He’d try to get in under the blanket and it’d be all rolled up like a rope, and he’d be struggling and struggling and after a while he’d get under it. He’d never make the bed, so it got to be a saying over the years after that: anything that was mixed up bad, it was “bad as Billy Morgan’s bed.” So, that’s the way it went on. I come back out to the Prairie again and worked for three or four years more, I guess, up in northern Alberta and down south of Winnipeg, down on the American line. All over the place. I came back home then, in 1931 it must’ve been. I stayed on the Island

then. The good old Island.

Island Work

I did nothing for a year or so, living home on the farm. Then I went trucking.

The first one I bought was from Jack MacLean in Flat River. He had an old truck I bought from him. And then the next yearI got a new one. Bought it in Charlottetown from the Ford people, Allison MacLeod. It was supposed to be a two—ton truck, I guess. Thirteen hundred dollars new then. Then I went on for a couple of years and I got another one from McGowan’s and I think it was only 16 or 17 hundred. That’s the last one I had.

Oh, first, I hauled eggs and produce like that. And then, the last years, I was hauling gravel. You’d be taking some load to town, as a rule. There’d be something, wood or something, cattle or something. I hauled eggs twice a week for the Egg Circle the first couple of years I was at it.1

They gathered eggs around with the horse and wagon, express wagon. Willie Ross collected them around this district, and DD. MacLeod in Orwell. I hauled for the two of them. It’d be just twice a week. Took them to town and then they’d get feed from Egg Circle people over there on Prince Street. I think there’s an auto body shop there now. So, you’d take out feed for the hens and stuff like that.

I used to haul a lot of stuff for Harry [MacTavish]*. And Harry had a lot of speeches. In the war years, we were hauling potatoes at John Alex Ross ’ s, and [Harry] was there buying stone for a foundation. John Alex was complaining about the poor help — hard to get help, and they were poor.

MacTavish said, “Yes,” he said, “the kind of help you get now, they just keep the bread from moulding.”

1. The “Egg Circle” was an early incarnation of a modern-day marketing board, based on

co—operative principles. _____________—_—————

2 16 BELFAST PEOPLE