Local Observation / THE BIG ROOM

In the kitchen sometimes from boredom you’d open cabinets. These cabinets were empty, shelves wiped clean leavening nothing but streaks. You’d rather food, you were always hungry. There was nothing apart from curvy silver pots filled with pebbles of dark sugar to be served with coffee for guests.

Guests visited often. These charades were faintly traumatizing. From when the doorbell trilled, to being dispatched to ‘make coffee’ which you never ‘made’. It was merely a respite when you could escape from the mayhem of ‘darlings’ and ‘you look so…’. you rushed the steps down to the kitchen which occupied the length of the basement of the house, and here the world changed.

In the kitchen the air was bright, the smells were inviting, the human company fortified you, the staff shared their food with you. You asked for the coffees, reported on how many were desired and only reluctantly retreated your steps, pressing your body against the hall wall slowly re-entering the fray of grownups blasting off.

The living room, skirting a courtyard and reached by a hallway, was always cold. Despite Louis Armstrong on the record-player and life-size portraits of a nude woman seated and coy, charcoal on paper, hung interspersed with mirrors, and despite the inviting sofas with cushions of Siamese raw silk, it was always more full of ghosts than guests in that large square room. It was always cold, full or empty, despite two raucous fireplaces and the southern exposure of a wall of glass there was barely enough light outdoors to tamp the damp within. England in the wintertime, like life itself, is not for sissies.

When the ‘growns’ evaporated to parties elsewhere this room was your room. This space was your music studio, a place to rummage the stacks of 78s and gently drop the stylus into that first groove. You couldn’t know it yet, when you danced around that room, sometimes to Beethoven other times to Oldfield, music was your sustenance.