As my mind wandered down Memory Lane recently I recalled something from my childhood that I thought I might share with you. To avoid any of you making the obvious observation --- Yes, I did say that my mind wandered, though not that it wandered uncontrollably!
Anyway, back to my childhood. I often felt somewhat lonely, despite coming from a large family, a phenomenon that I gather is not unusual in those circumstances. To counteract this feeling I would often create my own little world from my imagination, conjuring it up whenever I felt the need to do so. One of the ways in which I used to do this was to imagine myself going through a secret door, only large enough for a child to pass through with any ease, which was in the wall at the back of my curtained off wardrobe in the bedroom. The other side of the door I would find myself in a large attic room with little else but bare wooden boards apart from a chair and a few toys, the latter which I had carried in there myself.
Sometimes I would just sit in the chair and look out through the window at the world passing by, although my view was limited because I was in a room immediately above the first floor, although somehow I knew that it was lower down than the attic level in our house. At least I could sit and dream in comfortable solitude. On other occasions I would play with the toys which included an electric train set and a wonderful array of farm animals and machinery. With the latter I could create my own farm layouts, with fields divided either by hedgerows or fencing, and I could steer an assortment of tractors and trailers around them to my heart's content. In many ways I guess that I created a sort of child's Utopia, certainly as far as I was concerned.
Time after time I would retreat to my secret room which was a place where I felt safe and secure, and where I was happy playing. The strangest thing of all though is that many years later, on a visit to my home town when I was on holiday in the UK from Africa, I called at my old home, now an Estate Agents and offices. I asked them if I could look over the house, explaining that it had been my families' home for several decades, and the place where I spent the first twenty-one years of my life. They readily agreed and I explored as much of the house as I was allowed, eventually finding my way up to what had once been my bedroom. The curtained off wardrobe was no longer in the room but I checked out the wall where it had been, carefully searching for any sign that a there had ever been a door there, though I could find none. I recall the strange feeling that what I was searching for was not something created from my imagination but something that had really existed.
Interestingly, although the next door property was much smaller than our house with only one upper floor, the roof-space would have provided an attic area just as I had imagined there to be. Was it all in my imagination or was I somehow transported to an attic room somewhere? Certainly such rooms existed, and one such room was in the building opposite which housed Lloyds Bank. I was friendly with the children who lived there and we sometimes went up into their attic to play, although it was fairly full of the usual junk that gets stored in such places.
The probable answer lies in the last sentence, although who will ever really know for sure?
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