My Own Space

Cyberdog at Camden, London

It’s important to have your own space, something you can ‘own’ and have under your control or influence. Many of us have felt the loss of this during lockdown. Suddenly your family / housemates are present all the time so your personal space feels compromised. If you don’t have a bedroom, study or shed to which you can retreat, for privacy you may have to resort to curtaining off ‘your’ area in a shared space. If that’s not possible take long walks alone.

This inability to have our own space applies to many of us growing up, when sharing a bedroom with a sibling is not uncommon. I did not have a room of my own until I was 14 and my family moved to a smaller house. That may sound like I have it the wrong way, but the house I grew up in (2-14) had large bedrooms, hence I had to share.

In my earliest memories I shared a lilac coloured bedroom with my older sister. Our beds were on opposite sides of a window which, as nursery windows often did in older houses, had bars at the opening portion. My sister made lots of funny noises in her sleep – something I assumed everybody did. The curtains had purple polka dots with sprigs of violets on a white background which concealed a large blackout blind. If I wanted to read in the summer I’d duck my head and the book under the blind. It was so light outside I could read until I felt tired, so long as my parents didn’t catch me.

As my sister got older she was given a room to herself and my younger brother moved out of his cot-bed and came to share with me. He and I are two and a half years apart, and we are pretty close, but I confess to bossing him about when we were young. He was usually a good sport about playing my games, I didn’t have the same patience with his rows of cars in their permanent traffic jam. Riding out on hobby horses or sword fighting in plastic armour was always fun and my preference for being a tomboy meant he was usually excused from rescuing a damsel in distress.

One useful thing about sharing a room was that we also shared our bedtime stories. My mother would feed us and handle bath time, so when our father got home she could get the older family’s meal ready while he supervised teeth cleaning and tucked us in with a story. Sometimes we had a story each, my brother liked Gumdrop the vintage car or the Fantastic Mr Fox. I enjoyed Polly and the Wolf while my passion for traditional folk tales meant that dragons, never-empty-purses and men wearing seven-league boots were commonplace in our bedroom!

As we got older squabbles broke out between my brother and me about touching each other’s stuff, particularly if either of us had friends round to play. My mother cleverly solved it by putting our beds at opposite ends of the room – I was near the window while he was closer to the door. By putting our cupboards and drawers back to back, she sandwiched garden trellis in between to create a partition which nearly reached the ceiling. We had redecorated by now, our walls were primrose yellow with posters pulled from National Geographic. Now I had privacy, although in moments of temper, I needed a door to slam!

A couple of years on, we moved house so could have a small bedroom each. I was excited to have my own space, no matter how tiny. I chose a sickly blancmanche pink with which to decorate and my parents bought me a bookcase, a desk and a chair so that I could study at home. My various decorating fads meant that when I was a teenager there were coloured records stuck to the walls and the year I turned 18 I displayed fans and chopsticks for an eastern theme.

My brother’s room was painted bright spearmint green, but the wall colour barely showed between the posters of truculent looking musicians in bands he liked. He bought a record player and tape deck and soon his presence in the house was characterised by a shut door which barely contained his loud music. I often knocked on his door to sit in his room with him, listening to the bands he liked & talking. Although our interests and music taste had diversified, we still had an easy relationship.

This reminiscence is written for the prompt ‘space’, the sixth in Mrs Fever’s summer writing meme Musings in Memoir where looking back is encouraged. Why not follow the link to see what others have submitted.

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