Upstairs
The door opened onto a suite of rooms in an L shape. The first room was my bedroom. The second room, at the corner of the house, had a sink in it. That was Tertia's room. There was a short corridor lined with closets leading to a third room, which was Nulli's room. Eventually it became the boys' room. The short corridor (with was no more than six feet long) gave at least a nod to the concept of privacy. There was no privacy between Tertia and me although I felt I had some privilege since my room had the door. I could leave it open; I could shut it. Power!
The right-hand door on the landing led to a small self-enclosed room with a window facing west. When we first moved into the house, Nulli and I still speaking with accents we picked up in England, that room was our mother's sitting-room. Later it became a nursery, and then for the last few months it became my teenage bedroom. This was more firstborn privilege, I imagine, since it would have been more fair for Nulli and Quadrophonic to have a room each. Infant Quinta was moved into my old room.
Dear me. I feel like St. Augustine recounting his childhood sins.
Landing
The landing itself had charms, for it had a window that looked onto the leafy avenue, and eventually my dollhouse sat in front of this window. The dollhouse had a "stained glass" window, and when the sun shone from the south, coloured lights reflected on the dark stairwell's walls. The landing also had a dark wood and glass bookcase full of books, including the Easter-egg coloured covers of my mother's Georgette Heyer collection.
Lair of the Glue Monster
Our parents had a bedroom on the ground floor at the front of the house. I didn't like it. First, it was on the wrong floor, in my estimation. Second, there were bushes or trees in front the window, blocking the sunlight and the view. It had a door to the front hall and a door to the bathroom, which struck me as almost as good as a hidden door.
We were vaguely forbidden to go into my parents' bedroom, but we sometimes cautiously did, especially if one parent or the other was in there and the door to the hall was open. For example, my mother could be coaxed into playing a game in which she lay on top of the bed and stuffed her children under it while making horrible gobbling noises. This game was called "The Glue Monster."
This room was where we officially welcomed the new addition to our number, the newborn, fresh from the hospital, lying flat on the bed and possessing astonishingly tiny fingernails.
Living Room and TV Room
Across the dark front hall from our parents' room, past the mirrored door to the steep basement staircase, was the principal sitting-room. It had a picture window looking out onto the street, a long "mantlepiece" over a fireplace, and built-in bookshelves. It had a couch, armchairs, a carpet and standing lamps. It was quite obviously a room for reading in. At Christmas-time it had a tree in one corner or the other.
Beside this room there was a pine-wood lined chamber which contained a small television, a love seat, and an upright piano. There was a window in this room, and on fine spring days, the sound of Nulli's music drifted through our window through Mrs Brown's window next door. She greatly enjoyed that, and I enjoyed waking up on Saturday mornings to the sound of Nulli's playing, too. In hot July, an air conditioner blocked up either that window or my bedroom window, which I did not enjoy, as it made my room too cold.
The one bathroom was across a small linoleum hall from the "TV room", as we called it, the TV being more important than the piano. The staircase to the top storey was on the left and the route to the kitchen was on the right. The dining-room to the left of that. Before the kitchen was a short flight of stairs to the side-door, ending in a cat litter tray (for some years), a boot closet and a forest of coats imperfectly hanging on hooks.
Kitchen and dining-room
Over the dining-room doorway was a deep shelf where our Hallowe'en baskets were stored out of reach. Apart from my door, the sewing-room door, my parent's bedroom door and the door to the scary basement, the house was as open-plan as it could be. I did not approve of this either, and would have been delighted had my parents hung long strings of crystal beads between the "living-room" and the "TV room", to say nothing of between Tertia's pink gingham terrain and my chamber of lime green, tan paint and panda-bear wallpaper.
The memory of the green-and-yellow kitchen fills me with unease for some reason, despite the image of my grandmother at the round glass-topped table genially smoking cigarettes. I was washing dishes when she was carted off to the hospital with double-pneumonia, and I got down on my knees on the kitchen floor to pray for her life. Perhaps the unease stems from memories of our poor mother's early morning drudgery in stuffing an increasing number of children with hot breakfasts five days a week.
At their zenith, these breakfasts consisted of hot cereal with brown sugar and milk, bacon or sausages, eggs and toast with jam or peanut butter, plus orange juice. We would gently roll out the door at 8 AM to walk to the school bus stop.
My feelings about the dining-room are much less complicated. Despite my loathing for a dish called "Spanish steak", which I snuck to the cat as much as I could, it was a happy room. The room had windows all around the west and north sides, curtained with blue-and-orange plaid, and old-fashioned mustard pots, pewter tankards and fancy plates paraded along a narrow shelf. We were the kind of family that had dinner together every night--with Dad at the head of the table to boot--and so the whole family was together in one space once a day. That is also the room of all the birthday parties and birthday present-giving and other memorable and rare occasions like the appearance of foreign dinner guests, usually weird-looking linguists from Scotland or the People's Republic of China.
In the summer, as I have mentioned before, the scent of mock orange entered in through the screen windows. There was also the rose bush under the west windows. At least one of these did not have a screen in the window which meant that we children could surreptitiously climb in and out of it and hand the baby through it, at need. I don't think we did this very often, but occasionally we acted out plays in which there were tower scenes; the dining-room, naturally, was the tower.
Philosophical reflection
I did not have friends who came from families as big as mine, which is a pity, for it may have made me less resentful of the lack of walls between bedrooms. I think I was 20 before I realised that children in Ontario's big Catholic families often lived three to a room. My understanding of what was right and proper in the world came from books, and the heroines of books always had their own room.
At the same time, I assumed that every family in Canada, rich or poor, ate a hot breakfast in the kitchen together and then sat in a dining-room sometime after six to eat a hot supper. I had gathered that we were a rather old-fashioned family, but I didn't realise that this extended to the vanishing tradition of twice-daily family meals, to say nothing of the nightly enthronement of the Paterfamilias at the head of the table.
As I said, there are only six people now living who can remember any of this. Well, maybe seven, if Quinta wasn't too young when we left for a larger house farther north. I wonder to what extent we were all permanently shaped by this small kingdom. Possibly my parents were just continuing to live as they were brought up--only with more children and more after-school activities.
The Glue Monster's Daughter
Not having any children myself, I do not often enter into the old spirit of my childhood in Willowdale, except to argue that a dining-room is an absolute necessity to comfortable living.
That said, I return spiritually to Willowdale days when I visit my beloved friend Lily, her husband and their growing family. They live in a three-storey house on the north side of a tree-lined Toronto street, one reason of many why I feel so at home there.
In this house, with only a small amount of badgering, I will transform myself from a mere courtesy aunt into a kind of Glue Monster. This involves a great deal of underbite, growling and stuffing shrieking children into small spaces while roaring "YUM YUM YUM! HO HO HO!"
This proves that I am not totally useless as adults go and was properly brought up.
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