HOUSES AND HOMES

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 84, 7 January 1928, Page 19

HOUSES AND HOMES

THE POSTER IDEAL “We live,” says the heroine of a recent novel, “by the backs of magazines.” The more one muses over this statement, the more truth there appears to be in it, writes “8.H.5.” in the “Manchester Guardian.” Consciously or unconsciously, we are growing to mould our lives—our appearance, our habits, our houses—on the lines laid down by modern advertising. How often you experience, on being shown into a room for the first time, a vague feeling of familiarity. “Where have I seen it before?” you wonder, as your eyes roam from the small polished table with its runner, its “art” bowl of flowers over the incredibly swollen Chesterfield and chairs, the new and unused-looking piano, the set of prints on the walls, the cushions and curtains in admirably blending shades, and the magazines lying about in carefully oiganised disorder. Then the solution dawns upon you: the room is taken straight from the poster or the illustrated catalogue. It is in thousands all over the country. All is in excellent taste, but it is second-hand taste. There is no personal impress of the owners’ individuality—the secret of their private likes and dislikes, habits and hobbies, is carefully hidden away. You feel there may be some little unconsidered room tucked away upstairs which has escaped the catalogue plan, and that here, if you could penetrate to it, you might learn something of your hosts’ character and tastes; but not in the sterilised atmosphere of the furn-ished-to-plan rooms. This uniform ideal gives us, I suppose, far more pretty and artistic and convenient houses than there have ever been; but far fewer homes. A home is so much more than a house. It may be old-fashioned, untidy, positively ugly, and its furniture may be a grand jumble of periods and styles or it may be a real shrine of beauty. But so long as it has character and individuality, then it is a home. We all know homes like this, places where one feel? the spirit has room to expand, where it is not dominated and curbed by a “scheme,” but where there is a friendly give-and-take between the animate and the inanimate. The word “home” should conjure up . for each one of us, all our lives, a different and distinct memory. It may be just a cluster of trivial memories—morning sunshine filtering through a patterned lace curtain, the smell of baking gingerbread, the sound of booted feet clattering against brass stair rods, the good taste of new bread and syrup after the strenuous game. It may be a memory of endless, aimless young talk, of sudden prostrating laughter, of games and firelight. And in and out and through the memories must be woven the indefinable feeling of the house itself. For that is another point: the house has to contribute its due share to wards making the home. In a real home the house is, as it were, one of the family. Its weaknesses have to be considered, its whims humoured, its annoyances put up with. The window that buzzes like a bee in spite of all that can be done to it, the awkwardly placed scullery. and the old stair in the dark cornfit where one is always stumbling, all call upon one’s forbearance and for that very reason inspire a more tolerant and enduring affection. The modern house is efficiently planned. It is built with a view to labour saving and space economy. Sculleries are never awkwardly placed and the house is so compact that there are no rambling passages and dark corners. Frequently there is but one straight flight of stairs in the house. It is, in short, ‘"faulity faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” Except for lack of room and privacy, we have nothing to forgive and, in consequence, nothing very much to love. Admiration is apt to take the place of affection. We take a pride in having everything harmoniously in keeping, and to that end we ruthlessly scrap the old and the odd. That a thing is shabby or doesn’t “match” is sufficient excuse for discarding it, however long it has shared the home, or however companionable it may be in itself. It must be sacrificed to the “poster ideal,” perhaps with it we are also sacrificing rather more than we realise. One can always tell a home, even from the outside. Some old houses, even when empty, breathe an atmosphere of home. ' Almost startlingly, they conjure up the ghosts of the human presences, human voices, that once filled them. The inhabitants have gone, but the essence of the home spirit still lingers. This must be the secret of Haddon Hall’s supreme charm among the famous “show places.” Chatsworth is a palace or a museum, but you feel at once that Haddon has been a home. The kitchen with its homely marks of use seems to echo still with the clatter and bustle that once accompanied the preparation of its mighty meals, the long galleries’ and the window recesses seem to have been onlv just vacated, the ghost of a laugh or’tlie rustle of silk is caught in the air. “I wish,” said William de Morgan once, “everyone who leaves a house would seal up in a bottle* a short account of their experience there and bury it in the foundations. What an enthralling record it would make for those who come after!” Some houses nowadays would be hard put to it to find room for all the quickly following records. We are a restless generation and do not take root as our parents did, living, bringing up a faniilv, dying, in the same house. We settle like butterflies for a while and are soon up and off again. The swelling towns partly account for this constant shifting. We move farther and farther out to avoid being swamped. There is no time to make close and affectionate acquaintance with our dwellings, and one feels that they stand aside dispassionately watching the tenants that flit in and out. In any case, will there be many to “come after” in the houses ? Even those bouses built fifteen or twenty vears ago look dingy or decrepit today. In another generation they may all have gone to make way for immense blocks or flats or communal dwellings. And bv that time, no doubt, it will be literallv true what the old song says, and there will indeed be “no place like home.”