Memories of a Childhood Arcadia
For two four-year-old Ontario boys growing up in the 1950s, a backyard creek became the site of unforgettable adventures.
One sweet aspect of childhood, very much taken for granted by those enjoying it, is that your best friend often is that child of similar age who just happens to live on your block—the first person you bumped into around your third birthday, when you were first becoming aware of the outer world beyond your home. For me, that friend was Beezer. On weekdays, when my older brothers were all at school, he became my constant companion.
His people lived across the road on Connington Street, in the London, Ontario neighbourhood known as “Old South.” We’d get our adventures underway by about nine o’clock, when one of us would run over to the other’s house just as breakfast was being finished up, and called out from the street. I guess we thought that only adults were qualified to knock or ring doorbells.
(This was shortly after the Second World War, when children roamed about in this sort of way. These days, “play dates” are carefully arranged by parents over the phone, and a small child seen running down the street on his own attracts police attention—and perhaps even a visit from family services.)
“Oh, Dave,” or “Oh, Steve,” we’d call in a singsong voice just outside our best friend’s kitchen door. (“Beezer” wasn’t Dave’s real name, though “Steve” was mine. I got nicknamed “Herman” about four years later, and it stuck for the rest of my life.) The last spoons of cereal would be quickly lapped up from a melmac dish, and we’d set forth on a glorious morning of mucking about.
Amidst the dozens of games we’d concoct, an early one I remember was turning the handlebars around on our tricycles so that the round chrome curve swivelled against our stomachs like a horizontal steering wheel as we pedalled along. This simple adjustment was all it took to convert our trikes into buses, and we would zip up and down the sidewalk, stopping at designated fire hydrants and utility poles, making tissshhhh noises in emulation of air brakes as we picked up our (mostly) imaginary riders.
Beezer’s family seemed to be a little richer than ours (maybe because they had three children to our four), and their house was a little swisher. This meant that on those rare inclement days when playing outside wasn’t a possibility, we’d end up at our place, where my mother’s tolerance for noise and debris was the envy of other neighbourhood children.
But so long as there wasn’t a blizzard or truly torrential rain, we usually headed down to the wooded hollow at the bottom of our backyard, where a small creek emerged from a culvert, burbled along over the length of the property, and then found its way back underground through a barred grate. If a committee of four-year-old boys had been given the assignment of designing the Garden of Eden, that ribbon of wild land would’ve been what they’d come up with.
Racing homemade and store-bought ships on days when the creek was high, contriving lookout points in the trees and tamping down lairs in the underbrush, picking bouquets of wildflowers that would wilt before we got them home to our moms, twisting a handful of hanging willow fronds into an emulation of a Tarzan vine and swinging out over the creek—we learned a lot of useful life skills down there. If you wanted to stay on your mother’s good side, for instance, you didn’t tell her about squeezing in through the barred grate of that drain, through which the creek cascaded into a dark and acoustically resonant concrete tunnel that flowed on toward Ontario’s own Thames River, just behind Labatt’s Brewery. Like I said, it was a different time.
Even on the driest of days, if it was just me and Beez, we didn’t go in for any spelunking down there. You needed the security and extra muscle of older brothers to explore such depths. Instead, we’d just stand on the uppermost concrete ledge that sat just beyond the grate and yodel into the depths.
Though Beezer was about five months older than me, he had to tuck down most afternoons for an hour’s nap. This was a form of torture that my mother never went in for, shrewdly understanding that wiped-out boys who’ve been running around all day will be less disputatious about going to bed at night (thus netting her an earlier start to her evening parenting break). Yet, nap-time notwithstanding, Beezer was the alpha male of our duo. I may have been taller, but he was physically stronger. And being that much richer, he had neater stuff, like a push-pedal, one-seater car.
Frankly, you couldn’t do as much with that car as a trike—no travelling off-road over bumpy terrain or inviting friends to hop on the back for a lift. But I madly coveted it nonetheless just because it looked so freaking cool. (It’s a consumer tendency that real car companies exploit when marketing their products to males of all ages.)
He also had some really choice articles of cowboy gear, like a beautifully sculpted and generously brimmed hat with a strap that went under his chin and a leather belt with a tooled design of horseshoes and a big silver buckle. Most stunning of all were his cowboy gloves, which went halfway up to his elbows and had fringes running along the outside from just above the wrist, with decorative metal stars stamped onto the tops.
Naturally enough, we believed those gloves imbued the wearer with extra strength and courage, and upheld this article of faith for a couple of weeks until the day when we were rolling some rocks on the creek’s lower bank, and came upon a writhing nest of snakes. This sent Beezer screaming for higher ground even faster than me. “What gives?” I thought. “He’s got the gloves on. He should be grabbing those snakes and pitching them into the creek.”
It wasn’t too long after this moment of disenchantment that I lost touch with Beezer when our family moved into a cramped apartment on the edge of downtown, where I bedded down each night on a roll-away cot in the dining room. This decampment was necessitated when the sale of our Connington Street house went through five months before we were able to move into a new house on Mountsfield Drive—an interminable-seeming period of exile for a small child. Our new home was just four blocks from Connington Street, but it felt like I was in a whole new—creek-less and Beezer-less—world.
It turned out that Beezer was enrolled in kindergarten at the same school as me—but it took both of us a while to figure this out because he went in the morning and I went in the afternoon. According to the school board’s odd scheme, which must have seemed forward-thinking at the time, it was decided that taller kids should attend class after lunch. An authority figure explained to me that children did most of their growing in the night, and so it was scientifically advisable to let the lankier ones sleep in.
Out for a car ride with Dad in the Spring, I was flipping through the clutter that collected on that dusty, sun-bleached shelf underneath the back window, and found a yellowed, unsealed envelope containing a card decorated with a picture of balloons. I couldn’t read the writing, but wanted some pennies that were taped to the inside of the card.
“Good Lord,” he said when he saw what I was fussing with. It was an invitation to Beezer’s birthday party that he’d received from Beezer’s dad and then forgotten about. My father was a meat salesman for Canada Packers. Beezer’s dad had a similar job at Hayhoe Coffee and Tea. Sometimes they’d run into each other when out making calls.
My small-child brain was thunderstruck to learn that, after almost a year of not seeing one another, Beezer and I still lived in the same multiverse, and that it might even be possible to see him again. Dad got on the phone and arranged for Beezer to come over to our house that Saturday afternoon.
I remember to this day the ecstatic shock that rolled up my spine when Beezer re-entered my life. I was playing with some kids I didn’t know very well in a large sandbox when I heard his sing-song voice calling out my name. Thus began another six years of best friendship. And on this score, kids’ years are like dogs’ years—each being worth seven of the normal variety.
Life doesn’t remain frozen in sepia tones. As grade school wore on, we each started to take on other friends—and discovered that our new friends wouldn’t necessarily get along with the veterans. But we remained each other’s primary mainstay, the easiest guy to hang out with, until our tweens or so; riding our bicycles everywhere, living at Thames Pool all summer long; attending every Tarzan and Hercules movie that the Victoria Theatre screened; saving up a fortune each year from lawn-mowing jobs and cashed-in pop bottles to blow on our grand September excursion to the Western Fair.
When our family moved again—another four blocks, this time to the suburb of Lockwood Park—I fell in with a faster set of kids. Meanwhile, Beezer was getting deep into sports—a world I would never know. We both attended the same high school. But as I’d become an insufferable hippie and Beezer a bit of a jock, we had little to do with one another (though I did write a speech for him when he ran for the presidency of the Boys’ Athletic Association). In our post-high-school years, thankfully, we found a way to shed the clique-ish social exclusivity that marks adolescent life. But by then, real life had begun.
We reconnected in a big way at our 1986 high school reunion and have sought each other out at similar confabs in the years since. An abiding fondness has remained in place, even though many years separate our encounters. On several occasions, we’ve even gotten together just on our own for coffee or lunch— whereupon we’ve brought ourselves up to date with developments in our adult lives before, invariably, winding back the clock and reliving our days in that unforgettable Arcadia on Connington Street.
