Early memories of London – part two

Saturday 3rd September   

The move to my new prison in Putney took place some few weeks later.  At the time I did not understand and had thought that we were to be here forever in the hotel, with its’ dark green curtains and silent dining room and cobwebs high up above the light fittings. We had travelled out to the new (old I thought, how could they possibly be calling it new) house in Putney, and though it had been explained to me I am sure, I just saw it as another temporary place of containment, another place to lock me away.  And then the move was upon us, and Grandma was too busy organising the furniture and carpets and boxes of china to be bothered with me, and I was sent out to the garden.  At least here, I could feel a touch of the sun, as it tried to make its’ warmth felt through the dreary grey clouds banking up row upon row.  There was a scrubby patch of overgrown lawn, one or two trees and borders of shrubs in some mad overgrown matted mess that was never quite tamed.  We had a weekly gardener for a few years, but he just used to mow the lawn, and had cleared a couple of beds for my mother to plant geraniums in, but he was a great one for taking his cap off, rubbing his head and sucking air between his teeth and declaring it was such a big job, and so he never cleared back the shrubs, and neither did my mother, or me for that matter.

Then grandma called me in and took me by the hand and led me upstairs, stairs I felt went on forever as they turned at right angles and then up again.  She walked me down the dank and dismal hall and stood me in front of a brown painted wooden door, with a tortoiseshell Bakelite handle.  “This is your new bedroom, don’t you want to go take a look. Come on Catherine, you are a big girl now, with your own special bedroom, let’s look inside shall we.”  And we did go inside, but it didn’t feel special at all.  It felt like all the other rooms in London, cold and old and boring. There was a bed and a tall boy and a little combination desk and chair. I later learnt that like all our other furniture, this had come out of storage. It was Grandma’s old furniture from before the war that she had put into storage when she went to live in my parents’ first house in Chelsea.

It took a while, but I eventually came to accept the house, the garden and my bedroom as my own. My bedroom became my place of refuge, the one place I could be alone and dream, they couldn’t stop me dreaming then, and no-one has ever been able to either.