Hi friends,
I’m delighted to be back after a couple of weeks away and hope you’re all keeping well.
Welcome to my regular Sunday post which, this week, is free so if you like it, please share it with others. On Wednesday, I’ll once again be posting a new audio episode of my memoir for the Membership community. Today’s words don’t contain any plot spoilers, but this might be a handy post to read if you’re new around here:
And now for this week’s words… on wallpaper
I stand in the near-dark, in near-enough the same spot where – a long time ago – I took picture after picture of my nearly-one-year-old with her new teeth in her new cot in her new room: the one with the old wallpaper I’d argued to keep.
Now taller than I am, my nearly-teenager flits around stacking piles of books, crates of skincare and bundles of clothes into boxes that’ll be stored elsewhere until this room is made new for her again.
I’m supposed to be helping, she reminds me.
Instead, I’m looking at the densely-patterned wallpaper. Seeing things in it – Magic Eye-style – when I relax my eyes. Getting lost in it a bit, like I’ve allowed myself to so many times before. I’m sad, because I don’t want it to come down. My daughter’s delighted, of course. She thinks it’s hideous and has been tolerating it since she developed an opinion on interior design a number of years ago now.
When we moved into the house in 2012, this wallpaper was the only one that didn’t bear any of the dirty ghost marks left by the taken-down mirrors and frames elsewhere. Marks like those gave me a weird feeling. Anyway, I happened to love the pastel pattern and all it needed was a wipe down with a damp cloth which was a bonus when the rest of the house was a total shit tip.
This room was first my daughter’s then her sister’s. I spent hundreds of hours in it shushing them to sleep, feeding them through the night, reading them stories and singing them songs. For some reason, though, I always thought eventually the room and its wallpaper would be mine. A room of one’s own. And before the older one moved back in a few years ago it was mine, kind of. I chose to have my therapy hours in it, and during those sessions would lie on the spare bed under the eaves looking at the walls so I didn’t have to look at my therapist. My eyes would follow the pattern, yes, but also linger on scores and scratches I could never hope to explain.
Before us, who knows whose room it was. A long-ago baby’s? A daughter’s? Mr Hunter’s daughter’s (though did he even have a daughter? I remember only stories of sons)? ‘Old’ Mrs Hunter then – Mr Hunter’s mother? I know it wasn’t ‘young’ Mrs Hunter’s because hers became ours. And before the Hunters – sometime in the early 1960s when carriage stones still lined the street – whose room was it then? It can’t have had this wallpaper. Or could it? The writing we uncovered on the hall wall means it maybe is that old…
Houses like these foster in their custodians all kinds of irrational attachments. Breed wild speculations. Nurture a specific kind of madness.
For a while, my daughter’s been worrying at a bulging bit near the window frame. She’s shouted me through to get me to listen as her prodding loosens chunks of plaster under the thin paper. I’ve given up telling her to stop, and see it for what it is: part of her ongoing petition for a full room makeover, which I understand. More than that, though, we’ve put it off for too long and need to see what the wallpaper’s been hiding. I keep imagine the whole room collapsing in on itself when it’s finally removed which isn’t an unreasonable prediction, really. We stripped every other wall in this house and grew to expect whole chunks of lath and plaster to suddenly fall on us once a bit of steam hit it. This one is going to be messy as fuck.
I wrote about this particular wallpaper in this episode of my memoir, but it’s not the only time it crops up in the story. It has an important part to play in the ending, too. And it’s not the only wallpaper I wrote about in it, either. The other ones were dark. One the colour of a fresh bruise. Another, like sodden leaves at autumn’s end. Both were textured and patterned in ways my young self found a challenge to the senses. There was nothing mesmeric about the dark walls at Auchengate.
I know exactly when each of them was torn down, too. My mother made a frenzied start on the hallway one in August 1997 before she was sectioned and, the following summer, I set to the other when my grandparents’ bedroom became mine. Decorating that room at 15 was the first opportunity I’d ever had to declare who I was on such a grand scale. There would be no wallpaper. I didn’t even want a lining paper despite the warnings about the cracks that would grow without it. I just wanted paint that would make me feel like I was in a sunset, I said.
Or at least that was the idea.
An older memory. Five-year-old me being allowed a say when the house on Riverbank Street was redecorated after the fire. Possibly, this gesture was a way to make me feel less frightened returning to a house I’d last seen in photos taken for the insurance company. I’d had nightmares about them because they depicted my house but not my house, the walls soot-black and streaked with dried-in water stains. I think I remember the heavy sample book in the shop in Kilmarnock from which all the new wallpapers were chosen. The hallway one was a light, iridescent shell pattern with the kind of puffy textured bits I’d later enjoy making half-moon shapes in with my nails.
So I think we can agree I have a thing about wallpaper. I’ve thought about it in one way or other all my life. About who put it up, what it covers, what taking it down might reveal. I’ve gotten attached to it, lost in patterns, distracted by imperfections. Been drawn to touch some while being utterly repelled by others.
Can wallpaper have meaning? Moreover, what do we mean when we write about it? Write ourselves into it or its patterns into us?
These are questions I have this week as a reader as well as a writer. I’m three-quarters of the way through Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin in which two couples live in the same Paris apartment fifty years apart. The book “explores the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there,” so it’s clearly a book made for me. However, it’s also a story about what it means to be in a marriage and explores, without judgement or solution, the work of feminism on the institution.
The couples’ stories graze against one another across the decades and, as the menfolk shrink to occupy smaller and smaller roles in the narrative, we see that the big stuff (fidelity, fertility and feminism) occupies the minds of the women just as fully as the (arguably) small matter of choosing wallpaper for your kitchen. Maybe they’re connected, in fact.
In 1972, Florence’s husband humours her as she attempts to make the apartment she’s inherited from her grandmother her own:
“We have to take it down, Florence said. Put up something more modern. I want it to be – I want it to be brown! she said with a flourish. Why brown and orange paisley is more modern, I don’t know, but Florence is the fashion plate around here. I know she needs to make this place her own, not only to live here but to inhabit this space that knows so much about her family’s story, it’s not surprising she would want to tear down any of the places where some of that sadness might cling.”
Florence’s husband Henry wants to pacify and contain his wife. In the brown and orange kitchen, preferably. He doesn’t want the child she is desperate for and definitely doesn’t want an active feminist or trainee psychoanalyst for a wife. You can imagine for yourself what comes of such conflicts of interest. Half a century later, psychoanalyst Anna resists her husband’s pleas to join him in London, choosing instead to remain in Paris despite being on a leave of absence from work and disrupted by the refacing of her building. Behind the scaffolding, the apartment feels like hers to do with as she pleases and though there are no known ghosts to exorcise, Florence’s 1970s wallpaper has to go:
“I look around the stale, dim room. There’s so much to be done in here, it’s a minefield of other people’s choices, I feel like I’m fighting with the past. It has to be entirely stripped and rebuilt – starting with the wallpaper in rotting shades of orange and brown. Here and there it peels away from the wall… Brown and yellow and orange vines, twisting down the wall, imprisoning each other, lush and prickly. I locate one of the spots where it’s starting to peel away, lift my hand up to it, peel it away, a bit more, then a bit more, until I take a big swathe off in one massive go. Underneath, white wall, mottled with glue and age.”
Anna has holed herself up in the apartment following a trauma she’s still recovering from. Spending so much time alone, it’s easy to read her increasing preoccupation with the walls as a sign of her fragile mental state, and the sudden impulse to rip it off as an outward expression of a need to forget the past few months as well as the unknown former inhabitants.
There’s previous literary form for women finding something soothing, haunting, challenging or maddening in the walls of their intimate spaces. Bedrooms. Nurseries. I’ll include kitchens, too. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s unnamed protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper is the obvious one. Imprisoned in the would-be nursery at the top of the house by her doctor husband who believes in ‘the rest cure’ for her nervous condition, she starts to lose herself. Talks about herself in the third person as she unravels, eventually believing she’s discovered a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The ending of the story sees her tear it down. She thinks she has freed the woman and herself though, of course, she remains trapped in her madness and her marriage.
I studied this short story alongside Jane Eyre over twenty years ago and failed to vibe with the mad women in their attic rooms. I certainly wasn’t thinking about any link to my mother in the hallway a few years earlier. Nor, at 19, was I able to imagine what precluded those women from leaving the rooms they’d been put in or the power their husbands could’ve had over them. The gaslighting: a word I’m pretty confident we weren’t using in the early 2000s.
It certainly wasn’t being used fifty years ago. For a period of a fortnight or so in late August 1974, my grandfather kept my grandmother mostly confined to the attic bedroom with the bruise-coloured wallpaper that, a quarter of a century later, I’d strip with abandon. He believed she was safer there and that she was too ill to be left unsupervised or move around the house on her own. He recorded her breakdown on a thin piece of blue airmail paper. It was for the doctor but aside from him, I think I’m the only other pair of eyes to have seen it.
He’d have thought he was doing the right thing, as this episode shows, but did that confinement and surveillance contribute to her breakdown? I don’t know if she was seeing anything in the walls, and I’m probably in danger of getting fanciful again. That said, a decade later, she wrote a letter to my grandfather and uncles, who by then jointly owned the family’s sawmill, requesting an increase of £30 per week in what she called her ‘allowance’.
She wanted to decorate the house for the first time since 1959 and felt she’d been forced to tolerate its failings and inadequacies for long enough. She focused on the need for modernisation, which perhaps she thought might appeal to them, but I wonder if she was really saying she needed to make over the house as a way to forget the stuff I know haunted her? Her lost babies, her alcoholism, her mental breakdown?
The improvements never came. She died ten years later; the house exactly as it had been since they built it. I know, because by then I was living in it. Sleeping in what had been her bed – alongside my mum and my brother – in that same bedroom.
What does it say to you, I wonder? What’s your relationship to wallpaper? Do you have one, even? I suspect I’m not alone.
This weekend, though, I have been mostly alone. It’s a very rare thing to be home on my own for more than a few hours and perhaps that’s why my thoughts on this have become more complex than a Substack post. When I started thinking about what I’d like to write about this week, I just knew it had to be about all these wallpapers. I wasn’t sure quite what I wanted to say which isn’t that unusual: it normally works itself out in the writing. But now it’s Saturday evening and I’m still not sure what conclusions will tie these observations together in the neat way I’d like. I could almost drive myself mad, actually, clawing my way towards an ending.
So maybe it has to be enough that in writing about it, I’ve brought a few things to the surface. An acknowledgement of the way I lean into history and old stories as a means to bring order and give meaning to the present. An acceptance that my daughter deserves a room that reflects who she is, not one that she feels she’s borrowing from me.
So what happens when you tear a hole in the pattern you’ve been hellbent on preserving and take a good look at what’s underneath it? The one on the wall? The ones you impose on your writing? The ones you thought made sense of your life?
I need to be ok with not having all the answers.
This got me thinking of this book I had once Cutting Edge of Wallpaper by Ziggy Hanaor. The intricacies within some are works of art within themselves.
Love this Lindsay. My kids’ bedroom when they were little had the jolliest yellow wallpaper with green trees all over it. When I think of them that age I think of that wallpaper. loved it so much and was very sad to leave it when we left that house. It’s so very personal and I suspect got painted over pretty quick.