Whatever her father may have lacked in worldly abilities, True believed that he had a true calling and never doubted the sincerity of his faith. Her entire life appears to have been a search for the same depth of faith and for a calling to which she could give the same level of devotion. She told an interviewer that “I have a very clear recollection of church services. My father’s hair became white very early and he did have a very rapt and dedicated look.”16 Although her religious faith was never as easy or uncomplicated as that her parents appear to have had, she credited them for having shared their faith with her and wrote that “My parents and my church may not have been, as they seemed to me, the best parents and best church in the world, but they gave me the God that I shall never quite lose. The best Christmas gift for any child.”17
Charlotte Maher said that she always pictured True’s father from her description as having been “a dour type who always dressed publicly in a tight collar...” All sources seem to indicate that he was an austere, very correct, highly intelligent, very principled man with a deep sense of religious calling, a scholar whose ascetic, reasoned faith wasn’t easily conveyable to ordinary, compromising people.
In 1930, True wrote a short story which may have illustrated her belief that her father had sacrificed a successful scholarly career to work as a country minister. In the story, a country minister has written a novel and is considering submitting it for publication. His wife encourages him by reminding him of the kind comments made by his university professors about his writing. However the manuscript is unpublishable and the story ends with him having received a rejection letter from the publisher.
He turned to go, moving slowly and carefully like one in a dream. Five years’ work gone for nothing—five years, and failure at the end! When they had all told him he could write!...He had been so sure he could write. The college magazine—all his professors—what had happened to him? Perhaps, after all, he was not the old Samson—not the old Samson, but Samson shorn, blinded and among his enemies. Perhaps, after all, more relentless than captivity or death, the years did something to a man. The years—the Philistine years.18
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
