Broad Is the Way: Stories from Mayerthorpe

1 As the Twig Is Bent

one As the Twig Is Bent I was brought up to believe that there was nothing in the world I couldn’t do, provided I was willing to work for it. It was a rather useful belief for a child to have, but as I grew up I began to realize it wasn’t entirely true: I knew there were some things I’d never get to do because I was a woman. But at the time I didn’t want to do any of them, so this knowledge didn’t trouble me. My mother had more education than most middle-class women of her generation, and more than anyone else in her immediate family. She graduated from Toronto General Hospital as a nurse in 1915, and this training imbued her whole life. She had also taken a six-month course in nutrition at the Toronto Technical School and, thus armed, she felt entirely competent to bring up a healthy family. In 1916 she married my father, a struggling young lawyer, and my oldest sister, the first of five children, was born one year later. We were all what were then dubbed Dr. Brown’s babies, meaning that Mother followed implicitly the instructions of the current leading Toronto pediatrician. He advised my mother that I was a delicate child who “already knew too much” and that I should forego kindergarten and not attend school until my seventh birthday. With a birthday in April, I was seven and a half by the time I entered “junior first,” now called grade one. By that time, thanks to tutoring by my older sister, I had memorized word for word all of the first primer: The little red hen she found some wheat. She called the cat. She called the dog. She called the pig. “Who will help me plant my wheat?” “Not I,” said the cat—“Not I,” said the dog—“Not I,” said the pig. When I got to school, I was elated when I seemed to be ahead of the whole class in reading. However, I didn’t know which group of letters referred to which words, a situation my shocked teacher finally discovered. One day, with my eyes firmly fixed on the page, I “read” the wrong story. I did manage to pass at the end of the year, but I was 1 the only one in the class whose handwriting was never judged good enough to earn a notebook, a problem that put me in constant conflict with my teacher, Miss Merton. I was sure I’d inherited my handwriting from my father, whose writing was notoriously bad. To prove the point, I insisted that when a note had to be written to my teacher explaining the reason for an absence, my father would write it for me. But Miss Merton didn’t think writing was hereditary. The idea that I was delicate followed me till the end of high school. It may have been fuelled by the sorrow of my mother over the death of our baby brother who died of spinal meningitis, a death my mother mourned for many years. But as a child, I always thought it was because I looked like Aunty Gladys, my father’s much-loved sister, said to have died of a heart attack. However, I was sure she died of a broken heart, because she wanted to marry a Roman Catholic and the family wouldn’t let her. I never believed I was delicate, but the myth robbed me of two more years of school, one after a bout of strep throat, when I should have been in grade two, and another in high school when I had scarlet fever. The result was that when I went back to school, I worked doubly hard, determined to make up the lost time. At the end of my first year at school, we moved to the country because my father thought that was the best place to bring up a family . He built a house on a ten-acre lot, a quarter of a mile east of Highway 10, on the old Middle Road, which later became the Queen Elizabeth Way. We moved there just after the 1929 stock market crash, which began the Depression of the thirties. Two years previously, Dad had left a prestigious Toronto law firm, because he couldn’t cope with their ethics. He was now struggling to establish a practice with his younger brother, home from the war...