by Greg Malone ~ Knopf Canada
Review: Halifax Herald March 2009
‘Our memories are the bread crumbs that lead us home.
Without them, we stand bereft and alone.’
Greg Malone is a former member of CODCO. He is also a screenwriter, actor, director, activist and a one-time wannabe politician. Now he has added author to his impressive list of credits. ‘I love performing,’ he says as we drink mint tea in a busy Halifax coffee shop. ‘But there’s something very satisfying about [writing], to write something that’s just how I see things. I’ve always wanted to write.’ So he did. He wrote a book about growing up in Newfoundland. He began over ten years ago, writing down the more traumatic stories ‘for my sanity. I enjoyed it and people laughed, so I kept going.’
You Better Watch Out is a series of vignettes, snapshots of a childhood where friendships with Andy Jones, Cathy Jones and Danny Williams (who went on to become the Premier of Newfoundland) are cemented. The clarity of remembrance is striking and I asked Malone if he had embellished them at all. ‘No,’ he says. ‘They’re childhood memories. I don’t have these memories as an adult. I was a child, totally dependent and nowhere to go, which feels like life and death to an 8 year old, life and death in terms of your heart. This fascinates me, these dramas where the heart changes. It’s Jane Austen stuff, the little stuff that means so much to your whole life. And when you are 8 years old, it’s everything.’
It is the young Greg who tells these stories. He begins school but he ‘could not warm to Miss Snow. She carried a bright red stick, which she rapped our fingers with.’ There is a simplicity in the beginning stories as Malone sets the stage on St. John’s hilly, cramped streets. They are factual and descriptive. But as the young Greg settles into his narration and moves through grade school, the stories mature with him. He is able to see glimmerings of understanding in the incomprehensibility of the adults around him.
Malone does this well. He holds fast to the young boy, letting him tell it like it was, warts and all. Never does it seem to be imposed from an adult perspective and it is always infused with humour and insight, even those moments of terror that was part of growing up Catholic in Newfoundland.
Malone maintains his childhood perspective throughout, along with a fantastic sense of the absurd – even in Brother Clancey’s class. Br. Clancey is ‘six feet tall, (and) this overwrought celibate was not at his best in grade two.’ Br. Clancey has serious anger issues, and he has a profound and negative effect on Malone’s life.
But Greg was very young and the contradictions of religion and cruelty in the name of god and love are not to be challenged. He is traumatized. His understanding of the powerlessness of his situation develops, and by the time he is 9, his narrator’s voice has matured into the sophistication of a child who realizes that survival was not going to be on his terms.
An occasional PG warning would be in order for the more sensitive souls among us. Disasters. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,’ was the comment from the dentist ‘as (Gregg) went out holding his raw, bloody mouth.’ Betrayals. The Strap and Who is God horrify, taking the glory from school days when being strapped and terrorized was considered discipline. But even the harshest stories are softened by the humour of a bright and tender child who is determined to make sense of it all.
Malone’s love of St. John’s infuse these pages. His connection to Newfoundland is deep and clear and he has remained friends with many of the kids in the book, kids from early grade school. ‘It’s so rich,’ he says. ‘I’m so lucky. People from the Grade 4 class came to the launch (in St. John’s), kids from my street that I hadn’t seen in years. One of the [teaching] brothers came, friends came. It was a great laugh.’
When he can, in between acting and writing, Malone reads. ‘Sometimes I have to stop my life and read. Jane Austen is so fun, the way she plays with language. Dostoevsky, Margaret Lawrence. Doris Lessing sends chills down my spine. The Edwardian writers, Thackerary, they have so much passion.’
Will there be a sequel? We must hope! But now it’s time for something completely different! Malone is already writing another book, this time about Newfoundland joining Confederation. ‘I’m a history buff,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘and there was so much politicking and intrigue surrounding that period. It’s my type of history!’
‘What’s it like to win a Gemini?’ I ask as we finish our tea. Malone laughs out loud. ‘It’s a bit of fun!’ he says.
Greg Malone is a Newfoundland actor, AIDS activist and writer. He lives in St. John’s.
