Writing

The Middle Room

When you’re four everything is new, you are coming into the world of others out of the centre that was you and all is sensationally terrifying and bright.

My fourth birthday was marked by the singular sense of myself as agent of my own destruction, which in turn initiated me into the newness of being alone. I don’t even know if I was physically alone but for the first time I realised I was alone in the world and that my actions could bear down on me with a vengeance. In effect I learned to blame no one but myself, a lesson that made me writhe in discomfort and which I promptly forgot.

The middle room, as we called it, figured large in my life, it was where I spent my fourth birthday, where I got my first kiss, where I could escape to the garden without passing the giant witch that was our grandmother. Where, along with the remains of our inedible breakfasts, I hid a mean childhood and discovered another.

When I started school my mother became a childminder. School was another country, its ways of being bore no resemblance to life at home, we might as well have been on an island once we passed through the doorway of 70 Springfield Road.  After school the house was full of other peoples children they were both a source of fun and derision, but mostly they were our audience, we felt observed and defensive and so we performed.  No matter how many children there were, and sometimes they outnumbered us, we were always a unit; flowing around the house with our own language of superiority claiming our space from the invaders, as only children can.

The middle room was our room , the domain of the under fives only until the school gates opened and we raced the few hundred yards to our own country.

It had once been a Victorian parlour with gas mantles and a cast iron fireplace, it linked us to the outside by way of glass doors, French windows we called them, suspecting it was another of our fathers archaic West Indian phrases.  On Summer days the room filled with sunlight, it swept into the curves and corners, it animated everything; the white plaster flowers of the ceiling, the faded patterns of the floor even the dusty air swirled and danced to life in its light and I was afraid to breathe and take it in, for fear it would smother that live thing inside me.

Outside the French windows the garden began with a narrow path of blue bricks and alongside it an overgrown herbaceous border that had once been someone’s pride and joy The path curved as it entered the garden proper around a mound that had been an Anderson shelter and later became my mother’s endlessly replanted rockery.  The pathway up the garden was straight with a washing line stretched along the full length of it, the line was always full of white sheets and underclothes pinned in a neat size graded row and when it was briefly empty Mum would turn a sheet into a tent to shade us from the sun.

Near the house there was an outside toilet with a black and white chequered floor and a lean-to shed whose windows,  were permanently curtained by thick cobwebs.

The lawn was regularly dug up, the ground crushed by a concrete roller and then new turf laid, but nevertheless it always appeared to be either parched or bald, my father’s idea of gardening was to begin with demolition, followed by minimalism then a homely state of neglect.  I grieved when he pulled up an unhappy cherry tree by embracing it and tugging, he spared nothing in his horticultural efforts.  In the years between Father’s projects I discovered an affinity with living things and in the wake of his devastation made a hundred gardens.

As children our modest, narrow plot seemed huge, on one side we were fenced with low wooden railings separating us ineffectually from the people next door who soon abandoned their embarrassingly dark skinned neighbours and moved further into suburbia.  On the other side of us there was a hedge of flowering shrubs and trees that belonged to a garden that seemed forever abandoned, it grew into a jungle that we tunnelled through, terrified of the stings and bites of the fierce creatures who lived there.  The hedge spilt over into our garden in a shower of mock orange, brambles and pink climbing roses that smelt as though they were made of sugar.  The top of the garden was bounded by a line of rusty broken railings dividing us from the school playing field that stretched into the visible distance.  During the summer holidays we squeezed through the gaps into the filed and from there into an endless land of forgotten allotments and ancient coppices.

When you’re four a ceiling of white roses is palatial and tall elegant glass doors that lead to the endless green of outside are portals to paradise, but when I was four the middle room was off limits, it was someone’s bed-sit; a large black woman with vast bosoms, who was always washing.   It was self-contained, furnished with a pale blue kitchenette, a lino floor and a bed with a wooden headboard and an iron frame.  This was the scene of my third accident.  The first had been drinking bleach at the age of two; a simple act of infantile ignorance and not an attempt to be white as a melodramatic poetry teacher once suggested.  The second was the combustion of my hair as I passed the gas stove, I can still summon the flames frizzling in my ears and the furious hollow claps of my grandmother’s hands.

This third mishap, on my fourth birthday was an attempt to climb the blue kitchenette.  I,  a ‘well grown’ child,  hoisted myself onto the melamine table, and brought the washer woman’s tins and packets of rice crashing down on me.  I can’t say what I was after but I remember feeling a kind of drunkenness.  It was a too-much-jelly and-cake feeling and as I fell I felt the devastation of my own stupidity.  I landed on the iron frame of the bed, almost cutting my ear in half.  Each November my right ear swells, reddens and puckers up with blisters.  For a long time I believed it was some kind of perverse birthday gift, like Sleeping Beauty’s pricked finger.

After school was nothing to the euphoria of holidays, when the middle room and the garden merged into one vast playground that stretched to the end of summer.  We had a low blackboard along one wall and a large oak table, which had sacrificed its legs for the privilege of being a stage.  We strung a curtain in front of it and began our summer season, drawing in the crowds of neighbourhood children, bored by their neat and orderly homes.  

We had wooden trays of pencils, worn down too small for the infant class, reams of paper from someone’s office and boxes of second-hand toys that belonged to no one. In a corner we could be transformed by the contents of a large chest bright with saris and Moroccan sandals.  Once the door to our room was closed we filled it with noise, we etched ourselves, into the bare plaster of its walls, and transformed its form and location, we were castaways, searching for treasure, princesses waiting for love.  This was the childhood I made for myself after I stuffed the other away and the middle room, with its doors to outside, was its fabric and inspiration.