Head Space

Like Virginia Woolf, my mother thought it was important for a woman to have a room of her own. Ironically, it took a move to a smaller house to get her what she wanted. The house I grew up in had three proper reception rooms, plus a huge utility room (that was originally the kitchen),  a vast kitchen / diner and sun room. Upstairs there were six bedrooms (if you count the box room, which was always full of boxes, and one year, full of apples, individually wrapped in newspaper and perfuming the room with the smell of comfort and autumn as they slowly rotted). Outside there was the garage, the old outdoor loo (converted into a fuel store) and a shed big enough for my brother to hide quite happily all day when he was bunking off school.

Despite this abundance of space, my mother never had a room just for herself. We three kids each had our own bedrooms. My father had his study, and also appropriated the sun room, utility room and shed for the paraphernalia he used in his war of attrition against the house (it kept trying to fall down, he kept patching it back up again, but never properly). It was only when the family house was sold and my parents moved to a newly built, much smaller, house, that my mother got her own room. I suppose my mother thought that she had finally earned a right to her own room - she had retrained and launched herself into a very successful career as a financial advisor when I was in my early teens. In her room she had a sofa, a desk and a full wall of mirrored built-in wardrobes. My mother loved her job, she was hugely sociable, and she loved fashion - her room catered to all these needs.

She bought a traditional writing desk, with little drawers and a pretty bowed front. To sit at it, she used 'Aunty Jo's Chair', a delicate antique chair handed down from my mother's maiden aunt. I'm sitting on that seat right now - it has a wicker seat and is held together with ivory pegs. We weren't allowed to sit on when we were kids,  it was deemed so fragile, but it has survived my using it almost every day for some fifteen years. My laptop lives on my mother's little writing desk, or rather it rests there, when it is charging, or when it needs to be connected to the printer. When I'm writing, I usually sit at the kitchen table. This is partly because the writing desk isn't really the right size and shape for what I need, and partly because the kitchen is the nearest thing I have in this huge, Victorian house to a room of my own.

Don't get me wrong - I had a room of my own. We have a study, I used to work in there. But sitting at the desk, with my back to the door, I felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the house. I didn't like it. Here in the kitchen I can hear the kids in the other room, the washing machine running in the utility room, the rain dripping from the jungle-like tendrils of last-year's wisteria outside the window. The cats come in for a bite to eat and a quick leg-rub. There is evidence everywhere of the food we have just eaten, or the food I am going to cook later in the day. This is my room.