If I still was always most at home in my beloved woods, joining Girl Guides helped me integrate my home life with a wider world.

It was a fortunate time to discover Guides. Here was an approach very different from that we experienced at school where we had no say in what we did and never were offered any justification for why we needed to learn anything.

In the Guides of the fifties, everything we were expected to do was shadowed by the recent overseas reality of the Second World War. During that urgent time in Britain, even children were expected to contribute in every way they could. You never know when you might be needed. Just as the children in some of my favorite wartime stories had done, we were expected to read maps and give clear directions. Now that I was exploring my neighborhood on my bike, maps opened more doors for me.

Probably also because of women’s war work, Girl Guides were considered to be fully the equal of Boy Scouts. I felt challenged in ways that made sense: It was expected that girls would be resourceful, skillful, self-reliant and a real help both at home and in our community. Because we were offered meaningful work to do, and were expected to cooperate at all times bullying fell away. We learned some of the skills of working together as a group to solve puzzles. Do your bit. Give your all. At last I had found a place where I wanted to be.

Unlike school, Guides felt like an extension of home. It made sense to learn be able to find my way, to become familiar with maps, to be able to give effective directions. This was the kind of thing my parents’ upbringing approved of. Tracking and learning to follow trails were both splendid games and useful skills, which tied in perfectly with the Ernest Thompson Seton books I loved to read. (especially Rolf in the Woods) It felt important to learn to dress wounds.

There was a refreshing demand for excellence, but this was framed in a usefulness which justified the annoying pickiness. “You want to make your own bed, don’t you?” I hadn’t, but now I more or less saw the sense to standards which prompted a leader to insist I redo hospital corners again and again.

Now also, many of the things my parents never expected me to master came easily, surprising me and my parents with my array of newly learned skills. Although my parents hadn’t thought I could cook simple meals, these leaders hadn’t a doubt in the world that I would do them and do them well. I wriggled my long needle over and under the web of threads I’d stretched across my father’s sock, darning. Holding my breath I struck a match for the first time and touched the scary flame to light a beautifully constructed log cabin style fire. So this was all there was to making a bedroll, how clever and useful. Now I would be able to sleep out under a simply rigged tent, just as did Yan and his friend in Seton’s Two Little Savages.

I even glimpsed the rudiments of entrepreneurship on Saturday mornings selling Guide cookies. As I trudged from door to door it was easy to see that charming Guides had better luck than serious ones. Always it was emphasized by parents waiting in a car at the curb that giving up, as some of my Guide friends did when sales were flagging, was unthinkable.

Remembering, I see that I was fortune to meet a whole new style of women. The leaders then were splendidly prepared by school in Switzerland or a doctorate at Radcliffe. Fortunately for me, as was the custom then, they presently were marking time with young children at home, before their lives could expand into important careers. These leaders had a new vision of what was possible. Doing everything they could to sustain their own lives while running after toddlers, they joined early University Women’s Groups, founded a local museum (the Bradley Museum near the shore Of Lake Ontario) and fought to save the Rattray Marsh from development.

They participated in Guides because they felt they had been given privileges, and they wanted to share these with girls. In time my particular guide leader Rosamond Vanderburgh, invited me to her home, where she shared her passions for anthropology and antiques. She also did something my reserved mother would never have done; she gave me intimations of how difficult adult life as a wife and new mother could sometimes be. I lived with her through the shocking, frightening day when her husband had a breakdown, and how, as a couple they then had to reshape their lives. She was candid about the sometimes soul-shattering experience of traditional women’s work. In other words, she offered me an invitation into a more grown-up world. But she also was excited about her world where new universities were evolving, encouraging me to expand my horizons to consider Trent. Most important of all, she believed in me, probably the single most significant gift an adult can offer a young person.

The exhilarating message was that I could, and indeed had to, accomplish whatever was important to me.

Thanks to my years with the Guides, I faced my life with restored self-confidence and a broader sense of expectations of what was possible.