People always ask me, “When did you decide to become a lawyer? A judge? The first woman chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada?”

“Never,” I reply. And it’s true.

From a very early age, all I knew was that I wanted to do something that wasn’t ordinary. Because for a small girl growing up in a remote prairie town in the 1940s, the ordinary was very ordinary indeed.

Just before my sixth birthday, my mother found me in the living room of our grey asphalt house. Often she was distracted, running from this crisis to that family disaster, but this time, I saw the focus in her blue eyes. She meant business.

“Tomorrow you’re going to school,” she said. “You need to know how to write your name.” She sat me down and made me practise, over and over, all 19 letters — B-E-V-E-R-L-E-Y M-A-R-I-A-N G-I-E-T-Z — until I had them down pat.

I learned a lot in that, my first academic lesson. How to hold the pencil between my thumb and index finger. How to make the letters of the alphabet. The difference between lowercase and uppercase and why it matters — or doesn’t. (I was a skeptic even at the age of 5.) How you could draw the shapes sloppily, so the letters fell off their lines and grew thick and indecipherable, or do it neatly, so they looked good and could be easily read. And the big take-away, one that fascinates me to this day: how a pencil can create shapes that magically acquire meaning and allow you to talk to other people.

I approached my first day of grade one in a state of high anticipation mixed with trepidation. I had asked many questions about the world as I negotiated the transition from babyhood to childhood. Why were flowers the way they were? Why did my father read the Bible every day, and what was going on in his head when he did? How did numbers work? And, of course, my burning query: How long would it take to count to one hundred? Now, at last, all my questions would be answered.

On the appointed day, my mother dressed me in a new gingham frock, helped me buckle my patent leather shoes over white socks, and combed my dark hair into a tidy pageboy do. Then she drove me to the school. It seemed enormous to me. A two-storey edifice lined with long-paned windows, it loomed like a yellow colossus as my mother pulled me from the car and marched me to the entrance.

As the double doors swung shut behind us, the warm scent of oiled wooden floors floated up. Everywhere, strange kids and their mothers rushed about, all intent on the same task — to find the place where they belonged.

My grade one teacher was Mrs. Hinman, a thin woman with a narrow white face and bright red hair. She could not have been more than 40, but to me she seemed very old. Every teacher, I soon learned, had a reputation, and Mrs. Hinman’s was that she was strict.

I quickly became friends with a little blond girl named Gail Davis, who sat behind me in our classroom. We would race through our exercises to see who could complete them first, which required me to turn around to check where she was on the page. One day, Mrs. Hinman observed this and concluded I was copying.

She marched me to the front of the room, read the indictment to the class, found me guilty, and ordered me to put out my hand for punishment. Six whacks with a steel-edged ruler. As my classmates looked on, I stood before my teacher and took the blows — no crying, no protest, outwardly calm, inwardly dying of mortification and shame.

Punishment duly rendered and endured, I slunk back to my place in misery. Suddenly racing through lessons with Gail wasn’t fun anymore. Suddenly the joy with which I had picked up my pencil had vanished. I had had my first taste of justice — or more accurately, injustice.

It never occurred to me to be angry with Mrs. Hinman or to complain to my parents. They would just ask why I got into trouble and probably punish me again. Better to say nothing, I rationalized. I was learning a vital lesson — the world wasn’t always fair.

Mrs. Hinman and the teachers who followed her in subsequent years did what they were paid to do. They maintained discipline in the schoolroom. They taught us to read, write and do arithmetic. They did not expect much of me, or my brothers, Len and Conrad, and made no attempt to get to know us as individuals or find out what we were capable of.

The Pincher Creek Municipal Library saved me from premature intellectual death. It was my only enrichment program — and what a program it was. The local matrons — Mrs. Boyden, Mrs. Telford, Mrs. Allison and more — had at some point decided that Pincher Creek needed a book collection. I don’t know how they managed it, but they persuaded the town to found and (modestly) fund the library. A few thousand books were acquired, catalogued and shelved in a large room on the second floor of the town hall.

There was no money left over for wages, but each Wednesday at noon and every Saturday afternoon, one of the matrons would unlock the door and take a seat behind a big oak desk to await the local custom. Sometimes business was brisk — ladies in hats jostling with cowboys for space at shelves that housed Western novels (Zane Grey was a favourite) or historical fiction (popular takes on everything from King Henry VIII’s queens to the Napoleonic Wars). Other days, I was free to roam the shelves unimpeded by adult competition.

Every Saturday, I rushed through lunch to get to the library so that I could check out the two books that members were allowed each week. The cost of membership was 50 cents a year — two weeks’ allowance but worth it. Between us, Len and I had four books, and we usually got through all of them before the week was out. I worked my way through the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and every Anne of Green Gables book Lucy Maud Montgomery ever wrote. I started at age 8, and by my tenth birthday, I had read the library’s entire children’s selection.

There was nothing to do, I decided, but start on the grown-up options. Timorously at first, then with increasing hunger, I pulled the volumes down from their shelves. No slim juvenile tomes were these. They were fat books with fine print and thousands of words — big words, little words, words at whose meanings I could only guess. I discovered delights beyond belief. Historical novels, mystery novels, Westerns galore — all were grist for my mental mill. I explored the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. I lived, for hours at a time, with medieval ladies and knights.

The matrons behind the desk watched warily as my fingers roamed the high shelves. Sometimes they greeted my weekly choices with a raised eyebrow and pursed lips. They would rub the stamp in the ink pad with unnecessary vigour before bringing it down with a defiant thump on the sheet glued to the inside back cover. But they never told me to put a book back.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The Pincher Creek Municipal Library saved my life. Or so it seems to me now. Would I have survived without it? Probably. Would I have grown up to be the person I am without it? Most certainly not. In the pages of those books, I learned new ways of writing and thinking and feeling and being. And I discovered new worlds far away from my provincial little town in the foothills of southern Alberta.

In Pincher Creek, I had no preschool, no kindergarten, no enrichment programs. My parents, my brothers, my classmates, my library, the glossy weekend pages of the Star Weekly — these were my extracurricular teachers. They helped me understand the world I inhabited and introduced me to other worlds far beyond my comprehension. They taught me about myself, both my weaknesses and my strengths.

Our school had no counsellor and no career guidance program either, but in grade eight, all students were given a series of tests designed to suss out what they might be good at. When the test results came back, the homeroom teacher took me aside to explain them and offer advice. I perched myself on the edge of a chair she had placed beside her desk. She pulled a sheet from the pile before her and studied it, then peered at me over her half-moon glasses.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. I sat silent.

“Well,” the teacher said, holding my test results under her right palm, “you have an extremely high reading-retention score. But that won’t do you much good.” She paused. “As a girl, you know.”

She ran her finger down the lines of print. “You also have the lowest alertness score I’ve ever seen.” She shook her head in a flurry of tight grey curls, searching for a piece of useful advice. “One thing I can tell you: you must never be a waitress or a telephone operator.” She pushed my paper aside and pulled the next one from the pile.

“That is all. Please ask Jimmy to come up.”

Years later, in 1989, when I was first appointed as a justice to the Supreme Court of Canada, this memory came back to me as Justice McIntyre showed me my new office in the court building.

“You will grow to like this office,” he said, emptying his desk. “I could have moved out long ago, but I liked it and decided to stay.” He was a large man in every way: in body — he stood well over six feet — in mind, and in spirit.

“Really?” I responded skeptically, looking around at the barren walls.

“It has a big cupboard,” he said with a wry turn of the lip. “That’s a great advantage.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“For the books,” he explained. Then he sighed. “You’ll find out soon enough. Parties’ books. Interveners’ books. Hundreds of books — 50 for this case, 40 for that. You need someplace to keep them.”

I felt a flutter of panic in my stomach. “You read them all?”

“Let’s just say I look at the relevant passages.” He smiled. “Did you know that Supreme Court judges possess proficient reading-retention scores?” he continued. “They ran some tests for language-training purposes. Amazing scores, apparently.”

My mental clock ticked back to that bleak day in grade eight when my teacher had told me I was fit for nothing useful.

I nodded to Justice McIntyre. I had just found the answer to my teacher’s question: it’s useful if you get yourself appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Correction - September 23, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version to update a photo caption that misspelled Beverley McLachlin’s given name.