The Writer’s Room by Katie da Cunha Lewin

Author:Katie da Cunha Lewin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Elliott and Thompson Limited

By day we had a pact and would leave him alone for a few hours, but we could not resist slipping through his door to ask questions. He would be in the middle of composing a sentence, mouthing out the words as he wrote. Sometimes he would tell us about the book he was writing and ask us to name the characters, handing us the telephone directory with the instruction: ‘Think of a good name for a doctor . . .’29

It’s hard not to admire his commitment to his family as well as his work ethic. At the same time, he gives an insight elsewhere about other aspects of the Ballard home that fell by the wayside: ‘most of the women who know me would say I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other’.30 Ballard’s time as mother and father was not totally under the thumb of all those pressures that women so often face, namely the keeping of the house as well as the children. For many women, these two things are expected to go hand in hand: in Alta’s writing, for example, she becomes distracted by the dirty window under which her desk sits, so much so that she is compelled to get up and clean it. She considers how this moment in her writing might be discussed by a professor in a university classroom, a situation where the window would, in her mind, always be considered as a vehicle for other loftier meanings. But Alta brings it back down to the most practical: ‘it aint no metaphor, teach. i just got up & washed the fuckin window.’31 Where Ballard finds writing in among family remarkably straightforward, for many women, the labour of the house itself unavoidable provides the material that becomes the topic of that very writing.

I know, in talking to female friends over the years, that housework can cause friction and upset in even the most equal-seeming relationships. At the same time, homes are far more complicated than simply sites of labour: we spend our lives in our homes, and we find ways of making them joyful too. As feminist sociologist Iris Marion Young puts it, ‘Not all homemaking is housework.’32 My friend Susanna has a marvellous way of filling each space she lives in with personal touches – photos, dried flowers, wreaths – and I’m proud that visitors have always complimented my husband and me on the sense of cosiness we manage to create. This homemaking is echoed in the work of other writers who have made the home and the activities that define it a crucial part of their creative practice. The writer and illustrator Judith Kerr found her family home in Barnes, London, the perfect setting for the entirety of her writing life; she speaks with great affection for the way that it facilitated not

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