ON THE TIMES Victoria Daily Times
TUESDAY, AUG. 2, 1960
Column by Art Stott
The little green Cliffside store and post office is closing. Soon, they tell me, the
building itself will be torn down.
It isn't surprising that no one is willing to take on the store and post office —a small
and gallant anachronism and not too sturdy a one at that. The wonder is that it carried on so long. Perhaps, when it was conceived, the Cliffside store and PO on the east road beside Shawnigan Lake had some modest economic promise. It clung precariously to the roadway, on the brink of a small ravine. Behind it and north stretched a farm.
The store provided an outlet for some of the seasonal produce for summer residents and canned goods for the year-round folk. But the take couldn't have been anything other than meagre.
The Kinlocks ran it a little over a quarter-century ago. Then it was operated by the Kinlock daughter, Mollie, and her husband, John. Later came the Vaulkhards and a succession of tenants.
Pickings were lean at best. Yet even so they invited break-ins. A couple of burglaries in the last few weeks convinced the most recent occupant the game wasn't worth the effort. Somehow it always seemed to me that anyone who broke into the store was mean enough to rob a church's poorbox. There are such people and they invite a contempt flavored with pity.
The demise of the small store isn't going to cause a ripple in the Canadian business sea. The place will scarcely he missed by anyone but a few of us who have lingering and happy memories, by a handful of youngsters and by lake people who enjoyed its convenient location. We didn’t think enough of those memories or the convenience to give the place the patronage it needed. I wish we had.
In earlier days you waited on the porch of the little store for the proprietor to make his arduous way down from the E & N station far up the hillside with the day's mail.
You sent the kids there, when they were old enough, to pick up milk richer than the authorities allowed. You stumbled into its shady single room to buy a bottle of Whistle, which had replaced Orangeade and later gave way to the crushes and lime drinks.
You might have played your way to exhaustion on the clay tennis court a former operator had built 100 yards away, craving a drink and gulping it as you sat on the plank bench outside.
You rested and you examined the names Cliffside summer kids had scratched on the signs advertising soft drinks and tobacco. There you saw the brief evidence of young summer romance, a formal heart enclosing coupled initials.
You looked in later years and wondered where the youngsters had gone—some to the army, some to the navy, some to the air force, some never to return to Cliffside where life had been good. You tried to recollect what had happened to the girls, recalling a number now matrons—far removed from the skinny, brown-legged and freckled playmates of a simpler Shawnigan era.
You remembered children, gravely choosing cent candies from a meagre stock inside, and a store man attending to their wants with equal gravity.
Maybe you recalled letters received In distant parts of the world, hand-stamped “Cliffside” and carrying with them some essence of the hot summer day on which they were written, some imprint of a warm hand that had carried them along the trail, down the road to the store.
You remembered directions given to friends who were to motor up for a day's visit. “Just keep on the Cutoff until you come to the lake, then follow it. If you go too far you'll see the Cliffside store, a little green building on the left. Back about 200 yards our road cuts in.” '
The car and the outboard probably spelled the doom of Cliffside Store and PO years ago. When the kids who used to pack a shopping basket to get the milk, mail and a few odds and ends started to hop into the boat or the car to run up to the village, there wasn't much call for the way station.
In a while the blackberries someone planted and was unable to control will cover
the site of the little building. But in mind's eye it will remain, like the footprints of little children planted in the dust of the old dirt road and the shoulder of the Cutoff where the tar didn't reach.
Yorumlar