Sunday, July 28, 1996 - North Shore News - Special Supplement - 33

OVN AS

lycove unmaske

Tiddlycove lifestyle
like? Well, my wife
told me this:

One early morning recent-
ly when she was taking our
dogs for a walk in Lighthouse
" - Park, a man approached her.
Tn lesser places, in lesser
.” parks, that might-be cause for
apprehension. But not ‘in
_ Tiddlycove. ;

_ The man, who had adog of .
os his own, spoke warmly about |.

-our undistinguished mutts.
“Then he produced some pieces

' of cheese. My wife noted that
- they. were exquisitely cut. He
- gave the cheese to our beasts,
assuring a lifelong b bond with
them. ~'

That-is the. kind of en- .
te counter we expect in our area

and indeed; throughout
Greater Tiddlycove, as i dryly
(in spite of the rising ‘damp of

* our. climate), call West
, Vancouver,

‘The man vas, by the way, “

“ethnically Japanese, my wile

“thought. This is notable sim-.

2 ply because the western part, of

Tiddlycove

West Vancouver is —~ another
dry statement I sometimes
make — approximately 118%
white.

Not true, of course. Indeed
my sense is that the residents
Tiddlycove, virtually all of
them as well-educated and
well-mannered as they are
well-incomed, are friendly
toward everyone and utterly
color-blind.
In fact I happen to think
they are the salt of the earth.
Of course I don’t know all
of them. But ! know of no
exceptions in our own neigh-
borhood, especially the moms
and dads whose children
attend cosy little
(about 65 pupils)
Eagle Harbor
School.
That, admitted-
ly, is a bit off-
Tiddlycove, the way
some. theatres are
off-Broadway, But
no one could define
with
much precision. Itis
vaguely around ~

- Caulfeild Cove, and

its only claim to a

" commercial centre is the few

stores and offices across from
the firehall.
«Some would say Tiddly-

. cove is simply a state of mind
— the mind of great cartoon-

ist Len Norris, who immortal-

‘ized the area with his depiction
- of its harmlessly snobbish and
“gently eccentric characters, its

gravity-defying homes clutch-
ing the mountain slopes, its
tree street names, and its
beloved PGE (now. BCR) rail-

way line snaking through the .
area and often right through
the said homes, its trains
grandly ignored by the tea-sip-
ping dwellers as they toctled
between the living and dining
roums.

Tiddlycove isa place where
you can easily become lost in
the leaves and trees, not a
right-angled block or “regular
lot in the whole area, and thus
peculiarly able to be neighbor-
ly yet without any immediate
sense of having neighbors in
the way that conventionally
Jaid-out Ambleside and much
of Dundarave have.

Thus | feel reai warmth and

friendliness toward my excel-
lent neighbors like Morgan
and Rose, Cecil and Iris, Alex
and Barb, Bill! and Jill — with-
out actually seeing much of
them:

In fact our house is so full
of toys, to say nothing of my
own chaotic books and papers,
that we haven’t had any neigh-
bors. in. for . several ‘years,
Which, on my part at least,
doesn’t diminish my affection

‘for them. We must have a

clean-up some day, as I tell my
wife, without volunteering any
labor myself.

This is a grand neighbor-
hood. At either end of the
“block” we can get down to
the water in five minutes. The
little beach at one end is
delightful, often people-less,
and our children (ages 11, 7,
and 6) love to splash around
unimpeded on warmer days.

The aforementioned
school and recreation centre
(the latter destined to be
replaced with a much bigger
one near Horseshoe Bay) are
60 seconds away by car. So ate
some tolerably wealthy neigh-

‘bors: _ super-lawyer
John Laxron and
Canucks hockey mogul
Arthur Griffiths. /

A.J. Taylor, who man-
aged the Guinness
development _ before
the war and for! whom
Taylor Way is named,

chose to build his estate’

a couple of. apple-
throw’s away, his house
off Marine (Drive so
hidden that many

neighbors must know’

neither of it nor of him and his
place in local history.
But of course there are

many poor folk, like me, in the . :

area too. The homes and the
lives are mostly human-scale
around Eagle Harbor - thank-

fully, the monstez-house phe-
nomenon. hasn’t spread
through the area like an archi-
“tectural bubonic plague.

Sadly, the fine old Ingledew,

See Far Out page 34

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Ofstributed by:

_ Ate — see |