The Other Side of Midnight Read Free Page B

you could choose your work because there was so much business. Why take the scruff? Take the good stuff.
    If you got into trouble with Canadian servicemen, a drunken serviceman getting out of hand, you didn’t ring the police, you rang the shore patrol—the Canadian Navy Shore Patrol. They patrolled around the city just as the police did. They’d just arrest them right away and make sure you got your money. They were good like that. They were next door to us, right where there’s a tavern today. That was their jail. All night long they were hauling in the drunks off the ships, piling them in there to sober them up.
    But you never had trouble with an American. The Americans wouldn’t put up with their servicemen like that. They didn’t take any shit from them at all. They wouldn’t be out at night to the beer parlours because they had all their own clubs on the base. We got a lot of good work from the Americans. Fort Pepperrell was a big part of our business. We liked Fort Pepperrell because it was completely controlled. They were good people to deal with. A lot of Newfoundland men and women worked there, too, and they needed taxis to go to work and to come back home. We drove all of those people. The base might ring us and say, “We need three officers brought over to Argentia.” Or they could ask us to pick up such and such and bring him back to the NCO club. Stuff like that. You had servicemen who were courting Newfoundland girls, too. An American soldier might want to go see some young woman. He’d ring us to go pick her up to take them to a movie, or a dance.
    There weren’t too many companies working on the American base. There was us and Hotel Taxi. The Americans were very choosy. You had to get a licence and get checked out and everything before you were even allowed on the base. There was a little bit of bootlegging—that sort of thing. But we never got involved in any of it. If the Americans found out you were bootlegging a bottle of rum and it was in your cab you’d never be allowed back.
    The Americans were a different class of people than the rough-and-ready Canadian Army and Navy men. Even the Englishmen. All they were interested in was partying and drinking. The Americans weren’t like that.
    For us, the biggest challenge during the war was cars. You just couldn’t get cars because there were no cars being made. You couldn’t get tires, either. You could still get tires but you could only get so many a year—they were rationed. Tires didn’t last like they do now, either. In those days, because of the gravel roads, they only lasted two or three months. Now you can get tires on your car that’ll last two or three years.
    You had to have synthetic tires on your car because that’s all that was being made. Synthetic tires were tires that weren’t made of rubber. They were synthetic. You could tell they were synthetic by the big round red dot on them. It was about the size of a half-dollar. If you had them on your car you weren’t allowed to go anywhere the trains went. The trains were supposed to take the passengers. It was to save on tires—that was the rationale behind it. We’d have to keep the old pre-war worn-out regular tires to go back and forth to Argentia. But those jobs were good money. Thousands of men were out in Argentia. On the weekends, they weren’t staying in Argentia, which was actually Placentia. There was nothing in Placentia. The big city was St. John’s. What would happen was, the crowd would come into town on a Friday or Saturday, and they’d have to be back on the base early Monday. But the train didn’t leave until seven o’clock in the morning. Half of those guys would be in St. John’s, and they’d hire a taxi to go back out. A driver could go to Argentia and make himself $35.
    In our day, the taxi business was a regular business with regular working hours. It was