I took it as a personal insult. That the world was intruding upon the life I was living. Small union jacks were tilted out of bedroom windows. It was autumn. The war was a surprise — most of us did not know that it would come. But when it did we were alert to it and, of course, within minutes what was unforeseen had become inevitable. I saw men act differently. They became men who knew they had to absorb war. Women were knitting grey socks as if they had always knitted grey socks. As if war were a season for which knitted socks were mandatory. There were meetings. The word crucial was used. And effort. The word deploy. I guess there were orders from elsewhere trickling down to small communities like Brigus, but all I saw were the local executions of work. Now excess muscle must be devoted to the war push. This was aggressively agreed upon. I am speaking of the men in charge here — in the fishermen and their families I saw little change. There was no genuine rise in patriotic zeal.
