Domestic Interiors Database

The room was pitiful in the grey morning light. I thought it tumbledown last night but daylight was happy to show me more of its filthy secrets. Plaster missing from a bit of the wall. Jagged black lines of cracks everywhere. A missing handle on the chest of drawers. No basin in the sink. And there were lacy white patterns on the windowpane. Frost. I was taught by my headmistress, Miss Morgan, that frost is to be found on the outside of a window in England, but my curious finger got fastened to this stuff. Sticky with cold it melted under my warm fingertip on the inside of the room! For the useless fire roared with fierce heat only when I stood right on top of it. One inch, that was all. one inch back and the heat no longer reached me. Two inches, and I was in need of my coat. Three and it was as wintry as it was on the street. This room would not do. I could hear Celia Langley laughing on me. ‘The Lord surely moves in mysterious ways, Hortense,’ her mocking tome exclaimed.

But I paid her no mind. I opened my trunk. The bright Caribbean colours of the blanket the old woman had given me in Ochi leaped from the case. The yellow with the red, the blue with the green commenced dancing in this dreary room. I took the far-from-home blanket and spread it on the bed.

Miraculous - it was then I heard a bird sing. Oh, so joyful. Finding colour through a window its spirit rose to chirrup and warble. ‘Don’t laugh on me, Celia Langley’, I said. ‘Just watch me, nah.’ I determined then to make this place somewhere I could live - If only for this short while. For England was my destiny. I started with that sink. Cracked as a map and yellowing I scrubbed it with soap until my hand had to brush perspiration from my forehead. Pulling the stinking tin potty from under the bed, ‘You next,’ I told it. But then there was a knock on the door.