The world is an onion, Mr Menheniot, skin within skin, and anyone who thinks it's nothing but the outside one that lies in the dung can have it if he… - Howard Spring

the self-contained life

All these things were in the “front room.” We had all that fanatical devotion to the “front room” which is peculiar to the poor. It was a sacred place. A room of our own to work in would have suited me and my brother splendidly. But the whole family, including us, still crowded into the kitchen for all purposes. It was a fine, comfortable kitchen with an open fireplace, a cheerful room to be in if you had nothing to do but read or talk. Not so good, though, if you had any other sort of work to do. The simple fact is, of course, that the use of one room for all purposes, in a house with a beggarly income and no servants, arises from the necessity to save money and labour. Using another room would mean laying fires, and fires would mean money, and so would light. That is what really lies behind all the old jokes about the unused “parlours” of the poor. But the consequence is the creation of the “sacred” feeling where the parlour is concerned. Even in the summer-time, when light and fire were not in question, one kept out of it.

I wasn't an artist of any sort, but I thought I knew something about how artists' minds worked, and I didn't believe that to change an external situation had much to do with it. It was what they did with whatever was lying about that mattered.