Beckley Street

The movers were finished and gone, the door of the dishevelled cottage was shut, the mess and uprooting of the move was all about me. For a month I had toiled without help, cleaning and sorting, picking over, selling, condemning as garbage. I sold my four suite apartment house. The buyer wanted possession immediately. I said, “I will put every effort into leaving my old place nice.” The cottage I was moving into I was renting. I could settle at my leisure.  Here I was, in , but too dog-tired to move a finger. sitting on a wooden stool just inside the cottage door, crying timidly, crying for very tiredness. Here the good angel Willie found me and was as stunned by embarrassment as I was shamed by my tears. 

“Seems to be you need some help,” said willie, eyeing the mountains of muddle. He head wonderful furniture power and begin pushing into place, lighting fires, hanging picture, assembling head, foot, sides and mattress of my bed, calming the monkey, hushing the dog and teasing me into smiles. Willie the good, always out to help lame dogs over styles. 

There is in most some a joyousness that bubbles up from her depths when she starts setting up a home. It is a trait that belongs to the feminine, be it broody hen, mother cat or a human lady. It is the innate love for fixing herself a nest. Sometimes when I remember all the crude deplorable camps I have coaxed not only into livableness, but into lovableness as well, then I surely know that I am a woman, a homemaker. It was born in me.

Beckley Street lay in a working man’s district. My sister Bigger was shocked that I should go there to live. “It’s  not the Carr’s environment and setting,” said Bigger and pursed her lips in disapproval. 

Middle shrugged. “It is certainly not the district I would choose. I suppose it is quite respectful and your own business, but it is not what Carrs are used to 

First and foremost, the old fashioned college had high windows and plenty of light which was essential for my paining. That to my sisters was of minor importance. They did not recognize painting was my very life. 

Beckley Street was only only block long and blind at both ends., yet soon I had more friends up and down Beckley Street than I had al round the four sides of the block on Simcoe Street. They were simple people, many of them on relief. As artist, I was an enigma to them. If they came to see me they kept their eyes averted from the walls in disapproval. I entertained them anywhere in the house rather than in my studio, so as to save them and me embarrassment. 

It was the same when my sisters came to see me. They always made me feel as if my painting was indecent. It was not, unless you call the endeavour to bore into the heart of a nature, or trying to probe instead of being satisfied with skin-deep surface, indecent. 

The children of Beckley Street amused me immensely Their game were largely self-invented. I watched their play from behind my curtains. I did not want to spoil their delightful un-self-consciousness. Our houses had narrow strips of gardens between them. The family on one side of me had one little girl and several big brothers. The family on the other side had two small girls. 

The three little girls plan together on a strip of green on one side of me, or in a planked back yard on the other, according to the type of game they were playing. Sometimes they staged entertainment where each child did part of the programme, one a dance, one a song. Other times they played “costumers,” A pile of miscellaneous rages were heaped in a corner. The purchasing lady was loaded with rags: head, shoulders, waist and always a train dragging behind. 

Sometimes there were two purchasers to one seller, sometimes to sellers to one purchaser. The seller, after draping the rages on the purchaser, would stand back, wring her hands and roll her eyes exclaiming, “So becoming, Madame, so tremendously becoming! But let me show you this mantel Madame, just the thing for the Opera!

One day I was working in my garden when a small voice piped across the fence. 

“Any milk today, Mum?” We have a cow farm now.”

“Half a pint of milk and a quart of rich cream,” I ordered. 

“I’ll tell the milk milkmaid.” And, turning to the small girl sitting on the back doorstep, she shouted, “Jane, milk the best cow, at once.”

“Which is the best?”

“Cream cow, the Jersey of course, top step.”

Jane came with a beer bottle filled with water and a tomato can. She sat on the top step and slowly poured from the bottle into the can, drop by drop.

“Is the top cow the cream cow, too, Ma’am?”

“Of course, stupid. Every step is a cow, Of course, the top step is the cream cow.”

I discovered each step represented a higher grade cow; the higher the step, the better the grade.

There were boating parties too on the vacant lot opposite my home. Little girls in apple boxes with regiments of dolls tucked in between them would row furiously. The boats did a lot of tipping but made no progress. Finally, they turned them over and their were cries of, “Help! I drown. I drown!” The lady and her children were rescued  from the parched grass billows, the doll rubbed down and given imaginary hot drinks from old cans salvaged from the rubbish dumps. I could work myself into a keen as rescuer as any just from watching from my window. 

I was very happy in Beckley Street.

There was an old German woman aged ninety-five, living in Beckley Street. In spite of the creak and groaning of her years, she was wonderfully spry. She was poor but not eligible for city relief, though she had done some charring in Victoria ever since she was a young women. Because her husband had never taken out naturalization papers, now she was not eligible. He had been dead many years. Her family had married poor men and drifted away to the States, all but one daughter who was on relief.

The old woman held a reception in her cottage on her birthday. She notified all her former char clients of the approaching date afresh each year, and they came and stocked her cupboards well. Some benevolent  society or other made her a very small allowance. She owned her cottge and was excused taxes by the City. She chopped her own wood and grew her own potatoes. If you took her anything she always paid it back. The next day, along would come a grandchild with a monster potatoes of her own growing, or an apron made with her bony fingers, cut from impossible patterns and stitches that were so they caught on everything.

On her ninety-sixth birthday, a young reporter hunting copy. She was out painting her fence. while here daughters that had come from the States to celebrate with her stood by watching. 

“Ugh,” said the woman, addressing the reporter and waving in the direction of her daughters. “Ach! girls of now time dey aint no good for strong! Me, I paint my fence an’me ninety-six. Them girls is only seventy-two an’ seventy-five, dey most tired to put eats in day’s moufs.”

The last time I went to see here I thought Grannie would not paint fences much longer.

“I don’t know what the matter of me. Befor’ I scrup ceiling every years, this year no, climb so…” Like a shot she had mounted her trembling old self into a chair. “Me go so,” she swong her arms as if scratching above her head. “Round, round, round, he all go black for me. I don’ know what matter with me. 

Some charitable busy bodies insisted that she be taken to hospital. Away from the seclusion of her own cottage, the hospital ward sent her frantic. She made such a commotion they had to bring her home to dies.

The last year I was in Beckley Street, the ramshackle duplex opposite my cottage, where the drains were always being torn up and the tenants moved out every few months, housed a family on relief. The husband was a ne’er do well, the wife a disheartened women with one toddling child. What did they do but go and have twins! With nothing to clothe even one babe in. 

The Beckley Street ladies assembled in my cottage. We made a social sewing bee of it, equipping the twins from the toes up; ran up two layette, while drinking tea. All the ladies n Beckley Street that I knew came. It was my farewell to them; the cottage had been sold. I was moving. 

Good-bye Beckley Street. I loved you and am glad I lived in and was taught by you.