Growing Up In Roseland

"The problem when you write about a place in which you lived for some time is that it is almost impossible to differentiate place from personal experience. So, my ‘memories of Roseland’ will be both.

Roseland for me always had fairly distinct boundaries; Lakeshore Rd. on the south, Guelph line on the west, Hampton Heath and Roseland Crescent/Rossmore on the east and New street to the north. This was the stalking ground of my childhood and youth. And even within this relatively limited acreage – less that ½ a mile square, my over-riding impression of the neighbourhood was the sense of space; space that you filled with your energy and your imagination in any and all ways. There were the corn roasts, summer fairs and Victoria Day celebrations at the Roseland Club, tennis games and round robins on asphalt courts lasting all day, bike tag through every property and short-cut that was in the way, tobogganing in Gordon’s Woods, spear-fishing for Carp and net fishing (with illegal lights) for smelts, endless games of tag or touch football or baseball (using hardballs of course), sleep-overs in back yards during the summer with knick-knock played at 3:00 in the morning, gunfights, beau geste moments, home made hockey rinks in winter, swimming pools and the Lake in summer and the endless play of youth.

Except for the throaty blast of ship’s fog horns from the Lake and whistle blasts from CN/CP trains during the night, Roseland was generally a quiet place. How much of that was a function of the time in which I grew up and how much the natural rhythm of the place is hard to tell. But there was always time to think and solitude, if one wished it, in which to do so. Oh, and there were smells; the waft of leaves burning at the curb in the Fall (still one of my favourites), the aroma of stewed tomatoes coming from the Aylmer plant off Lakeshore and Brant, the pungent odour of sheep manure applied to nearby farms and market gardens, the gunpowder tang of canon crackers on the May Day long weekend (and several weeks prior) and the occasional sting of an inadvertent ammonia release from Columbia Carbon on the Bay. Combine these with the aromas of much home baking, fresh-cut grass and earth and you have a sensory pastiche of my childhood.

Life was much different then. The natural inclination is to believe that it was much slower, more relaxed, freer and richer in some fashion. It’s difficult to judge but things were definitely different. We read copiously – books, comic books and magazines – and traded our material freely. For adults, there was the Roseland Club Book Club with a generous list each year of significant fiction and non-fiction both. I can still remember my mother, who ran the book club for a time, complaining that a particular lady with a boyish nickname living on Balmoral was always late in passing on the books to the next reader. We roamed the neighbourhood freely and without many of the restrictions that are unfortunately necessary today. Halloween, for example, was a night of incredible magic with long, unsupervised excursions, home-made candy apples and treats for closest friends and parties at the close of the evening. We swam in the Lake in all types of conditions, riding the swells and back flows coming from large retaining walls. We explored the caves and crevices made in an eroding shoreline never thinking of the danger involved or that there was any such thing as ‘private property’. We watched TV but that was generally a Saturday morning or before bedtime activity and it tended to be a family event. Perhaps life was simpler because there simply weren’t as many pastime options; perhaps, it was richer because we had to put more effort into the process.

There was also a sense of proportion and balance – everything seemed to fit; The large Tudor and Estate homes on Rossmore, the small cottages with interesting breezeways, the large ranch styles, the comfortable two storey bricks of Balmoral, the imposing Carter home at the end of Hart, the Valance compound on Lakeshore, or the Maws Estate occupying most of the Hart, Lakeshore, Guelph Line, First Street square. It all seemed to belong together with a comfortable and easy grace. Gardens abounded and there was considerable pride taken in well landscaped homes – most done by the owners (with the exception of the Maws who had a gardener actually living on their estate). People loved their homes and they were family places overall. From my recollection, there were none that were ill-kept or falling into disrepair and this was not the product of wealth but rather a sense of appropriate care and community.

Indeed, there was great wealth in Roseland but there were also families of modest means and single parents- working mothers at a time when it was quite unusual. The image of Roseland as a uniform, monied social block is simplistic and completely in error. The wealth was deep and old and the families possessing it, by and large, knew how to deal with their status; quietly and without obvious pretension. Shows of flashy affluence were considered distasteful and unnecessary. This is not to say that there weren’t jealousies, rumour mills and petty rivalries but they seemed to be subordinated to a sense of community and fundamental respect. It was a very special neighbourhood; one with a founding place in the City and region’s history; a unique place to grow as a child, thrive as a youth and a comforting place to leave when the time came.