That’s Alderney reunion, please — not Elderly
The kids (now adults) of the families who settled Alderney Avenue, punching the East Mountain open to the south in the 1950s, can rhyme off each others’ names like they came over on the Mayflower.
The Dormans. The Gregorys, Lamberts and Shieldses, too. Others as well. And they were there on Saturday, Aug. 11, or at least parts of those families.
The ones who didn’t make the reunion seemed almost an equally real presence with the ones who did, as though the past were, as yet, still quite unfinished, and bits of it had come seeping out of the photographs, glossy black and whites, displayed on the condiment table. There they were, the photographs, mingled in among the mustards and finger foods, crudites, crackers, cheeses and spread, and the bottles of wine, in Bryan Shields’s backyard (where the reunion was held) — refreshments, to stimulate both the mouth and the memory.
The Alderney Avenue gang. Their street, carved out of the now superseded farmland and wilderness of the East Mountain between Fennell and Mohawk, Upper Wellington and Upper Wentworth, represented something special. In some ways it encapsulated the Baby Boom. Brand new in 1954-55, with families moving in before the sod had been laid in their yards, it was the axis of a neighbourhood that Mountain families eagerly moved to, it being the next stage, custom-built houses, after the postwar subsidized homes. Alderney’s were houses that families could afford, without assistance. And though Alderney was/is not large, it was soon booming with about 60 kids, more coming, who were tight as thieves, many of whom have kept in touch.
People like the Lamberts. “Don’t call us the Elderly Avenue reunion,” joked Betty Lambert, there with sister Linda, and brothers Roger and David.
Glenda Gregory (now Suggitt): “There were farm fields all around, and when we got home from school, someone would come out with a ball and everyone all of a sudden was outside playing.”
They wouldn’t come in, until the street lights came on and their parents called and even then, said one reunion attendee, “The call would come back — what’s for supper?” as though their return depended on the answer. There was such promise and pressure of growth in the area at the time that the city built Hill Park Secondary School, the oldest high school on the Mountain and a mere ping-pong shot away from Alderney. You can almost see it from Bryan Shields’ backyard.
“I remember burying a dinky toy in the front of Hill Park (when it was being built),” said Mike Dorman. “It probably came out when the bulldozer levelled it all.” Hill Park was closed in 2014.
Bryan Shields, who jockeyed the barbecue to a perfect equilibrium of grilled excellence, smilingly counselled me not to believe a word I would hear. I took everything with a little salt — both the burger and the banter — but there wasn’t a false note struck or a wrong foot put. Even the exaggerations rang with a wonderful truth. The cohesion I felt over the course of the afternoon was, I imagine, made of much the same stuff that held these people together as children.
People like Michael Brown and Mary Jane Brown, John Gale, Wayne Lannigan, Glenda Gregory and on shared with me such fond reminiscences — getting paddled for robbing vegetables from a neighbour’s garden at night; exploring Forest 1 and Forest 2 (there were woods all around); picking wild strawberries out by the horses on Mohawk; bicycling out to Mount Albion; playing Relievio; the years of the “great fog” (“you basically couldn’t see your hand in front of your face”); bumper surfing on cars.
One of the highlights was Bryan’s dad’s home movies, some of the best vintage footage, set to music, of a backyard frozen shinny rink you could ever imagine. Classic Canadiana. Classic Alderney Avenue.
“The street seems smaller now,” said Daniela Rakoczy Burgess. But the trees are all bigger. The beautiful maple in Bryan Shields’ backyard was a mere sapling in one of the photos. (Bryan bought out his siblings several years ago and moved in to his parents’ house, the one he grew up in.) On Saturday, the tree provided a majestic canopy, and in its leafy branches and boughs the laughter of the same people, six decades apart, seemed to mingle like a fragrance trapped in one’s hair. Everything, it seems, has changed and yet nothing has.
When I left, of a magical hour on that late afternoon, the party was still roaring. Their mothers and fathers weren’t around to call them in once the street lights came on but if you imagined really hard you might’ve heard those admonishing parental voices still echoing in the air some 60 years later, perhaps betraying a tone of impatience; those 1950s buckaroos and buckarettes seemed never to want their days to end. They still don’t. And who can blame them? Next year, I expect a re-vite. Here’s to you, Alderney Avenue.