Helen Bowes – Sydenham Then and Sydenham Now
Helen Bowes was born in July, 1937, in Kingston, and this month she is celebrating her 90th birthday, not that she has slowed down all that much. She moved to Sydenham as a child and has followed the changes in the village over the years. As she is blessed with both good health and an excellent memory, she remembers quite a bit about what the village was like back when she was young, through WW2 and into the post war years.
She has also kept materials from the past and had put some of her memories down in a journal, which she shared with the news.
I met her at her impeccably clean apartment in early July, just as the summer heat was picking up. She was cool as a cucumber, however, and certainly not overwhelmed about turning 90, although she has been enjoying time with her children and grandchildren, many of whom live relatively close by.
Helen was born two years after a major fire in the village, but there are still dozens of buildings that she remembers from her youth and that she has a family connection to. Her mother’s came from the Woodruff family, who were major figures in the history of the town. Not only was the family the owner of the Sawmill, Grist Mill and Powerhouse that was the life blood of the community in the late 19th and early 20th Century, Mrs. Joseph Woodruff was the owner of the hotel on George Street that burned down in 1935, two years before Helen was born.
The fire burned the hotel and the bank, and threatened to destroy the entire village, before fire crews arrived from Kingston to put it out. At Trousdale's store, across the street from the fire, wooden shutters were hastily put up over the windows to prevent them from melting.
Helen remembers growing up in Sydenham during the war years, and the most important person in her young life, with the possible exception of her mother, was her sister Anne Marlene, who was four years older than Helen, and was her lifelong best friend. Anne Marlene died in 2023.
Helen's description of life in Sydenham as a child in the early 1940's is dominated by swimming and boating on Sydenham Lake all summer, the distinctive call from their mother calling her and her sisters and brother’s home could be heard and was known to all in the village.
Her family had a boat moored at the property where the Trousdale's Foodland and Home Hardware are currently located, and she knew how to get into the boathouse when it was locked, and took the boat out in secret, at least from her parents.
Helen attended school in Sydenham just up the road from her house, joined the choir at St. Patrick's Anglican Church, next to the High School, in 1944, at the age of 7.
Later, she married David Bowes, a local boy six years her senior. They lived in Sydenham and Kingston, had two children, and moved to Woodstock for 5 years for work. They had three more children in Woodstock, and returned to Sydenham in the early 1960's. In the late 1960's, Helen started working at the Royal Bank in town, a job where she excelled.
In the late 1970's, David and Helen opened a dance hall at the building that is now occupied by Trousdale’s Foodland, but David's health began to deteriorated and he died in 1984.
Since then, Helen went through a bad second marriage, and came out the other side of that, taking the attitude that instead of dwelling on the bitterness that came from that marriage, it was best for her to “for give and forget and move on”.
And she has, forging a life on her own at Loughborough Housing, although there is romance in her life currently, much to the amusement of her family. She enjoys her children and grandchildren, who have made their own marks in the world, locally and further afield.
When Helen turns 90 this week (July 19) she will wake up in the morning and enjoy another day in the village where she grew up, knows about the past and the present, and where she continues to be a force to be reckoned with
