Life at 2 Lumley Avenue

Life at 2 Lumley Avenue was pleasant, even magical. The orange brick house could have been built by the sensible one of the Three Little Pigs. In fact, it was more accurately "The House That Jack Built " (Jack being my father who constructed the house along with his friend Vic Peiro in the early nineteen forties.)

On either side of the stone steps leading up to the porch were white mock orange-blossom bushes and a rockery garden containing Bleeding Hearts, Forget me Nots, orange California Poppies, Lilies, Irises, Peonies, and a fragrant French Lilac bush. It was a lovely English Country garden created by my New Zealand born father, complete with white picket fence and trellis at the side of the house. I would bounce my tennis ball against the house playing rhyming games by myself, or sit in the back yard doing my oil painting, while keeping an ear out for the younger children riding their tricycles on the street. Everything was picture perfect, peaceful, and above all, safe.

My mother was kept constantly busy raising three, sometimes four children. I was the eldest, Eileen, born on Bastille Day, July 14, 1943. My sister, Maureen (more Eileen?) was conceived on my first birthday. She came along twenty one months later, in April of 1945. A year later in April 1946, Eric, our cousin was born, and came to live with us in August of 'that year. He stayed with us until he was five, and as soon as he left to live with his father in New York, my mother got pregnant with my brother Paul, who was born in 1950.

My mother was extremely well organized. When she wasn't hanging out the laundry on the clothesline that she had done in the wringer washing machine , she was making dinner or canning or making pressure cookers full of applesauce. Her cold borscht was famous. On long summer afternoons we waited as she filled dozens of glass milk bottles with the creamy cold pink drink. My father came home from his job as a tax accountant at exactly five-thirty. Supper was exactly at six o'clock. He would take a nap on the living room couch while mother finished cooking dinner and I set the table. it was my job to wake him up. Another one of my chores was washing dishes, which could take me hours, since I got lost in playing with bubbles in the glass cream separator, used for taking the cream off the milk in the glass bottles. While waiting for dinner, I would sit on the kitchen stool, kneading the Parkay Margarine plastic bag to spread the colour. It was enormously satisying puncturing the bright red bubble in the middle and watching the colour spread through the white margarine like streams of blood, finally turning it gold. Next to mixing the batter for chocolate chip cookies, that was my favourite chore to do, but it became tiresome. Then there was always the joy of vacuuming. watching as the colour of the burgundy living room carpet shifted depending on which way I brushed it. It was like the sun on my mother's sealskin coat, laid out on her bed. The children would lie on the bed burying our hands in the fur, smoothing it back and forth to watch the light change the colour from champagne to chocolate.

Apart from those rare, perfumed and lipsticked nights when our mother would tuck us in before going out with my father, I remember her always at the porcelain sink in her apron, washing dishes or preparing meals. I would be sitting in the living room playing marbles against myself with my black cat, Magic, watching. The radio would be playing Classical music on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As the piece would be coming to a finale, Mom would wipe her hands on her apron, push her way through the swinging door that led to the living room, and run in front of the Blaupunkt radio, just as the announcer was about to report the name of the piece and the composer. She would beam as she beat the announcer to the punch, always correctly. Then she would return to the kitchen, satisfied with her accomplishment of the day.

The house ran like clockwork. Everything always seemed perfectly clean and under control. It was quiet, except for the sounds of classical music, and the deep tones of announcer's male voices. Behind the desk where my father worked at his accounting books after dinner, there were built in bookshelves filled with rows of books that my father collected. Over the couch there hung two matching Diego Rivera prints of Indian girls. My parents had bought from Rivera himself when we drove to Mexico in my father's green and yellow Mercury when we were five and seven.

Nothing disturbed the peace and order. Except for one small detail: the constant squabbles with my sister. When we were babies, mother had read her Doctor Spock. She dutifully arranged our nap times at different hours to avoid sibling rivalry. It didn't work. An Aries, my sister could never seem to forgive me for being born first. To add insult to injury, my cousin Eric came to live with us, only one scant year and four months after my sister's birth. birth, sandwiching her into the position of the middle child. By the time I was two years and eight months old I was the big sister to two younger siblings. I loved it!

Mother treated us like the Bobbsey Twins ( a children's book series of the time.) Along with giving my sister and I matching names, she sewed us matching nightgowns out of crinkly white cotton with tiny blue roses sprinkled all over them, held up on our tiny bodices by wide blue satin straps. We had matching French four-poster beds, with matching blue and white ruffled cotton bedspreads. We would wrap the bedspreads around our heads, letting the rufflles trail along the floor, and play "Princess." Sometimes, though, the Princess needed a Prince, so I would press my sister into playing the part, which understandably, she resented enormously!

My sister had an adorable round little face and sturdy body. Physically stronger, and definitely more aggressive, she would torment me with tickling fights which quickly turned into pinching, scratching, hair pulling, followed by a mad chase up the stairs to the bathroom where I would narrowly escape her (I was the faster runner) and lock myself in for the afternoon.

I never complained, because I was told I was the responsible one. I had to "understand" and take care of my little sister. Years later that phrase, "You understand, don't you?" would come back to haunt me. I didn't understand. But I wanted so much to be a good little girl and earn my mother's love that I accepted my role. I learned to act. The possibility of not being good never occurred to me.

Until I reached Kindergarten. The first day of school, the stern old battle-axe of a teacher, (dressed in a white lace blouse with a big bow, brown plaid skirt, and wearing brown laced up Oxford shoes) surprised me by approaching the table where I sat with my classmates and fanning out a rainbow array of brightly-coloured construction paper and asking me to choose a colour. The wonder of such a thing as coloured paper astounded me. I had never seen anything like it. I chose black. There was a box of pastels on the table, and I proceeded to scribble little marks on the paper, oink, then lime green, then mauve, fascinated at how many colours there were, and each colour appeared differently on the black paper. What an extravagant luxury!

I was immersed in this glorious activity when the teacher appeared and asked me what the marks on the paper were. I realized suddenly that this process of discovery of colour was not enough. They needed to BE something. As I gazed at the black page wth its bursts of colour all over it, I remembered being held by my mother with the blanket snuggled against my face and lifted to see the fireworks. I must have been less than two years old, probably more like eighteen months, but the wonder of that memory has stayed with me since. I can remember thinking that the plastic yellow star shaped buttons in my mother's button box were probably what was in the sky.Thinking quickly, (I was, after all, a highly imaginative child) I said, "Fireworks at night!" Apparently satisfied, the teacher wrote the words of my first story on the page.

That day began a life long affair with colour. I longed for coloured construction paper and coloured pastels. I wrote my name in the pages of the children's books. One day a friend of our family came to visit us from an exotic place called Detroit. She was a teacher and brought us books and, wonder of wonder, construction paper! One sheet of it. Grey. Immense. A treasure. I kept it hidden in the top shelf on the upstairs hall linen closet. When I wanted to use it I pulled the drawers out and climbed to the top of them to reach the top shelf where I kept my cherished piece of paper. Sereptitiously I would cut a circle out for some project, and put it back where I thought no one could find it except me.

How to obtain crayons was another question. I knew that when it came to food and clothes and books, all good things were available. But paper and crayons did not occur in my world, except at school. One day, a few months later, I discovered the stock room in the new school I had moved to now that it been built in our neighbourhood. There were rows and rows of boxes of crayons. Thinking no one would miss it, I took one And was caught.

The punishment was severe. Though I was only in Kindergarten, I was taken into the Grade One Room, where, after I was sternly scolded. Then, with the Grade One teacher as witness, my new. Kindergarten teacher pulled down my panties and spanked me. Devastation. The magical, creative, innocent little girl that I was suddenly exposed. Underneath the good little, the responsible big sister who looked after her little sister and her cousin, the little girl who loved magic and fairy tales, there lurked a shameful THIEF! There was something seriously wrong here. The possibility of failure occurred. In a world that had been filled with warm blankets and clean sheets, beautiful music, fireworks filled nights and sun-filled days, corn on the cob and beefsteak tomatoes, ballet dancers and laughter, suddenly became dangerous. In that moment of of deep humiliation and shame I unconsciously decided that I would never happen to me again. Somebody should have made sure that didn't happen to me. And surely somebody should make sure it never happened again. And if they didn't, somebody should be made to pay for allowing me to be so heinously hurt. This is the mind of an upset five year old that I was not even aware, until recently, was running my life, and attracting theivery, attack, humiliation, and punishment into my world.

That incident, and its ramifications, has haunted me ever since. Because, of course, what we keep hidden in the shadows, our secret fear, is what we are sure to attract. Humiliation and exposure, and dangerous painful punishment, and no one to protect me became the theme of my life. It affected how I behaved, what I did and didn't do. My sense of safety in the world was definitely impacted. I must not let anyone know who I now understood myself to be, alone, unsupported and guilty. I swallowed the story of my loss of innocence whole. But I couldn't let anyone know, least of all myself.

I had already learned how to play "Let's pretend." At three, I made my first appearance on stage. Spellbound by the footlights, red, blue, yellow....red, blue, yellow..... I forgot my little goldfinch dance. I looked up and saw the spotlight shining like the streetlights against the black sky on an icy winter wonderland night. Then I had felt safe, bundled in my snowsuit, supported by the love of my parents, learning how to skate. Now they were in that velvet black darkness of the auditorium, laughing fondly and loving me as I remembered and performed my dance.

I knew it was safe in the spotlight. so I began to hide there. I became the consummate actress, playing the part of the good girl, while retreating into the safe and magical world of fairy tales. I became Maid Marion, helping Robin Hood save the poor by robbing the rich! I immersed myself so much in magic, that when I read The Tree that Sat Down, by Beverly Nichols, I literally believed that if I put three pennies in my top drawer and DID NOT LOOK FOR THREE DAYS, they would turn into something that I strongly desired.

I looked, of course. But then I tried to kiss my elbow, because one of my books told me if I could do that I could turn into a boy! I just wanted to see what that would be like so much. Perhaps if I was a boy the other children at school wouldn't torment me so much and call me a "fairy." I had made the mistake of bringing my ballet shoes to school and dancing in front of the class, and acting in front of the class in a little play. I joined Brownies and learned how to darn socks. I got straight A's on my report card. Except for one "B". I ran home, so excited at this wonderful report card, only to be received with, "Why did you get a "B"? Again, the possibility of failure occurred. I would never be good enough to earn my mother's love.

I was trying so hard to be a good girl to cover up that hidden shame. I never knew if my parents knew about what had happened that day in Kindergarten. Nothing was ever said. I only knew that they seemed pleased when my picture was on the front page of the newspaper just for being a pretty golden haired little girl in the park. If that was what made them happy, I would get busy looking good. I became a dancer and an actress. By the time I was ten, I was the youngest member of a Children's Theatre Company. And I had my books to comfort me.

While I was locked inside the bathroom, I would lie in the bathtub, or sit on the toilet, reading. I spent one entire day reading a novel called SHE, about a woman who was thousands of years old, and restored herself to youth and beauty by bathing in a lake of fire at the center of the Earth. I was lost in that world. My mother got so upset and worried about me that she put a ladder up to the second floor bathroom to get me out.

Finally, one day, to get away from it all, after some fight with my mother, I hid in the back yard amongst the raspberries, and watched as she called my name. I packed my little green leather suitcase that my uncle Leo in Montreal had given me, my Princess bedspread and my fairy-tale book, and marched across the street to the Russell's house. I crept down the driveway, around the side of their huge house, and through the backyard to the edge of the hill behind the house.There, overlooking the valley below was a white trellised gazebo, and behind that the hill sloped down to the "varine." as we used to call it.

The Russells lived in an enormous Tudor-style house, with a circular driveway. My parents referred to "Russell Steel" in hushed reverential tones, as a way of explaining why their children were driven by a chauffeur to private school every morning in a limousine. When I played with the Russell children, we occasionally were allowed inside the house where, in the place of honour in the mahogany beamed living room we got a glimpse of the portrait of Mrs. Russell, lovely, like a Queen, wearing a long green velvet dress with ermine trimmed sleeves.

The Russells fascinated me, seeming to live a distant life of unapproachable privilege. Every night, at exactly nine o'clock I would watch from my bedroom window as the beautiful Mrs. Russell would glide past the casement windows across the front of the house to the bathroom. She would walk gracefully back, and then, a few moments later, Mr. Russell, tying his robe, would trace the same pathway down the hall and back as she had.

As far as I was concerned, along with the Parson's house, next door, which had stone turrets and looked like a castle, the Russells was the closest thing to a mansion that I had ever seen. One day, as I watched, a great number of trucks pulled up to the front of the house, brought out huge bunches of flowers in the garden, in time for a large party which turned out to be a wedding, which we children watched from across the street. Then, at the end of the day, the trucks came and took the flowers out of the garden and took it all away.

It took courage to trespass on the Russell's property, but this forbidden majestic place was the perfect adventure for me. This was where I took myself the day I decided to run away forever, and find peace and beauty in a fairy tale world.

What a splendid afternoon that was. I must have been about eight years old. I made my way down to the foot of the hill where I found a beautiful old oak tree leaning over a lovely little brook. Wrapped in my princess atire, I managed to climb the tree with my fairy-tale book.There in the dappeled sunlight, ensconced on the solid bow of the tree, I read and watched the water spiders on the surface tension of the water. Finished my story, I climbed down and decided to investigate just what it was that was holding up these tiny spiders. As I took off my shoes and stepped into the tiny stream, the spiders skimmed away. I decided to investigate exactly where this lttle meandering stream led. In fact, I wondered where it actually began. As I followed the ankle deep water around each curve, shrouded in flowering bushes, I finally came to what I was seeking. There, as I pulled aside the honeysuckle bush, bubbling up out of the ground I had found the spring, the source of the water.

I stayed there a long, long time, lost in the wonder and beauty of my discovery. It seemed like Heaven on earth. But finally it was time to go home. I came back to the house with my suitcase, hoping that my parents would be worried about me. As I approached the house I could hear that they were in the living room. There was laughter coming from the open window beside the driveway at the side of the house where my father's Vauxhall car was parked. They appeared to have guests. I got into the car, and listened as hard as I could to hear any mention of my name. Nothing. They did not even seem to have noticed my absence! I stayed in the car, waiting, until eleven o'clock at night. Finally I slunk back inside the house, unnoticed and went quietly to bed. Nothing was ever said.