Our family home was on the Belt Line Railway Tracks. This line was so called because it circled Toronto like a belt. In the ’40s, the train came by twice a day, carrying Lake Simcoe ice and coal to the storage elevators on Mount Pleasant Avenue, back and forth, or, rather, forth and back.
It was my world as a young naturalist. I would just climb over our back fence, jump the creek then head off into my natural world of the ravine. The creek was a tributary of the Don River and so a great funnel for migrating birds in the spring and fall. Now it forms a very well-used public trail which may one day be part of a Robert Bateman Nature Trail network in Toronto.
In the winter, we — my brothers and friends and I — still “hiked down the tracks,” under the old wooden Eglinton Avenue bridge and on to what we called “Twig Pond.” This was a large, flooded area underneath very large willow trees. Naturally, branches and twigs fell into the pond, which froze in winter, and we called it “Twig Rink.” We used the pond for skating but the embedded twigs did not make for very clear skating.
Looking out our front window on Chaplin Crescent, we peered through a small grove of thorn apple trees growing out of our front lawn. Our dad regularly flooded the front lawn for a skating rink. We would zigzag around the trees on skates, often grabbing onto a branch and swinging around. It was not suitable for hockey, but it was fun anyway.
A regular sight looking out of our living room window through the trees in the evening was the Brown’s bread wagon and horse coming back after a day’s deliveries. I did this painting in impressionist style about the same time as the Belt Line piece. Once again I worked directly looking out the window and not from photos or my imagination. In my art, I trust my eyes more than my imagination.
At Christmas time, that window would have a little red wreath with a small red bulb. Each of the five windows at the front of our house were so lit, including my bedroom. Falling asleep on Christmas Eve to its red glow is my most cosy Christmas childhood memory.
Art museum open throughout the holidays
The works on this page, done by Robert Bateman a half-century ago, are from the Robert Bateman Centre. The centre, in the historic Steamship Building on the Inner Harbour, is a public art museum housing more than 100 works spanning seven decades of Bateman’s career. Supported by the Bateman Foundation, the centre is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through the holidays, except for Boxing Day, when it will be open from noon to 5 p.m., and Christmas and New Year’s Day, when it will be closed. More information is at www.batemancentre.org.
