‘Just One Room’

There it is again - that simple phrase uttered by a reporter for the BBC. ‘…just one room!’. Those few words, employed to promote reactions of horror, pity, amazement, condemnation, sympathy, understanding or a plea that ‘it is not right’. What sort of truth is he trying to convey? I need to visit some of these rooms.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven - eleven people all live in this windowless room - this tin shack perched high up, facing a narrow path which winds down the steep slope, one of a warren of alleys and passageways spreading like a spider’s web across the hillside on which the family are trapped. But the mother must let the older boys out to scavenge within the web or run dubious errands, for tonight’s supper. The men must hang back in the claustrophobic room protecting what little they have or prop up the doorway and watch, whilst the young girl risks all to get to her work as a maid in the luxury apartments they can see rising above the golden beaches at the bottom of their hill. There is water to be collected and the roof to be mended with a piece of ‘borrowed’ plastic. The youngest children play in the puddles but there is one boy sitting on the wooden step pouring over a battered book struggling to spell out words, studying  - determined to get away from this room.

There is no escape from this room. It is 8ft by 6ft and has a solid metal, locked door at one end and a tiny barred window high up at the other. There is a single hard bed, a thin blanket and a bucket. The walls are bare but for the rows of little scratches in the corner behind the door. In this room is one man, one voice, one lifetime. He cannot go out, he cannot talk to anyone, he cannot find out about his wife and children or his comrades. He is locked up, incarcerated, in chains. But they cannot lock up his mind, they cannot incarcerate his spirit, his cause -if just - cannot be bound in chains or held in just one room.

The student lounges in his new college room – his own room just for him, to decorate to his own taste. He has his music, his books, his gear. There is the one bed in a room not to be shared by his brother, or another pupil of his boarding school or anyone else; a room that he can enter or leave whenever he likes and can keep in the state he pleases (except perhaps when his mother is coming). A new city, a new term, a new life and his own room to which he can invite anyone in the world or no one.

There’s not one surface that isn’t covered with an ornament, a picture or some other treasure in which is locked a bounty of memories and history. The family photos stretch from the sepia tinged formal portraits of a stern, unsmiling father standing proudly over his equally serious wife, and their brood in sailor suits and frilly dresses; through marriages, births, holidays and graduations to the latest digital snaps of naked grandchildren on the beach in Thailand. The blue glass from Bristol, the souvenir from Llangollen, the wonky bookstand proudly presented on a birthday long ago, a pretty glass paperweight from a dear friend, each is capable of transporting the room’s occupant out of the imprisonment of a pained and cripple body tied to a chair in her room.

The stairwell in the middle of the faceless concrete block is dark and rank. A child’s cries filter down from a room on the third floor. In the room a mother hangs washing on a line, climbing over the bed to reach the corner. The little stove is as clean as she can get it and the washed dishes and pans are piled on a shelf behind a checked curtain by the sink. The baby in the basket is still crying but the other two are playing quietly with some coloured stones on the tiny square of worn carpet. The mother gathers up the baby and sits at the small table by the window, which looks out on the unsafe children’s playground and three identical concrete blocks. She sighs and studies the bills, waiting for the man from the council to come and inspect the damp, before she collects up the family and gets out to the corner shop.

She sweeps diligently and systematically, with her mind way ahead in the day. All the men-folk are out on the steppes tending the horses and sheep, her youngest son proudly astride his pony desperate to prove his worth. She shakes out the yak skin rugs, wipes the brightly painted surfaces of the cupboards and bedsteads set round the edge of the circular room, moves the dish of horse’s milk collected earlier and checks the iron stove with its metal chimney leading up to the opening in the middle of the roof of the ger. As she leaves she passes her newest and proudest possession - a small TV set perched on an improvised ledge poking out of the felt wall. When the wind fills the batteries and the aerial is set right, a whole strange, distant world can be brought into this isolated room.

Does a single sheet of United Nations plastic over a rickety wooden frame count as a room - one that bakes like an oven by day, and cools as a freezer by night? At least it provides some refuge, in which the drained, exhausted and hungry mother and children can huddle, in fear or resignation. There is little to remind this family of their previous life - the hut, the animals, the land, the village, the laughter. Soon the gaunt, haunted woman will need to take courage once again and venture out to look for food and firewood. This room provides shelter from the wind and rain but not from the nightmares, the incomprehension, and the sense of hopelessness. 

‘This building has been in the same family since the 16^th century, There have been extensive alterations at various times, of course, as the family fortunes have waxed and waned.’ So explains the National Trust guide to the tenth party of tourists of the morning. Until fifty years ago the family had occupied the whole building with its fifteen bedrooms, several reception and dining rooms and all those other rooms associated with this sort of establishment. But during the last few years the various members of the family have had different aspirations and other dreams, which didn’t include maintaining a chronically expensive pile in the middle of the countryside. As the children moved on and moved out the family living area contracted, and after the lord of the manor died the old lady withdrew to her favourite corner of the house and gave the rest to the Trust saying, ‘I don’t want to rattle around on my own, in all those rooms.’

Next time I hear that phrase  ‘…just one room’ I will make more effort to imagine what it really means and respond with greater and more appropriate empathy and understanding. Maybe I will even take action - support efforts to provide education for the underprivileged; write a letter of encouragement to those fighting a just cause; lobby against increasing student debt; offer transport for Age Concern; add my name to the call for better housing standards; read more about those whose cultures differ so much from mine; campaign for help for refugees; encourage the preservation of solid symbols of our historic past. The reporter has done his job.