Willowdale 3: The Gardens of the Kingdom

The small white house and green strips of land I'm about to describe exist now only in the memories of six living people but, reassuringly, also in the mind of God.

I was almost 15 when my family left, so I had ten years to impress the place upon my memory. Naturally, I did not do this consciously--I was a terrible skimmer-over of descriptions of place in books--and I'm frightened that I've forgotten something or, worse, have started mentally painting another scene over what was our home.

When I dream of home, I am always returned to this house and those gardens. We are Canadians, so  really we called them yards. The front yard rose gently up to the front steps; it was a green hill with a small rock wall supporting a minute garden. A black iron lamppost suspending a  house number sign from its ladder rest sprung from this hill. There was also a tree. It still lives.

The real treasure begins at the side, east-facing, door of the house, which had a green-painted milk-box on its right side, and a fragrant bush or tree of some kind that grew under a sash window--one of the kitchen's three windows. Directly opposite the door was a faded wooden shed, accessible over the eternal jagged gravel by flagstones. Facing the shed, but turning to your right, you would have seen a flagstone step or two taking you down to the grassy backyard. Eventually there was an alternate route beside the shed around a wilderness of bushes, a massive maple tree, and the stone outcropping where our father built a sandbox.

From a child's perspective, the backyard was enormous. It ran from flagstone-walled gardens beside the house, which filled with ferns every spring, to a broken wooden fence separating our land from that of a house on the next street. There were wire fences on either side to divide our yard from those of our single old-lady neighbours (when the westward one moved or died, she was replaced by a weirdly childless couple). Our dad put a swing set between two trees on the west side, and we swung facing east, sweet-peas growing up in the wire fence behind us, a friendly pussy-willow tree to our left, and a stern slim tree with high branches to our right.

I always longed to climb trees, but almost all our trees were unclimbable. We did manage from time to time to scramble into the massive maple, sometimes cheating by dragging a flat bench over the flagstones from its place under the big kitchen window facing north. We only made it as far as the first Y of the trunk; the Ys of the actual branches rose away out of reach.

The next most important tree was on the west side, surrounded by impenetrable bushes featuring dry white balls of tiny flowers. (I may have been told what they were called, but unfortunately I wasn't the kind of child who cared; I considered gardening a form of torture.) In the middle of this circular shrub was a pear tree. Its flowers made me break out in red spots, my only childhood allergy.

Some years our young parents climbed a ladder and harvested the pears of this tree. They erected a baby-fence in the kitchen doorway and boiled up jars and jars of pear jam. We ate so much pear jam, I began to loathe it, although now--of course--I long for a peanut butter and pear jam sandwich on supermarket white bread. (Yes, we were the sort of Canadians who really did buy and eat that sugary bread. For one thing, it was cheap, and my parents ultimately had five children.)

There was a mock-orange under the dining-room windows at the south-west corner of the yard, and it released great waves of perfume in summer.

Strips of flower garden stretched from the dry snowball bushes around the perimeter of the garden, overwhelmed here and there by bushes. There was also a thin and disappointing walnut tree that never gave any walnuts, for complicated sexual reasons my mother tried to explain. Then there was a large vegetable garden near the north-west corner of the yard, which my mother worked at and sometimes forced her children to work at, too, although I complained so much, her usually steely resolve faltered.

There was also a white-painted wooden arbour, with great purple flowers flowing up one side, and purple grapes and iconic green leaves flowing down the other. Finally, behind the arbour there was round raised garden made of flagstones, from which orange tiger lilies grew.

The north end of this yard--territory of the vegetable patch, the arbour and the tiger lilies--had been built up so it was slightly higher than the south end, which meant that in winter we children could amuse ourselves by sliding down the small difference on our sleds. It was a rather a short and sudden drop, however, so it wasn't that amusing, but it was something.

All that is left to describe is the grassy stretch along the west side of the house, which was separated from the forbidden front yard by a high wooden fence. My mother planted a rose bush here, which scrambled up the house's white harling wall. For some reason, the grass in this section was deeper, richer and greener than the grass anywhere else in the small kingdom, and much the pleasantest to our bare summer feet.

We were sent out to play A LOT, and in almost every weather, for which I am only now grateful. Left to my own devices, I would have sat indoors all day between September and April and read books. Going outdoors willingly in spring and summer may have been a concession to my fictional friends who seemed to think outdoors was just wonderful. For some reason only a very expensive therapist might be able to discern, I found the natural world deeply dull--and disappointing because there were no fairies in it.

As Nulli and I grew older, we became interested in history, especially in warfare, and so one of our favourite outdoor games was to recreate the dogfights of World War One flying aces. The skies of France were much more interesting to me than the glorious flowering kingdom around us. The southern swing was my Fokker triplane, and the northern swing was Nulli's Sopwith Camel, and our little sister Tertia was a blonde French maiden whom I invariably kidnapped so that Null would come swinging to her rescue.

Now, ironically and inevitably, this childhood game is of much more interest to me than the actual fatal battle between our esteemed countryman and the great German knight, which the Australians now claim to have won. Australians certainly watched the battle; our colourful re-enactments (the Red Baron probably left the French maids alone) may have been overseen by our young mother, either through the small window over the kitchen sink, or through the large glass plate beside the lace-covered kitchen table.

Our mum spent her thirties tending to that small white harling house, those sprawling gardens, and her growing family; she was younger than I am now when she and my father boxed everything up and left it. It now seems to me incredible that a one-income Catholic couple with two, then three, then four, then five children could own (actually own) a detached two-storey house with gardens in northern Toronto. When people talk about progress, that is something to think about.

Meanwhile, the house has vanished and the gardens gutted. A ridiculously huge and modern house stands in its place, well back from where it was, with only the tree remaining of the front yard. It contains a double garage and wide driveway stretches to the sidewalk. It ate up most of the back yard,     felling some of the trees and all of the bushes. All the gardens, all flagstones, and the arbour are gone.

There is a sales video of the monstrosity on youtube, dated 2011, accompanied by jewellery-ad music by Vivaldi. The introduction to the new house involves apparently exciting photographs of North York city centre, which is a rather vigorous walk away and, now, the site of a massacre.