16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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Worlds beyond the window
The urge to fabricate a happy childhood, merrily skipping across the sunny uplands of the carefree, is understandable enough: it is one of the last duties we can perform for our parents and certainly one of the few that we can continue to perform long after they have passed away. That it is a peculiarly modern urge -- it post- dates the invention of childhood, is a post-Freudian, non-atavistic desire, mired in all the contradictions that implies -- matters not a jot. For impossibly complicated reasons we need to have been happy children, and the need is heartfelt.
Without the most savage editing of experience, though, it is difficult to maintain the rosy glow. And in the absence of any truly horrendous happenings in the supposedly smiling years of pre- pubescence the first thing that must be excised is often the terrible boredom of being young. That, at least, is my experience. A reasonably ordinary British childhood at the time I was a reasonably ordinary child involved a great deal of time sitting in front of windows and waiting for it to stop raining.
Dawdling indoors was actively discouraged. This was pre- computer games, pre- the time that children could be parked in front of a television set. Television was viewed with a suspicion that bordered on hostility, something to be strictly rationed if, indeed, it was condoned at all. The thing to do, if the weather was not absolutely against it, was to go outside and play. Paranoia about the safety of children, their vulnerability to predatory adults, had yet to start: you could spend the day wandering aimlessly with friends, building dams across streams, picking bluebells, building nests -- perhaps this was always a rural phenomenon -- and no one would bat an eyelid as long as you turned up at meal times or before it became dark. The problem was that the weather was often against such activity, it rained and rained and rained, and I would sit and sit and sit, watching drops roll endlessly down the window, totally, utterly bored.
Detail from an early 16th century Flemish painting
Looking at the outside: it is one of the activities that I had assumed windows were for. That is until I escaped from those endlessly damp and drizzly days. Later came that fascinating urban activity, looking in through windows, a form of curiosity that the double-decker bus might have been invented to assuage. It still tempts, this perambulatory voyeurism: when in London I will happily take two buses rather than a single tube. There are no distractions on the underground save your fellow passengers, and they can be an irredeemably dour lot, hiding behind newspapers to avoid even the most abbreviated of greetings. Buses, though, provide an ongoing series of fleeting glimpses into the spaces in which other lives are led. The window provides the opening: it remains in vision for the shortest of times, disconnected, yet episodic, one window replaced by another, and the images making about as much narrative sense as a film projected on wonky projector.
Later still, in Cairo, windows assumed a different function. Invariably they came with shutters, most commonly of the folding type but occasionally rolling and controlled by a strip of material that is always on the verge of not quite fraying completely through. And shutters, more often than not, appear to be for closing rather than opening, keeping the outside outside. They demarcate outside and inside rather than allow for any transition between the two. Which is hardly surprising given the extreme climate.
The picture window, in any of its variants, could never have been an element of the Egyptian vernacular, despite its widespread embrace by contemporary householders. And even if one takes it as read that those who can afford to indulge themselves in such imported styles of fenestration can also afford central air-conditioning the picture window is seldom allowed to open out onto a view, be it urban or beach villa. It must be accompanied by fabric, topped by an extravagantly deep, swagged pelmet and edged with heavy, pleated brocade. Nor is the area of glass that remains exposed likely to be left to its own devices: rather, it will be seen through a veil of net, often with a woven pattern that will impose itself on whatever -- and it will not be much -- remains visible of the world outside.
There is an episode that has stuck in my mind from a book read, most probably, on one of those endless childhood days spent next to a window waiting for the rain to stop. The book was one of the Moomin Sagas, a Scandinavian series of novels for children set in a valley inhabited by the Moomins -- blobby creatures that looked, in the illustrations, like smiling versions of the hippopotamus god Hapi -- and their associates.
One of these, the Snork Maiden, sensing a change in the season, decides it is time to spring clean her house. And so she begins, moving everything, dusting, beating, washing, scrubbing, becoming increasingly uneasy as the day and her tasks progress. So unhappy does the Snork Maiden become, and so upset by the fact that she can identify no source for her unhappiness, that she is forced to abandon her cleaning. Only then does she become aware of the reason for her disquiet, for she is suddenly overwhelmed by the recognition that she inhabits the kind of house where the windows look inwards. A depressingly Nordic bit of insight, and one from another land where the extremes of climate could hardly have led to the picture window without first the invention of central heating.
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