There was a time when Winston (Pinny) Foggo relied on roosters to wake him up at 4 a.m. Today, time no longer has the same importance. Having worked until well into his 80s, he is now content to relax and take life as it comes - one day at a time.

"I'm just glad to be alive," he says.

As might be expected of someone who has been on the planet for 92 years, Mr. Foggo has more memories to recall and yarns to spin than hours in a week. What do you want to know about - Fishing? Boating? Bootlegging? The US Bases? His wife and children? Just ask, and ye shall receive!

Born well before the causeway connecting St. David's Island to the mainland was even a twinkle in some engineer's eye, Pinny Foggo grew up in a household of 12 children, eight boys and four girls. His parents were hard-working, and meted out discipline with a firm hand. There was no electricity, laundry was done in a washtub in the yard, and the children slept on the floor on homemade mattresses fashioned from flour bags and local grasses. They went to school barefoot, and when they came home each one of them had chores to do - and woe betide those who didn't perform.

To be sure, it was a hard life with no luxuries, but that's how things were for almost everyone in St. David's, yet no-one complained. Instead, it was a close-knit, caring community where everyone knew everyone else (and their business), looked out for one another, and pulled together.

St. David's was also a fishing and farming community which made families self-sufficient. The Foggos kept a cow and chickens, and Mr. Foggo's father also fished, so milk, eggs, fish and fowl were always "handy".

"We never had to go to no supermarkets," Mr. Foggo says. "My mother made her own bread and birthday cakes. All the families did that. St. David's didn't have no bridge so we all lived independent. We didn't have electricity, everybody burned wood, and you'd have to get your meal before dark. We had not a damned thing modern."

Children all went to the same one-room school run by Miss Eva Minors, where teachers exerted strict discipline.

"They wore a leather strap around their necks, and goddamit you couldn't do a thing about it if they used it. When you got home you couldn't tell your parents you'd got the strap either, because you'd get some more. `If you didn't deserve it you wouldn't get it' was how they talked," Mr. Foggo says.

"There was no nonsense in St. David's. We had real discipline. It was nice. The kids today - their discipline is very poor. Back then you started training them when they were still crawling on the floor."

Going to school barefoot was acceptable - so long as it didn't conflict with Miss Minors' belief that cleanliness was next to godliness.

"She'd look at your feet, your ears and your fingernails, and if they were dirty she'd send you right home to wash them." Mr. Foggo says. The boys also had to have clean collars.

By the time children first entered school, their mothers had already taught them to count to ten and to spell their names.

"As they got older the mothers taught the girls to sew and cook," Mr. Foggo says. "Now they learn nothing. Today, if a boy is nine or ten and can't spell his name, they should make him eat the book. We didn't have no books at school either, we had slates. Everything was memory."

When, as a 13-year-old, he was sent to "higher school" in St. George's, he quickly took a practical view of the situation.

"They brought in a West Indy man, and I couldn't understand his talk, so I told my mamma `You might as well take me out of school and buy bread with the money' so she did, and I learned from older men and paid attention to retired people instead."

Children did what they could from an early age to help their families financially. Meeting the ferry from St. George's on Saturdays and carrying the ladies' shopping baskets home for them was a popular money-earner, but very hard work.

"It took a whole day for we byes to make a shilling. Sometimes you'd walk a real long way and then the lady would say, `My dear child, I haven't got any more money but I'll give you a slice of bread and jam'. We didn't want no bread and jam, we wanted to make our shilling, but you couldn't get smart `cause they'd report you to your parents. Oh yes, you had to be on your toes and show respect in them days."

Growing up around boats and often helping his father to fish, it naturally followed that most of Mr. Foggo's working life would be sea-related, in the tradition of most St. David's Islanders.

"You could get a job rowing the pilots out to the ships in the gigs. There'd be six men rowing ten to 12 miles out to sea," Mr. Foggo remembers.

"We'd go up to the lighthouse with the spy glass (binoculars) and nighttimes we'd take it in turns looking out for ships. The first one to see the ship got an extra five shillings. You could buy a lot for five shillings in them days. When we saw a ship we'd call the pilot and off we'd go."

Later, Mr. Foggo found work on the big schooners ("they call `em tall ships today"), including a two-master on which he was "the onliest one of the all-Newfoundlander crew who could swim".

His travels took him to North America and around the . You steered two hours at a time, and you didn't have no house to sit in. Rain or snow, you just took it, wearing your rain suit. You had to be tough. Now the boats are like hotels."

Particularly memorable were Mr. Foggo's rum-running days during prohibition in the United States.

"The rum came from Canada in sealed wooden boxes which would fill the warehouse on the wharf in St. George's. Since the boxes took up too much room on the boat, the bottles would be put into little bags. We did our business by telephone. We loaded on Mondays ready to go to sea. The Captain would call his manager in the United States and tell him to look out for him on Friday. You couldn't use radio because the Coast Guard would catch on, although they'd come into St. George's and sit right alongside the crew drinking together at the White Horse. When we got to the States we couldn't make a noise, so we had a piece of pipe to fit over the exhaust to keep the sound underwater. There was a fella in a small boat who'd guide us in. People used to say to me, `Aren't you afraid?' I told `em, `Hell, if you're afraid you won't go anywhere in life'."

At 17 Mr. Foggo applied to join the Bermuda Militia Artillery during the Second World War. In recounting the tale, he mimics the accent of the man who interviewed him.

"I was too young but I was a big bye. The English officer said, `You're six months too young' but he must have thought about it. `Can you lift 100 lbs.?' he asked. That was the weight of a shot for the guns. I said, `Hell, if I got the opportunity I could lift 200 lbs.' and I got it up to my knees. `You'll do' the officer said and took me on. We got paid one shilling a day, but that wasn't what I joined for. I joined to learn something. You couldn't go to school for a shilling a day."

Thus it was that Mr. Foggo patrolled Bermuda's waters in search of German submarines in a boat with depth charges sitting on the stern ready to be primed and tossed overboard. When the war ended, the bemedalled soldier farmed, and also fished with his father before joining the nearby US base as a marine pilot. Thirty years later, and in his 70s, he retired with a pension - but far from ready to put his feet up. Instead, he moved on to the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, again piloting boats. For the next 15 years, until he retired in his 80s, Mr. Foggo not only took scientists and researchers all around local waters, but also accompanied them to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

"It was the first time I'd ever been on a `plane, and I've never been on one since," he declares. "If you got in a storm in one of them things you couldn't do nothin', but in a boat you can get into a little boat. I was brought up in boats and I don't want to go in no `planes."

Also for the first time in his working life, Mr. Foggo returned home with his money intact thanks to the generosity of his colleagues who treated him all the way.

" `Put your money back in your pocket, Foggo', they'd say. When I came home I handed it to my wife but she said she didn't want my money so I put it back in the bank. I was gone a week, and it was also the first time in my whole life as a man that I had an opportunity to travel with educated people. It was beautiful."

Mr. Foggo's roots being what they were, he also wound up voluntarily farming some spare land at the Bio Station, sharing his harvests with his fellow workers. At one stage he even mowed the grass.

A bachelor until he was 27, Mr. Foggo was married to fellow St. David's Islander Vesta Wilkinson, and together they raised five daughters and two sons. For 40 years the couple also took care of his widowed father, who promised his son that he "would never regret" his kindness.

Widowed himself in 1999, the great grandfather continues to live in the century-old little wooden house in which he was raised as a child and in which he also raised his own family. Both his son, who live next door, and daughter June Hall, who lives nearby, keep a particularly close eye on him. Mrs. Hall visits three times a day to give him his meals and see that he is all right. He particularly enjoys sitting in his manicured garden atop the hill, shaded by poincianas and fanned by sea breezes, looking at the boats at anchor on Great Bay. This summer, he hopes to go fishing with family members.

In his day Mr. Foggo was also a keen cricketer who played in the St. David's County Cup matches. Following in his footsteps today is grandson Chris Foggo, who also plays for St. David's.

Looking back on his full and eventful life, the nonagenarian has views on most changes which time has wrought.

He thought the bridge to the mainland was a good thing because it allowed people to get out of St. David's and see a bigger world. He was sorry to see the Base close because he valued being able to meet, work and talk with so many interesting and educated people, and he felt similarly about retirement from the Bio Station. As for his beloved St. David's, it is not what it used to be, he says.

"It has changed 100 percent since the `foreigners' moved in. Mamma used to call them `immy-grants'. You could trust people once. You could go out and leave your house wide open, leave the windows up to catch the bleddy breeze, but you can't trust people now. St. David's has gone down the drain."

Asked if he thought television had an adverse effect on children today, he says: "It's the programmes what counts. Showing them programmes with guns and shooting one another and all that igrince, that ain't no good."

Nor does he think much of today's vogue for sinking big bucks into birthdays and other celebrations in hotels and restaurants.

"You never went to no hotel and had a bought birthday cake. Your mamma or wife made it and friends came by. You never paid no $100 for a plate of food and all that stupidness. Today, girls go to school and don't learn nothin' from their parents. They expect the teachers to teach every goddam thing. It's a damn shame really."

But what really gets him is the young people's lack of respect.

"Respect is number one in life," he says. "If you have a dog and you train it to sit down, it sits. You can't do that with children today. If you tell them to do that they'll turn around and jaw you."