A telly room of our own
As Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own turns 90, Mary Killen and Giles Wood from Gogglebox write about…
Mary
I’m very grateful to have a roof over my head – but ecstatic happiness tends more frequently to occur in other people’s houses or in hotels. I find so much to grumble about in my own. One day, as I was grumbling to a psychotherapist friend, she told me one’s house is a metaphor for oneself. It wasn’t that my house was cluttered and disorganised – my brain was. I had to agree.
I’ve been thinking about these things because this autumn marks the 90th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. In it, Woolf declares, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’
The television-watching room which features on Gogglebox is probably the least unsatisfactory room in our Wiltshire cottage. Regarding its William Morris theme, I once wrote an article about the top ten taste-brokers in London. They included antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, decorator Robert Kime and Lady Amabel Lindsay, widow of Christie’s director Patrick Lindsay. The one thing the ten had in common was that they all had one room in their house decorated in the same William Morris willow pattern. I immediately ordered it from Dible & Roy in Marlborough. The lounging chair, also in willow pattern, does make us look a bit obsessive on television but we are not the sort of family who buy our own furniture – we accept other people’s. Ditto the curtains, also willow pattern, off camera. A neighbour, assuming we were obsessive William Morrisites, donated those.
The general effect is of a natural background and therefore soothing. This room is not too cluttered, but the door doesn’t shut properly and our dog opens it six times an hour or scrapes to get in again – so we have to keep jumping up and down because of the draught whistling through. The one thing, as Giles grumbles, ‘that might spark joy in the cottage’ is the crackling log fire. But it is this that creates the jet-engine effect and then the cold draught.
Isn’t it amazing how you can be dissatisfied for year after year but too idle to do anything about the source of the dissatisfaction? Each time I look at the pine fireplace in the Gogglebox room, I get mildly annoyed because Giles has painted it in Sadolin wood protection paint. I really mustn’t grumble because I am lucky to have somewhere to live (it was touch and go at one point).
Room 4, as we call it, is by far the most toxic room in the cottage in a feng-shui way. It has four separate doors and also leads out into the garden, which means there is a lot of mud on the floor. Giles and his ancestors have only ever considered houses as places to come into when it gets too dark to garden and as repositories for tools. I have a daily battle with Giles, begging him not to wash his soily hands at the kitchen sink or throw down gardening gloves on top of breadboards. I’ve already had a campylobacter infection once.
My favourite writing room of all time was in a writer’s retreat in Scotland. It was spartan and there was no internet, no mobile signal and, best of all, none of my own clutter. I wrote four times as much as I would have done at home.
Unsympathetic friends often suggest that they will pay for a skip and I can just put everything into it. But these are people living in accommodation three or four times the size of our cottage.
Giles
The room that I work best in is in my mother’s house, which is a converted peach house, belonging to a Victorian manor on Anglesey. We call it the piano room and it has a door off it into the garden. My father used to play the baby grand piano there all night long – Chopin, Mendelssohn etc. So it has pleasant associations, even though he had the most annoying habit of practising his mistakes. It was rather like how it is with an old 33rpm vinyl record when you remember where the scratch is and you
start cringing in anticipation of having to get up and nudge the stylus on. Except this was a human and, although he was so-called practising, he never got any better over the years.
Notwithstanding his faults, I was very fond of my dad. And some of his paintings are on the walls of the peach house. In general I find this room to have very good vibes as I always seem to finish troublesome paintings there. Or if I am writing, I manage to overcome writer’s block there.
In our cottage, I find it very hard to concentrate. If I look out of the window, I see where the shears have missed a bit of foliage and it is all too tempting to rush out and start snipping. In the piano room, I don’t get the same compulsion to garden because there are only four panes of glass and, never one to stand at an easel when there’s an option to sit down, I can see only the tops of trees waving in the gentle Welsh zephyrs, mostly ancient pine trees – very conducive to settling the ever dancing molecules of the mind.
Next door is an ancient sound system on which I like to play, when I am painting, Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet. This provides exactly the right, slightly agitated, overblown, melodramatic musical themes to inject some urgency into the proceedings or I might easily nod off.
At Shrewsbury School, the music rooms were particularly claustrophobic – soundproofed like tiny submarines, each with a honky-tonk piano. But the music library had a skylight and, if you could push it open, you could get out onto the roof and smoke Player’s No. 6 cigarettes. The great worry was that someone would come in and lock the window and you would be stuck on the roof for ever, your corpse found a year later, being pecked by seagulls.
The worst room of my life was what we called The Slum, a basement in Coulson Street, Chelsea, during the years when the King’s Road was fashionable. It was dark, damp and with bars on the windows. I slept in it, even though it was meant to be a reception room. The only source of heating was a gas hob in the next-door kitchen which you had to turn on in the hope that the heat would permeate through. The front door, which did not fit the frame, gave onto the basement coal holes in which rats resided. It was very Withnail.
One night we were entertaining other dead-end kids and I was lying across the doorway, because there was nowhere to sit, when a large brown shape came towards me and scrambled insouciantly over my recumbent body as though I were no more threatening than a draught-excluder. It was a rat.
In those days, there were characters on the King’s Road rather than bankers. One of these was Irish Jimmy whom we met in the Phoenix pub in Smith Street. He would go into Safeway, load up a supermarket trolley with random foodstuffs and push it out without paying. He would then deliver the load to the top of our basement stairs and up-end the trolley at the top of the stairs. All the goods came cascading down, often bursting out of the wrappings as they did so.
Those were such confusing times – the late Seventies – that I cannot remember now whether he did this as an act of charity or one of aggression.