The Other Side of Midnight Read Free Page A

don’t remember it. It was before my time. After all, I’m only eighty-odd years old. He used to go to the railway station and the harbour to pick up passengers. At times, there could be hundreds of people down there. Some came across the Atlantic from England and Europe and all those places. Some came from Nova Scotia and New York and Boston. He met all the Newfoundland coastal boats, too, like the SS Kyle . The cars would be all lined up, and the drivers would say, “Taxi, taxi!” In those days, that was part of your business. Those people needed taxis when they came to town. Nobody had a car. Even if they did, they weren’t getting around. Sure, we never got our first snow plough until after the First World War. It was an old British tank. All they did was put a blade on the front of it. But that was no good because when she’d go down in a drift she couldn’t get back up out of it. Eventually, they scrapped her for metal during the Second World War.
    Later on, when the Newfoundland Hotel went up in 1926, my father and his brother and four others formed Hotel Taxi. They were Bugden, Voisey, Clooney and Dooley. That was so long ago now I can’t remember their first names. But they were all taxi men trying to make a dollar wherever they could. They called it Hotel Taxi because it was on the side of the Newfoundland Hotel.
    My father was the type of man who wanted to be on his own. When he started up at the Newfoundland Hotel, he had 500 people telling him what to do. But then war broke out in Europe. All of a sudden, business was booming. Fort Pepperrell (American Air Force Base) was here, and Buckmaster’s (Canadian Military Headquarters for Newfoundland) was here. But all he had was his car and his brother’s car—that’s it. He wasn’t going to have that; he wanted to make money. “I’m not staying here with just two cars,” he said. “Goodbye, boys.”
    The rest of them carried on, but they broke up after. The hotel said they no longer wanted a taxi stand on the side of their business. Voisey took the Hotel Taxi name, and he started up again on Queen’s Road. Clooney and Dooley both got out of the business. Harry Bugden had nowhere to go; he had nothing. When Voisey moved down on Queen’s Road, he didn’t take Bugden with them. Old Harry Bugden couldn’t get along with Voisey and them. He was a nice man, but he had his own ways.
    When Burgess Brothers’ Cabs started up in 1941, we were the first company in Newfoundland to call our cars “cabs.” Everyone else used to call them “taxis.” My father said, “We’re going to call them cabs, just like they do in England.” The building is still there. It’s a restaurant today, but the original building is still there on Duckworth Street. We had a small garage, too. It was foresight on my father’s part. He wanted to maintain his vehicles himself. There weren’t many stands around with a garage. Crotty’s Taxi was one. They had an old warehouse on Theatre Hill. Queen Street is what they call it today.
    The war changed everything. That’s when it got rough in town. The taxi drivers were always half-afraid with the soldiers getting drunk. In those days, no one ever hailed taxis. But if they called, you might get stuck with a drunken Canadian, or a drunken Englishman, and he might vomit up over the seats. Then the car would be out of commission all the next day getting cleaned. The Canadians coming off the ships were pretty terrible. The Canadian Army base was at Lester’s Field. They were always drunk up there. The Canadian Navy was in Buckmaster’s. The bases were supposed to be self-contained, but the soldiers were downtown all the time into the beer parlours. If someone rang us from Buckmaster’s: “Oh, we haven’t got a car.” We didn’t want to go up to Buckmaster’s, or Lester’s Field. In those days,