Frank Murphy Talks about Trying His New Skates

[One year] I got a pair of skates. Now right after school opened in December, I never got the chance as we never had hardly any ice that year. So this night, right after Christmas, we had a lot of hard frost. And the bottom was the favorite place for skating. So I got my skates, in school, that day when recess time came, or dinner time came, I’m going to try my skates.

So Uncle John Foote’s wharf was you know, where Cyril’s house is to now, we calls it Cyril Foote’s house, someone else owns it now, I takes my skates when I comes out of school, when I goes down, those were skates that would clip on your rubbers, there weren’t no boots on them, just clip ‘em on, so I’m going to have my skate now, I goes down, I walks out on Uncle John Foote’s wharf, now, there’s only one night’s ice there see, and in around the wharf itself the ice has broken up. So I’m going to get off on  it now see and I’m going to go into

Uncle Peter Murphy’s store, that’s the way I’m going to go, not knowing that Daddy was already in Uncle Peter Murphy’s store watching me. So I clipped them on, jumped out on the ice and once I made the first push, I did know how to skate, and once I gave the push the wave came in the ice because the ice was soft.

Now I says, I knows I’m going to go in the water, but my only chance of saving myself because now I’m on the ice, is to go into Uncle Pete Murphy’s wharf, and so I gave it to the old skates, and when I gets in about 3 feet from the wharf, down I goes … but I was close enough for to catch one of those rails they haves across, I caught the first one but before I got to haul myself up to the second one,  here, right here, daddy grabbed me and he hauled me up on the wharf, and now I’m trying to keep ahead of him because I knows I’m going to get a tanning, a lacing right.

Anyway, where you comes up to where Art Gaulton got the store now, that’s where the lane used to come out, I came up, when I gets up the lane to the road, every once in a while he’d get close enough to me to give me the boot in the arse right, we would never go home, because see we knew if we went home we would get  a lacing, so the best place for us to go when we got wet was down to Granma Murphy’s, went down to Granma Murphy’s she would strip us off, take every bit of clothes of us and put it around the old stove and put  us in behind the stove, and warm us up.