My parents bought me my first ever wardrobe when I was a child, perhaps nine years old. It was situated underneath my cabin bed. I moved the majority of my possessions into it and even made a number seventy three sign with my colouring pencils. In this wardrobe I passed many happy hours, reading borrowed books about architecture and organising my teddy bears lives. I always felt secure and nicely contained. Eventually I grew too tall to dwell inside and had to move out of my number seventy three makeshift house. I remember crying my eyes out when I saw the broken pieces of wood propped up against the driveway. I had felt loss for the first time and grew up emotionally ever so slightly. I didn’t own another wardrobe until my twenty fourth year.
My new wardrobe was a gift. I had already tried to get into Narnia through it, but it wasn’t that kind of wardrobe. This particular wardrobe was old and ugly and brown. For days I toyed with potential colours; and finally decided on a pure white. And then for days again I painted and painted and painted but it always turned a funny dirty old cream colour. I applied so much paint three entire rooms could have been brilliantly white and then perhaps one more room. But this wardrobe remained grubby so eventually I gave up. Instead I adorned its walls with frames of beautiful images of cats and nature and a sideways man from the late seventeenth century, and finally a heart shaped scented decoration with a lace frill around the edges. And yet it still wasn’t pretty and never smelt of anything but stale wet wood.
