THE SUMMER OF 1945 marked a threshold for my father, Ian Rusted (1921-2007). He had completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and was two years into medical school at Dalhousie University when the opportunity to work as a medical officer on the S.S. Kyle became available. The contract was renewed for 1946, and taken together these summers frame a threshold to both personal and public transformations. Assuming the role of medical officer on a coastal steamer brought him face to face with the responsibilities on the front lines of Newfoundland’s health needs. The country was crossing its own threshold, leaving a world war and a frayed economy in its wake. Although he did not reflect on these transformations explicitly, except in a brief description of V-J Day celebrations and mention of broadcasts regarding the United Nations, their presence and influence are palpable in his writing during these summers. These experiences and his subsequent role as a consultant with the Department of Health helped shape his vision of medical education for the country soon to become a province. Despite career opportunities elsewhere, he returned to Newfoundland after completing his medical and graduate training and by 1967 was appointed founding Dean of Medicine in Memorial University’s new Faculty of Medicine.

This manuscript was among my father’s papers and was something he had been preparing for publication late in 2006. He had drafted the essay from three primary sources: small, pocket-sized, daily diaries that he kept during the 1940s; a notebook where he recorded every patient interaction that he had during his two summers on the Kyle; and a small archive of 8mm home movies and snapshots that he made during the trips down the Newfoundland coast to Labrador. A fourth resource consisted of his embodied memories of these events. Although the diaries and notebooks were written and the images taken at the time he made these trips on the Kyle, they were shaped into this manuscript decades later. Each source bore marks of an ongoing engagement with this experience. On several occasions he attempted a narration for the edited film footage, and he annotated the diaries and the manuscript with details of the unfolding lives of particular individuals. The manuscript and its memories had an emergent vitality.

Despite or because of its innumerable annotations, corrections, and editorial remarks in his handwriting, the manuscript appears to be a final version. In readying it for publication, I have tried to respect these corrections and deletions. Where additional material has been added for the sake of clarity or continuity, it has been placed in square brackets. Only the events of his first summer on the Kyle have been included. He did draft a second part of the narrative covering events of 1946, but the typescript is incomplete and it has not been included here.

Although mention is made within the manuscript of photos and film footage taken during these trips, my father did not prepare the manuscript with photos. As with all good tourist and snapshot images, his provide a glimpse of the scenic (icebergs, sunsets, coastal landscapes), a hint of complex social networks (of family, friends, travellers, and other health-care professionals), and coincidentally they document the quotidian activities of the Kyle (unloading freight and mail, sunbathing on deck, community visits onshore).

Ian Rusted was not alone in writing about his experiences as a medical officer on the Kyle. A special issue in 1984 of the journal Them Days about the Kyle included brief memoirs from other medical officers: Dr. E. Peters, Dr. W. Drover, and Dr. D. Hawkins. My father’s brother, Nigel, also had been medical officer on the Kyle, in 1930 and 1931 (Connor and Hyde, 2011; Hanrahan, 2007) and his memoir about travelling the south coast on the M.V. Lady Anderson several years later (N. Rusted, 1987) may have been the encouragement his younger brother needed to begin writing about his Kyle experiences. The manuscript he produced about these experiences is neither diary nor memoir. Although it locates the reader in the present of the events it describes, it is not simply or merely a sequence of brief, daily jottings. The use of quotation marks in the manuscript identifies passages drawn directly from the diaries. The balance of the essay, though, is not a retrospective reflection on the past that artfully shapes selected events into a well-told tale. The reader is not asked to partake in such temporal distance. The unfolding day-to-day experience of the Kyle’s routine ports of call, the contingencies of weather, the details of patient cases (as many as 30 in a single day), the pranks, the sites seen through the eyes of tourists, and the richly intertwined social networks of acquaintances and colleagues are not judged, evaluated, or re-imagined in the light of recollection.

In trying to chart the contemporary relation to recollection and the past, sociologist Pierre Nora drew a firm and frequently contested distinction between history and memory. Put succinctly, he saw history as "a representation of the past" (Nora, 1989: 8) and opposed it to memory. Memory is alive, what some might now consider a non-representational practice (B. Rusted, 2010). It is the life of the past in the present, "a bond tying us to the eternal present" (Nora, 1989: 8). The writing in this manuscript seems to evoke this notion of memory. It assumes a reader who can share in the memory of the Kyle. The critic and visual scholar W.J.T. Mitchell has suggested that forms of life writing such as autobiography are intersubjective because they are fashioned to be read by someone else (Smith and Watson, 2001: 20). In this case, the intersubjective leaks into the character of the manuscript itself: the reader is given a glimpse of the way intersubjective networks form and dissolve during each trip, the way social visits pre-empt the ship’s schedule, the way relationships and conversations resume on a subsequent voyage, and so forth.

A recurrent observation about autobiographical writing is that it "celebrates the autonomous individual" (ibid., 3). Nancy Pedrini (2010: 256) echoes this in suggesting that "both autobiography and photography make their living by laying claim to a transparent, authentic, truthful representation of self." Clearly there is evidence here to support such assertions, yet aspects of this manuscript suggest a less unified self, one formed as autonomy is challenged. Although Ian Rusted was raised in communities like Upper Island Cove and Carbonear, the reader has the sense that the liminality of the Kyle and the social worlds he encountered further down the coast were neither uniform nor consistent with his social experiences to that point. He did have previous interactions with the Mi’kmaq community in Newfoundland when travelling as a guide through the island’s interior in the late 1930s (MacLeod, 1999), and this seems to have translated into respect for the Inuit and Innu he met in Hopedale, Rigolet, and North West River.

Even before its final run as a coastal steamer in 1959, the Kyle had entered the region’s folklore. In the decades since it has taken up residence in poetry, fiction, and the visual culture of the province, and has sacrificed its mobility to become, literally, a site of memory. "The moment of lieux de mémoire," says Nora, "occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history" (Nora, 1989: 11-12). This manuscript and the Kyle itself provide an opportunity to reflect on this assertion. Perhaps it was this sense of the country’s lurching from a world of collective memory to one of critical history in the mid-1940s that sustained Ian Rusted’s interest in these recollections of the summer of 1945 on the Kyle.