The Magic Garden
People ask me all the time "What part of England do you come from?" My answer confounds them. I reply that I come from the Montreal part of England. However, in many ways my life does begin in England. Here then, is how Rob became a Brit. Here is how I became an adventurer. Here is how I learned to love being free. Here is why I am, at heart, a sad person - for the price of all my adventure and freedom was love.
In this picture you see me with my sister Diana and our maternal great grandmother, Charlotte. It is 1954. We are in my granny's garden in St Andrews New Brunswick.
We are with her because our mother had left that summer with our father to set up house in England. The plan was that Diana, aged 2, and I aged 4 would follow in the late fall with our nanny on board ship.
Great Gran, aged 70, thought this a remarkably irresponsible idea. She felt that Nanny was a buffoon and we were so young. So she, aged 70, was going to accompany us and ensure that we did not fall overboard or whatever. So that fall, Great Gran, Nanny and Diana and I set off from Montreal on the Empress of Australia for Liverpool and for an adventure that was to shape our lives.
Here is the Empress of Australia at dock in Montreal. This was an interregnum for CP ships. The Old Empress of Britain had been sunk in the war and the new one was not going to come online until 1956. The Empress of Australia had been an old French Liner, the De Grasse, that had been sunk in Bordeaux and raised for CP.
I remember none of the voyage. But our arrival in Liverpool is engraved in my mind. Our mother was there. We had not seen her for months. She met us at the docks and gave me, of all things for a 4 year old, a book. It was a pop-up book and this one inspiring moment started a passion that I have all my life for reading. By the time I was 8 she was sending me book parcels to school. I had read Moby Dick, Tale of Two Cities, Beowulf and even War and Peace before I was 9. I discovered the world of the mind and of the imagination.
As we journeyed to our new home, 14a Airlie Gardens, I was also struck by how different London was from home.
Everything was small - the cars, the trains, the houses. It looked, in the fall of 1954, as if the war had ended the day before. There was bomb damage everywhere. The house next to ours was a bomb site. People wore pre-war clothes. Rationing was just ending. Many children had never seen any fruit other than an apple. There were very few cars and very little petrol. No one had central heating. Instead people still had grates to burn coal. Coal that was delivered by men who looked like Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady. They wore funny leather hats with a long back so that they could carry coal in sacks off the horse drawn wagons and tip the coal over their heads into the coal holes in the pavement. When you walk the streets of London - look for the round iron coal covers - underneath were once coal cellars. We had smogs and all the buildings were black. Milk was delivered by horse drawn wagons. Taxis were all pre war. It was a London hardly changed from Edwardian times.
14a Airlie Gardens. This was a truly Magic Garden. This was the special place that formed much of my life.
Here Diana and I are with Nanny Cosgrove in the garden. Behind us is our 2 story, 5 bedroom flat. It cost 210 pounds a year to rent. Note we are with Nanny and not with our mother. We had lunch with our mother once a week on Thursdays - Nanny's day off. More on Nannies in a later chapter.
Here is the garden now. It seems even more magical than in 1954.
Here is the pond at the centre of the garden today
Here are the buildings that surround the garden as seen today
14a is off to the right of the picture up the lane. Airlie Gardens surrounds one of the most lovely gardens in London. The garden is completely enclosed and hence is very safe. Diana and I and all the children from the buildings ran wild here. We lived like the children in Swallows and Amazons.
This was the formative safe container that did so much to shape my world view. Here I learned to love nature and adventure.
Of course, the garden was only a garden to the adults. For us children, it was a portal to anyplace we wanted it to be. It was our Narnia. In it, we re-enacted the wild west, oceans where pirates were common and more than any thing we re-enacted the war. Not all the residents appreciated the noise that 10 kids could make when replaying the Battle of Britain and roaring around the garden with arms akimbo being Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109's making machine gun noises. But one resident did. Better still he had a huge collection of Toy Soldiers and Guns. Better still he was a movie star!
Here he is - Peter Cushing - the lord of the Hammer Horror films. For my younger readers, he was the commander of the Death Star in the first Star Wars film. On the left, you will see what looks like two boys with guns facing the camera. The shorter boy is in fact my sister Diana. The taller boy is me. The year is 1958.
He was a lovely man. It is so ironic that he played parts like Dr Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes who were very distant men. In person, he was very warm and I suspect that he had never been able to have children of his own. He had a special place for them in his heart. He loved to play.
This was our gang. We spent all our days with each other. The boy almost crouching away from PC was called Ronald. He had a huge collection of Airfix models - more on them later.
The sweet little girl on the right is Fiona. She caught my sister's hand in a gate. In revenge, we persuaded her brother, Andrew, the sweet little boy on the left, that we had this brand new lemonade from Africa. We got him to take a deep draught. Of course, it was not lemonade. Nor was it from Africa. I leave to you to wonder what it may have been. Needless to say, I got into a of of trouble.
This garden is where I lost my Canadian accent for ever. After all, a child has to fit in and this was a cultural pressure cooker. There was no TV. Every waking moment was spent in the garden with this gang. My greatest crime, and the event that introduced me to the most mysterious person in our family, was committed with them. As I have said, rationing was just ending. No one had had any kind of luxury for 15 years. An admirer of my mother, she looked like Grace Kelly, had given her a box of Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars. They had this wonderful box all full of color.
Mum had put them away for the day when she and my father really had to make an impression. I had found this treasure. What really appealed to me and the gang however was the box. We tried to smoke a few, most of us were 7 or younger, and became suitably ill. So we broke up the rest of the cigars and I traded the box with Ronald for an Airfix model.
The big night came. My father's boss had come for dinner. The fatted calf was killed. And then - the big moment. Dad asked if anyone would like a real Cuban Cigar. Men began to faint in expectation. He strode in triumph to the drawer to find - nothing. I will never know how he guessed. I am also not much of a lier. Enraged he pulled me from my bed, and asked what I had done with the cigars. When I told him that we had smashed them all up, he could not contain himself and he spanked me for the first and the last time.
That was my first memory, aged 6 of meeting him, my father Jim - the mystery figure in our life in the nursery.
Next - English Food and Sweets in the 1950's
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