I’ve spent the last few weeks writing an essay about the teenage bedroom as refuge/workshop/performance space. This came out of a long thing in my PhD about objects as identity “props”, and how we “read” a room. Then I was trying to figure out which teenage bedroom on film was the first one to use fairy lights. I feel like the 1980s answer to fairy lights was the candelabra or an oil burner (burning Dewberry oil from the Body Shop!). Am wondering if I can pivot to being an art director, or a set decorator, or even a props master, because I love nothing more than the well-placed object. (I’d be okay with being a location scout too.)
As you can probably tell from this blurt, the essay started to get unwieldy. Eventually I decided to cut all the lead-up to my own teenage bedroom, which was really a brief evocation of childhood spaces. In House as a Mirror of Self, Clare Cooper Marcus has this to say about the special places of childhood:
“Our hiding places are a physical expression of our emerging ego-self, separate from parents of family. They are our first tentative experiments in the experience of dwelling, in appropriating and personalizing a special place and unconsciously reflecting on what we have made.”
And:
“There is no doubt that for most of us, the childhood dwelling and its environs is the place of first getting in touch with who we are as distinct personalities. Indeed, we may have a clearer and more accurate sense of our true selves at that time than in later years, when the demands of societal and familial expectations create mask-like overlays on the psyche, hence the critical importance of looking back at childhood places as a source of understanding more deeply who we are.”
I have drawn many maps of my childhood places, and asked students to make maps of theirs. I have written here about a childhood memory relating to the Roy Grounds’ Round House (it still exists but is reportedly hidden by other buildings now). And of course there are places in books and movies that captured me and still capture me. (Subject of another essay.)
The underwater house in Hello Down There:
Sam’s house in the hollow tree in My Side of the Mountain:
And, of course, the Moominhouse.
My childhood home was a 1950s three-bedroom bungalow. Nothing flash, but not terrible either. It was on a big, sloping block with pine trees and a native garden that my Mum planted. There was significant under-house space, including a laundry (with laundry chute) and a storage room full of mystery dad-things. Under the house there was also crawlspace around the underpinning. My sisters and I thought this area had clubhouse potential. Sometimes we’d go there with books and read by the light that came through the slats in the siding. Other times we went there alone to fume or cry or feel enigmatic.
I used to make elaborate sketches of future underground lairs. How hard could it be, to dig a hole and line it with plywood walls, and give it a trapdoor with a fake grass lid, and a rope ladder? Even then my imagination outstripped my ability. I drew my architectural inspiration from hobbit holes, and bush shelters, but I never got past the design stage.
In a flashbulb under-the-house memory my sisters and I find an old suitcase that contains a policeman’s uniform and badge. We get excited. This is surely evidence of some long-ago crime. We plot our next move. We are thinking big. We are thinking reward money, a private exhibition, a phone call to Simon Townsend’s Wonder World … Of course our dream is crushed by someone older and wiser—someone OAW is always killing our dreams. It might have been a parent, or it might have been a cousin telling us that the suitcase was nothing special, the clothes were just dress-ups. By then the situation was so far from a Meg mystery that we immediately had to pretend it had never happened.
A major house renovation resulted in a new “wing” with an upstairs and downstairs. Gone was the bright yellow kitchen with the black and white Florence Broadhurst-esque wallpaper. We now had a rumpus room, a second lounge, and an under-house-space you could actually stand up in. Suddenly there was light, at least in the new part of the house. In the old part, where my bedroom was, millipedes still curled across the carpet; huntsmans materialised with their weird bodies that make them look like they have eyes on their backs. My bedroom was at a high point in the split level. When I looked out the window I felt lofty and superior, and also safe from kidnappers. Down along the overgrown, inaccessible side of the house, there were ferns and a fig tree. Even today the smell of figs reminds me of my room, and the tiny lacy moths that lived on the leaves. We must have stayed in the house during the reno and yet I remember none of it. Even though our house was much-improved I still had an eye on our neighbours’ house; a new-build brick monolith with courtyards and an actual in-ground swimming pool. We never went over there, but we knew about it. We could smell chorine all summer long.
Today when I look up my old house and their old house, I can’t see why I thought theirs was so much better. In fact, my childhood home is exactly the kind of wood-and-windows charmer that my eye always finds now. (It has had a bit of a monstrous joosh in the intervening years but you can see the bones are still there.) Clare Cooper Marcus writes that in adulthood we often find ourselves reproducing aspects of our childhood places, if not consciously, then in dreams: “Our memories and dreams are our personal “library”; they can be powerful motivations and inspirations, rich resources for later creative thinking.” Maybe this is why I keep following Earthships on Instagram.
How hard could it be?