Church of England, the Anglican Church. They were all strict Methodists, the Wests were. My grandfather was such a strict Methodist, Grandfather West, that he was very disappointed in my father joining the Anglican Church. And what he said to my father — he was so disappointed — “You left your father’s God.” You’d think he’d joined a cannibal tribe or something.

My mother’s father came from Nova Scotia in, oh, around 1850 or ’60 or so. He came over here for his health. He had a shoe store in Halifax and he got kinda run down and the doctor told him to get outside in open air. Well, he fished a bit when he was young and he heard about the lobster fishing and tried it. He liked it so well over here he brought his family over the next year. Actually, there’s a reef down there off Point Prim away out, I don’t know where it is out there; it’s still called Longard’s Reef. He was the first one to fish there. The other fishermen were scared to go out there because it was a rough place.

But he was a very, very good living man. I don’t think he’d even spit on Sunday. He’d have his shoes polished on Saturday night and my grandmother’d have the vegetables all ready, far as she could do, on Saturday night. They always had — custom in those days — a big feed on Sunday because there was always visitors in, you know.

I never heard him say a word out of the way; very religious man. But one time, I was only a little gaffer, and Robert MacWilliams — that’d be Johnny’s grandfather ~ was living, and he was at the house one day, my grandfather’s house, and I was up there an awful lot. They were talking about somebody on that he had committed a crime. Now, I don’t know what crime it was but it was a fairly serious crime. I remember old Robert MacWilliams said, “That fella ought to be hung.” My grandfather said, “Hanging’s too good for him. He ought to have his ass kicked.” Now, that’s the worst I heard that man say and he lived 50—odd years after that. I suppose he thought that’d be a worse indignity than being hung, actually.

The Polly Field is on James Halliday’s farm now, the field right at the comer of the road; there’s a turn to go down to the wharf. It got that name from the fact that in 1903, I think it was, the hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Polly, they had a tea there. And if I recall right, the proceeds of this tea was to go toward this Polly monument that’s situated at Belfast

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