The current craze in America is apparently the ‘man-cave’.
This is part of the home where no woman is allowed to tread.
A place in which the man of the house can host manly gatherings, keep a fridge stocked with beer and display his precious collection of superman comics, vintage motor memorabilia and the guns with which one day he might contrive to shoot someone.
My dad had one of these places long ago. It wasn’t in the house of course – our house was much too small. It was a seperate entity located in the back garden and it was called a shed.
In it, just like the Yanks, dad kept his store of precious things. The motor mower that one day he was going to strip down and rebuild, the rake with the broken shaft and the length of ash which would replace it when he got the time, the old kitchen table that served as a workbench until the day he got round to building a proper one. And most treasured of all, the Special Tool Box with its range of Important Tools.
These tools, in their box which opened automatically as you put it down, were radically different to the ones kept in the kitchen drawer and used for ordinary things.
They were there against the day he finally began restoring the vintage motorbike he hadn’t actually obtained as yet; ordered the timber and built the ocean going yacht he had the plans for – somewhere. And constructed the powered model glider like the one he’d seen in that magazine he wished he’d kept.
Mum never went near the shed. If she wanted her husband she opened the kitchen door and shouted, or sent me with important messages such as ‘tea’s ready’ or ‘you’re missing the football’.
On these occasions I never found dad actually doing anything. He was either ‘pottering about’ rather aimlessly or – more often – leaning against the bench, sucking on his cold pipe and gazing unfocused through the grimy window.
I used to feel sad over this strange separation into two realms – dad with is shed and mum with her house. But I now see it served its purpose.
Divorce wasn’t so easy in those days.
Image: Dull Hunk under CC BY-SA 2.0
