AS SOON AS you see a doll’s house, you want to open its doors and look inside. The doll’s house doorknob is part of that enchantment; it is one of the stray objects that found a home in the button box. The doll’s house I played with as a child still has the wooden doorknob I remember; the ceramic version is an earlier vintage but is just as round and pleasingly button-like, which is why it landed in the box in the first place.
The doll’s house was my mother’s before it came to me, though she was not its original owner. The house was built by a local draper, Andrew Neild, for his daughter in the 1920s. What shop furnishings it must have enjoyed: all those off-cuts – snips of brocade for net curtains; plaid strips turned into rugs, taffeta ribbon drapes for the parlour, satin bedspreads. It was possible to buy a toy draper’s shop complete with peg-doll assistant, a customer, miniature scissors and bolts of cloth, although no child who lived above a shop needed one to play with when the real thing was downstairs. When the draper’s daughter outgrew the house and it transferred to my mum, it acquired a grand piano and became home to several film stars. Who would have thought that Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power and Alice Faye were among those who sat on its red velvet chairs?
I have only vague recollections of the interior before the doll’s house came to me – I remember a twist of metallic paper which stood in for the flames of a fire and the delicate wire tracery of a pot holding ceramic flowers. A hand-painted Bakelite clock stood on the bureau and, along with a three-piece suite my grandma re-upholstered, is the only relic from those years. The double-fronted house was completely refurbished – its slate roof re-papered, its white walls repainted and its window surrounds transformed by a 1960s light, bright blue which, at that point, matched the paintwork of my childhood home. The re-upholstered red velvet suite came with a single lace floret pinned to each chair. That, too, resembled real life in the form of the three-piece suite with its own antimacassars in our lounge.
The doll’s-house chimney pots were slender painted cotton reels; a strip of red-brick paper was pasted at the base of the house. The stairs were re-carpeted in red corduroy, probably using the same piece of fabric with which my grandma made my favourite doll a handsome fur-collared coat. A knitting needle formed a satisfying hand rail (and newel post). Unbeknown to the casual observer, the house has two attics, accessible from the rear. As a child of her time, the 1920s draper’s daughter may have required maids to sleep in those rough-hewn rooms; I had no such thoughts, but was delighted that those secret spaces existed, tucked away out of sight.
I too was a child of my time and so I re-papered two of the walls with sticky-backed plastic: pale pink with bronze dots for the bathroom and yellow with abstract diamond shapes for one of the rooms downstairs. I was not the only hooligan, however, because some other walls had already been redecorated in lumpy wood-chip. Many years later, the downstairs room shamed me by giving up its no-longer-so-sticky-backed plastic to reveal a pretty 1930s wallpaper reminiscent of vintage summer frocks but, in the early 1960s, vintage florals meant nothing to me.
Like the different wallpapers, the doll’s house furniture expressed the different decades in which it was played with. My mum’s suggested a typical thirties interior: its dark wood dining suite had a sideboard with nail-head handles and a pattern carved on its cupboard doors; a dark wooden block with fake drawers represented a bureau. Some thirty years later, my own dining suite, composed of hard plastic and ‘contemporary’, as the word was then, was equally of its moment. Mine was a G-plan style suite with stick legs and coloured chairs, some green, others orange (the kind of chairs that have come around again and are found in open-plan kitchens). My mum’s doll’s-house furniture came from a Sheffield toyshop dedicated to doll’s houses which was bombed during the Blitz – all those diminutive houses blasted and shattered, just like real ones; mine came from Redgates, Chesterfield’s over-stuffed toyshop, where doll’s-house furniture was part of the general mish-mash of toys on sale.
My mother’s miniature Queen Anne tea service imitated the silver Queen Anne-style service my grandma bought when setting up home while my grandfather was fighting in the Great War. My own doll’s house tea set was a clunky metal one for everyday use, a bright kitchen blue with poorly modelled cups and saucers. I also bought a set of aluminium saucepans, the largest of which held a life-like ceramic cabbage with crinkled edges; to further tempt Beatrix Potter’s Hunca Munca two unattractive lamb chops sizzled in a frying pan. Thanks to its film-star tenants my mum’s version of the house held more glamour; mine more mod-cons. These included a metal telephone and slender telephone table, and a record cabinet similar to the real-life Dynatron downstairs.
The house in which I grew up was built for my parents and was a model of a different kind. A sign of the post-war New Jerusalem and of all the hope held out at the start of the New Elizabethan era, it gave my mum the chance to choose furniture again and on a much larger scale. After all, playing with dolls and playing house are steps along the way towards the real thing.
A wartime survey concluded that most people wanted security before wealth and, after putting their lives on hold for six long years, many of them were all the more determined to settle down. Naomi Mitchison’s diary records a conversation with a young ATS officer: ‘The girls all wanted to be married and have homes of their own rather than to have careers, that was what the army had done to them; when [the officer] told them it was possible they mightn’t all get married, they tore her to pieces.’1 Punch made a characteristic dig at the accelerated speed of some post-war romancing. A young woman sends a telegram: ‘Marvellous evening – met B. – show – supper – dance – asked marry – under consideration – writing.’2
Katharine Whitehorn and her friends ‘all yearned for love’;3 they read and re-read Nancy Mitford’s best-selling novel The Pursuit of Love, a welcome shot of wit and upper-class shenanigans after all that gritty austerity. Its young characters ‘talked of romance. These were most innocent talks, for to us, at that time, love and marriage were synonymous, we knew that they lasted for ever, to the grave and far, far beyond.’4 For my mum, the immediate post-war world also meant romancing. Her autograph book contained a rhyme that was doing the rounds back then, ‘X is her name, single is her station. Happy the man who makes the alteration.’ No mention of the woman’s happiness – that was taken for granted. This was the generation who believed that a diamond engagement ring with three small stones represented love today, tomorrow and always.
My parents met at a New Year’s dance; there were so many dances, occasions for old-fashioned romancing via quicksteps, waltzes and foxtrots. When they married in 1950, my grandma took the second bedroom and gave the main one over to them. (At that time, Eva was still living at the corner shop with my great-grandparents.) Before waving the young honeymooners off for a week in Torquay, the wedding guests trooped upstairs to look at the clusters of roses with which my mum had re-papered the walls and the dark new bedroom suite with its Utility label. Downstairs, the sitting room had a recently purchased dining table and leatherette sofa. Out with the old chaise longue: my mum wanted something new. So did Chesterfield Council who were busy ripping out old lead ranges and replacing them with fawn-tiled fireplaces. Nella Last acquired her tiled fireplace during the 1930s; my grandma had to wait until 1949.
In her wartime ‘Letter from London’, Mollie Panter-Downes reported that, despite the housing shortage, ‘a poll taken of urban housewives showed an overwhelming preference for houses instead of flats. In the middle of a global war, the British dream is still of a little box behind a hedge.’5 My parents were no different: they too wanted their own home – and a house with a garden. For some years after the Second World War, however, demand for new housing considerably out-stripped supply. Three-quarters of a million houses had been destroyed or severely damaged and major cities were still soiled by Victorian slums. Between 1945 and September 1948, 750,000 new houses were built; permanent housing accounting for almost half the total, the rest pre-fabs; there was still a long way to go. ‘We’re two of the lucky ones,’ an advertisement for the Westminster Bank declared, illustrating the statement with a happy family group, echoing those seen in post-1918 advertisements. ‘We have home, a job and two children … Some day we’re going to buy our own house.’6 Some day, but not yet.
When my parents approached the Council in 1952, they joined the Housing Waiting List at number 2,001. ‘Why not build your own home?’ a colleague suggested to my father, and so my parents took that unprecedented step. A meeting with the town architect to ratify their plans called for best clothes and so my mum’s honeymoon suit got a fresh outing, as did her honeymoon hat. My parents sat quietly and dutifully before the architect, who, in response to some anodyne remark about being a recently married couple, informed them that marriage without children was licensed fornication. That made them sit up straight and was surely an old-fashioned view, even then.
In 1955 only 29 per cent of people owned their own home; my parents were among the new breed of home-owners taking the future in hand. Photographs show the young couple on their own plot of land and Annie and Eva standing on the same spot, the younger generation taking a decision the older ones would never have dreamed of. The rented shop where Annie and Eva spent many years stood on the corner of a terrace built to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, with no hot water, one cold tap and a privy in a communal block across the yard; electricity did not arrive until the mid-1930s. In Annie’s married home, the council house in which my mum grew up, the neighbour’s kitchen window faced theirs; Cora was used to standing before the window in her pyjamas to wave goodnight. The house my parents built took them into new territory in every sense.
The house was completed in the year of the Queen’s Coronation. A family friend presented my parents with an embroidered tray cloth as a house-warming gift. The cloth was decorated with flowers and coronets, with the auspicious year, 1953, picked out in mauve silk thread, the personal and the regal combining. As a marker of her new role, Cora hand-stitched a set of bathroom curtains. To help her accomplish this Herculean task Eva gave her a cream Bakelite box with the word ‘Pins’ scrawled across its lid in silver lettering, one of Eva’s many ‘treasures’ that had fascinated Cora as a child: a small homemaking gift for a young homemaker.
The post-war emphasis on homemaking was insistent. Those uncertain how to go about it (many of whom had spent their recent years saluting), could read magazines like The Home Decorator or Practical Householder, or purchase a set of Woolworth’s ‘Homemaker’ pottery which, as if to help young couples acquire the knack, set out a visual itinerary including splayed-legged tables, plants, a corkscrew and a cheese knife. Even tea towels became pictorial advisers, displaying the accoutrements of contemporary living, and in vivid patterns too – brightening those brand-new kitchens with blocks of primary colour. Young women were no longer embroidering hollyhocks but buying cacti and spider plants, and converting raffia-covered wine bottles into lamps. Like other young homemakers of the period, my parents bought a Formica-topped kitchen table, the latest thing and wipe-clean too. There was also a kitchen stool, which was not only practical but suggested there was no time for relaxing on weekday mornings in the new fast-moving world.
The majority of the receipts for my parents’ early furnishings have survived (put into a bureau and long since forgotten) and so it is possible for me to see my childhood home take shape: a coffee table, a bedspread, the walnut bureau … Like many other homemakers of the period, their tastes straddled the contemporary and the traditional, G-plan furniture mixing with the Regency style that was enjoying a revival. The dining furniture was ordered in readiness for completion but the lounge remained unfurnished for nine months (ideal for the house-warming party) and the stairs were uncarpeted for a further three. Many families acquired a television set to watch the Coronation (or the World Cup) but my parents needed their money for bricks and mortar; it was 1957 before they purchased an Ecko TV. In the meantime (and thereafter), they numbered among the estimated 50 per cent of adults who were weekly cinema-goers.
When I became a home-owner in miniature, my purchases reflected those in the family home to an uncanny degree. Sadly, I did not have an ‘exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe … all ready for lighting’7, like the one in Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘The Doll’s House’, nor a lamp that actually glowed, like that which delighted writer Emma Smith as a child. But I bought, or was given, a standard lamp resembling the one my parents owned – even its lampshade was the same colour – and a Bush television set and television table. For all its accessories, my house was nothing like as crammed as those museum-quality Victorian doll’s houses, brimful with cooking pots and needlework samplers, candlesticks and miniature paintings, many of which were contributed by adults, just as my grandma re-covered the velvet chairs for me. Sanderson included wallpaper for doll’s houses among their products and may have been the source of my red brickwork; each generation replenishes doll’s houses for the next.
Jocasta Innes described the fun she had as an adult redecorating a doll’s house and what pleasure it gave her to transform a ‘suburban villa with a glaring red roof, blue windows and paper bougainvillea creeping across its green walls’. When she had finished with this ‘hideous modern’ house (which sounds not unlike the one I loved so well), it looked like a ‘neo-Georgian residence in one of the select parts of St John’s Wood, very swanky and prosperous’.8 Few of us have her formidable skills. Nonetheless, many doll’s houses, however humble, are labours of love, just like the one the 1920s draper made for his daughter.
Doll’s house collector Faith Eaton owned two doll’s houses, including a 1939 shop-bought house complete with sandbags and stirrup pump, wartime lessons in homemaking being more stringent than most. Its dolls dressed appropriately in siren suits and tin hats, and looked ready to do their bit. Unlike my larger dolls, my own doll’s-house dolls were never satisfactory. I loved the house itself and its furnishings far more than the dolls who lived there. The house and its diminutive objects were my delight: opening those tiny drawers and lifting the lids on tiny saucepans. I wanted to shrink like Alice and step inside.
An Edwardian child, Gertrude Freeman, visited a toyshop with her grandmother as a Christmas treat. Tea at Fullers preceded their trip to a shop in Birmingham’s Great Western Arcade which sold hundreds of doll’s-house pieces, each costing one penny. (You could buy carefully crafted hand-made doll’s-house furnishings for a penny in the 1900s.) Gertrude’s grandmother told her to pick an item of furniture and, when she did, said, ‘Now choose another … Now choose another …’9 Again and again. Twenty-four times. Gertrude’s account takes me straight back to childhood. Imagine her joy at being invited to choose twenty-four doll’s house treats.
Towards the end of my time with the doll’s house I bought a new set of kitchen furniture: sturdy white wooden pieces, simple, rustic, fit for a shabby-chic kitchen today (though I doubt that the cooker would pass muster). I particularly liked the Victorian-style dresser, with its open shelves for plates, although it must have looked incongruous against those sticky-backed-plastic walls. Around this time, Alison Uttley described her love for the real dresser that had stood in her mother’s kitchen. It was big enough to hide in and its shelves were full of jugs, each one with its own history. Uttley bemoaned the disappearance of a piece of furniture known to so many country children over the years but which future generations would not be able to enjoy. She thought she was describing a way of life that was vanishing and, in some respects, she was. However, the vogue for the past was already well underway – and was even making its presence felt in doll’s houses.