A Farm Woman's Odyssey: Part One
Beatings. That's all that Moira Sherrington can remember about her childhood. Time after time her mother beat her. "I know why now," Sherrington said years later. "I'm dark skinned and so's my mother. No one else in our family is." Her mother hated the colour of her skin and hated herself, Moira figured out. So as a result she beat her daughter.
Her mother used her hands, her fists and sometimes a paddle she kept in a drawer in the kitchen to hit her younger daughter. Sherrington lived in a farm east of Saskatoon, along with her father, sister and two brothers. Her mother hit her when no one was around. Those beatings hurt. Sometimes the pain was terrible. Yet her mother hit her on her body not on her face. And she hit her daughter when no one was around. So no one else in the family knew about the beatings or at least mentioned them.
Yet Moira grew. When she was 14 she was as tall as her mother and she started to fight back. Soon her mother couldn't beat her daughter anymore, unless that is she would get beaten up too. By then Moira realized that she and her mother were the only dark skinned people in the family. How this happened Moira never found out. But there it was: Moira and her mother were red in colour. All the rest of the family were whites.
At the age of 18 Moira graduated from the small high school that lay about five kilometres away. A year later she left her family with no regrets and moved south to Regina. She got a job first with a bank. Then later, she found a job with the provincial government. "You're the fastest typist I've ever seen," one of her supervisors said. She did type fast. She could type close to 100 words a minute. This skill helped her hold down many jobs.
One day Sherrington saw a picture on t.v. of wintertime Vancouver. There's no snow there, she realized. For a young prairie woman who'd endured many long bone chilling winters, this was great news. She gave up her government job with some regrets for it had paid her well. And on a snowy day in the late 1970's, she got on a train and headed for Vancouver. She left Saskatchewan for good.
Once in Vancouver, Moira moved into a rooming house. She ended up working as an attendant for sick and older people. She then got a job in a service firm that helped handicapped people. Moira had no trouble paying her bills. Yet sometimes she felt depressed. She started to drink and then stopped. She felt she needed somebody, some man to be with. She already been engaged to be married but her fiance had died. She also felt a great hole somewhere in her mind that she thought must have come from some form of trauma.
Then along came a man who helped her, though he had his flaws.Stanley was a tall man in his early 30's. Moira was only 22 at the time."I was a revolutionary," Stanley told her. This was true. A few years before, Stanley had led demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He had also lived in communes where he and other young rebels had openly smoked dope and made love. Moira had never met such a person like Stanley. For quite a time, she felt happy.
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