(First published in Baptist Times - Outside Edge - 11 February 2011)
I've just read a Man Booker shortlist novel, called 'Room.' A five-year old boy lives in one room with his mother, a room he has never left since the day he was born.
I won't spoil the story by revealing why they are there. But the reason the child never tries to leave the room is his mother's assertion that everything outside is 'just television,' not reality.
The story gripped me. At the time of reading 'Room' I was staying in a motel room in an area where I knew nobody. Also, in childhood my family was homeless, and I have early memories of inhabiting a room, with my mother and sister, in various employers' houses, our life very separate from theirs. So it doesn't need a leap of imagination to see that the world outside a room could seem not only separate and unfamiliar but even illusory to a child with no experience beyond it.
A friend who grew up in a vast city housing project describes how a lawyer came visiting him and his brother at home when they were in trouble with the police. Trying to find his way out of there afterwards, the lawyer got lost and stopped to ask a ten-year old, 'Which is the way out of here?' The child stared at him and replied, 'I don't know, mister. I've never been out of here.'
A prison teacher planned a lesson around a streetmap of central London, as several of the class were Londoners, but found they had hardly heard of the major landmarks, let alone knew their location. Though the men were in their fifties, they only knew the streets and pubs and bus routes of the small area in which they had grown up and never left.
A man whose childhood was neglected and abusive and whose teenage years were spent on the streets with others from similar backgrounds, recalls that they all thought the happy families with peaceful lives in comfortable homes were not reality but idealised images on TV, along with sitcoms, soaps and adverts. He was shocked when he started attending church and, on being invited to people's homes, found families who did actually eat together at table, took the children to the park and tucked them up at night with a bedtime story. It happened in real life, not just on television.
A woman who suffered a long history of mental illness described her years of confusion as, 'Another world was real to me.' Her behaviour, which to others appeared erratic and even threatening, made sense to her in the context of the reality she perceived.
When I first went snorkelling, I was wowed by seeing a whole other world under the waves. But when some underwater obstacle loomed, my automatic reaction was to raise my head above water - where I could see the 'real' world. Not the most sensible thing to do, with the rest of me still in looming-obstacle zone under water.
A children's worker who supported a teenage girl through the process of informing church leaders that one of the deacons had kissed and fondled her was outraged when the leaders told the girl it was nothing. He was, in their words, a 'dinosaur,' oldfashioned, eccentric and harmless. They knew the man well, within the context of church meetings and their own social circle. He couldn't have another reality, acting so differently out of their sight and context. The girl must be lying, exaggerating, or misinterpreting some innocent action. That explanation seemed more real to them, so they called it the true version, and she and her family left the church.
What lies outside our 'room' of reality, with limited vision and its familiar furniture of like-minded people and unchallenged attitudes?
Be thou our vision, Lord. We don't want to be stuck in a room because we believe there is nothing outside the door.
'Room' is by Emma Donoghue, publ. Picador
