As
part of their Whose London Is It Anyway? season, Camden People's
Theatre have turned their window spaces into rooms – a toilet, a
kitchen, a bedroom, a sitting room – and invited people to occupy
them during the day. Each window has an A4 poster highlighting some
appalling fact about the entirely fucked London property market: for
instance, that a garage in Camberwell recently sold for £550K. Don't
get me started. It's a nine-hour shift (initially advertised as 12
hours), which for me translates as the longest amount of
uninterrupted time I've been able to sit at a computer since before
the kids were born, so naturally I signed up and here is me earlier
today:
Yes
of course I hid behind a curtain of paper: what do you think I am,
some kind of exhibitionist? I can't remember the last time I felt so
painfully self-conscious. But as people, especially children, began
to peek around the paper to wave hello, the exposure grew less
excruciating. And it certainly gave me focus: I got more writing done
today than I did in the whole past fortnight.
Back
in the days when commuter trains were barely bearable (as opposed to
wholly impossible), I used to see people with copies of the Evening
Standard, and then the Guardian, encounter something I'd written,
occasionally reading a few sentences but mostly turning the page. So
I'm used to people ignoring my writing: it's a useful reminder to
check my ego. Having readers is far weirder. Especially when those
readers are standing on the other side of a sheet of glass, barely
six inches away.
Their
proximity made me glad that I believe, very deeply, every word they
read today. It made me recognise something else about indifference,
too. If no one cares about what you write, then you have the freedom
to write as you choose. I know this, always have, but often forget.
Thank you, CPT, for opening up a space today in which I could
(re-)remember.
Below
is the text (plus the images) behind which I hid. And seriously, if
you haven't read A Room of One's Own yet, or even recently, treat
yourself.
*
I was 13 when I first got a room of my own.
Before
that I shared with my younger brother. Our room was a prison far from
the playground; a forest and we its falling timber; the hideaway den
of the Dukes and cousin Daisy. I knew I needed a room of my own the
day I – oh, wait, I'm not allowed to tell that story here.
I
couldn't decide what colour to paint my first room of my own, so we
settled on pink-for-a-girl. My best friend at university thought it
was hilarious, and bought me this postcard so I'd never forget.
*
My
second room of my own was at university. Inspired by the painter
Pauline Boty, I turned one wall into a scrapbook collage of my life.
It's one of the best things I've ever made.
At
university I read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own for the first
time. That was half a lifetime ago, so I don't really remember what I
thought, but I was already feminist, so I'd guess it confirmed
everything.
*
My
third room of my own was in a rented flat south of the river. My
parents had nowhere to live because they had bought a derelict house,
so they became my lodgers. I laid down the ground rules. Amazingly,
they agreed.
At
25 I bought a flat of my own. The older I get, the stranger this
seems. I painted the walls sunflower yellow, crimson and teal, and
saved the violent pink for the toilet. There was a room for sewing, a
garden out of the kitchen, and my flatmate introduced me to swing. I
still live there in my dreams.
When
I got married I had a succession of rooms of my own. The first became
the nursery. The second became a toddler's bedroom. The third was
always cluttered with scooters and spare chairs and bags of
recycling; then, in 2014, it disappeared to become part of the
kitchen.
And
that, my friends, is how motherhood affects personal space.
*
I
re-read A Room of One's Own last week and might do so again every
year now. It's astonishing. And painful. Woolf published it in 1928,
but the world she describes and rails against is still recognisably
ours. Patriarchal. Unequal. Shaped by and seen through “masculine
values”.
Men,
she noticed, didn't like feminists saying such things. They tended to
respond with a “ cry of wounded vanity … a protest against some
infringement of his power to believe in himself”. Social media and
comment boxes are full of such protests, not only when women speak,
but people of colour and queer gender or sexuality, too.
*
I
remembered Woolf's call for a room of one's own, but not the
accompanying cry for money – £500 a year. She makes quite the
argument for Basic Income.
Woolf
believed that, with a room of her own and money to support her, women
would be able to write truly, of themselves: finding “some new
vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her”.
I've
always earned money through writing, and that money has always given
me rooms to write in. The bit I'm struggling with is the poetry. The
art.
*
Here's
something else Woolf recognised: “Life for both sexes … is
arduous, difficult. A perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic
courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of
illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.”
You
could call confidence another kind of room: not physical, but mental.
That
mental room is one money can't buy.
*
In
her book Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich argues that
depression is “how capitalism feels”. How having money and a room
of one's own feels.
I
look at the entrenched inequality in this country, and of human
existence generally, and feel not the strength of someone who has,
but horror at how many have not.
I
look at London, the room I was born in, and how much money it demands
that people living here make, just to get by, and feel not the
confidence of someone who got lucky here, but anxiety at what it
means to embody a social system, and bring children up within it.
I
keep writing through that horror and anxiety, but it feels selfish,
immoral and wrong.
*
On
the final page of A Room of One's Own, Woolf looks forward to the day
when women have not only “five hundred a year each of us and rooms
of our own” but “the courage to write exactly what we think”.
I
think we have a responsibility to use our money and our rooms to
write our way out of this inequality.
That's
what I'm trying to do in this little room, this minuscule room of my
own, today. Wish me luck. And thank you for reading. x
