strata of story, theirs and mine and of something else, sensed, yet undefined. I
believe that the house in Tudor Street was extremely influential in making me the
person that I have become, not the social me but the deeper me, the self that is
deeper than the ego. That house created in my psyche templates and possibilities
and now, it is as if every house I enter, particularly if it has the potential of being
home, must somehow be aligned with that home, not physically in terms of layout,
but more as a sensation or anticipation of something yet to be announced or
discovered; the feel of the lounge room, the kitchen with the old round wooden
table and the wooden ice-chest, the woodshed at the rear of the yard near the
outside toilet, the mouse-hole in the kitchen, the upstairs backroom, where, much
to my parents’ horror they discovered, under the loose floorboards, not only my
hidden treasures but exposed electrical wiring. Even now I remember the musty,
earthy odours from beneath the floorboards and see, hidden there, the small toy
train engine, the prized, richly coloured marbles and the small lead soldier, minus
his feet, that I had placed in a miniature makeshift stretcher. I n the hiding of these
things and other objects beneath the floor I seemed to occupy the house more than
the others who simply existed in it. I knew the house and became a part of it, its
history, its secrets and its spirit, and the house had become a part of my secret
interior life.
Then there were the bedrooms. Bedrooms as places have always seemed to
be special rooms; more than just rooms of privacy, of sleep and of shared physical
intimacy. A bedroom seems to be a place where the occupant of the room is
vulnerable and discards not only the clothes of the day but the social roles and
personas in preparing to face a greater reality, like a priest in a sacristy changing
into the robes and adopting an attitude to perform a ritual where any disturbance of
the secret rubrics will render the rite invalid or defiled.
I well remember my parents’ bedroom in that house which on Sunday
mornings became a place of laughter and excitement when, together with my two
brothers and my sister, I would get into the big bed with my parents. Father would
tell us stories that he invented about wolves and goblins and sometimes about more
local and familiar things, even stories of his life and of mother’s too. There are
many memory-fragments of stories imagined in that bedroom where so many of the
rituals of childhood were enacted and where, in a very real sense, my spirit, my
identity seems to have announced and confirmed itself.
ron
(Ron)
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