Letters from the Manse
By Joan Archibald Colborne  

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From the Introduction
by John Cousins

There was a time, no further away than half a century, when Canadians were mainly a country people, scattered in a network of village and farming communities, to the edges of Canada. And though fifty years is a short time, we have largely forgotten that vast and viable rural world with its commonplace trademarks: the farms, the schools, the stores, the repair shops. And, in thousands of these places, seeking to give spiritual unity to the ordinary people, laboured the Protestant clergyman and his wife. For the church was centred, physically and spiritually, in the daily life of the people.

They were a special breed, these churchmen and women. We knew them from a distance, for they were in our place, but somehow not of it. We knew they were special and important and otherworldly. They did not think or feel like the rest of us, and if they experienced the pleasant joys and pastimes that we knew, we did not see it. If we knew their first names, we dared not use them. If they had a sense of humour, no one heard it. It was common knowledge that they had little or no sex life, and, if they had children, they were children somehow set apart. They were not demonstrative, as nearly as we could tell. They did not attend dances nor did they discuss hockey. They had apparently no knowledge of the fight at the party down the road. Infuriatingly to all parties involved, they did not take sides in disputes between neighbours. They did not Gossip, and They Did Not Take the Name of The Lord Their God in Vain. Some of them (the men) smoked, but most did not, and, surely, They Did Not Drink. Most important of all, They Did Not Talk Politics, though their very innocuous reference was analyzed by parishioners who pondered their allegiances. Their toil, we believed, was useful, but if pressed we could not really tell what they did during the six days of the week that were not Sabbath (not that we took much time to think about it). Apparently they visited the sick, and sometimes the healthy, and they probably wrote a lot because we knew that some of them composed their sermons beforehand. Some of them spoke well from the pulpit, and, if they didn't, we did not hold it against them.

But we never questioned the fact that we needed them badly, for, if there was a haven of rest beyond this world, they held the key to it. As children we did not know what adults knew: that we needed them most when Sorrow came. And thank the Lord that children do not know the power of sorrow in the way that grown-ups do. Ministers and their partners gave grown-ups permission to mourn and to cry, which, when we grew up, we found to be a good thing.

We knew also that Protestant clergy usually came in pairs, and that, too, was good, since it was generally believed that the manse was built for at least two people. To have one person rattling around in that big house, whatever its condition, was a shame. And everyone agreed that the Minister's job was so important that it was hard to do it properly without a lifelong partner. Thus, The United Church Couple.

Of course, we know now that our views of them were wrong, and that our picture was painted only in stark black and white. We know that a myriad of brilliant colours were there if only they were painted in. But the voices of the Couples are strangely muted, and we look in vain for a good description of what they thought of us, of themselves, of the immensely important work they did, and of the countryside in which they laboured. This omission is not unimportant, for, as I said earlier, they covered this country at a time of great change, and they exerted an immense positive force in rural Canada. Nor is the omission surprising, for the past is the country of untold stories. And besides, in their dedication—almost obsession—to serve, they were the consummate professionals. To talk "outside" about delicate and sensitive and heartbreaking work was to compromise precious success. And They Did Not Compromise.

Hence the importance of Joan Colborne's wonderful Letters from the Manse. For she paints in the vivid colours we knew were there, and illuminates the fascinating personal experience of two young, idealistic, and dynamic church people in rural Canada of half a century ago. And, just as important, the letters speak with a universality that gives voice to the rest of the Church Couples from those times. Her accounts are so wonderfully irreverent, so human, so young at heart, so infused with idealism and hope, and so true. Those of us, in our hundreds of thousands who remember those lost days, those of us whose lives were touched by their work, will read these and say: "This is what I hoped and expected they were like. Now I know it."

To their story: a few months before they were married, Blair got his first posting, as minister of three churches in Prince Edward Island. It was the dead of winter, January 1949. The newlyweds landed in a world in which, city bred as they were, they had little experience. Blair's first charge was the churches of three hamlets stretched over fifteen miles of the Island's northwest coast. To the north, along the shore facing New Brunswick, lay Cape Wolfe, a farming and fishing village. Six miles south of Cape Wolfe and a couple miles inland was the community of Springfield West, the centre of the pastoral charge with Bethel United Church and manse. South of the manse, about eight miles by road, lay the community of Glenwood.

Depending on the particular hamlet, English and Scots pioneers had settled this area between 1805 and 1850, with the majority coming between 1820 and 1840. Eventually, the coastal communities had expanded inland, creating farming settlements such as Springfield West. The parishioners—farming and fishing people—were no richer or poorer than most other rural Canadians, not withstanding the fact that the average wage on PEI at that time was about half that of the rest of Canada.

In the summertime, a half-century ago, this spot was as pleasant a place as you could wish to be. The red clay roads bordered small, gently rolling hedgerowed fields to the edge of the Capes. In the spring, long windrows of young people ambled slowly down the fields, dropping potato sets. At haying time, clover scented the air, for this was good land, light and warm. At harvest time came the rattle of binders, with men behind them stooking. And, in the fall, when you bent over your potato basket, the sound you heard was the heavy clank of harness when the horses snapped into their work pulling the potato diggers.

But in January 1949, winter told another tale. By then, the warm westerlies had turned to freezing gales, and small children arrived home from school crying from the aching cold in their faces, and big tough boys sometimes walked backwards into the bitter wind so their noses and ears wouldn't freeze. And in the snow months between December and March, the woodstoves could not keep the frost from the windowpanes, even in the middle of the day. The driving wind turned white with the snow it carried, and hedgerows bowed to the east under the blasts. This was PEI writ large, and rural Canada writ small—a place of no paved roads or electricity, where snowploughs and bathrooms were a rarity, but weeklong blizzards were not.

Five days after they arrived, on January 12, 1949, Joan began her account of life at the Bethel manse at Springfield West. The manse was cold and rat-infested. Pipes and drains froze, water pumps stuck. Unlike the vast majority of houses in the community, there was a bathroom, albeit one so dysfunctional that Joan began to envy the ordinary farming people with their "wee hoose" or outside toilet. Car travel was simply impossible, and was more trouble than it was worth. Soon they resorted to the horse and sleigh, which we mistakenly connect with earlier times. And later, Blair walked, many miles across country, to one of his churches, and to visit the sick. In many a real way, this could have been 1849.

Somehow, in the euphoria of married life, Joan managed to find time to ignore it all: the physical hardships, the out-of-sync feelings, and the culture shock. On Sunday afternoons, while Blair preached in one of the three churches, she forgot the rats, the cold, and "that Goddamned Water System," armed herself "with an old portable typewriter," and wrote to her family. The preponderant ambience of the letters is of love, humour, and enjoyment of life and work. We see through her eyes the essential goodness and generosity of country people in hard times. Some of her best vignettes are of rural social life: the entertainment in "little stuffy" country halls; of weddings where the practice of the chiveree and "bouncing" were still common. She writes about the eternal waxing and waning of the seasons, the winter storms that came like a slap in the face, and the sudden coming of spring. She writes about the birth of Michael, their first child, and the inevitable storm that followed. Her images of country scenes, gone now, are so close to the heart's core that they are sad for those who remember them.

These are telling episodes of things which we ought to know, but have forgotten. This was a time when rural Canada counted for something, when F. R. Scot, a major Canadian poet and National President of the CCF Party of Canada, would sit in a rural manse and type out his O'Leary speech on Joan's old typewriter. (Blair, still remembered as a great CCF supporter, had broken the commandment that rural ministers Did Not Talk Politics.)

These true and vivid accounts are an invaluable legacy. Joan Colborne made us remember what it was like to live at a time when neighbours would refuse to leave the community for fear that the clergyman might get himself in trouble and not be able to get to church. Or when a minister would walk eight miles to see a sick member of the congregation, through drifts that a horse could not travel through. Or three miles through the woods to preach. And we realize it is not that long ago when a minister's wife "blushed crimson" because someone from the charge might have seen her looking at baby clothes. Or when a little boy, seeing Blair taking washing from the clothesline, would tell his older sister, "My, the minister sure is good to his woman." They are wonderfully poignant and true pictures of where we come from—evoking a world of battery radios, the smell of oil lamps, sleigh rides, and telephone party lines.

She writes about the work of a church which was a dynamic force in the changes the country was undergoing as it modernized. Her experience was both an Island and a Canadian reality. Islanders and, indeed, all people who remember their roots in rural Canada will recognize Joan's story. Joan and Blair Colborne spent three years in the community, and even though it is more than half a century ago, they are still remembered by the older people.

An African proverb says that a river that forgets its source will dry up. Closer to home, Milton Acorn, the great Island poet, said it another way in his poem "The Squall." He writes of life's oddity that in a sea of storms, men and women look backwards as they row their boat to safety, "Taking direction from where they'd been / With only quick-snatched glances at where they're going."

Joan Colborne's letters make sure our rivers of memory will not dry up, and from them we know that if we are to reach our destination, sometimes we have to look back.

John Cousins

John Cousins is an historian and folklorist who was seven years old when the Colbornes came to live in Springfield West. He and his family lived in the next community over.