The map and photo in Elspeth's room

Two slightly odd things caught my eye about the decor in Elspeth's bedroom, which we see twice in the movie -- once near the beginning, when she's showing the room to Mr. Scott, and again near the end, when her father comes in to talk to her and she ends up crying.

The first item is seen while she's explaining to Mr. Scott the game of pyramidology. As he looks over her shoulder, on the wall behind him, centered over the mantlepiece, is a large framed map of the State of New York. It's absolutely unmistakable. But why would a 12-year-old English schoolgirl in 1951 have a map of an American state neatly framed and so prominently displayed on the wall of her bedroom? The only thing I can come up with is that her father, who's an American, might have come from New York. But none of this is ever explained. Add to this the fact that, in designing the look of the room, the art director and set decorator would have had to really go out of their way to find a map of New York State suitable for framing, which could not have been that plentiful or common in Britain in 1951. So clearly there was some care taken in making this very unusual choice of decor, but what its significance is remains a mystery.

The second thing I noted was the position of a photograph in the room. In the scene with Scott, the camera follows the two as they hurriedly leave the bedroom and head downstairs after her father has returned. As they go out, the camera stops and on a table by the door is a framed photograph of an elegant, well-dressed woman, quite obviously Elspeth's late mother, though nothing is ever said about the photo. But in the later scene, when Honey is talking to Elspeth, the photo is on the night table beside the bed. Why was it moved? It could be a continuity error by the filmmakers, but somehow I doubt this. I'm frankly more intrigued as to why the photograph would have been at the far end of the room in the first place, somewhat out of the way, and not near Elspeth's bed. After all, wouldn't this child be likely to want to have a picture of her late and much-missed mother near her, and not off in some corner?

So here's a thought: it might be that Elspeth had originally kept her mother's photo off to the side because she was trying to maintain the image of her being the "woman of the house", caring for her father, with her mother remembered but not a part of their daily lives. However, given the sudden upheaval to her life after her father becomes famous, the realization of how sheltered she had been, and her worry over once again being relegated to that existence after a brief fling of being popular with other kids, she may have deliberately moved her mother's photo nearer her as she found herself disenchanted with the life she had been leading because of her father's well-meaning obtuseness. It may have been her way of indicating that she now valued her lost mother more than her father, that she needed a mother figure in her life (Miss Corder?), and drew comfort from having her mother closer to her in her bedroom.

Or, maybe she and Miss Corder merely rearranged the place. But I like to think there was more to it than its simply being some incidental (or accidental) reshuffling of the decorations. Especially since -- while it's very difficult to tell for certain and this is not at all clear -- in the second bedroom scene it looks like the NYS map has been removed from over the mantlepiece. We don't get a clear shot of it as we do in the scene with Mr. Scott, only an oblong glance from a distance in the scene with Honey, but the pictures on the wall don't quite look the same. If this is so, and if New York was her father's home, the map's removal would also have great significance. But I may be mistaken about its absence; it's hard to tell definitively.