Free Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet Page B

accordance with rural custom, we were a backdoor community. A knock on the front door was always an occasion for alarm.) One or two families did not conform. The Rileys, fecund Roman Catholics, notoriously used their front room as an extra bedroom. As did the Moores, but they had a son with polio who had an iron frame on his leg. The Parkers, around the corner from us on Dryden Road, actually spent evenings in their best room. We’d see light seeping from the edges of their curtains and wonder what they could be doing in there.
    Best rooms were museums. But unlike conventional museums, they did not commemorate the past. They denied it.
    The inhabitants of the Millfields estate — with only a very few exceptions, among them my father — belonged, and knew it, to the rural working class. We had been, until comparatively recently, peasants. The world we lived in was still recognizably feudal, and we knew our subordinate places in it. So, if our best rooms had been museums in the traditional sense, they would have contained hoes and spades, jars of hoof oil, yokes for carrying pails, cracked boots stinking of dung, unworn christening gowns, wonky milking stools, superstitious medicines, rusted bayonets, crutches.
    But they didn’t. Like ours, the best rooms on the council estate contained items of ponderous furniture, embroidered platitudes and biblical quotations in wooden frames, brass fireside companion sets, elaborately vulgar vases and ceramic shepherdesses, loud clocks, bone-handled cutlery in boxes lined with imitation velvet, black-edged plates printed with Prince Albert’s likeness, poufs stuffed with horsehair, out-of-tune musical boxes. Superfluous, boastful things that properly belonged in the homes of people from a social class above our own. Best rooms announced that we had those things, too, thank you very much. Yet they were quarantined, permanently, in the best room. And for a particular reason: if we had actually used them, if we had incorporated them into our daily lives, we would have been pretending to be better than we were. We would have been getting Above Ourselves.
    Getting Above Yourself was a heinous and peculiar sin. It attracted vicious censure. Win, among others, had exquisitely attuned antennae for detecting the faintest whiff of it. For example, when, in 1961, our ambitious neighbor Maureen Cushion summoned the doctor to a home visit instead of walking to the surgery, Win was scandalized. From behind the curtains she watched the car arrive at the house and the doctor hurry in with his black bag.
    She said, “Chuh! That Maureen, she think she’re got everyone at her beck and call, now she’re got the tellerphone.”
    The fact that Maureen suffered a miscarriage two days later cut no ice with Win; she paid her cold courtesy ever after.
    It must have been a torment to Win that her daughter’s husband was Above Himself from the word go, having been a bloody jumped-up noncommissioned officer. And later, when I got way, way Above Myself, she could only cope by pretending that I was mad, or a changeling, or invisible.
    But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself.
    Now and again families would update their best rooms. Out would go the sullen black sideboard; in would come its perky modern replacement, a veneered plywood affair with splayed and spindly legs and sliding doors with recessed handles. It would stand abandoned among the glowering old stuff, as incongruous as a stripper at a Presbyterian funeral. A modern picture — an Asiatic woman with a green face, a stylized child with photo-realist tears running down its cheeks, a racing car taking a bend — would be hung above the mantelpiece. Tiled fireplaces would be boarded up and electric fires installed; families would stand and admire the way the curled elements reddened, then switch them off, wary of the demand on the meter, and close the door.
    Our best room never went through such transformations. It remained