Day 734 of the Daily Poems, and our poet Sally Warrell has memories of the sitting room door. No chance the door could be left open. “Were you brought up in a barn?”
The sitting room door
When I still lived at home, I’d be in my bedroom upstairs
hearing my mother slam the sitting room door again,
and again, and again as she went about her business
putting things on the stairs for us to take up
or cleaning, dusting, hoovering in other rooms.
It was a distant subterranean echo I couldn’t ignore,
a reminder that she was down there and I was up here,
studying for my A levels or maybe listening to music.
No chance the door could be left open. “Were you
brought up in a barn?” she’d say if I forgot to close it.
When I challenged my father, as he sat on the couch
one evening, he said memorably, “I bring home the money.”
Even now, when I am somewhere else and a door
slams down below me, I think of her, of both my parents,
in the downstairs room, and of myself, imagining
what they were doing or saying, and I feel young again.
Sally Warrell