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, then travelled to Europe to study for a post-graduate degree with Dr. Alfred Adler in Vienna and at the University of London where she published two articles in the British Journal of Medical Psychology.31 She was a member of the founding staff at Summerhill, the famous British alternative school. Marsh married in the late 1930s, moved to South Africa and had two sons.
She returned to Canada, with the two boys, in 1946 and stayed with True in Streetsville for a year. This was soon after their mother’s death and may have been an attempt by Marsh to provide True with some of the support that she needed then.32 While her children were still young and at boarding school, Marsh was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her decision to leave her husband and children and come home to Canada to die may be the best possible illustration of the depth of attachment between the sisters, despite True’s underlying rivalry. Marsh died soon after her arrival in Canada and was buried beside her parents. Her decision to return to Canada at that time was something her children never understood other than to say that “they [the Davidsons] were an unusual family.”33
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL DAYS
True told few stories of her early years and even fewer of the people she had met then. Most of her childhood stories related to the places where she had lived and demonstrated her strong, poetic attachment to Canada’s geography and history and her love of nature. She told one reporter that she had been born in a village near Montreal “on the shores of that Lake of Two Mountains that knew the steps of Champlain.”34 She recalled her father taking her to hear Sir Wilfrid Laurier talk when she was nine years old:
I might as well say it, I was a precocious child, and when my younger sister was sleeping in my father’s lap, there I was listening to that courtly, white-haired, dignified man—and thinking even then that what I wanted to be was a...politician.35
A common comment by those who knew True is that she rarely discussed her past, her family or other people. Her activities were constantly focussed on what she was doing now and her conversations were almost always about ideas. Several noted that she seemed to prefer talking to men, perhaps because she felt that their discussions were more likely to be of this sort. It was fascinating to note in Doris Pennington’s book about Agnes MacPhail that Agnes had the same preferences.
In a CBC tape [Agnes MacPhail’s sister] said that at parties it was the custom for women to visit in one room, men in another, while the young people gathered in a third. Agnes was generally to be found with the men, “discussing such things as farm prices.” Lilly would go after her and say, “Why don’t you come in with the rest of us? We’re playing cards.” But Agnes would generally stay with the men.36
True’s deepest attachments from her teenaged years were to the open lands of the prairies. One of her poems, quoted in part below, expressed her love of their natural beauty and the sense of emotional refreshment they gave her.
Land of Greatness
I used to walk on the prairies,
In the tangled, wild-flower spring
With the wet wind sweet on my forehead
And the migrant birds a-wing.
And life was a wonderful thing.
................................
I must go back to the prairies,
For, whatever change I meet,
I must sense again the vastness Of those miles of cattle and wheat,
Where earth and heaven meet.37
True began writing poetry at an early age and later claimed that the idea for her best poem was conceived when she was fifteen years old.38 She excelled at school, matriculating from South Vancouver High School in 1915, then graduating from Regina Collegiate Institute.39 One of her early resumes included information about her first summer job—working in a shoe store and doing playground work—followed by three summers of clerical work during 1917-19 for the Government of Saskatchewn, one year in the Treasury Department and two in the Education Department. Her final summer, between receiving her B.A. and entering Normal School (teacher’s college), she worked for the Regina Public Library.40
True’s mother had been instrumental in the formation of a C.G.I.T. group in Lumsden, Saskatchewan and True became one of its most active leaders. Sixty years later she recalled the day that she made her pledge as a Canadian Girl in Training in Saskatchewan.
At the end of a conference we sang an old-fashioned song, “Beulah Land.” I said, “For three days we have been living on the mountains, underneath a cloudless sky. Now we are parting and going down into the valleys. There will be clouds and sometimes we shall feel alone. But we shall not be alone and we shall remember the sun is still there even when we cannot see it. And we shall keep our pledge.”41
Although its influence has decreased greatly in recent years, the C.G.I.T. provided leadership for many young women. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, it “was established in 1915 by the Y.W.C.A. and the major Protestant denominations to promote the Christian education of girls aged 12 to 17. Based on the small group whose members planned activities under the leadership of adult women, the program reflected the influence on Canadian Protestantism of progressive education, historical criticism of the Bible, the social gospel and Canadian nationalism.”42 The pledge, or purpose, that is still said aloud at meetings by both members and leaders had a large influence on True and reads:
As a Canadian Girl in Training
Under the leadership of Jesus
It is my purpose to
Cherish
