Westerland

Most of my childhood was spent in a house a couple of hundred metres from this one.

When we moved into the neighbourhood in the summer of 1954, it was in a new housing subdivision, and this was our closest "original" neighbour. I remember it as an imposing, aristocratic estate, where the grand man who owned the farm behind it lived. I thought of him and his family as royalty, and indeed they sort-of were. The man who owned it by then, the son of the man who'd built it in the 1860s, was made Lieutenant-Governor in 1956, the Queen's very representative. When, decades later, I read about lords of manors, I thought of this man, who let no one cross his fence, but who let his big dogs wander around the whole neighborhood.

I was different from most of his neighbors. I delivered the morning newspaper, a copy of which went to the door between the two gables, and another copy of which went to his hired man, Jim, inside the cow barn fifty metres beyond the house. Thus I got to step inside the big house from time to time, and inside the cow barn every morning, plus to collect my weekly money at Jim's house, an equally old but far less elegant house closer to the cow barn than to the big house.

Over the decades since, I have often walked along the lane it is on (most of which is now just a footpath) and enjoyed the quiet of its well-treed, park-like setting.

Over the decades -- indeed starting before I was born -- the family that owned the farm sold chunks of it for various institutional purposes. The house and the last of the land was sold 25 years or so ago to the University, just across the street. But, a few years ago, the University decided to sell it on to developers. The developers are about to knock down this manor house and replace it with three large apartment buildings.

Oh well. I am old. I'm a dog barking but the trains move on.

I went by today to take some pictures.