First
Bedroom
I can still remember quite vividly, my first real bedroom.
I was about four years old.
We had moved around a few times and had taken refuge
in other people’s homes, sleeping on floors or sofas, glad to have a roof over
our heads.
At first glance, the walls were brownish beige. (I
am assuming that the last tenants were heavy smokers). A very faded light blue
and white striped patterned wallpaper lay underneath the nicotine. A naked
lightbulb dangled from a black flex in the middle of the ceiling. The floor
covering was a square piece of light blue linoleum, which didn’t fit ‘wall to
wall’ but did cover where we walked.
There was a grey ‘army’ blanket stretched over two
nails for a curtain across the single sash window. It looked out on to a very
small concrete yard, complete with outdoor toilet and a tin bath hanging from a
nail in the brickwork. You could see across to the other identical backyards
and the alleyway that ran between the two rows of terraced hovels.
You couldn’t really called them ‘houses’ as they
were condemned buildings, part of the ‘60’s regeneration programme of knocking
down all the old slum terraced houses and moving everyone, road by road,
community by community out to new housing around the edges of Liverpool.
Instead of keeping communities together, people were
split across various sites so you lost all your neighbours and friends as
no-one had a car to go visiting.
At that moment, there was a shortage of new housing
(nothing changes), so people still lived in the condemned slums, waiting to be
relocated and still paying the local council rent for the privilege!
You could look out across the horizon of black
slate-tiled rooftops and smoky chimneys (the days before smokeless fuel) for
what seemed like miles. You could smell the coal smoke in the air most of the
time.
If it was foggy, the smoke would mix with it and
become smog. We were warned not to go outside, and keep the doors and windows
shut. But if you had to go out, you had to wear a very thick scarf across your
face to stop you breathing in the toxic air.
The fog/smog could be so thick, you couldn’t see
someone six feet in front of you. It had a slight yellow tinge to it and
smelled of sulphur. Some people carried little battery torches, but I think
this sometimes confused drivers who were crawling along, driving slowly in the
fog as the torches looked like bicycle lamps.
My two sisters (two and three years old at the time)
and I, shared the bedroom and also the big rickety, black iron framed, double
bed that was well passed its expiry date!
It was so old, I think it actually had a horse hair
mattress. It was high off the floor to us, with our little legs that we had a
wooden orange box next to the bed we could step on to enable us to get into bed!
The smallest sister would fall into the well in the
middle of the bed whilst the two older sisters would cling to the edges of the
mattress, hoping not to roll into the middle and squash the youngest in their
sleep.
We had flannelette candy stripe sheets and matching pillowcases,
a candlewick over-blanket and if it was really cold, a few grey scratchy ‘army’
blankets and a great big old Abercrombie overcoat which weighed a ton.
It always made me feel sorry for soldiers, as I
imagined them wrapped up in these awful scratchy blankets, not being able to
sleep. I don’t know whether they actually were ‘army’ blankets, but that’s what
Mum called them.
The pillows were feather filled and we usually spent
first half hour in bed, pushing the feather shafts back in to the pillows so
they didn’t stick in your face when you were asleep.(if we pulled the feathers
out, Mum would go bonkers)
There was an old dark wooden chest of drawers against
the wall opposite the bed and we had one drawer each for our meagre
possessions.
The wooden floorboards creaked and moaned under the
linoleum as you walked across the room, so there was no chance of sneaking out,
even if you could get the big iron latch open on the heavy black wooden ‘z’ door.
In the winter, ice would form beautiful fern
patterns on the inside of the single pane window and I would stand in the cold
for ages, wrapped in one of the candy striped blankets, tracing the patterns in
the ice with my finger and marvelling at the beautiful and sparkly way they lit
up in the sun or moonlight.
I sometimes tried to melt patterns into the ice with
my fingers, pressing them against the glass to change the pattern. Sometimes,
you could peel a sheet of ice from the inside of the window, formed by the
condensation from our breath as we slept if it was really cold.
But my favourite thing was looking out over those
rooftops at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Elbows on the window ledge,
chin resting on my hands - making up stories in my head about ships and the sea,
mermaids and airplanes.
Or imagining the people in the other houses – what
they would be doing, conversations they would be having, listening to them as
they walked up and down the alleyways or while the women grabbed sheets from
the clothesline when it rained or the men carried in coal from the coalhole or
shed in the backyard.
Or watching the drunks stagger down the alleyway
late at night, kicking out at growling stray dogs and swearing as they
ricocheted off the walls as they went weaving along, trying to find the back
door to their house in the dark.
Barking dogs shouting to one another, and people
yelling at them to shut up.
Cats walking primly, their heads held high and tails
sticking upright as they made their regal way across the back walls that
separated the houses. Yowling late into the night and having empty milk bottles
or a piece of coal thrown at them to chase them off.
If it was foggy, you could clearly hear the foghorns
of the ships and boats sailing in and out of the Mersey. And me, watching it
all - just day dreaming.
© Kate McClelland 2016
Image by Pixabay
