Owning Up: The Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

warming-pan.
    On the first floor, up the dog-legged staircase with its carpet rods and a gate fixed across the top to stop us falling down, there was a different pattern of rooms. In the front were the nursery and the night-nursery. The night-nursery, where our nanny slept with us when we were still young, has become vague, but the nursery is as clear as if I had just left it. The floor was of dark green cork, the walls white, the furniture apple-green. There was a gas fire with a tall fender guard and in front of it a grubby, faded white rug with animals on it. There was a big toy cupboard, a table with cane-bottomed chairs, a child’s table, round with four legs, and two little chairs; one curved with arms, the other with a rush seat like Van Gogh’s. There was a shelf of books, mostly tattered copies of Beatrix Potter, a small sand tray with tin animals, and a big chest, once my father’s tuck-box, containing a large number of wooden building blocks. There was a wind-up gramophone and a few old records, a framed print of Margaret Tarrant’s sugary ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. There were dark green blinds instead of curtains, and an ottoman in front of the windows.
    Behind the nursery was my parents’ bedroom, which overlooked the back-yard and the roof of Hogg’s dairy. The general effect was blue largely because of the shiny blue eiderdowns on the twin beds with their dark polished headboards rounded at the corners. Twin beds for married couples, like calling the drawing-room ‘the lounge’, were a further proof of being ‘modern’. My grandparents’ generation still slept in a double bed which my parents believed to be unhygienic. Between the beds was a cupboard with a chamber-pot in it and a small drawer below containing medicines; a far from hygienic arrangement I should have thought. Although the bathroom was next door to them, my mother and father always used the pot, though my mother, as a further proof of her modernity, emptied it herself every morning instead of leaving it to the maids as my grandparents did. Over the beds were two nineteenth-century lithographs: sly Pandora and her box, and Lady Hamilton looking rather distraught. The originals were perhaps by Reynolds or Gainsborough. My mother believed them to be valuable because they were wedding presents from a rich woman. Over the gas fire was a water-colour, a gift of a local artist and ‘rather modern’. It represented barges on the Seine. There was a tall mahogany wardrobe with mirrors, a quite good chest of drawers and a dressing-table in the window with silver hair brushes and a cut-glass scent spray with a bulb. My mother’s jewel case had very little in it: a few rings, some art-deco clips, some earrings, a string of pearls, and Uncle George’s ‘peace offering’. There was a Coty powder box which was round and had a pattern of little black and orange powder puffs on it. This pattern was very important to me, but it wasn’t until I saw one recently in an antique shop (£5), that I realised what the black and orange shapes represented.
    The bathroom, with the only indoor lavatory, was pretty functional. My father used a heavy safety razor with a one-edged blade which he honed on a special leather strap. There was a loofah, a sponge and a pumice-stone on the wooden rack over the claw-footed bath. No bathroom was then complete without these objects.
    My father’s dressing-room built out over the back kitchen was tiny, although later I was to sleep in it in a child’s wooden bed of Swiss origin that had been handed down from my great-grandfather. Before this it had little in it except a wardrobe and a chest of drawers with a mirror above. On the chest was a cedar-wood Chinese ‘mess-box’ full of collar-studs, stiffeners, golf-tees and, as I discovered later, a solitary French letter, surely by that time unreliable, which once I had learnt its function I used to show my giggling and impressed school friends. There were also