Tomkins Park

We're in the west end of Tomkins Park, at the intersection of 8th Street and 17th Avenue Southwest. In 1914, this land was donated to the city by Henry William Tomkins, and in 1919, Imperial Oil proposed to build a service station here, but at the city's request, it was never completed. In the 1920s, Tomkins Park was a wide empty boulevard, nary a tree to be seen, and this is how the young Calgary girl who would become the acclaimed Canadian poet known as P.K. Page would have known it.

P.K. was born in 1916 and she moved to Calgary with her family in 1920. By 1922, they were living in the Beltline in a bungalow a few blocks from here at 7th Street and 14th Avenue, one block north of the Nellie McClung house. For a few years, Nellie McClung and P.K. Page were neighbours - I'm wondering if P.K. Page ever kicked a ball into Nellie's yard. P.K. was also growing up in the blocks around the Lougheed house, a place that the young P.K. called "old Lady Lougheed's stone castle." P.K. went to private school, St. Hilda's School for Girls, on the site of what is now the Beltline Safeway. At St. Hilda's, she was known as a bit of a troublemaker, an independently-minded student who bumped up against school rules from time to time. By the time she was in high school at St. Hilda's, the family was living in Elbow Park, so every day [she] made the daily trek back and forth from Elbow Park, up over the hill on 8th Street, and down to school through this intersection at 17th Avenue and 8th Street where we are standing. She and her friend would often stop at the corner store and buy a package of Buckingham Cigarettes for a dime. Now, P.K. was fifteen or so, and her father knew she was smoking, and I guess he thought that was all right, but one day the girls were spotted smoking on this street corner. They were wearing their school uniforms of course, tunics and Black stockings, so they did announce to all who passed by that they were from St. Hilda's School. Of course, they were reported to the headmistress - one more infraction for Patsy Page. When you pass through this intersection, you can think of P.K. Page and her school crimes and misdemeanors.

Calgary was really important to P.K. Page's development as a poet. As a teenager, she spent hours at the public library in Central Memorial Park, reading everything she could about the lives of artists, because increasingly that is what she wanted to become herself, an artist. At seventeen, she wrote her first poems in a friend's basement on Riverdale Avenue. But it was her childhood summers on the southwest outskirts of town that left a profound impression. As a child, she camped with her family at what was then called Sarcee Camp, a military base on the Tsuut'ina Reserve where her soldier father participated with exercises with Lord Strathcona's Horse. There during those childhood summers, P.K. absorbed the light and landscape that would later inform her poetry. At Sarcee Camp she also encountered Indigenous peoples, and those meetings shaped her view of this place and her own way of looking at the world. You can easily find a film about P.K.'s life on the National Film Board website made in 1990, and she is talking about those childhood summers and what impression they made on her. So, P.K. Page and her Calgary childhood at Tomkins Park.

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