On a Boy and His Bedroom.

I was reading a comment on an old blog post this morning from young Andrea Kiss of Tennessee, in which she talked of how she used to decorate her bedroom as a child. I never did that, you know. Maybe it was a generational thing; maybe British boys of my generation were too much influenced by the realities of post-war austerity to give vent to such frippery.

But in my case there was another reason. We lived in an apparently haunted house and I was terrified of ghosts, so my bedroom was not so much a valued and private space as the daily source of stress. Going to bed was always scary, especially at the dark time of year. Summer wasn’t so bad. 

And when I entered high school the family bureau was moved into the room for the purpose of providing a homeworking facility away from my parents’ TV viewing. There was no place for fancy pictures when I was labouring over French verbs, quadratic equations, and the question of whether Macbeth was a greater fiend than his wife or vice versa. It was about then that the magic of Christmas began to dissipate and I finally forced myself to turn the light off before going to sleep.

But before that happened there was, of course, one exception: Christmas Eve. I was always most anxious to go to bed on the most magical night of the year. My only fear that night was that I would be unable to sleep, and we all knew that Father Christmas declined to visit houses where the children were not asleep.  Needless to say, I always managed it in time.

But not before I’d spent a few minutes gazing out of my window at the sky over the wood at the back of our house. One Christmas I saw a meteor zip across the heavens, and was quite certain that it was the old man and his reindeer out on their rounds. Another year there was a single, very bright star sitting above the trees – probably Venus or Jupiter I expect – which I naturally presumed to be the very star which had guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem. Oh what a naïve little boy I was, safe and snug in the simple certainties of simpler days. I miss him sometimes.