TO LET

Evening Star, Issue 22276, 29 February 1936, Page 2

TO LET

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’]

You may 1 remember, gentle reader, that last week there were burnt offerings of letters and receipts, the accumulation of ages. Such a holocaust was not performed from mere wantonness or for hygiene alone. Next week the windows behind which these plumes were curled will be curtainless, and weeds will sprout in the paths. Wo are about to move.

This is a melancholy reflection, for the best people never move. It is a bourgeois activity, moving, whether called shifting, suggestive, of honest heavy loads and weariness; or removing, hinting at some elegance and glassy ignorance as to liow the sordid business is performed. Aristocrats, of course, do not even remove. They remain in their ancestral halls, scorning alike the supertax which impoverishes them and the rain that pours on to their traditional beds through gaps in the roof. Peasants, also, remain close to their native soil, in the hut or cot where their grandfathers were before them. Tinkers and gipsies, on the move continually, with their houses on tlxeir backs, arc spared the unlovely upheaval of shifting. The patricians at the top, the vagrant, at the bottom, do not suffer from such middle-class crises.

When peasants are separated from their old homes the occasion is a national crisis. They do not leave from choice, and they have not themselves to blame. When landlords given to hunting and enclosing common lands drive them from the soil they are celebrated in a poem, and their plight becomes classic. Fate strikes nobly at burly men, weeping women in shawls, and sleeping children. A faithful dog follows the procession, and snow lets fall its benediction. In the slums there is the consolation of excitement, for when people refuse to pay their rent the bailiff stamps in. He is a thick-necked man who settles himself in the only armchair and sends the children of the household out for his beer. The neighbours come in and sympathise with the afflicted in chorus, adding the classical touch. Pity the poor middle class, who are upheld neither by the fervour of persecution nor by the pleasure of passive resistance to a bailiff. They are the backbone of the country—the merchants, the traders, the entrepreneurs, the administrators. As such they have possessions, and when the day comes that the roof leaks, since they are not bound" to it by any strong traditional ties, they move under a sounder roof; or when their families multiply, since their standards demand a certain number of cubic feet per child, they move where there is more air.

The moving would not be intolerable without the possessions, and there are times when the maximum penalty for arson seems a small thing compared with the minimum trouble of removing a few handfuls of keepsakes and the cat, sprinkling petrol, dropping a live butt, arranging an alibi, collecting the insurance, and furnishing afresh. But the middle classes are notoriously lawabiding and Have a prejudice against gaol that to the lower classes and to the aristocracy is incomprehensible. The lower classes find it bad luck, and the upper find it rather distinctive; but the middle classes, constitutionally better fitted for hard labour, prefer to keep out, though the alternative be to move. Yet even dryads, who live a strenuous life, are permitted a shriek as they leave their trees. To move is to suffer the rigours of the monastic life without the compensation of grace abounding. It is to clatter over bare boards, to walk delicately to avoid tacks, to bark the shins on packing cases. It is to know, exhausted, that the only book that would bring sleep is drowned in the bottom packing case, deeper than ever plummet sounds. It is to gaze on unpictured walls, where the pale ghosts of shapes that used to be prints shine from unsunburned patches. Looking at * house from which the personality is gradually fading, a house that has shrunk till it is bare and decorous, is to have an idea of what the body will look like when one is dead. ~ The older a house is, the more touchy it grows, and the more necessary it' becomes to study its caprices. Newcomers will not know that the gate likes to be coaxed, that it hates being shoved. When the bathroom window swings back suddenly, new tenants will think it is perversity, when it is only a habit that began as a joke. New people will deprecate the little hole in the dining room door, ignorant that it is an empty grave bereft of the screw that kept from staggering the fat brass knight that so long swung his tankard there.

If moving hurts people, furniture also suffers. People realise that there are compensations, but thoughts of the greater space is to be theirs does

not comfort old couches, which frequently collapse from the shock of movement. Pictures, more conservative than artists, are so accustomed to their old positions that the jerk of change breaks their cords, and they fall. Mirrors are so sensitive, so averse to new reflections, that they crack. Tiles fall out. To leave any house is to abandon something, to deny certain intimacies. The anonymous traveller who came to the door every spring to sell packets of mignonette seed will miss a regular customer. It seems churlish not to send him a card, but we do not know each other by name. The sparrows at the back door will not be fed at the same regular hours; and they may not get starchless crumbs. Our sleek sparrows, preening themselves in the sudden pond where the asphalt sags in the yard, will wonder why their svelteness has- turned to scragginess or to fat. The oak tree has never had bigger acorns; will our successors dig in the leaves? Will they stamp hard on the new generations of earwigs that will batten on the sweetness of next year’s carnations ?