FINDING GHOSTS IN THE HOUSES OF THE HOLY

“The domestic details of north-country farmhouse life are among the things to which Beatrix Potter gave herself most completely. A well-scrubbed flag floor, a rag rug of many colours, a saucepan on the hob and a flat iron beating against the bars of the range, were not objects to evoke any pleasure, one would suppose, in the minds of Mr and Mrs Potter; but Beatrix was in love with every circumstance. Nothing, not the pattern of an oven door nor the design of a crocket kettle-holder; escaped her, and she dwelt on the household arrangements of Tiggy Winkle and Tabitha Twitchit as lovingly as a connoisseur on the details of a van Eyck.” Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s domestic interiors and the hovels in Catherine Cookson’s Mary Ann series were my earliest reading, and they made me a voyeur of other people’s homes.

An uncle once opined that one must read books twice, once to chase the plot and then slowly, to enjoy the writer’s craft. I read my favourite books three times, because from the first I was besotted with the stages, the settings. The houses and their interiors, the arras behind which Shakespeare hid his murderer and victim alike from one another, Brideshead’s Chinese Drawing Room, Mandalay’s gardens and Tara’s windows. Toasted scones on the hearthstone and a flickering candle on a raw, scrubbed wood table. In school the teacher read of Pompeii and in the slides I saw people frozen in death at the most mundane moments; here lay one as if he had just sat down for a good session of cogitation on his lavatory one morning, and the shit had instead hit the proverbial fan and there he lay for all eternity, caught with his pants down, but it was his pottery jug and bowl that held my attention.

History is just boys saying to each other “Give that back it’s mine, I’m going to punch you!”, or “I’ll give you two marbles in exchange for that country, you aren’t using it. Wanna swap?”. And women, grown-up, tired women, saying to each other “what the fuck are we going to give the children to eat tonight and where will we all sleep?” And those tired women wanting to soften it all up a bit, to have something nice.

I believe that heritage is the food and homes, and not the screeds of pages detailing the battles, or the memorials to the flag-bearing men in uniform that makes up the black and white -and the grey, and the myriad red- stories inside history.

Give me a world of hearths and window frames, higgledy-piggeldy roofs and skew stone kitchen walls, a garden well, a staircase leading nowhere and a wooden floor with pockmarked secrets of a thousand stiletto heels, and I go to pieces.

My interest in history, specifically South African history, gradually became a specialized interest in the psychology of the domestic interiors of the urban and rural built environments. Our architectural history, our cultural geography, became my porn, and I want to share some of the passion I feel for landscapes and their importance in forming who I become as a walk around looking, reading, and thinking about it all.

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