The House of All Sorts could not have been quite itself in any other spot in the world than just where it stood, here, in Victoria, across James’ Bay and right next to Beacon Hill Park. The house was built on part of the original property my father had chosen when he came to the new world and settled down to raise his family. This lot was my share of the old cow pasture.
Father’s acreage had long ago been cut into city lots. Three houses had been built in the cow yard, more in the garden and others in the lily field. The old house in which I was born was half a block away; one of my sisters still lived in it, and another in her little schoolhouse built in what had once been the family vegetable garden.
Bothers cannot be escaped by property owners and builders of houses. I got my share from the very digging of the hole for the foundation of the House of All Sorts. But the foundations of my house were not entirely of brick and cement.
Underneath lay something too deep to be uprooted when they dug for the basement. The builders did not even know it was there, did not see it when they spread the cement floor. It was in my memory as much as it was in the soil.
No house could sit it down, no house blind what my memory saw–a cow, an old white horse, three little girls in pinafores, their arms full of dolls and Canton-flannel rabbits made and stuffed with bran by an aunt, three little girls running across the pasture to play “ladies” in the shrubberies that were screened from Simcoe Street by Father’s hawthorn hedge, a hedge now grown into tall trees, flowering in the month of May.
I remembered how I had poked through the then young bushes to hang over those old rotted pickets, now removed to permit the dumping of the lumber for my house. I remembered how I had said to Bigger and Middle, “Listen, girls, see if you can tell what sort of person is coming up the street by the kind of tune I blow,” and I put the harmonica to my lips and puffed my cheeks. But a gentle little old lady passed, so I played very softly. She stopped and smiled over the fence at the three of us, and at the dolls and foolish, lop-eared, button-eyed rabbits.
“Eh, dearies, but how you are happy playing ladies in this sweetie wee grove!”
And now my house was built in the “sweetie wee grove,” and I was not playing “lady,” but was an actual landlady with tenants, not dollies, to discipline. And tenants’ pianos and gramophones were torturing my ears, as my harmonica had tortured the ears of Bigger and Middle. The little old lady had made the long pause-she would not come that way again.
Ah! little old lady, you, like cow, horse, dolls and rabbits, contributed a foundation memory to the House of All Sorts.
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