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Call Me True. Eleanor Darke
Читать онлайн.Название Call Me True
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781459714403
Автор произведения Eleanor Darke
Жанр Публицистика: прочее
Издательство Ingram
The same story portrayed a devotion between the minister and his wife that I would like to think was enjoyed by True’s parents. “They looked at each other, and in their eyes again for a moment flared the gleam that age...cannot dim, and that is sweeter than many apple-blossoms.”19
True’s attachment to her mother wasn’t as intense as the unity she felt with her father, although she respected her mother, saying of her that: “They [my parents] had a passion for truth and scholarship, and my mother had a passion for the arts as well. My mother painted. Our home was full of paintings when I was young. She was a musician. She was talented dramatically. She was the life of the church cultural programme.”20
True’s mother, Mary Elfleda [Pomeroy] Davidson. True loved her mother and cared for her for many years but was never as close to her as she was to her father. Courtesy David Cobden
It appears that True’s mother was devoted to her husband, but frustrated at his lack of success; a frustration likely deepened by comparison with her father’s prominence within the church and by the fact that her success was totally dependent on that of her husband. While her father, Rev. John C. Pomeroy, also had been a scholar he had been a highly successful minister as well, holding several of the most important circuits and stations in the Methodist Church. He was described as being “highly gifted and...warm, impassioned and convincing...He possessed the most pleasing personality, his disposition being most kindly. It was easy for him to make friends. He was the life of any circle in which he found himself.”21
True and her sister, Marsh. Even then True preferred to read a book! Courtesy Michael Cobden
Both of True’s parents were very interested in the youth of the church. Their activities in this regard again illustrate the differences in their personalities. While True’s father did committee work as Secretary of the Religious Education Committee of the Saskatchewan Conference, his wife was active in the creation of the Y.W.C.A. and in helping to organize the new Canadian Girls in Training (C.G.I.T.) group in their area.
The relationship between True and her sister, Marsh, was the most complex of all. True’s nephew, Michael Cobden, later described it to Charlotte Maher, as “the original love-hate relationship.” To me he said that his mother had been “the pretty one, the popular one” and that he had been astonished by the depth of resentment and rivalry that True later had expressed to him about his mother.22 Marsh seems to have inherited all of their mother’s social abilities and ease with people. The rivalry was primarily on True’s side, caused by her insecurity regarding Marsh’s popularity. She saw her sister as a rival for their parents’ love. Charlotte Maher told me that she always felt that True “would have liked to have been like Marsh. I think she was envious of Marsh. I think she would have liked to have been little, and feminine and pretty.” Doris Tucker, who was Clerk of East York while True was Mayor and who shared many conversations with her, agreed that True had expressed resentment concerning her sister, feeling that she had been stuck with all the responsibility for the parents when they became old and that Marsh had an easier time in life than True. Doris particularly remembered that “her sister didn’t go through what she went through to go to school. They were a little better off when the sister came along. She told me that.”23 True likely was referring here to the fact that she had to work for a few years between taking her B.A. and her Masters Degree, since the age difference between the two girls during their undergraduate years wasn’t great enough to have made any substantive difference in the family’s income.
True and her sister Marsh as children. Courtesy David Cob den
Things may have been better by the time Marsh was doing her graduate work, but the family never had money for luxuries. Columnist John Downing was only one of many who commented on her childhood poverty when he wrote that “True could be tight with [the public]...dollar, due to her childhood in the genteel poverty of a Methodist manse.”24 In a short story she published in 1930 True conveyed very effectively the discomfort and general meanness of her “genteel poverty” in a passage describing the chair in which her minister protagonist sat. “The chair was not a comfortable one. Its back disdained the easy luxury of curves, and rose with puritan rigidity at a direct perpendicular just to the point where it could prod the spine with the maximum of discomfort. The seat was too shallow, the arms, too high and too wide apart for convenience, were not wide enough or sufficiently remote to be ignored. In a word, it was just such a chair as is always found in village parsonages, in cherry finish, to accompany a desk in golden oak.”25 Doris Tucker remembered True mentioning that she had had only one dress when she first went to Victoria College.
Perhaps the best description of True’s almost hysterical rivalry towards her sister came through in a later interview when in describing how prayer helped calm her, she said, “I can remember as a child I was high strung and tense. I can remember dropping to my knees beside a mattress in a playroom...I couldn’t have been more than seven and I asked God to please help me find my diary or my sister would get it. Not that she could have read it anyway.”26 [Marsh would have been only 5 years old at the time.]
It also shows something of the emotionalism of their lives. Isolated by their father’s position and by frequent moves, True found making deep friendships difficult. The family was also intellectually and educationally separated from most of the parishioners in their country postings. Clara Thomas recalled that True and her friend, Edith Fowke “was born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan...and True’s father was a minister there for awhile. When Edith was young she got to know True through the family because they had a lot of books and Edith was, from birth, a reader and during the Depression, of course, there were few books around and the Davidsons let her just walk in and out of their house and borrow their books at will.”27 True also described their library and that “Nobody tried to hold me from anything in my father’s library. I read all of Shakespeare before I was nine. It was in a great big India paper edition, illustrated and unexpurgated.”28 Their isolation drove the family to seek everything from each other, intensifying all of their relationships.
True’s early emotional loneliness formed a pattern which continued for the rest of her life. Many who knew her commented on how, although a very social person, True had few close friends and that they felt she was a lonely woman. Doris Tucker remembered a “chap on the school board [who] said ‘You’re her friend for so long, then all of a sudden she gives you the boot...You’ll find that she has a friend for awhile and then she’ll drop him.’ Myself, I used to say ‘that’s her Achilles heel. As soon as people get too close to her she pushes them away. You see. There’s something about her background. She just doesn’t trust people.’” Her nephew, David Cobden, remembered that she didn’t really warm up to him until almost the end of her life although his wife said that, by then, True was extremely fond of him.29 Charlotte Maher said that “when the purpose [for which she needed someone] ceased to be served she dropped them...the closest she was to anyone was to Emily Smith” but Emily said that True seldom shared her personal feelings or background with her.30 Charlotte qualified her comment, however, by noting that “I really didn’t care very much because it was all so exciting.” [Being with True and meeting people True knew.]
Marsh was every bit as academically brilliant as True. Like her sister, she earned an M.A. from Victoria College, in her case, in Psychology. She worked at an Ontario mental health clinic,