Under the bed

When I was a child I had a place where no one could find me.

My grandfather’s house was as tall and scary as was he was. Austerely dressed in a cardigan with holes in it and thirty year old pyjama bottoms, he looked through me fiercely as if I was an annoyance. He was a twentieth century “great man”, a philosopher and a painter and also by reputation a bohemian philanderer. Intelligent, taciturn, given to speechifying. My grandmother was soft and warming in comparison but tough in a different way too.

He would talk about me as though I wasn’t there. “Can’t that child go out and play?” he’d roar as if his version of playing was supremely important whilst mine was beneath contempt.

I found no solace in the scary poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Lady Macbeth, none in the moulting case of stuffed Egrets on the dusty stairwell and fewer still in the terrifyingly be-whiskered Victorian man in the sepia photo who shared Grandpa’s piercing eyes.

So, in order not to be problematic I created my own universe, under the bed in their spare room at the top of the house. Me, a cloth goose, a broken Tonka truck and a hideous doll that looked like Hamble from playschool. Here I learned to imagine, and how to withdraw and use my own voice.

Years passed and Grandpa befriended me in the end, he saw himself in me and because he’d never talked to me at all as a small child it wasn’t an awkward shift. Unlike my changed relationship with my grandma who was horrified to find a spiky teenager who looked determinedly like a boy sitting where once Little Tilly had been. Little Tilly, who’d been so enamoured and keen to learn the rules of domestic servitude was dead.

Grandpa taught me art and thinking and clarity of purpose. How to not let the periphery obscure these. In the end I became so like him that my husband takes the kids to the park so that I can concentrate on my writing every Saturday morning even though I have five days of blissful peace before that when they are at work and school. I know intellectually I’m lucky that, like grandpa, the domestic world is arranged to preserve my imagination but I’ve never felt it.

Until this shit storm started.

How do they screech so loudly? Why can’t they understand reason? If I go in the garden they follow me and I’m not allowed anywhere else thanks to this privacy invading virus. My husband has gone to the shops to buy new toilet rolls and paracetamol and they are shrieking and crying so loudly I think I’m going to go mad!

In desperation I stick Toystory 2 on, the only way to guarantee half an hour of peace. Then I climb to the old spare room at the top of our inherited house and crawl under the bed where my friends the cloth goose, the broken tonka truck and the hideous doll that looks like Hamble from play school are still waiting like Woody and Buzz to resume the old, old game.