Out Port Girls (Bonavista Light), oil on canvas, 24" x 36', Steven Rhude 'I can't think of anything the [maids] didn't do They got the coal, cleaned and washed and got the big copper pot boiling to wash the sheets with lye . . . . They had a regular routine for the housekeeping and cooking . . . . I was 5, 6, 7, 8; they were probably 17, 18, 19 but they seemed adult. They stayed for years, some of them, and usually left to get married.” So recalled Janet Story, a St. John’s nurse and nursing archivist, of her childhood years during the interwar era. Janet Kelly, a prominent city businesswoman, remembered that “almost everybody had maids. We did when I was a young kid. My father worked in St. Mary’s Bay, so we had a source, people who knew the family and would trust us with a young girl coming to St. John’s. It was not just the well-off had maids,” Kelly continued. “The middle class, if they could manage it at all, had
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