A Knight’s Tale (71: Chinese Boxes)

From our sitting room we could peer through two windows into a kitchen that appeared also to contain bunk beds.

I photographed the scene in November 1976. Chopping of food took place all through the night.  This somewhat interfered with sleep.  In the early hours of one morning Jessica lost patience and rather politely called out asking the choppers to desist.  The reply was: ‘We’ve been here fifty years.  If you don’t like it, move.’ We did so in 1980, but before then,

this was our sitting room. I still have the rocking chair which was a favourite seat. The brown velvet trousers mentioned in https://derrickjknight.com/2021/11/07/a-knights-tale-60-i-come-a-cropper/, much patched, are now long gone.

Michael’s use of Chinese boxes is featured in https://derrickjknight.com/2021/11/17/a-knights-tale-66-horse-and-dolphin-yard/

I used them as bookshelves. My collection was moved to our next home in Gracedale Road, SW16.

Here Jessica, Louisa, and Sam are seen in front of them in 1984. When our son was about the age that Louisa is here, my Dad, concerned about having witnessed the toddler’s one attempt to scale the stacks, arrived with a drill and a set of screws with which he fixed the rather higgledy piggledy shelves to the wall. We learned later that our purchaser, when he sold the house some years afterwards, claimed to have constructed my library repository himself, and turned it into a selling point.