The Good Shepherd Doll's House

There was something magical about yesterday. We were invited to a luncheon for old people at the Good Shepherd Community Centre. There we met a number of ageing acquaintances with whom we have collaborated to put the world right in days gone by. So many have helped others along the way. It was particularly good to see Y, who for many years came on foot with a friend to pick and store fruit, and to process windfalls into juice and wine. They would walk from Keighley town centre up onto the moors to pick boxes of bilberries and bring them to us to share. Their English was ropey, to say the least. Y's friend literally could not speak one word of English, and never did learn any over the decade or so that we knew her. Like so many people who migrated to Keighley from so many parts of the world since the end of World War II, they looked back with longing to their childhoods in peasant farming households. They described all the processes of food production and preservation, as also the production and processing of fabrics for clothing and for furnishing their homes.

Whilst we were at the Good Shepherd Centre yesterday I was delighted to find a sadly battered doll's house containing some oddments of furniture. I bought it and took it home in great delight. Perhaps I'm going completely senile already, as a result of Parkinson's and creeping old age? But as I explore the subject of doll's houses more fully (see blog in this series for 30th September) I find a whole new world opening up. Doll's houses can tell us a great deal about how we lived in the past, how we are organising our households at the moment, enabling us to think our way through to plan how our homes and local communities might look in the future.

Doll's houses are not mere toys for the young child or collectors items set in aspic for the decadent rich. On the contrary, properly organised, they can provide the focus for discussion of the role of the household as the foundation stone of the world-wide social order. What rooms could we have in the future? A lounge for watching big screen TV, for crashing out when we return from 12 hour stints of waged and salaried slavery? A music room? A library? A nursery? A fast food kitchen? A slow food kitchen? An artist's studio? Needlework room? A compost loo? Does the house have a garden? And so on.

Presently, redundant doll's houses are ten a penny, as families think their children have grown out of them. These and their fittings and furnishings can become the focus for community group discussion about households past, present and future. Such discussion is nothing new. In the November 1935 issue of The Catholic Worker, Peter Maurin advocated the establishment of farm-based communities:

It is in fact impossible
for any culture
to be sound and healthy without a proper regard
for the soil,
no matter
how many urban dwellers
think that their food comes from groceries
and delicatessens
or their milk comes from tin cans.

Those words were written way back, before World War II had even started. Like so many present day migrants to Keighley from peasant farming backgrounds, Peter Maurin signposts possible routes to the sustainable household and community of the future. (See blog for 4th October for reference to Peter Maurin's Easy Essays on Catholic Radicalism. and the Catholic Worker movement. The above quote was noted on page 127 of Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World, by Dorothy Day with Francis J. Sicius, Orbis Books, 2004). We cannot put the clock back, but we can learn from the past.