Alice Catlin
Alice
Catlin lives in the house she was born in on the
Cundy's Harbor Road. She was the oldest of five
children. Alice was seven when her first brother was
born on Christmas night in 1918, during a bad flu
epidemic. The only one in the family who didn't get
the flu was her 75-year-old grandmother; even the
woman who helped with the birth got the flu.
Alice did not have
electricity until World War II, before that she used
kerosene lamps for light. She used a wood stove for
cooking and for heat. Her family used an outhouse
for the toilet; they called it a “chick sale”.
The women had to scrub the
clothes, do all the cooking and do all the cleaning.
The men had to cut the hay and take care of the
animals. “From when you woke up in the morning to
when you went to bed, you had to be doing chores.”
They had a big garden and grew lots of their own
food. They had to; otherwise they would not live.
Most of the food that they bought came from Watson's
General Store in Cundy’s Harbor.
They raised animals to eat
but they did not eat much meat because it was hard
to keep. They did not have a freezer. They raised
pigs that they would kill in the fall. Then they
would build a fire in the smokehouse to smoke the
ham and bacon. That was a way to keep the meat. They
ate lots of fish, which did not cost much. “The
poorer you were, the more fish you ate.” Alice got
fish in Cundy's Harbor. They were so big she had to
drag them.
They had horses. The horses
pulled wood, plowed gardens, and did other gardening
work. The horses pulled carriages. Sometimes they
went to Brunswick. It took a long time to get there
with a horse. “In the rainy season the wheels of the
carriage would get stuck in the mud up to the hubs.”
The schoolhouse that Alice
went to is near the Cranberryhorn Cemetery on the
Cundy's Harbor Road. When Alice went to school she
always walked. There weren't more than 12 - 15
people at school during any school year. When Alice
went to high school, she lived in another family's
house, where she would work for room and board. She
would wash the dishes, take care of their baby, and
do other chores and not get any money for it.
High school only went to a
little past one o'clock so you could go home and do
chores. Most people didn't go to college. Alice
didn't. There weren't any radios until Alice was in
high school and no TV’s until she was a young woman.
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