Goodbye to Griffith Street

Anne Hutchings, a former elementary-school teacher-librarian with the
Durham Board of Education, is an educational consultant.

John’s parents are getting a divorce. Tomorrow John and his mother
will move away from the small mining town to a new place, leaving Daddy
alone in the small white house at the end of Griffith Street. John has
already said some of his goodbyes, but when he awakens early in the
morning to find that snow has fallen during the night, he thinks of a
special way to say farewell to his friends. When Mrs. Wright and her
dog, Queenie, Milo Petrovich and his mother, and the Beatle
Bugs—Lurlene, Brenda, and Andrew—awaken, they find Griffith Street
covered with snow angels and stars.

This gentle story, based on author Marilynn Reynolds’s own childhood
and illustrated with Renné Benoit’s muted sepia-toned
ink-and-watercolour drawings, reminds us of an earlier, simpler time
when children had fun bouncing on featherbeds, didn’t understand the
word “divorce,” and enjoyed making angels in the snow. Benoit’s
illustrations show old cars, hydro poles lining the streets, laundry
hung out to dry on clotheslines, and miners trudging off to work,
black-metal lunch pails in hand, giving us a detailed picture of a small
northern Ontario mining town in the 1940s.

Goodbye to Griffith Street addresses the issues of change, wanting to
leave one’s mark and be remembered, and the need for closure. Children
who are themselves experiencing the upheaval caused by divorce or
separation, moving to a new place, the loss of friends, etc., will be
able to relate to this story. Recommended.