My interior life
Add to Favourite Print View: 3575 times Post on:11/16/2012My interior life
A child of the 1970s, Gareth Wyn Davies has been agonising over décor ever since he learnt to say the word.
It’s Christmas morning 1975. I tear downstairs and burst into the sitting-room, keen to discover what Santa has left for me on the north Wales leg of his round-Britain tour. Among the pile is… an Action Man. An Action Man?! Was ever a Christmas present less appropriate for a boy of five? Now, I can’t recall what I had hoped to receive that year, but of one thing I couldn’t be more certain: it wasn’t this.
That poor toy, subject as it was to serial humiliations over the years. First I tried to remove his beard, though it would prove stubbornly resistant to depilation, then I caked him in eye make-up (blue felt-tip applied up to the brow, à la Yootha Joyce). If that wasn’t emasculation enough, some time later I decided to get creative with an old box, turning it into a bijou bachelor pad for him, complete with co-ordinating wallpaper, curtains and duvet in a blue and white sprigged pattern. Well, my mother would go leaving offcuts of Linda Beard’s Dolly Mixtures range for Coloroll lying around in the airing-cupboard.
If Action Man had been intended as a correctional toy, one designed to nudge me into macho pursuits, then my parents were in for a nasty shock. But what did they expect, really? My mother still relates how, during a stroll around the back lanes of our village one Sunday, I raced up to the rest of my family, having lingered too long outside one cottage, to breathlessly announce, 'Mummy, the people who live in that house have mixer taps!’
My parents were serial movers and doer-uppers themselves, and I’d been betraying David Hicks tendencies since I was very young, and not much taller than their G-Plan three-piece suite at the time (low-slung, brown and gold nubbed wool, teamed with swirling paisley curtains). I’d also been rubber-necking and clocking visual signifiers from toddlerhood. In fact, my earliest memory is of crawling on our neighbours’ bathroom floor. Nothing unusual in that, except that what registered, what mattered, was that the floor was varnished cork. And when other boys were out kicking footballs around the rec of a weekend, for me there was no greater pleasure than re-arranging my bedroom.
Besides mixer taps and cork, there were other things, too, that conjured a particular type of smart (this was the 1970s) living. Split-level bungalows, split-level cookers, picture windows, cathedral ceilings, open-tread stairs, chalet-style roofs, vestibule halls… To this day I’m not sure what constitutes a vestibule hall, but I knew we really needed one. Anyway, gleaned from the property ads in the local paper, these were words guaranteed to have me reaching for my Lego. Thereupon I would set about lovingly creating the house I felt should rightfully be ours, and offer it up, like some prize gateau, to my parents. If they lacked anything, these houses, it was sliding patio doors, but that was because Lego only produced poxy little window frames back then.