Nurse Bennett story needs new medicine
Ever since Robert Chafe’s play “Tempting Providence” made its appearance at Cow Head a decade ago, Myra Bennett’s reputation as a medical worker has grown and spread. “Don’t Have Your Baby in the Dory,” Bennett’s biography, was first published more than 40 years ago, when she was less well-known, so this reprint is probably overdue.
H. Gordon Green, who wrote the biography, is (to quote the publisher’s promotional material) “author of numerous rollicking books.” That adjective should be a warning — there is a certain forced jollification between the covers.
It’s not just the jollification that’s overdone. It’s been more than a century since Sir Wilfred Grenfell discovered that it’s a lot easier to sell medical heroics if you exaggerate the deprivation and poverty of the recipients, and Green learned the lesson well.
Today, we are less inclined to feel that just because people live off the grid, they are to be pitied.
To be fair, Green does say that Nurse Bennett denied the Depression was any worse in Daniel’s Harbour than elsewhere, but he still tries to paint a picture of Newfoundlanders as ignorant, toothless, tubercular, malnourished but ever-so-friendly and amusing. We are made to play the stray dogs to Bennett’s Charlie Chaplin, the Baker Street Irregulars to Bennett’s Sherlock Holmes.
I finished this book while waiting for a plane, and went to the airport bookstore to find another, only to spot a second new Bennett book, a DRC publication of her journals. It would be interesting to compare the two, and to throw Chafe’s take on the woman into the mix.
It was good to reread “Don’t Have Your Baby …” after all these years, and I did enjoy it, but it’s probably time for a new study of Myra Bennett. I think even she would have admitted that her view of Daniel’s Harbour, as it appeared to her in 1921, was somewhat skewed. In
1973, four small children died when their Harbour Breton house was swept away by a flood of rocks and mud. Almost 40 years later, Bruce Stagg has documented that event in “Landslide: The Jack Hickey Story.” I dreaded reading this book, and having read it, I dreaded having to write a review of it. My reluctance to tackle the book was simply because the death of a small child is a subject I find hard to confront. Multiply that dread by four and you have a mind-numbing nightmare.
I have twice in my life known parents who have suffered such loss. One couple were merely acquaintances, so that when seven of their children were killed in a dreadful car accident, I was able to avoid actually having to deal with them. The other couple lost their five children in a tragic house fire. They were witnesses at my wedding.
I mention these matters only to stress how sympathetic I am to those who have suffered such loss, and those who are left to comfort the grief-stricken.
It isn’t easy to be the recipient of such recollections, and Bruce Stagg, I am sure, suffered his own nightmares as he wrote this book. My sympathies go out to both Mr. Hickey and Mr. Stagg.
That being said, however, there are problems with “Landslide” that cannot be overlooked. The writing is lamentably poor and the editing entirely inadequate. My criticism of the form is in no way a reflection upon the content, which I’m sure is heartfelt and honest.
Several examples from the first chapter will serve to illustrate problems with the text. We are told that Jack Hickey “was born in the family home in Harbour Breton by an English nurse.” No, he wasn’t. He was born to his mother and delivered by a nurse.
We are then told that “To this day