Little Minge and the rooms

Our house, a council house, was on the north end of the town.

Behind us, there was a service road, used by the bin-men to take our crap away or for residents to park their cars in their garages. We called it the alley. My Protestant friends and I would play in it, running up and down it or riding our bikes along it, up and down the hill. Mum said I should go no further than the flats. If I couldn't see the house, I'd gone too far.

The Catholic children weren't allowed to play with us.

We weren't stopped from playing with them, but they weren't to play with us.

At the front of our house was the common. It had a name, Turbary Common, but only people who didn't live along Turbary Park Avenue called It Turbary Common. They didn't belong to it. It wasn't their common. If you lived in Turbary Park Avenue, you were special and had certain privileges, like calling it the common and not Turbary Common. My brother, Mark; Rexy, our dog and I spent most of the daylight hours there in the Summers of 1976 and 1977. In 1978, Mark got too old to play with me. Instead, he sat in his room with his friends, listening to seven inch records and playing cards.

I say his bedroom, but it was in fact our bedroom. We shared sleeping quarters from 1978 until 1981 when our sister Christine got married. I then got to have my own room. It was small and cold. Although it was mine and no-one else's and I didn't have to put up with my brother's restless sleeping, farting and other annoying habits, I missed him and I missed my room.

From our room, I could see my beloved common; the grass, trees, shrubs, the bicycle track and wood. Memories would flood into my mind as soon as my eyes were cast in front of me from the window.

From my room, I could see the airport, the rooves of houses in the roads behind us and the bloody school. Thoughts of school upset me. I'd rather be looking out from the front of the house.

Our room was better.

My room was shit.

When I left our room, Mark covered the walls with posters from pop magazines and his own sketches. He was putting his mark on it. It wasn't our room any more. He even started sleeping in my old bed.

My room still felt like Christine's room. I could smell her perfume in the curtains. I switched her lamp on when I went to bed. Her books were still on the shelf above me as I went to sleep. Her broken television was still on top of the wardrobe with no door. Her records were still in a pile under the window.

My pens and pencils, pads of paper and school books would usually be scattered across the floor. It was my floor at least. Until Mum told me to tidy up. Then everything was shoved under the bed. It went back to being Christine's floor. She'd chosen the carpet with my Father three years before. It was only an off-cut, cheap as chips, but it was her carpet.

Nothing was mine.

So I changed all that. With some help from Mum.

We found some material in the attic and made new curtains. I put the television in the bin. All her records and books went into boxes and the boxes went into the garage until she picked them up. Mum and Dad had new carpet in their bedroom, so a square was cut from their old carpet and put down in my room.

I filled it with the books that I'd started collecting, paintings that I'd done at school and gifts that I'd been given for birthdays and Christmas. Mark even made me a new lamp of my very own at woodwork class in school! It finally felt like it was my space. My room.

But I still missed our room and that wonderful view.