My Secret Room

[Marianne S]

For the closet dresser living with family, there are twin problems: where to hide a female wardrobe, and not getting caught by family members coming home unexpectedly. In both respects I was outstandingly lucky.

I started dressing when I was twelve or thirteen. I was an only child, and since I was ten years old both my parents had been going out to work during the day. So on school vacations I was alone in the house and could spend some time dressed. Luckily neither of my parents ever came home unexpectedly and caught me.

At first I was wearing my mother's clothes, having no other source. But eventually I started buying a few of my own, when I could afford them on whatever was left of a meager adolescent budget, after covering other necessities such as records. (I imagine most people here are old enough to remember what "records" were.) I remember tooling around town on my bike, now and again bringing home a blouse or underwear hidden in the saddlebag, and smuggling it indoors later when my parents weren't around.

As an only child, I had a bedroom to myself, with an old chest of drawers that was fortunately lockable. So I was able to conceal my small stash in there, among other items of my own, with no brothers or sisters to come prying or "borrowing" things.

When I was just shy of seventeen my father died as a result of an accident. It was a sad loss of a good man, husband and father. All I can say is that there were one or two things to compensate me. For one I "inherited" his car, which I had to myself since my mother never drove. Among other more obvious benefits, now I could go farther afield in search of stores having female clothing I liked, and nobody to investigate what I brought home in the car.

Besides that, our house had an attic. It had no flooring and was only accessible through a trapdoor in the ceiling. Nobody had ever used it as a room. or installed one of those drop-down ladders. My father might have climbed up there on a stepladder for some reason or other, though there wasn't much of interest there except for a water tank. However, I knew my mother would never do that.

So I made it my "secret room." I started by making a rope ladder, with cord and lengths of broomstick for the rungs, to give more convenient access. I strung a light up there; there was no skylight, so the attic was pitch-dark without it. I got hold of some lumber to use for flooring (here the car came in useful again) and put it down to cover the joists. My mother knew I went up there on occasion, because once I inadvertently put my foot through the ceiling and she came home to find me repairing the hole with plaster, complaining about the dust where I was sanding it flat from below. But she never knew what I did up there.

The flooring was in the middle where the roof was high enough to stand up. At the sides, where the roof sloped down lower, there was no point in laying floorboards down, but gaps between the joists were a useful place to keep my growing stash of clothing, covered by a large sheet of thin plywood that I could lift on hinges as a lid.

In later years my first "serious" girlfriend and I made love up there on an old mattress we got from somewhere, with my mother in the house below having no idea we were there, as long as we kept quiet. One time another girl who couldn't get home that night slept up there. . My innocent mother (a nice woman, incidentally) thought any strange noises above her head must be mice. For more reasons than one, it was a fun place.

But my girlfriend, like my mother, never knew about the clothes hidden under that hinged lid in a dark corner of the attic. And my "secret room" served me well for several years, not just to hide my clothes, but also as a place to dress where I never needed to fear being discovered. My mother never knew what I was really doing up there. For more reasons than one, I always thanked my lucky stars for the precious gift of privacy.