By Laurie Taylor
A spotless front room reserved only for visitors can be about much more than just keeping up appearances.
My mother devoted a considerable amount of domestic concern to keeping our semi-detached house ready for the moment when visitors might call.
My two sisters and my brothers were constantly urged to keep the vestibule and hall tidy in case such visitors arrived unannounced. "Imagine what they'd think of us Laurence, if they saw your pyjama bottoms on the stairs."
But, of course, what most dramatically inscribed the importance of visitors upon our childhood sensibilities was the fact that one entire room of our modest house was reserved entirely for their use. Nobody was allowed to use that front room except for Dad, who was permitted to stare through its window every fortnight so he could check the coalmen were delivering the right number of sacks.
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Not that I ever wanted to invade the space so assiduously reserved for visitors. My dad's concern with the price of heating meant the room was often freezing cold, so cold that the objects it contained seemed permanently refrigerated.
The elements of the three-piece suite sat like small icebergs alongside a piano that was never played, and next to a china cupboard containing plates and bowls from which no one to my knowledge had ever supped.
Pride of place in the room - I knew this from the dusting that it was accorded and from the look of pride on my mother's face as she contemplated its presence - was reserved for a picture called Bluebell Wood, which featured a path winding away into the far distance. It was, apart from the slightly saucy calendar which Dad brought home every year from the local garage, the only piece of art in the house. And, of course, it was only there for the aesthetic delectation of visitors.
Superior
I was so impressed by the time and effort mother devoted to the prospect of visitors that I almost imagined them as some form of superior being, perhaps not unlike the angelic visitor in my schoolbook who popped down to give Mary the good news.
When some visitors did finally arrive, they were considerably less auspicious. They were called Hilda and Leo Duck and had apparently become friends with mother at the W.E.A class she attended one winter.
From the very moment that mother announced their intention to visit, my father declared his opposition. As far as I could gather he felt that as they only lived two roads away they weren't bona fide visitors. They were more like passers-by. Certainly not worthy enough to justify the cost of heating the front room.
But mother prevailed. Two bars of the electric fire were switched on at midday, the lid of the piano was opened, the cold cushions plumped and pristine drinking glasses were extracted from the glass-fronted china cupboard. And, in a move which even further exasperated my teetotal father, drink was bought: a bottle of sherry and a bottle of gin.
When the Ducks were duly seated mother asked them what they'd like to drink. "Sherry or gin?" she asked. "Oh, gin for me," said Leo Duck. "Gin and orange. And sherry for you, Hilda?"
Mother passed the orders to father who was sitting uncomfortably on the lip of his armchair. "There we are, Stanley," she said, as though addressing a functionary in Harry's Bar. "One gin and orange and one sherry."
My father took the order and disappeared for what seemed an unreasonable amount of time. When he finally re-entered he was only carrying a small glass of sherry. "And a gin and orange, Stan," said my mother brightly.
Utilitarian
Dad disappeared again. Hilda Duck admired Bluebell Wood. "It's funny, isn't it?" said my mother. "But you can't really see the end of the path can you? It sort of fades into the distance."
That was the moment which my sisters and my brother and I never fail to recall when we gather for a Christmas drink or two. It was the moment when my father finally entered the visitors' room, crossed the recently hoovered carpet, and deposited on the small table next to Leo Duck, one lemonade glass half filled with gin and a whole orange.
Only this week did it occur to me that our visitors' room had a special function that I previously overlooked. Whereas the rest of the house was designed along purely utilitarian lines, that front room, with its distinctive furniture and solitary picture, was the one space where my mother exercised "taste", where she could show visitors that she had discrimination, sensibility.
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