RACHEL ANDREWS

77

Anglin in the Glen, and the bill was paid monthly. The family ate dinner around 3:30 p.m., and afterwards, my grandmother stacked everything onto a tray and brought it to the kitchen. She folded the tablecloth, rolled the serviettes into rings, put them in the sideboard. The washing up was slow, laborious: the ware had to be scrubbed, rinsed, dried, put away. She hated rubber gloves and eschewed them, but the flaked powder she used (there was no dish soap) gave her severe dermatitis—my itchings, she called it—on her hands, up her arms, spreading down her spine.

After that was her time until tea time. She used to sit in her kitchen in the quiet of the late afternoon, when the sun came from the west, and do the crossword in the Sunday Times. She smoked there, listened to the radio, away from the wrestle of the family.

She sang then.

Because I am interested in space and the bodies that move in it, I am drawn to Gaston Bachelard. Even the title: The Poetics of Space. I follow him on his journey around the house. I read about drawers, chests, wardrobes. He discusses the significance of doorknobs. He has a chapter on the miniature. Corners are havens for the imagination; nests are spaces of quiet and rest. The book, a meditation on the joy and serenity of the interior, is by now legendary; on first publication, in 1958, it was groundbreaking. That the philosopher would care about domestic space. That he would pay it such close mind. That he would dignify the dull, the insignificant. That he would suggest its importance, its immensity in the shaping of lives. “The house,” he says, “shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” I’m reading Bachelard as he turns to literature, art, poetry. I read him as he quotes Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, van Gogh, Henry David Thoreau. I read him when he writes that “the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world,” and as I read, I am reading into the gaps, the absences. I am reading into the bodies that do not feature in Bachelard’s world, the bodies that fold, the bodies that sweep, the bodies that put away. I am reading into the empty, silent, clean parlour of his memory and dreams, and I am wondering how it would have been had he turned his attention to a different kind of parlour, the parlour that is clean because somebody has cleaned it, the parlour that is empty in brief, grabbed moments before a demand is made by it, in it.

I am wondering how it would have been if Bachelard had sometimes read silence as isolation, rest as effort, love as duty, warmth as quiet resentment, reverie as frustration.

Bachelard’s book, translated from French, was a sensation worldwide, while Modersohn-Becker’s paintings took so long to become known outside of Germany.

Bachelard didn’t write about the kitchen. Modersohn-Becker painted the work of the kitchen.

Inside the kitchen, inside the house, there is the labour. There are the bodies that toil.

Here is how some of the home work goes on inside the three-bedroom house with the noisy black cat and the front porch filled with children’s shoes.