A Place of My Own

Written by Gail Walter

Imagine a place where the kids could sleep and live, a sort of wing addition on the house with partitioned sleeping quarters and a large children’s lounge for kidding around in. This was my mom and dad’s dream, to build their own home, designed on the back of a cigarette box and rationalized over a couple of bottles of red wine with a friend who was also an architect.

It was 1974 before it was ready. I was sixteen and somewhat torn by the design of the place. I liked the whole kid’s lounge thing but the partitions sounded like a nightmare. My parents tried hard to sell the plan to me. It didn’t really matter, I was the oldest and the only one who could see the dark side of the lack of privacy that comes with partitioned sleep quarters with walls that didn’t reach the ceiling.

The three cells were in a row and all of them led onto the children’s lounge through a curtain covered opening. I mean, really! Sixteen years old and NO door to slam when the whole world clearly didn’t understand! My sisters were too young to complain, also I think they suspected that there were going to be hidden benefits like gaining hitherto unsurpassed insight into the life and loves of their teenage sister, me.

I was alone in this, and yet, not alone enough!

I felt as if I had exchanged my solo transport for a bicycle made for three; myself and the little sisters. But I tried; I tried to make my small, UN-soundproofed cubicle – because it was – into a teenage world that reflected the life and times of my era. I would stride inside and slam the curtain behind me.

Inside was a world that was mine alone even if it didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. There was a bunk bed in the corner and my mum had “home decorated” all the bedclothes to match the curtain doors and the hardwearing wall-to-wall carpet. The dominant color was sky blue and turquoise which was pretty avant-garde when you consider the relentless autumn colors of the seventies era.

So there was my bed, the same color as my sisters’ beds, the same color as the carpet and all the curtains. Yes, there was nothing much that I could do on the bed front. There was not a lot of wall but I hungrily annexed it. It was the place that I could express my quintessential seventies self. Collages were very in and I was in to them. I had piles of teen mags with dozens of pics of David Essex, David Cassidy, David Bowie, Slade and TRex.

In my tiny little cell I would crouch down and devour the pop culture dripping from their enticing pages. I had a small bedside table – everything was dinky because my well meaning parents had sacrificed sleeping space for living space – upon which I had my transistor radio proudly playing the top twenty with reliable regularity. As long as I stayed on my haunches I could pretend I was in a real room with real walls and a door that made a loud, uncompromising sound when you closed it.
So on my wall was MY seventies. In the forefront were all the boys that I was currently in love with. There were a lot of them and I’m embarrassed to say that a good few had nothing more than a couple of dimples in lieu of any real tangible talent. David Cassidy was the leader of this pack looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his rather delectable mouth. Who could look at him without hearing strains of “I think I love you”. David Essex gazed down at me in between cutouts of The Cowsills all in a row, everyone with their hair in that peculiar helmet style so popular in the seventies.

I had tried unsuccessfully to get over my affair with Jack Wild from the musical Oliver but it was proving well nigh impossible. His wickedly gorgeous face with that audacious boot-shaped nose was a recurring theme on my wall; one might almost say it was the backdrop for everything else. Sometimes I would get up off the floor and collapse on my bunk bed with my hands behind my head and worry about how I was going to engineer our inevitable meeting. But, that’s enough about the wall. A wall is just a wall after all.

I’d like to cut to the part that really mattered: the depth of the wound unwittingly inflicted on my teenage self by my well-meaning parents’ design for an ideal house. Whether alone or with friends I became an object of sociological fascination to my younger sisters who merely had to climb up on their built in dressing tables to be afforded a view of whatever their older sister was up to.