Our father was born the same year that our future family home was built, in 1925. He and his parents lived about a mile north of Windsor Place in the Fairmount District. From there he would ride his bicycle or be driven to Lily B. Clayton Elementary School, which is still standing today; it would educate the four of us children decades later. The school is located in the neighborhood known as Berkeley Place. Berkeley adjoins Fairmount to the south, and it is where we grew up in the years 1957 to 1969. Had our father, as a child, ridden a few more blocks past the school, he would have seen the great house where he was to live as a young doctor and father, on Windsor Place, in the heart of Berkeley Place, a place within a place.
Windsor and Berkeley are not the only English-named streets in our neighborhood. The developer, in the 1920s, either was from England or had fallen in love with the country or, perhaps, with someone from there. Windsor Place is surrounded by other English names. Hawthorne, Huntington, Wilshire, Glenco, Pembroke, Dartmoor, and Chatburn are the streets of Berkeley Place; all were named after English towns or villages. Examples of English architecture are found on every street. The houses are stately and reserved manors, or would be, had they been built on English country fields or hillocks centuries ago. Grand old trees line and shade the streets and old lampposts light the sidewalks. Queen Anne-styled homes, with the flat box-like elevations and many-windowed floors, were built there a hundred years ago. Georgian-style houses, modeled on the Greek, can also be seen with their great columns beneath the porticoes at the entrances. Many are Tudor-styled, some miniature castles themselves, and can be identified by the high gabled roofs, arches, and tall towers and chimneys. It is enchanting to pass by so many large edifices, each deserving its own estate, instead neatly lined up in rows along the quiet leafy streets.
Our house on Windsor Place was Tudor, with a gabled roof on the second and third floors, a large facing to the front, and a small covered porch next to the front door. Once inside the Sewell household you are standing in a small foyer with a coat closet, a bureau and mirror. To the right is the kitchen and dining area, leading to the back door; ahead lay the dreaded stairs to the second floor and the bedrooms; to the left is the living room, dominated by a piano, and then on to the family room and the French doors to the outside and the back yard. Honeysuckle and mulberry bushes lined the fence; a plum tree bore fruit in the summer, and a large pecan tree dropped its shells in the winter.
The four of us, two brothers in between two sisters, were all born at Harris Hospital, near downtown. My younger brother and sister know Windsor Place as their first home, but my older sister and I were brought from the hospital to another house across town, though we were too young to remember it. We walked to school every day from Windsor Place, past our friends’ houses, the few blocks to Lily B. Clayton Elementary. Meeting up with other Berkeley Place kids at school revealed secret and faster ways to get home, cutting through yards and alleys, hopping fences. The streets between the school and our home seemed like neighboring kingdoms. Strange castles and palaces stood side by side wherever we looked. The lords and ladies of those mansions, I’m sure now, were less than thrilled to see us vaulting their gates and disappearing into their hedges. Though we were never caught, once home, we were not immune to finding our own trouble, of course. Just by doing the math, the factorial
Children! = sister1 x brother1 x brother2 x sister2
leads to disasters large and small. Impromptu haircuts, incidents involving paint or lighter fluid, fights, accidental torture of the cat- all resulted in the same punishment: banishment to the stairs. It was typical for there to be at least one monster-child sitting on the stairs silently crying, head in hands, and looking totally hang-dog. Time-outs in our rooms were not an option. Being confined to the stairs placed us safely within view during the time-out and reminded the others that they too might be next. For this reason, the four of us, each grown child, even with children of our own, live in one-story houses.
We were a medical family, a surgical family, forever and amen. Our father was our Doctor and Surgeon; our mother was his Surgical Assistant and our Nurse. They met over an anesthetized body during his residency at the hospital where she worked in the surgery. It was love at first sight, surely.
Therefore, we children never went to the hospital to get patched up, not for some gash or sickly disease, not ever. Our hospital and emergency room were at home, on Windsor Place. Our parents usually had, on any given day, at least one little patient healing from some accident or infection. We did accompany our father sometimes on his nightly rounds to the hospitals when our mother, for one reason or another, needed us to be out of the house. In those days that meant wheelchair races and we rated the hospitals by their hallways. We had mastered the art of racing by whisper; total silence was impossible, but silencing the occasional victory shout was also impossible. The favorite race course was the Catholic hospital. At the end of each hallway stood a full-color, larger than life ceramic Saint or Angel. The winner was the first one to rush to the statue, touch the hem of the garment, and make it back to the nurses’ station before the others. If there were people in the rooms we sped past, maybe they kept score- we never knew. It also meant that, instead of seeing human suffering, we were gathered up for a while near the doctors’ exit and taken to get ice cream on the way home.
Often, our father would be called away after supper for some emergency at someone’s home, a house call, or one at a hospital. Our mother saw that we were bathed and ready for bed; she led our bedside prayers and read sleepy stories to the youngest children. Once in a while he would return, in the middle of the night, holding some sweet treat a patient had given him for us. We were never more than half-awake during these moments, but we all remember the sugar cane, freshly chopped and husked, melting away in our mouths, and on our pillows, into our dreams.
Windsor Place is only one of a few cross-streets between two larger arteries of traffic, Forest Park Boulevard and Eighth Avenue, so we did have to watch for cars. Forest Park Boulevard is a busy road, dividing the Park itself from our streets. A small grocery was on the other side, where we got our candy and drinks and bubblegum cigarettes. A tall man in an apron, Mr. Tillery, I supposed -the place was called Tillery’s Grocery- stood behind the counter every day waiting to take our dimes and nickels. Mr. Tillery had the softest hands in the world. I could feel them when I handed him my money and when he gave back my change. His eyes were soft too, and so was his smile, or maybe sad. I was too little to know the difference then. At ten years old I only knew if someone was nice or mean, but I know the difference now. His eyes were kind, his smile was kind, and his hands were the softest in the world.
Beyond the road were the perfect wonders of childhood: The Zoo and the carnival rides, the baseball fields for the little leagues, and the Trinity River and the paddleboats. And beyond that was the-little-train-that-goes-five-miles, a miniature-scale steam engine with a grown up conductor and little cars filled with hooting kids and smiling parents, following the river through the park to the duck pond where it turned in a wide loop and headed back to the Zoo.
The other end of Windsor Place was another matter, though. Our street stopped at the railroad tracks and Eighth Avenue. This road was for grown-ups. We only saw it from the car windows on our way to the dentist or the eye doctor, or when our Mother decided it was time to go downtown to shop for new school clothes. There was no walking along Eighth Avenue for us, ever. It was mostly car lots, with used cars for sale, and car repair garages; oily, dirty men worked on oily, dirty cars while others stood around smoking. It smelled of danger and gasoline. The train tracks followed alongside Eighth Avenue but curved away to somewhere we never saw.
Park Place, the boundary between the Fairmount and Berkeley neighborhoods, was another cross-street between Forest Park and Eighth Avenue. Lily B. Clayton Elementary, our father’s and our own first school, still stands there. Park Place also ends at Eighth Avenue; that’s where the drugstore and the Parkway movie theater were at the time. This is the only place where we were allowed to cross Eighth Avenue and the railroad tracks, and never alone. The fountain at the drugstore had real milkshakes and cherry cokes for a dime; across the street at the Parkway, it cost a quarter to see Godzilla, and a nickel for the popcorn. After the movie was over, we’d say good-bye to any friends we’d met there, find our bikes where we left them and head for home. It was just a few blocks up Eighth to get to our street from Park Place, but that was forbidden. In a couple of minutes, we would be charging through the familiar streets, coasting down Windsor Place, leaving the bikes in the back yard, just in time to wash our faces and hands before supper.
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