, the first response to anything is, 'No,' regardless of what it is, a book or whatever. And you don't accept negative as an answer if you're determined to get anything done. You don't accept no, you just keep on going."