I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. John’s. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I don’t remember a lot of them, but most of them were scattered along a couple of roads in a place called the Goulds, about an hour away from town. It wasn’t much of a place, not even a village, but it was where Jennie was born and where her parents, Lucy and Ned, still lived, on Petty Harbour Road.
You might think that a memoir covering a span of six months as a seven year old would be of scant general interest or entertainment value but the story within Jennie’s Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood is surprising, engaging, and full of heart. Reading like narrative nonfiction, Wayne Johnston’s account of having been a sickly child with a chaotic home life is told with warmth and humour, and has a satisfying narrative arc. And for anyone who has read a pile of Johnston’s novels, as I have, there’s something very intriguing about seeing the influences behind his later writing; between this and The Mystery of Right and Wrong, I feel like I’ve gotten to really know the author this year and the experience has been a delight. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Repairing me seemed to be impossible because no one seemed to know why I was sick. A doctor I could not remember having been to see had once said I had a nervous cough. Jennie seemed to think I had a nervous cough because I was nervous all the time. She said she had heard of other people who had nervous coughs, but she never named them. Calling it a nervous cough made it sound like I was constantly trying to clear my throat, but that wasn’t the case. The cough was so deep, so loud and so relentless that each of my three brothers had tried to kill me to shut me up.
Born the third of four sons (with more siblings to follow), Wayne’s barking cough was so disruptive that not only was he forced from his brothers’ bedroom at sleep time (aided in hauling his rollaway “bedmobile” into the living room at night, where his insomnia kept him awake), but he was banished from school and usually removed from Mass in the clutch of a coughing fit. After his father drank away the rent money, again, the family relocates to a substandard house across the street from Wayne’s maternal grandparents, and when his parents take the bus into town to work, and his brothers go to class, Wayne spends the days with his grandmother, Lucy: a loving, deeply religious woman who is still mourning the untimely death of her own young son so many years before and who knows that iced chocolate Quik, taken three sips at a time, is the only thing that Wayne is able to consistently hold down.
There is a health scare and trips to specialists, but this is mostly about the Johnston family dynamics: Wayne’s mother, Jennie, “ripping into” his father, Art, for secretly drinking away the poor family’s meagre means — until Art starts to berate himself and the whole family needs to gather around and tell him what a great man he is. Wayne’s brothers enjoy digging into him — making the case that everything would be better if he wasn’t so sick, putting so much pressure on their parents — until Wayne starts to cry and the brothers hug and reassure him. This is the story of a family, and especially seven year old Wayne, under tremendous strain, but it’s not bleak: this is a story with a tremendous amount of heart and warmth.
I didn’t want to be led to the living room by Jennie and have to kneel with her while she held my hand to keep me from losing my balance and tipping over sideways like a statue. I didn’t want to walk among the same grown-ups I had walked among the day Lucy had her false alarm, Jennie’s boy dressed to the nines as if nice clothes could disguise the fact that I looked as though I would be the next to go.
Because this reads a bit like a novel, I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I do want to make the point that you don’t need to have read Johnston’s novels to be moved and entertained by this memoir (there are medical mishaps! brawls! car chases!). Turns out, six months in the life of this seven year old makes for a very satisfying tale.
