Violets on the Wall

On Saturday we visited the excellent Abbey House Museum, just across the road from Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds.

I've been there many, many times before - it was a favourite haunt when Emily was little - but they refurbished it a few years ago and it's always worth a visit.

There's a street of 1880s Leeds shops:

There are also some exhibits of typical Victorian rooms. My favourite used to be the Victorian parlour upstairs, but sadly that went with the refurbishment of a few years ago and it's now downstairs and smaller:

What I particularly liked about it before was its size: it was the size of an actual room, not just part of one, and I loved, as a child, to imagine the ladies in crinolines actually living in it.

But my favourite room now is this one:

Why? It's the wallpaper. When our family moved to the house where I live now, when I was three, my bedroom was the little one just at the top of the stairs - now our spare room for visitors - and my parents decorated it with identical yellow wallpaper with its pattern of bunches of violets. Very faded now, of course, in the museum - and in our house it's long gone and now the walls are plain white.

I loved that wallpaper - even as a very small child I loved the violets because they reminded me of the Lake District and the violets there.

It's very well-known that smells can take you back to a certain time, a place - - in fact there's a whole exhibition in the museum about smells. Wallpaper isn't, perhaps, so well-known on the nostalgia front. But in most of my years as a young child I would wake up and see that wallpaper and every time I see it now I am seven again, waking up and looking at the violets and then drawing the curtains to see the apple tree outside the window.