Coleman Anne - Ill tell you a secret: a memory of seven summers

Written with the immediacy of the present and the wisdom of the intervening decades, Ill Tell You a Secret is a perceptive meditation on the thrall of infatuation.

Sandra Martin, Globe and Mail

Expressive, lyric and beautifully paced.

Jury citation, Governor Generals Awards

Colemans present-tense narrative story captures the immediacy and visceral force of adolescence, and holds that spell throughout. She conjures the spirit of an intellectually aware but inexperienced girl, with all her wilfulness, doubts and insecurities as well as a strength that pushes her beyond her fears.

McGill News

The truth conveyed in the book is emotional, subjective, and one-sided, echoing Alice Munros stories of girlhood in their narrowness of location and point of view, as well as their concern with what is unspoken and unrealized.

Quill & Quire

Though Hugh MacLennan couldnt save her personal life, he did posthumously inspire a great book. With a few sparse scenes exquisitely rendered, Coleman sets character and circumstance in collision mode and stays the course.

Montreal Gazette

Copyright 2004 by Anne Coleman

Cloth edition published 2004

Trade paperback edition published 2005

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Coleman, Anne, 1936
Ill tell you a secret : a memory of seven summers / Anne Coleman.

1. College teachers Canada Biography. 2. Coleman, Anne, 1936
Childhood and youth. 3. MacLennan, Hugh, 1907-1990 Friends and associates. 4. North Hatley (Qubec) Biography. I. Title.

PR55.C65A3 2004 c818.603 C2004-902519-8

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

eISBN: 978-1-55199-445-1

v3.1

In memory of
Mr. MacLennan
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit

and for

my children, Paul and Jane
my seven grandchildren
my sister Carol, my brother, Charles

I am swimming up into the morning through green-gold water that is shot with sunrays as I surface. It is a dream and I float out of the image as I open my eyes.

And I am in my own bed. I am lying on my smooth white sheet, my covers on the floor, and I can hear a wild tumult of birdsong: the trees, even the verandah vine, are full of so many birds singing that it is amazing that everyone isnt awake, but all the sounds are outside. Within the house all is quiet and everyone still sleeps.

I lean up on my elbow to look through my wide open window. The air is cool but the day will be warm, maybe even hot.

I hitch myself up to look out and better see my maple tree, which is at this moment seething with the singing birds. It is huge and ancient and because of the way the lawn slopes below the house, I am almost on a level with its crown. The leaves nearest me are in shadow and the sun is lighting the ones only at the very top on the eastern side. The sunlit ones are the bright new green of early summer. Below me the grass is dark green, still wet with dew. I know just how it would feel, cold, under my feet and that I would leave silver tracks. By my new watch I see that it is six oclock.

I will think about my secret.

I rest my arms on the sill and notice how brown they already are, making the little blond hairs on them look white as they catch the light. I am wearing pale orange pajamas, short-sleeved, many times washed, in fact a faint peach colour now, and rather shrunken. Or is it that I am now so tall? My arms and legs have lengthened even since Christmas.

At every time of year my first ritual on waking, when I am home, is to study the leaves and bark of my maple. I know from their look how early it is; also in the evenings, how late. I am not someone who really needs a watch but time is important to me and I like to be precise. And I like my watch, which is a mans and what I asked for. On long summer evenings, I stare at the leaves until the shadows have gathered and deepened and then it is important that I sleep at once. I must not still be awake when darkness overtakes the tree.

From the tree, I also know the weather and the temperature: in winter the trees unprotected skin pales, becomes dry and brittle, grey with the cold. Watching from my window, I know how it would feel under my hand. And it darkens with warmth and moisture on a milder day while the snow around its base greys and coarsens. In spring the bark is a richer brown and I watch the thin, high branches, the fragile black twigs against the sky, and think of the sap mounting. My brother and I pound in sharp spigots, one to each side to hang a pail on, and tap it. The sap tastes of spring, thin and green. We boil it down and make a tiny jug of syrup.

I am obsessed with seasons as well as time. I am a very odd child, according to my sisters. Even though I am a quiet person, it seems that I am turning out to be the most extreme member of the family, in some ways anyway. I am not sure how much choice a person has in who she turns out to be. The difficulty is in wanting the things and being the ways other people expect. A person can make herself do certain things perhaps, but she cant make herself want to. In my case I dont even make myself do them.

The situation is getting worse because I am about to be fourteen. Increasingly I feel the push of other peoples expectations on me of what a girl is supposed to be and I cant want any of the things Im supposed to be eager for. My sisters have gone ahead of me along the path into, and in the case of my older sister, out the other side of, adolescence. They have had to endure miseries and perils, and I have watched in dread the tortures of shyness and holding back in the case of one, and the worrying but brave ventures forth in the case of the other, both of them being determined, throughout, to succeed at being the right sort of woman whatever the cost. The miseries and perils were about having the wrong sort of hair (we all have curly) and having in every way to look and behave unnaturally or face terrible scorn. I long to bypass the whole stage and I will, somehow. I dont seem able to do anything else, in fact.

However, at the moment I am so happy I cant even worry. I am home from boarding school and I will never go back there. Mother has promised. We may even move back to Toronto and Id go to school there. I have been home for two weeks, but still each morning I wake up to joy and relief at being in my own bed. And there is my new and secret friendship. It makes me feel a little bit excited all the time, even when I am doing other things.