Sarah's bedroom story
I didn’t have bedroom of my own as a child. As a baby I must have been in my parents’ room, I suppose, and who knows about the next two years, when my mother and I lived with my grandparents, successively. When I was three my father came back from the war and bought a house, fully furnished. The bedroom that fell to me was not a child’s room at all, but simply the second bedroom, after my parents took the master bedroom for themselves. Six months later I was joined there, I imagine, by my baby sister, and from then on I never had a room of my own for almost sixty years.
There was nothing special about the room, but I adored that house. A small American version of English Tudor, but even more charming, with its gable front, it’s rounded oak door, the little arched passage to the side door for the milkman and such, the leaded small-paned windows and the great shutters that could actually close (no such thing in the typical New England house we lived in later where shutters were simply decorations to keep a house from looking too spare). Not to mention the lawns and the trees and the garden front back and sides, with tulips, irises, daffodils, azalea, mock-orange, hollyhocks, roses, phlox and what have you according to the seasons. Even lily of the valley in a nook in the shaded north corner. It was a fairy-tale house like those in my picture books, and I imagined that the lead in the windows was ebony, just like the windows where Snow White’s mother pricked her finger.
Five years later we left that house for a very spare one in Vermont, a clapboard box surrounded by a bare lawn and that was that. My father was tired of spending his weekends raking the leaves or caring for a garden. I missed the old house endlessly. As for the room I still shared with my sister, there was still nothing personal there. For several years we continued to share the double bed that had come with the furnishings of the first house, a situation that resulted in innumerable squabbles. After a few years my parents invested in a pair of twin beds, that at least. But although I made plans for them to raise the roof, as various neighbours had done on their houses, so as to be able to cut our room in two, they were not persuaded. As for the decoration of our room, that, like everything else in the house, had been decided upon and put in place by my father before the rest of the family even arrived. So we had, as well as a bookcase and a chest of drawers each, three Godey’s Ladies Fashion prints, a reproduction of a 17th century Dutch painting with a windmill, a portrait of my father as a young officer (very handsome) and a chromeo of the Holy Family walking the streets of Nazareth. I, for my part, liked all these very well; it never occurred to us to want to pin up movie stars or rock stars or pictures of dogs or horses the way teens are generally supposed to do. Still, I would have like to have some private space of my own.
I lived in that room for not even seven years before I went away to university, first college then graduate school, during which time I always had a room-mate. When I came to France I shared a studio with a French girl. Then I married and as one might expect shared a room with my husband. (The Hungarians traditionally had a much better system, at least among the bourgeois and the aristocrats: each member of the couple had his or her own room. One knocked to enter and could be refused.)
So the first time I ever had a room of my own was after my divorce. The flat in Strasbourg is really mine, mine alone. But my room there is also the place where I put everything I don’t know where to put elsewhere, so that it is really only a place to sleep in. That leaves Flavigny. For the last few years I have been working on transforming our old bedroom into my little kingdom, because the house as a whole is somehow not really mine but that of the whole family. I had no peace when the computer and the telephone were downstairs so I made a little study in an alcove of the bedroom and installed my books, my computer and the internet box there. A lovely place. But …
That was not taking into account that my grandchildren are now teenagers or almost there, and that Wi-fi is as necessary to their lives as breathing. So now when I open the door to my room it is likely as not full of kids, filling the chairs or draped over the beds (because I do have a couple of extra beds in there for visiting family if necessary), playing video games or talking to their friends. Only when the family is visiting, of course, but that is very often—and is the moment natually when I most need a place to retreat to.
A room of one’s own—a theme of Virginia Woolf’s. An unreasonable desire, an unattainable eldorado?
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Paula's bedroom
| 11:28 (il y a 1 heure) |
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When I was a girl, my bedroom was a playroom and a place of refuge, a library and a laboratory, a café and a cabaret. It harbored happiness, and heartbreak, and healing. It was a place of whispered secrets and whiskered pets. In that room, there would be afternoons of raucous laughter or resentful tears. It contained whole worlds, in dreams and poems and stories and songs.
And it was never truly my own, because through it all, I shared that room with my sister, 18 months older than me, one grade ahead of me in school, and light years ahead of me in sophistication.
The room was at the back corner of the house, across the hall from our parents’ bedroom, with two windows overlooking our backyard, and one window looking out onto the neighbor to our left. What began as two little girls in a trundle bed with a single play chest morphed through the years into twin beds on opposite sides of the room, and our own dressers and closets. As we got older, we were constantly rearranging the room to create distinct and separate spaces that we could call our own.
I came home from school one day to discover that our mom, in an effort to produce some cohesion in a space shared by two very different personalities, had made up the beds in a bright floral fabric of blues, purples, and greens, with curtains to match, and a fluffy blue rug on the floor. Would her two younger daughters, one moody and deeply introspective, and the other, funny and outgoing, find harmony in such an environment?
This was around the time that my sister, Dawn, began playing nonstop on our shared turntable the albums of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. I had to wait until she went off to smoke dope with her friends before I could put on my Beatles, and Sly and the Family Stone.
The hard-fought harmony we finally established, in no codified way, revolved around who could have friends over, thereby banishing the other sister to the rest of the house. I spent plenty of afternoons and evenings in the family room, or doing homework at the dining room table, or playing Kick the Can in the streets and yards of the neighborhood, or sprawled on my older sister’s double bed, staring at her poster of Fontainebleau as she did her college work at her desk. I envied friends who had their own rooms, their private spaces, their personal sanctuaries.
When Dawn left for college, I got my wish, for exactly one year. Down came her posters of meadows and streams, and up went mine of Joe Namath and Paul Newman. I bought a bean bag chair to curl up in and read for hours. I pushed the beds together and luxuriated in the feeling of a double bed to myself. My friends and I would sing along with my Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson records at top volume. We would stand in front of the mirror for hours, trying on clothes and experimenting with makeup. We would pop popcorn and bring a huge bowl upstairs to sit on the floor between us as we played gin rummy or Yahtzee. We would make up funny stories and act them out, using my family’s Mardi Gras costume closet for props, always collapsing into such fits of giggles that my father would often bang on the door to ask if we were choking. We would perch cross-legged on my bed across from each other and talk about boys. We’d wonder about the wonders of sex, and about what lay ahead for us in this world.
Then, of course, I, too, moved on to college, then marriage, never again really having a room of my own for decades.
Years later, when my parents died, and my sisters and brother and I began cleaning out the house to prepare it for sale, I realized how truly small our bedroom was, while our big sister and younger brother had rooms of their own. We were always so busy fighting for a space for ourselves that we never really made space to get to know each other. Such a small space, struggling to hold the big dreams of two very different girls.
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_Jackie's bedroom
When I was about 4/5 years old I lived with my parents in a caravan when we arrived back to the UK from South Africa. The caravan was small for my parents and myself - a narrow space with kitchenette and I slept in an alcove just next to the little bathroom. The caravan was parked in a field belonging to a lady who had lots of dogs, geese, rabbits, goats and sheep. It was doggy wonderland with kennels and puppies running all over the place. My father built a house for us on a plot that they had bought in Ferndown south of England in Dorset. In the brand new house I had my own bedroom. It was wonderful. A real bedroom all to myself as I had no brothers and sisters. I was young though and don’t quite remember everything. But I do remember a comfortable bed reading to chaffinch my pyjama dog before bedtime and looking over fields and trees and the vegetable garden with chickens and angora rabbits that we bred.
After a few years we moved to San Diego California. Living in a rented flat for quite a while I had my own bedroom but don’t remember one single thing about it. Then we moved again further north to Burlingame – just south of San Francisco. We rented again my parents sacrificing a bedroom by sleeping in the sitting room but again I have no recollection of that room. Then, they managed to buy a house – a garden and I had my very own room. This was situated in a quiet street lined with eucalyptus trees – when it rained, and it didn’t very often, the smell of the eucalyptus was wonderful. Smell remains my best memory of that time . The house was built in wood on a slope and stairs led down to a garden and garage and my father installed a desk for himself downstairs as he was a ham radio operator in his spare time and in my bedroom I could hear him speaking to other ham operators in the world.
My father pulled down walls built cupboards I was allowed to paint the walls of my very own bedroom the colors I wished. I chose orange for one wall and yellow for another. These are still my favorite colours today. Another feature of my bedroom was a sort of outside sculptural grid over the porch before the lawn and the street. This grid felt protective and was a really nice feature of the house and let loads of light into my room.
I felt secure and really at home in my own space. I could shut the door and my surroundings felt so familiar and so me. The squiglly house phone cord reached into my room and I spent hours gossiping to my girlfriends from school – at my desk making scrapbooks and reading Seventeen magazine. I collected leaves and cinema tickets and receipts and newspaper cutting for my scrapbook Writing up my diary daily and dreaming of boys in my class.. I wrote numerous letters to a cousin I had met in England during holidays and waiting patiently for return letter but as he was training to be a catholic priest I was dreaming for nothing.
Being so tall was a handicap for me as most of my school friends were quite small and I always seemed to have the smallest girlfriend in the school. Opposites attract. We were in that house for a few years before my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. I wasn’t told at the time being considered too young (16) to deal with it. So it was a shock when she went back to the UK just before my graduation from high school and it was a sad day for me as my Dad was at work and no other family around. I flew back to England end of June for holidays and sadly never saw my wonderful bedroom again as my father knowing that my Mum was ill travelled in a panic to England leaving the house intact. Later neighbors had to go in and pack everything up and send on to England. Probably quite a few childhood treasures were lost in that move.
A few years ago I went to California and stood outside the house – it had been entirely renovated with a second floor added onto the roof. As I stood outside memories flooded in my mind and I looked at the sculptured grid and longingly wished I could have had a look inside at my old bedroom but it wasn’t to be . Perhaps better to keep souvenirs intact.
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Annemarie's bedroom
My Bedroom (age 7 x 14 year old)
Thunder rumbling, the rain rattling and trampling over the corrugated iron roof, pattering loudly. I'm lying in bed under the mosquito net, listening to its hypnotic, steady drumming, sometimes fierce, sometimes whispering as it pours its way into the two huge water tanks outside the bedroom.
Our simple bungalow was built on a level cut into the side of a hill, each room having a view over the coffee plantation. My sister and I always shared a bedroom, beds side by side separated by a huge African drum, covered in cowhide. When it was too slack for purpose Indahano, he who drummed the beginning, middle and ending of the workday for all the workers, gave it to my father. I can still hear the mellow thrum of it waking us each morning as we lay beneath our brightly coloured patchwork quilts made by Mum. Our beds made, our mosquito nets were tied into loose knots, so inviting ...and we did swing on them one day, and we did break them.
We had wire-netting windows, no glass. In stormy times wooden shutters sheltered us from the rain that drove horizontally across the verandahs that surrounded our home. From my bed I could see the beautiful jacaranda tree with its fat panicles of mauve-blue flowers and the orchids gathered by Dad and placed by me in the cleft of the tree. A red clay-tiled floor was covered with vibrant rugs. Once or twice a year it was polished with red Cardinal polish. I loved seeing Sebewe slide his feet into a couple of small sheepskins and shimmy his way round the room on polishing day but we girls were expected to sweep the floor and and make our own beds every morning. Opposite our beds was an enormous wardrobe, at the bottom of which was a huge long drawer where Mum kept all her fabrics - the Mirikani Drawer. On top she kept all our school paintings, at least some of them - or perhaps just the ones which won prizes!
When the sun went down the Flit gun was sprayed everywhere. The smell was awful and the rooms out of bounds for a while. Then four kerosene lamps were lined up. Watching the light being pumped into the coloured net wick inside the mantle never failed to fascinate us.
When my parents went to bed and all lamps extinguished everywhere was pitch black. Later they had an 'engine ' house which they operated from a button by their bed. When we heard the dugga- dugga- dug of the engine dying we knew it was blackness again till morning. We would lie in our beds listening to the croaks and trills, whistles and squeaks of frogs, nightjars, crickets - sounds of the African night.
Before going to bed Mum or Dad would pull back the sheets to make sure there were no snakes, having once found one snuggled in my sister's bed. The scotching stick (in the corner of each room) was used to evict the intruder. Dad would cosy us up in bed while he read a bedtime story, mostly Rudyard Kipling -"The Just So Stories", "Thé Jungle Book". Perhaps because as a child he had, with his father, walked their dog with Kipling on the South Coast; or perhaps because he was enamoured of India after training there during the war. We loved the stories and knew them off by heart. One time Dad explained the meaning of 'scent' and many nights I would wake up from terrible nightmares when a tiger was hiding in the Mirikani Drawer. I remember feeling paralysed with fear until I suddenly managed to get out of bed, rush through the darkness into my parents' room and literally jump on top of them, shouting "It's scented me! The tiger's scented me!" The engine had to be started and the entire Mirikani Drawer emptied before I was persuaded there was no tiger.
We had very few toys as we spent most our childhood outside come rain or sun but I did have a beloved rabbit who lived on my bed. He had white fluffy feet and 'hands', head and ears and was dressed like a gentleman in felted green trousers, felt black jacket and a black bow-tie around what I thought was a blue shirt. One day, having learnt to sew I decided to make Snowy a new outfit so I, with tremendous effort (pulling), eventually released him of his gentleman's outfit only to discover he was blue-skinned all over, no shirt at all. I never felt the same about my naked, blue rabbit with fluffy white extremities and a bow tie sewn to his blue neck.
Mostly our 'toys' were real animals, usually orphans brought to Dad by the workers. Snugglebug, our duck who couldn't swim, had roaming rights in our bedroom, as did my pet rabbit (he had proper fur all over). Dad converted Mum's wire-netted meat safe into a two-level home for the baby chimp who shared our large bedroom for the time he was with us. The chimp was allowed to run around the room, leap over the beds and generally cause mayhem. At eventide, before 'flitting' I had a long net to catch insects in our bedroom; these were for the orphan bush baby, so tiny with such huge eyes and baby-like wails. Dad taught me their needs, and 'never to give them names' and to set them free when they were able to fend for themselves. Not a single pop star poster in my bedroom - just my sister and animals.
Mirikani - Swahili for material (coming from American, as much fabric did come from USA)
Wilson
