Childhood Room

I had a lovely big room as a child with lots of light.

My parents have a long thin house with two staircases and two rooms upstairs are connected. My room was one of those so it had two ways in. It also had the door to the airing cupboard so when I was reading in my room I would often have my Mum come in to hang washing up and have a chat.

It had windows on two opposite sides. A lovely big high up dormer window on one side flooded it with light while a tiny old fashioned under the eaves window had less obvious delights. It was the little window that the clematis grew in through. It was the little window that allowed reflections of flowers and grass and people on the path below to appear blurrily on my sloping ceiling when there was bright sunshine.

The ceiling sloped on both sides and so did my floor more subtly. The old wooden skeleton of the house was exposed and black while the brick inbetween was white. Everything was uneven. I had a basin with a mirror with a horse silhouette sticker and a glass shelf above. In the winter my pipes would freeze. There was a black shelf in the other corner by the airing cupboard which was home to a china schoolroom which was a light as well as one of the speakers of my hi-fi.

Inbetween the airing cupboard and one of the other doors was my bed, an oversize single that had been my dad's as he had grown up. One wall had a fitted wardrobe with a window seat under the little window. I hated it, ugly varnished pine slats with big round door knobs.

I had three bookcases, a tall skinny by my bed, a lovely glass doored one that had been my Gran's until she moved and an old church one that sat on the big wooden desk. In order to make things tidy everything would get pushed under my bed. Sometimes things ended up there that I never remembered taking to my bedroom and had no interest in.

the house would creak and make a whole host of noises as it moved and each and evry noise was familiar and comforting. I never had nightmares as a child, although my older sister would sometimes drift through my room to my parent's like some pale ghost.

I had a painted paper fish mobile which sat in my dormer window and a small collection of beswick horses. The posters changed many times.....

When I go home I don't get to sleep in it very often now because F and I don't fit in a single bed. Sometimes if I go home alone I do and I love it. Being in that room.

I guess the thing I loved most was the airy spacy light feeling even thouh I had plenty of clutter. I loved the light so much, I always had plenty and a beautiful view of the sky. I miss that. I have big windows in my house but they face the wrong way mostly to get good light, I don't have views of the sky either...