Book ReMarks:

A century ago – August 1997 – I was in Trinity for the sailing of the Matthew celebrations. 

In the evening there were festivities on the beach, throngs of people, fireworks and the like. It was an unusually still evening.  The water was flat calm. P’raps there was a moon. I don’t remember. I was having a bad experience with alcohol.

At dawn the following morning demon rum – well, demon whiskey, actually – forced me from my brother-in-law’s camper to take my ailing guts for a daylight stroll. Some stroll! I dodged along the old railway bed of the defunct Branch line, occasionally buckling violently forward for a closer inspection of the rail bed.

And you know what – to paraphrase Jim Furlong of NTV’s This Date In History broadcast – the rail bed I so painfully examined, might have been the same one Fred and Billy Bartlett walk so many times in Edmund Burry’s novel ‘The Loop’.

It might have been.

The Loop is the story of the Bartletts of Goose Cove, a Trinity Bay community on the outskirts of the town of Trinity, a community directly influenced by the presence of the Branch railway line running from Clarenville to Bonavista.

Ah, down on The Branch.

There’s a part of me that trembles and quakes with ingrained fear when I  hear any mention of the Bonavista Branch train – a part of me that commenced to quiver when I was a twelve year old bay boy from Random Island visiting my aunt in Shoal Harbour.

Some young rowdy Shoal Harbour boys – remember, I was a sensitive soul from down on the Island – befriended [!] me and one day lured me to George’s Brook, a community just down the line.

They lured me there to do a swimming feat impossible to do on Random Island, even if I had been brave enough to do so. They went to jump off the George’s Brook trestle! They went to leap recklessly into the brackish puddle – yes, I could see it was a mere low-tide puddle – beneath the trestle’s crossties.

Milquetoast me, I never did leap from that towering trestle. I was pushed.

Despite their waving and bally-hooing, when the Clarenville bound train slowed to climb the grade to Milton, I didn’t join those nimble ruffians when, like hobos, they jumped aboard the caboose.

A solitary tramp, I trod the rail bed cinders all the way back to Auntie’s.

Enough about me and my traumatic youth.

In The Loop, Fred Bartlett returns from the Great War a damaged man. Wounded both physically and emotionally, when he meets his young nephew Billy he is not suitable to be a good uncle.

Nevertheless, Billy pesters Fred with endless questions during their walks from Goose Cove to Trinity – Fred to work in the forge and Billy to deliver eggs to his customers, especially Aunt Jessie.

Time, as it is wont to do, passes.

Sometime after Uncle Fred has given him a handmade, metal amulet, Billy discovers his uncle has a secret. Curious, Billy unearths – literally – Uncle Fred’s secret. His find reveals items that add to his confusion about his uncle’s glum character.

Time, as it is wont to do, passes some more.

Billy becomes Pilot Officer William Bartlett, dogfighting Germans from the cockpit of a Spitfire.

Time, as it is wont to do, does it again.

Billy ends up in London where his Uncle Fred spent some convalescent time during his years overseas.

Here Billy makes another discovery. The gates of William Manor, King’s College Hospital, have a “decorative iron crest” shaped exactly like the amulet Uncle Fred forged for Billy.

Ah-ha!

Billy plays detective and, slicker than Sherlock, learns the identity of a nurse who once worked at the hospital.

Ah-ha.

Not for the last time, time passes.

Billy is back in Goose Cove embracing – but not right away – Uncle Fred.

The author winds up his story, a story that has mixed history – two world wars; the battles of Britain and Beaumont-Hamel; the evacuation of Dunkirk – in a stew of human emotions.

Burry even manages to toss chickens into the stew.

Hens, actually.

I mention that because at the same time that I chickened out [!] on the George’s Brook trestle, I was having courage issues with our family’s broody hen back on Random Island.

Enough about me.

Thank you for reading.