When I
was twelve, my brother and I had a den in an unused outbuilding belonging to
the house we lived in. We trod a narrow winding path through a deep bed of
green nettles to get to the flaking, rickety door; we whitewashed the walls and
found some old broken stools and chairs to furnish it. It was our private
place. We made a cardboard sign to hang on the door and ward off intruders: it
read, in drippy red paint: ‘Beware! 10,000 Volts!’
A few years later when we were in our early teens, our parents bought an
enormous old house in the Yorkshire Dales which had been empty for three
years since the death of the last owner, an elderly spinster whose family had
built the house in the early 18th century. There was no electricity,
so for six months we went to bed with candles and oil lamps. One room, with a
hole in the floor, was too dangerous to enter until the joists had been
mended: we would peer in from the doorway at a clutter of mysterious objects:
a half-rotted Jacobean table, a Victorian birdcage, knife-sharpening
machines, stone-floor polishers. Another room had a pointed, arched doorway.
My parents had the decorators in, and one of them peeled away damp wallpaper
to discover a small, hidden cupboard. In great excitement he called us all to
assemble before he opened it. But it was empty…
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In ‘The
Uses of Enchantment’, Bruno Bettelheim discusses secret or forbidden rooms in
fairytales very much in Freudian terms: ‘ ‘Bluebeard’ is a story about the
dangerous propensities of sex, about its strange secrets and close connection
with violent and destructive emotions.’
The blood upon the key which betrays to
Bluebeard that his wife has entered the forbidden chamber leaves little doubt
that Bettelheim is right in this instance. Keys, locks, blood: you can’t get much more
Freudian than that. But, in a related fairy
tale, the Grimms’ ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, it’s an egg which the murderous magician
bids his brides take with them as they explore his house. ‘Preserve the egg
carefully for me,’ he says, ‘and carry it continually about with you, for a
great misfortune would arise from the loss of it.’ The first two girls manage
to drop the egg into a basin of blood which stands in the secret chamber: scrub
as they will, the bloodstains won’t wash off. Now an egg is of course a female symbol, and
this tale seems to me more a case of infidelity worrying the magician, than
of defloration worrying the heroine – who brightly ignores the command and puts
the egg carefully aside before unlocking the forbidden door. In fact, the obvious impracticality of having
to carry an egg ‘continually about’ suggests to me a sly criticism of society’s
unrealistic expectations of women.
There’s a
well-known old riddle about eggs:
A box without hinges, key or lid
Yet golden treasure within is
hid.
The egg
which the heroine keeps safe is a secret chamber in itself, but the treasure
hidden within is not necessarily her virginity. We are free to interpret it in other
ways – as her self-determination, even her very soul: folk and fairy tales
world-wide tell of an external soul contained in an egg. In the Russian fairy tale ‘Koschei the
Deathless’, the monstrous Koschei is killed when Prince Ivan bursts the egg in
which his soul (or life, or death) is hidden; and in ‘The Young King of Easaidh
Ruadh’ (collected by J.F. Campbell on Islay in 1859) the young king’s wife
manages to get the giant who has imprisoned her to tell her where his soul is. Actually
this story is so lovely, here’s a long piece of it –
‘It is not there that my soul is,’
said he. ‘There is a great flagstone under the threshold. There is a wether
under the flag. There is a duck in the wether’s belly, and an egg in the belly
of the duck, and it is in the egg that my soul is.’ When the giant went away in
the morrow’s day, they raised the flagstone and out went the wether. ‘If I had
the slim dog of the greenwood, he would not be long bringing the wether to me.’
The slim dog of the greenwood came with the wether in his mouth. When they
opened the wether, out was the duck on the wing with the other ducks. ‘If I had
the Hoary Hawk of the grey rock, she would not be long bringing the duck to
me.’ The Hoary Hawk of the grey rock
came with the duck in her mouth; when they split the duck to take the egg from
her belly, out went the egg into the depth of the ocean. ‘If I had the brown
otter of the river, he would not be long bringing the egg to me.’ The brown otter came and the egg in her
mouth, and the queen caught the egg, and she crushed it between her two hands.
The giant was coming in the lateness [of the evening] and when she crushed the
egg, he fell down dead, and he has never yet moved out of that. They took with
them a great deal of his gold and silver. They passed a cheery night with the
brown otter of the river, a night with the hoary falcon of the grey rock, and a
night with the slim dog of the
greenwood. They came home…
Returning
to ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, as soon as the heroine shows the magician the unblemished
egg, ‘he now had no longer any power over her, and was forced to do whatsoever
she desired.’ The girl goes on to revive and rescue her sisters and orchestrate
the magician’s death. In a way, then, there are two secret rooms in this fairy
tale: the Bloody Chamber which represents death and the Unbloody Chamber of the
egg, which represents life and power and potential. Though other fairy tale
rooms, such as the Sleeping Beauty’s chamber or Rapunzel’s tower, are often seen
as symbolizing a closed virginal space in which nothing at all happens until it
is penetrated by male activity, we should perhaps be wary. It is dangerous to
take a Freudian interpretation as an explanation. Fairy tales are
usually much richer than any particular common denominator.
How many
books did you read as a child, where the discovery of a concealed room was one
of the most exciting parts of the story? Enid Blyton had them by the dozen. I
well remember one (in ‘The Rockingdown Mystery’) where the hero, blue-eyed
Barney, spends several nights in the deserted, but poignantly furnished,
nursery of an eerie abandoned house - full of old dolls and damp, moth-eaten
blankets, with strange noises echoing up through the floor. You know he’s not
going to stay there, he’s going to go down exploring through the dark abandoned
house, he’s going to find …what?
Hidden
rooms in children’s fiction are transitional places, they have meaning, they
hold some clue that leads elsewhere. In Jane Langton’s 1962 classic ‘The
Diamond in the Window’, Eleanor and Edward discover the ‘hidden’ room at the
top of the tower – with, significantly, a keyhole-shaped stained-glass window –
from which, years ago, two children with exactly the same names disappeared.
This keyhole has no sexual implication. It stands for the unlocking of mystery.
[Eleanor]
was blinded at first by the dimness. Then the many colours of the great keyhole
window blossomed… and gradually illumined the objects in the room… a huge mirror
that was sunk into the well of an enormous dresser across the room from the
window. There was a table, and what was that on the table? …It was a castle, a
castle made of blocks. And there were chairs and toys, and a little wagon. And
what was that on either side of the window? Eleanor’s heart bounded into her
throat.
It was
two narrow beds, and the covers were turned neatly down.
‘Two
narrow beds’ – there are suggestions here of death, absence, the mysteries of
time. Just as in the book by Enid Blyton, here are traces of long-ago children
who have vanished. This is a recurrent theme in children’s books: for it’s a
sad and certain, yet also glorious and fascinating truth that all children do
disappear – into adulthood, and ultimately into death… which is presumably the
meaning of that very unsettling short story by Walter de la Mare, ‘The Riddle’
– where, one after another, a whole family of children climb silently into a
carved chest in the attic and disappear for ever.
Then
there are bedrooms. Bedrooms, in children’s fiction, are places of magical
refuge, yet full of possibility – as different as possible from the Bloody
Chamber but perhaps with some similarity to the magical egg from which the
young chick hatches and sets out to explore the world. A bedroom of one’s own,
for a child, is a place of self-determination in which she can be and do and
imagine whatever she wants. Rooms in children’s fiction, therefore, often
reflect the desirable qualities of a perfect personal space.
Elizabeth
Goudge was good at this. Maria, heroine of ‘The Little White Horse’, coming to
the magic and mystery of Moonacre Manor, is provided with a bedroom in a tower with
a door too small for an adult to get through. The room has three windows,
one with a window seat, a ‘silvery oak floor’, and a four-poster bed ‘hung with
pale blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars’. And ‘the fireplace was
the tiniest she had ever seen,’ but big enough for ‘the fire of pine cones and
applewood that burned in it… It was the room Maria would have designed for
herself if she had had the knowledge and the skill.’ From such a base Maria can
with confidence launch her campaign against the men of the sinister Black
Castle in the pine wood.
In
‘Linnets and Valerians’, perhaps Goudge’s masterpiece, the quieter heroine Nan
is given a parlour of her own by her austere Uncle Ambrose. It opens off a dark
passage, but then:
The
room inside was a small panelled parlour. There was a bright wood fire burning
in the basket grate, and on the mantelpiece above were a china shepherd and
shepherdess and two china sheep. Over the mantelpiece was a round mirror in a
gilt frame… Nan sat down in the little armchair and folded her hands in her
lap… It was quiet in here, the noises of the house shut away, the sound of the
wind and rain seeming only to intensify the indoor silence. The light of the
flames was reflected in the panelling, and the burning logs smelt sweet.
And yet,
in the heart of this paradise a snake lurks: the discovery, in a cupboard, of
an old notebook written by the witch Emma Cobley. ‘Nan sat down in the armchair
with shaking knees, but nevertheless she opened the book and began to read.’
In each
case, the rooms – though so utterly desirable – contain clues and hints of the
past, of the passage of other people’s lives (often relations), and of
mysteries which must be investigated. But the rooms give them the assurance to
cope. Tolly’s delightful room in Lucy Boston’s ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ is
filled with the toys, memories and ghostly presences of the children who lived
there in the past and who become his companions. Though haunted, the room is magical and reassuring rather than scary, and Peter Boston's wonderful black and white illustration shows it as a tangle of enchanted shadows.
I adored the book so much as a child, I painted my own version of the room, complete with rocking horse, dolls' house, Russian doll, birdcage and mirror.
When Garth Nix’s heroine Sabriel comes for the first time to the house of
the Abhorsen, escaping terrifying dangers, it is a place of refuge: 'The
gate swung open, pitching her on to a paved courtyard, the bricks ancient,
their redness the colour of dusty apples. The path wound up to…a cheerful
sky-blue door, bright against whitewashed stone.’ And she wakes later, ‘to soft
candlelight, the warmth of a feather bed…A fire burned briskly in a red-brick
fireplace, and wood-panelled walls gleamed with the dark mystery of
well-polished mahogany. A blue-papered ceiling with silver stars dusted across it
faced her newly opened eyes.' Though Sabriel cannot stay here, the house strengthens
her, providing not merely physical comfort but a very
necessary sense of of identity and self-knowledge.
Betsy Byars’
‘The Cartoonist’ takes this further. The only place in Alfie’s crowded house
where he can be himself is in his attic. Here he expresses himself by drawing
the cartoons that are his life-blood. As long as he has his attic, he can cope
with the demands of his noisy, feckless family:
Nobody ever went up there but Alfie.
Once his sister, Alma, had started up the ladder, but he had said, “No, I don’t
want anybody up there…I want it to be mine.”
When the
family decide over his head that his older brother should have the attic,
Alfie’s entire personal existence – and his imaginative life – are threatened.
He barricades himself in. And in Michael Ende’s ‘The Never-Ending Story’,
Bastian hides himself in the school attic ‘crammed with junk of all kinds’:
Not a sound
to be heard but the muffled drumming of the rain on the enormous tin roof.
Great beams blackened with age rose at regular intervals… and lost themselves
in darkness. Here and there spider webs as big as hammocks swayed gently in the
air currents.
Sinister
it may seem, but this is a safe place, a place where Bastian can open the
Never-Ending Story and escape into fiction.
I
remember wishing I, like Heidi, could have a bedroom up a ladder in a hay-loft,
where Heidi sleeps ‘as soundly and well as if she had been in the loveliest bed
of some royal princess’. And to this bedroom she returns later in the book with
her rich, lame friend Klara:
They
all stood round Heidi’s beautifully made hay bed…drawing deep breaths of the
spicy fragrance of the new hay. Klara was perfectly charmed with Heidi’s
sleeping place. ‘Oh Heidi! From your bed you can look straight out into the
sky, and you can hear the fir trees roar outside. Oh I have never seen such a
jolly, pleasant sleeping room before.’
This
mountain home will give strength to Klara and heal her. And isn’t part of the charm in Frances
Hodgson Burnett’s ‘A Little Princess’ the way in which Sara’s attic room is
transformed, first by the power of her own imagination and then by a reality
which she calls ‘the magic’, from a cold, inimical space into a place which
comforts and sustains both body and soul?
‘Supposing
there was a bright fire in the grate, with lots of little dancing flames,’ she
murmured. ‘Suppose there was a comfortable chair before it – and suppose there
was a small table nearby with a little hot – hot supper on it. And suppose”- as
she drew the thin coverings over her – “suppose this was a beautiful soft bed,
with fleecy blankets and large downy pillows. Suppose – suppose –’ And her very
weariness was good to her, for her eyes closed and she fell fast asleep.
Of course
she awakes and finds it’s come true…
Secret
rooms in children’s fiction are not Freudian symbols of sexual awakening, nor
do they represent a static no-place-and-no-time from which it is necessary to
be rescued. They are miraculous, transformative spaces in which a child is
protected and nourished, and from which she or he draws strength
and confidence to set out into life.
Picture credits
The room at the top of the tower, from 'Thorn Rose', by Errol le Cain, 1977
Bluebeard, by Jenny Harbour, 1921
The Search Begins, from 'The Diamond in the Window', by Erik Blegvad
Maria's Room from 'The Little White Horse', by C. Walter Hodges
Tolly's room, by Peter Boston
Tolly's room, by Katherine Langrish
Heidi's hayloft, by William Sharp
Heid's dream, by William Sharp
