If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Read Free Book Online

in a nursery and living a life peripheral to that of his or her parents. But a seventeen-year-old suddenly became an adult, allowed to socialise with his or her parents and their friends and given a separate bedroom.
    Only in the 1950s did an interim life stage – the teenage years – begin to be recognised. This coincided with a post-war housing explosion which saw parents able to provide older children their own individual bedrooms for the first time, rather than putting them in with their younger siblings and reservingthe spare room for a nursemaid. Possession of a private room encouraged teenagers to amass their own age-specific clothes, records, posters and pastimes.
    But younger children were still treated as powerless, slightly inferior members of a household, with lower-priority needs and desires. Today it’s quite astonishing to remember that only in the last thirty years have children been placed right at the heart of family life. Terence Conran, writing on children’s bedrooms in 1974, considered that ‘it’s pointless spending a lot of money on decorations for young children. They won’t appreciate the financial sacrifice, and will feel highly indignant when you nag about scribbles and dirty marks.’ It’s not an attitude shared by the Habitat shops he founded today, or by the huge industry that makes and sells furniture and gadgets for children’s bedrooms. Nowadays children are treated as equally, if not more, deserving of a family’s resources than parents. Despite the evidence that loving parents have existed throughout the ages, households are now more child-centred than ever before.
    People often think that the practice of wet-nursing died out in Britain by the turn of the twentieth century, yet in fact it was still relatively common until the 1940s – as it remains in other cultures. And despite the danger posed by HIV, swapping babies for a feed is not unusual among laidback middle-class mothers today. Perhaps milk-less mothers who want their children to enjoy breastfeeding’s benefits will once again bring back the wet nurse.

4 – Knickers
Comfortable garments … which all of us wear but none of us talk about.
    Lady Chesterfield on knickers, 1850
    What do you do first thing in the morning? The Tudor physician Andrew Boorde recommends that you should ‘stretch forth your arms and legs, and your body, cough, and spit, and then go to your stool to make your egestion’. Today, likely as not, you still stretch and visit the bathroom. Then, every single morning of your life, you choose an outfit, moulding your identity for the day ahead.
    Bedchambers have always been places for storing clothes, unless you were grand enough to have a wardrobe. This was originally a separate room, not a piece of furniture, staffed by specialist servants. The ‘wardrobe’ department (‘warders’ of the ‘robes’) was a subsection of the royal household. Its members looked after the king’s and queen’s clothes, as well as their soft furnishings. From the time of Edward III, the wardrobe staff even had their own central depot in the City of London, handy for the cloth merchants. (Its existence is echoed in the name of the church ‘St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe’ near St Paul’s Cathedral.) By the seventeenth century, the king still had a ‘Great Wardrobe’, a central repository, but he also had a ‘Standing Wardrobe’ ineach royal palace and a ‘Removing Wardrobe’ which travelled with him.
    The wardrobe would eventually evolve into the wooden cupboard to be found in bedrooms today, but this would not happen until the nineteenth century. Textiles and hangings in medieval times were stored on a hanging-rail called a ‘perch’ (from the Latin ‘ pertica ’, a rail or pole; also used as a unit of length in land surveying) or in a chest. A cupboard would not be found in a medieval bedroom. It was literally a board, or shelf, upon which cups could be placed, and it belonged in the great hall or