The Wallpaper …

It’s in my DNA to be drawn to colours and patterns. My grandfather was a pioneer of designing and printing textiles for homeware in the 1960s and 70s. You know, those gaudy tea-towels with flower power patterns or souvenirs from a visit to London. Whilst his siblings followed the fine art route from The Slade into professional portraiture and landscape painting, Grandpa saw the opportunity to create vibrant domestic cloth to enhance the growing popularity for brightly coloured kitchens and bathrooms. Who can fail to remember the delights of the avocado bathroom suite and yellow formica kitchen units.

My father demonstrated his creativity by introducing patterned ceramic tiles to modern kitchen and bathroom design to develop the first ‘collections’. These concepts were adopted by the big manufacturers of the day like Wrighton kitchens, still operating today although everything has gone to bland white and shades of grey urgh! No surprise then that when I look at colour and patterns there’s something that awakens inside me. I was only small when Grandpa died so I have only vague memories of a smiling gentleman in a porkpie hat, square rimless glasses and a thin moustache. My Pa looked a lot like him in his latter years. Both men were magnificent salesmen. You wanted to be in their company. As one buyer told me about my Pa: “He always brings interesting products and also good ideas. It’s never a question of whether we buy from him; it’s about how long it will take to do the deal as we enjoy all the chat.”

Completely digressing as is my tendency, I wanted to tell you about my recent visit to a very old Welsh cottage. We’d gone along to view it as a potential home. It was in a charming location and had been in the same family for three generations. It was in need of a great deal of work. The paper on the ceiling was hanging down in swathes due to the ingress of water. It look rather sad on the inside. On the outside it remained a solid stone house just like the ones we drew as children with four windows around a central door. Whilst my friend went from room to room, out to the garden and undertook a complete inspection of the exterior construction, I was drawn to a bedroom at the front of the house. It had an original floral printed wallpaper dating from the 1960s. The ceramic rotary light switch was probably even older – goodness knows what state the electrics were in. The oversized flowers looked like some of the folk art designs my Grandpa would have printed on textiles in the 1970s. The flowers were big, bold and brash but the colours were more muted. Maybe they’d faded. There was a mixture of mustard yellow, dusky pink and beige grey. On its own this wallpaper was not exceptional. What drew my attention were the dots that circled just a few of the flowers. They were not uniform and only appeared around flowers on one wall. It was a wall where a fireplace had been boarded up and papered over. You could make out the outline of the original chimney breast. As I leaned in I thought I could hear a faint sigh, but the agent and my friend were outside. I could see them in the front garden. I was alone in the bedroom. I zeroed in on the dots once more. Could they be a code of some kind. In fact, the closer I looked at the dots, I could see they were tiny pin holes pricked into the wallpaper – from the reverse side. My understanding of Morse code is rudimentary, but this did look like marks to make up the sign for SOS. Surely, I was being fanciful. I could feel a presence though.

What had happened in this room all those years ago? And who could have made these marks that poked through from the other side of the wallpaper? I didn’t stay to find out. The dogs were whining in an unusual high-pitched fashion by the front door, which added to my unease. I raced downstairs taking two steps at a time and reached the door. My friend and the agent were debating how much the seller would have to drop the asking price to reflect the volume of work required to bring it up to scratch. I blurted out: “Not for me, it’s too dark inside.” In more ways than one…..