Areas that are forced to serve the urgent needs of man are doomed the moment those needs succumb to economic and political vagaries. In 1911, Easton’s miners walked off the job, seeking an extra three pence per day. People suffered terribly during the three-month strike: children went to school barefoot; feeding centres were set up. If you owned a bicycle and worked as an errand boy, you were considered well off. When the strike ended and the Easton pit was closed, a series of disasters—the First World War, then the Depression—besieged the area: and crime gained a foothold.
The final nail in the coffin for Easton was the Second World War. All those Victorian terraces that sprang up in the late 1800s became a useful marker for German bombers: pilots only had to spot the coal slags and the long streets of row upon row of terrace houses to know they were closing in on Bristol’s shipyards and factories. On their way to bomb the city, German planes dropped a few on Easton. One, in April 1941, shattered two streets so badly that a huge hole in the ground revealed the coal seams of the colliery below.
Easton devolved into an eyesore, a cautionary tale of urban blight. In the 1950s and 1960s, plans for a “new Easton” were trotted out by successive governments, but none of the attempts stuck. Stillborn and infant mortality increased. Unemployment ran at 20 percent; immigration rose to 35 percent; poverty doubled; crime and violence soared. Drug dealers and hookers were about the only people in Easton who earned money. A survey measuring poverty and deprivation based on seven criteria was conducted throughout Bristol. Of the ninety-nine zones surveyed, Easton was one of six zones that ticked all seven criteria. As recently as the 1980s, half the houses in Easton were deemed unfit for habitation.
And then a welcome reversal breezed in. Urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida have long cited artistic and entrepreneurial energies as the drivers of regeneration and positive gentrification. Some areas are resistant to public policy and government measures but manage to find their footing through grassroots initiatives. So it was with Easton, where renewal happened organically. In the mid- to late-1990s, when a fine Victorian house in the area would set you back just £18,500, creatives and young families braved Easton’s sketchy reputation. Banksy was among them: his graffiti art lives on several buildings.
Today, Easton is a mosh pit of cultures and identities: churches, mosques and gurdwaras coexist with man buns, dreadlocks, pink hair, and artistic collectives producing menstrual art. You are not likely to encounter anyone wearing a tie here. It also has graffiti, lots of it: mostly the good kind. Cafés, bakeries, hot-desking space, and trendy eateries attract the young, the educated, the flexible, the tolerant. A walk from our house to St. Mark’s Road passes sari shops, halal butchers, Indian grocery shops, a bakery, an artisan pizzeria, and a smattering of restaurants—Moroccan, Bangladeshi, and Indian. An Italian restaurant is opening up soon in space formerly occupied by a vegetarian restaurant. Italian. In this area that will count as exotic.
Equally important to any area, maybe even more so, are the family-run corner stores, the community centres and church-run programs offering book clubs, yoga and Pilates classes, food banks, and mental health groups that are vital to successful and long-lasting regeneration that help retain that village feeling.
It is obviously paying off: The most recent census (done in 2011) shows that Easton has a higher proportion of young children and people in the twenty-five-to-forty-four age bracket than the England and Wales average. It bodes well for us newcomers that our attraction to this area others might view with trepidation is finding its way back to respectability.
14
The Hamilton Homes
It is mid-May, and a respite from reno hell arrives in the form of quick trip to Canada to visit my kids, friends, and the dentist. People consider it eccentric of me to cross the Atlantic for a dental appointment. Believe me, eccentricity has nothing to do with it; it is self-preservation.
Before he retired, my fiery, Irish dentist imparted some firm advice. I was pinned in his examination chair, and when his assistant mentioned that I was moving to England, Dr. McKenna stopped prodding around in my mouth, and fixed me with a stern look: “Never trust a British dentist.” I smiled, nodded as best I could with an aspirator in my mouth, but he leaned in closer and said it again. “Seriously, do not trust a British dentist. You’re taking your life in your hands when you do that.” His warning has been borne out by British friends and acquaintances, who have regaled me with their dental horror stories. Obligingly, I now schedule my biannual visits to Canada around appointments with Dr. McKenna’s successor and a team of gentle hygienists.
Of course, there is a side benefit to this: the dental office is located near all my former homes in Hamilton.
Although I was born and raised in Toronto, circumstance moved me to Hamilton, where I lived for nearly twenty-five years, though not, as you now know, in the same house. I had earmarked myself for a settled life after university, but the reality was that within a decade of graduation, I had married, had two children, and moved house eleven times.
My husband at the time and I were pushed into home ownership. Renting was for losers, we were told: purchasing a home was the path to upper adulthood, and the bedrock of financial and marital stability. In the case of financial stability, the advice was sound. As for marital stability, my marriage was over before the eighties were.
My family and friends were not surprised about my divorce, but when they learned I was moving from Oakville to Hamilton, there was a collective intake of breath. “Hamilton? Are things that bad?”
Hamilton was the armpit of Canada; a dirty, industrial steel town of working-class grunts. In 1988, moving from ladies-who-lunch Oakville to gritty Hamilton was the British equivalent of moving from Chelsea to Wolverhampton, or the US equivalent of moving from Carmel-by-the-Sea to Buffalo. While life’s vicissitudes do not always hand you address choices, in some corner of my mind I sensed that although my marriage had failed, my world was about to be reassembled in an exciting way in Hamilton.
I was completely unfamiliar with Hamilton, but my move there was dictated by a few factors, chief among them being that I had a part-time job at The Hamilton Spectator, my only source of income. (Out of pride and stubbornness, I flatly refused any form of social assistance offered to single mothers.) Being a single mother was about as low down the societal totem pole as you could get when I moved there. Drug dealers commanded more respect. Social demographers and their flurry of research and data were all over single moms like lice in a kindergarten class, declaring that being a divorced mom was the fast track to poverty and to all manner of social, educational, and intellectual disasters for one’s children. They were so wrong. I thrived as a single mother. My kids thrived, too.
Another reason for moving to Hamilton was that it was shockingly affordable. The city was only fifteen minutes down the highway from my previous home in Oakville, but the difference in terms of cost of living was like night and day. In Hamilton, I was able to buy a house in a decent area and cover the mortgage, groceries, and bills and have money left over, all on a part-time wage. You are hard-pressed to achieve that nowadays, and certainly not in Hamilton, which has recently seen the biggest jump in house prices in all of Canada. It gladdens my heart that the city has shaken off its down-at-heels reputation. Since moving away, I have become even more appreciative of this lovely, unpretentious city, and hold it in higher esteem than my birthplace of Toronto.
Hamilton’s new gloss is evident on this bright spring morning as I drive into the city ahead of my dental appointment. The air is warm, and the magnolia blossoms are out. As I cross the high-level bridge over Hamilton Harbour, the city’s burgeoning skyline rises in greeting. On the horizon, ghostly silhouettes of factories and steel mills slip in and out of the haze. Thirty years ago, they were alive, belching out the last gasps of the city’s industrial heritage. Now they slumber like hulking beasts brought to heel.
The drive-by visits to my previous homes follow the sa
me route, in chronological order, like stations of my personal cross. At each house, I pause in the car and silently recite the gospel that pertains to that particular home. Sometimes I pray; sometimes I just let the memories out for a little run. A few times I have wept.
I drive past the historic cemetery on York Boulevard, where I taught my kids to ride their bikes on winding paths beneath a protective canopy of maples. Across the road, stately Dundurn Castle, as creamy white as a butter cake, sits in a verdant ganache of parkland.
At the first lights I turn right on to Woodbine Crescent. The scenery changes abruptly from the elegance of Dundurn Castle to small, plain houses, some in a state of untidiness and neglect. My old home looks a little worse for wear today, and there is no evidence of the peony bush my boyfriend planted as a housewarming gift.
When I first met this house, it took me all of five seconds to tell the real estate agent, “Draw up the papers. I’m buying this.”
“But you haven’t seen more than the front hall!” he said.
“Don’t need to—I know it will be perfect.”
It was a plain early twentieth-century reddish-brown brick house with steps leading up to a small veranda, and a green asphalt roof that was almost all dormer housing the main bedroom. Inside, on the main floor, a small living room with dark-wood pocket doors opened up to a large dining room with dark-wood trim and rose-pink chevron wallpaper. The kitchen, at the back of the house, was white and had a walkout to a small backyard. The basement was partially finished, and it is where I set up a play area for my little boys, a small writing area for me, and a laundry room. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a walkout to a spacious deck that benefited from the shade of the cemetery’s trees. I have never been wary of living next to a cemetery: such places provide me with a sense of calm and an appreciation for life.
The house was hardly luxury, but to me I was living the dream. It was certainly the antithesis of what those social demographers characterized for the single-mother lifestyle: according to them I should have been some greasy-haired slattern injecting myself with heroin. Instead, one sweltering summer afternoon I found myself stretched out on a chaise lounge on the upper deck, pink lemonade in one hand, Vogue in the other. I felt utterly content, and with it bloomed the sentiment If single motherhood is society’s version of the road to ruin, bring it on.
The other trope about young mothers—and single moms, for sure—is that their homes are disaster zones of dirty dishes teetering in the sink, disorganized kitchen counters, toys and clothes strewn everywhere. That was never my house. I kept a tidy place both for my sanity and to imprint a standard on my children, for I believe that the first step to raising responsible children begins with teaching them to keep their own space tidy, and to carry that practice outside the house by respecting the property of others and the environment in general.
My eyes now linger on the veranda where my boys played, and as one memory fades another sharply inserts itself: of them waiting eagerly for their father to pick them up for the weekends. They would run squealing joyfully into his arms on Friday, and on Monday he had to drag them kicking and screaming back into my house. Their father was the fun parent; I was the scolding, strict, eat-your-broccoli parent. That my boys preferred the company of their father hurt deeply, but it was something that had to be endured.
To this day, I am grateful that I took the plunge to buy a home when the more likely and perhaps more prudent scenario for someone in my situation would have been to rent. Owning my own home focused my responsibilities and gave me stability and control. Besides, I did not want my boys to think that a woman on her own, especially a mother, could not shift for herself; I wanted them to see that there should be no discrepancy between the resources of a single father and those of a single mother. There was definitely wage discrimination—still is—but the point of my example was that there was no excuse for inequality. It was important for them to see that mothers can work and earn a living. With the rare exception, my experience has been that single mothers do not receive support payments that roll in like a monthly lottery win.
Woodbine Avenue was kind to me, requiring little in the way of fixing up. I did not do much beyond a bit of wallpapering and touching up the painted woodwork.
I acquired a boyfriend at this time. He was handy and did small repairs on the house, and I repaid him with hearty home-cooked meals. That summer of 1988 was hot and sultry, a typical southern Ontario summer. On Friday nights, we slid into his big, black ’79 Buick Park Avenue and cruised down the Queen Elizabeth Way, windows down, cooled by a humid breeze. We drove across the Skyway Bridge, then over the Garden City Bridge, past Niagara Falls, and across the forty-ninth parallel into Buffalo. Sometimes we went for dinner, sometimes just for a drive. Time was an open, unhurried road with no horizon. I felt so free then, so blissfully alive, so in love. Life felt settled, and easygoing. There was no past, no future, only the present. It was a great time to be thirty-four.
A year and a half later, our respective divorces finalized, we got engaged. We bought a home together to accommodate his two children and my two. That is the home to which I drive next.
Trepidation jangles me whenever I approach Hyde Park Avenue; I tend to mentally brace myself, never sure of the reaction the house will elicit. Hyde Park is where a new life began and where it ended, where I finally breathed easy and then suddenly started hyperventilating. There have been times when I have avoided the house entirely on my drive-bys, but today for some reason an inner strength governs me.
I do not spot the house as soon as I turn onto the street. The trees and shrubs on the other properties have matured in the intervening years and now obscure the approach slightly. But then I see it: a still-handsome two-and-a-half-storey coral-and-cream brick Edwardian; three chunky creamy pillars supporting a broad veranda; cream trim around the windows. Its current owners obviously care for it.
The house impressed me at first sight in the summer of 1989: it had the space for our blended brood; it had the location for good schools; and it was in a leafy, tranquil neighbourhood. My low-cost single-mom years had me worrying that such a home was beyond our means; however, my fiancé was smitten, and his enthusiasm carried away any misgivings.
Four months later we married on a snowy New Year’s Day. Our reception was held in our new home. The twinkle of white lights strung across the veranda and wound around the pillars reflected in the freshly fallen snow and made everything look magical and clean. My two boys and stepson in their little suits and bow ties, my stepdaughter in a pink floral dress and little pink ballet shoes: we looked like a happily-ever-after family. By the end of that year, we had a daughter, the bridge in our blended family.
What with the five kids bouncing in and out of our house, people wondered how I kept it all together. But I did—we did. Hyde Park was my Tara, and I adored the life I had there. Our home was the locus for street-hockey games, for dinner parties and birthday celebrations; of big family Christmas dinners, and cozy weekends in front of the fire playing board games or watching TV. I was even fortunate with work: In addition to my part-time editing job at the newspaper, I became the Homes columnist and feature writer. I was now paid to nose around other people’s homes.
Life was good, and a few years later, one Christmas, we took the kids to Disney World. My husband and I were not fans of theme parks, yet we had a truly wonderful time. Best vacation ever, it was agreed by one and all. We even talked about returning one day.
But you can never trust the Magic Kingdom. Shortly after we returned home, everything toppled. My husband inexplicably ceased speaking to me. At first, I thought it was a joke, a bit of game playing, but no amount of cajoling or begging on my part would convince him to talk. He just stopped communicating with all of us. Was he worried? Upset about something? He would not say. I had loved my husband deeply, and we had been an affectionate, playful couple, so this swift change of behaviour was a kind of torture. It was hard enough to maintain a bra
ve face with the children, but my husband and I were by then working at the same Toronto newspaper, and our disintegrating marriage became office gossip.
As the silent treatment continued, and I agonized over what could have brought it on—another woman? a sudden drug habit? a mid-life crisis?—I walked around the neighbourhood in the late evenings, cloaked by darkness, embarrassed by the state of my marriage. This was my second, so it certainly felt like a curse was upon me. I walked up and down the streets, looking enviously at the light spilling from other people’s houses, wondering what ingredient I lacked that they apparently had in abundance. Were they really happy, or did danger lurk behind their confident laughter and smiles as they sat around the dinner table or chatted across the kitchen island with wineglasses in hand?
Dreams were my salvation—day and night—and I began to confide them to a diary. Always present in these little fantasies was a Victorian cottage with my children tucked snugly and safely inside. They were a balm, these musings, but they also struck me as outlandish: surely my marriage would, could, be salvaged. I could not imagine being separated from my husband; then again, I could not abide being treated so harshly.
Now as I sit in my car outside the Hyde Park house, my nose prickles as memories and emotions collide. Just then, a well-dressed woman emerges from the front door. She eyes me with curiosity as she waters pots of geraniums on the veranda. I wonder if she is pretending. I grab my mobile phone and pretend to take a call. I avert my eyes. I do not want to engage with her or anyone on the street.
Hanging up my pretend phone call, I stare straight ahead and move the gearshift to Drive. I proceed up the street, not making eye contact with the other houses, each with a story I could tell. Left at the first intersection, then left again.
Open House Page 14
