ZKV 34

 

Nearly 60 years later - same facade, door now grey-blue.

ZKV34

 

Blank screen for several weeks, then a night of digs lived in during the 1960s, shifting the walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, smells, atmospheres around me in the dark. Then the hand turning the kaleidoscope slows and stops and I am in the tiny back room of 26 Parsonage Street, Cambridge, a row of two-up two-down terraced houses, and my landlady, Florence Wolton-Carr (call me Florrie) is mounting the narrow, steep staircase with a washbasin in which a large pitcher of hot water is standing. Introibo ad altare dei. The morning ritual. There is no water supply except in the kitchen, the privy is out in the back yard across a stretch of concrete.

The room is minute, one sixth of it, the entire left-hand corner out towards the long, thin slice of back garden, consists of a white box from floor to ceiling. It contains the cold-water cistern of the house. Right of it is a large sash window which offers me a view of a single, slender pear tree that I attempt to photograph on nights when a full moon hangs above it. An armchair completes the back wall. The rest of the long left wall is an old-fashioned, highish bed with wooden railings at head and foot. The bedspread is bright green. A chest of drawers fills the short wall next to the door. There is a gas fire in the fireplace of the other long wall. A small square of carpet in the middle. About 7-8 sq metres all told. I live there for two years, in this crow’s nest of a cell, writing away on an esoteric Dutch poet. A chrysalis hoping to emerge. The creak of Florrie’s footsteps dies away on the staircase.