Cold Pastoral

COLD
PASTORAL

MARGARET DULEY

COLD
PASTORAL

UPHOLDING THE LEGACY OF GREAT NEWFOUNDLAND LITERATURE

P.O. BOX
2188,
ST. JOHN'S, NL, CANADA
,
A
1
C
6
E
6
WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

COPYRIGHT
© 2014 Margot Duley
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Duley, Margaret, 1894-1968, author
Cold pastoral / Margaret Duley.
Originally published: London : Hutchinson, 1939.
ISBN
978-1-55081-479-8 (
PBK
.)
I. Title.
PS8507.U45C6 2014      C813'.52      
C
2014-900563-6

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
.

Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

To my brother
CYRIL DULEY

…maidens overwrought,
with forest branches and the trodden weed;
…Cold pastoral!
–
JOHN KEATS, ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
BY JOAN CLARK

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

INTRODUCTION

BY JOAN CLARK

M
argaret Duley was the first Newfoundland writer to gain an international reputation, having been published and favorably reviewed in Britain, the United States, Sweden, and Canada. New-foundland was still a separate country when
Cold Pastoral
, Duley's second novel, was published in Britain in 1939. Both her first novels were written and published in the aftermath of the First World War and prior to the Second, and like many Newfoundlanders, the Duley family was deeply affected by World War I during which the island lost a generation of young men. Margaret's younger brother Lionel was killed at Ypres less than two weeks before the armistice, and her older brother Cyril severely injured at Les Boeufs, the Somme, in 1916. Duley's decision, then, to write a romantic, coming-of-age story about peace and beauty can be seen as an attempt to mitigate the horrors and ugliness of war.

Decades after the publication of
Cold Pastoral
, Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence famously advised aspiring fiction writers to write about what they knew, and Margaret Duley wrote about what she knew, both from her own family's experience of war-time tragedy and from situations and stories she had heard from across the island. No doubt she would have known the story of Lucy Harris, the girl from New Melbourne, Trinity Bay, who survived after being lost in the winter woods for eleven days. Duley's romantic heroine, Mary Immaculate, was lost in the winter woods for three days, but unlike Harris, Mary benefitted from the ministrations of Philip Fitz Henry, a young St. John's doctor, and her frostbitten legs were spared amputation. Mary was also spared returning to the cove where she existed almost as a stranger to her father and brothers, and after being discharged from the hospital, Philip Fitz Henry brought Mary home to live with his family. Mary never returned to the Cove, and her mother, josephine keilly—arguably the novel's most impressive character—agreed that her daughter be adopted by the Fitz Henrys, who provided Mary with all the advantages a genteel, townie life.

Today's readers might find it incredulous that Josephine handed over her daughter to people she barely knew, but such arrangements were not uncommon in Newfoundland at the time. And Duley had a
true
story close to hand. Margaret's mother, Tryphena Chancey Soper, one of seven children born to a fishing family in Carbonear, Conception Bay, was adopted by an aunt and uncle as a girl and lived with them in St. John's until her marriage to James Duley. Although she cultivated a prosperous townie life, Tryphena took her children to Carbonear for summer holidays, and as Margaret Duley's biographer, Alison Feder, observed, “Townies, though they were, they [the Duleys] learned a lot about out port life and the fishing industry.” It was this firsthand knowledge of the hardships of outport life that Margaret effectively made use of in
Cold Pastoral
.

Margaret also incorporated the Duley family's strong ties to Britain. When she was seven, Margaret's British-born father took Margaret and her older sister Gladys to England to attend the wedding of their aunt. As a girl, Margaret was to return to England twice more, and later, as a young woman, she attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which provided her with skills useful to an incubating writer with a voracious appetite for poetry and fiction, which she often read in school at her desk, the open book in her lap.

As valuable as her experience of living in Britain was, readers should not underestimate the value of growing up in an often overlooked British colony. Duley's biographer put it more succinctly: “Margaret Duley wrote truthfully and poetically about a little known region that she loved more than she hated.”

Feder goes on to say that beneath Margaret's grand manner and play-acting, lay the spontaneity of a child. She loved to dance and often spun around the room for pure joy. Margaret was also an accomplished mimic. This description of the author explains, in part, Duley's strength as fiction writer. It explains her fresh, exuberant prose, her ability to create characters that leap off the page. It also explains her gift for writing dialogue, her ability to create conversation that remains fresh and immediate.

The main character of
Cold Pastoral
is the impressionable and imaginative Mary Immaculate, a fisherman's daughter who, though born in a skiff, goes out of her way to avoid the water and the fish-rooms where her father and brothers gut and salt their daily catch. Mary prefers the forest: