HOUSES
By PHILIP CARR
cAHOUSE! A house! My kingdom for a house!" If that is not exactly what Shakespeare made Richard of Gloucester cry, it might well have been, if he had been living today.
The population seems t3 be almost equally divided into the complacent, who are installed in houses ; the rapacious, who are selling houses ; and the harassed, who are seeking houses. I say " houses " and not "flats," because there are no longer any flats to let. The small flats were all taken first, then the .large flats, then the small houses, and now there is nothing left except the large houses—and these are only to be bought and not to be rented. I • went to one house agent, who had put on his door, "We have no fiats or houses to let."
Of course, there are still deluded optimists, who imagine that they are going to discover the undiscoverable. The "personal" column of advertisements in certain papers reveals some of the wiles which they employ to try to gain their ends. "Gentleman owning beauti- ful country house, twenty bedrooms, stabling for eight horses, would exchange fo: bijou flat in London, West End." "Homeless lady would like to be housekeeper to another "—although it is not sug- gested where they will keep house if they are both homeless. Appeals are confidently made to patriotic sentiment. "Furnished flat wanted by wife and three-year-old child of regular officer." "Flat wanted by released officer and wife, with a job and nowhere to live." These appeals even go so far as that of the demobilised major, who hopes to find a "wealthy philanthropist" to lend him £1,5oo to complete the purchase of a house, as he "cannot afford the usual interest rates."
However, even supposing the major got the money, he might find other difficulties ahead of him. There are houses to be bought, but they are nearly all large. The major will probably want to let out part of his ; but here he will meet unexpected obstacles. He will need to make certain alterations. If he has bought the freehold there is no one to prevent his doing this, except that he must Persuade the local authority to allow him to have the work done and must find a builder who has the workmen free to do it. How- ever, if what he has acquir-d is a lease, he is pretty certain to find a clause in it which forbids him to use the house for anything but the residence of a single family. No doubt Parliament will eventually do something to put things right in this matter, and may even go so far that we may see all the large and ugly houses of the rich in London divided up for the occupation of the poor, which will be a just revenge for what the rich have done, and are doing, in the way of the occupation of the small and pretty cottages of the poor in the country. This passion of the rich for little dwellings may even end in their camping out altogether and living in caravans, especially if they became desperate in their search for houses ; but things have apparently not yet gone very far in that direction. For although caravans figure in the advertisements, it is the sellers and not the buyers who are advertising.
As a house-hunter myself, I have been oppressed by the strange sense of the indecent which pervades a house, now empty after being occupied, perhaps for many years. It is something quite different from the pathetic revelation of domestic intimacies with which the spectacle of bombed-out homes has made us familiar. The empty house discovers no intimacies. It is just naked. And yet it does not make me feel ashamed in the way I have done when my own furniture was being removed, and looked so surprisingly shabby in the light of the open air that I wished I could hide it, as I used to lock up my suit-case on visits to country houses in my youth, so that did footman should not discover the threadbare condition of my underclothing. Nor is the emptiness of these old- fashioned and dusty houses the primitive and innocent nakedness of Adam and Eve, as is the emptiness of a house just built. It is the nakedness of mature persons who have been stripped.
There on the wall is an ugly stain, and around it the tell-tale mark of the wardrobe, which was long since placed there to hide it. There, again, the removal of pictures shows what might never otherwise have been noticed, that the colour of the wall-paper all around them has faded. One is quite relieved to pass for a moment into the caretaker's room in the basement, where there are at least some tables and chairs and a bed.
Indeed, the caretaker seems to have made herself quite comfort- able. This perhaps accounts for the tone of her comments as she takes you over the house. "That's the room where the gentleman died, Sir. The big drawing-room was never warm enough for him. It's true it has got three outside walls, and that makes it a cold room. Yes, they did have the roof repaired, several times they did. Of course, you noticed that damp on the third floor."
One can try to be merry about it ; but the dearth of houses, especially in London, is something very different from a joke. When a man can write to the paperi to say that he is "7,000 and something on the local waiting list for a house," he is perhaps exaggerating ; but Professor G. D. H. Cole's figures must be taken more seriously. He calculates that, in orde: to deal with existing and constantly accruing-demands, we must build 630,000 houses a year for eleven years, which means nearly 7,000,000 houses in all. It seems hardly possible that we shall do this, and the only solution seems to be that we must lodge those 7,000,000 families in some other way. Moreover, they must be lodged in the country as well as in the towns ; for, as a farmer has recently remarked, the difficulty about agricultural labour is not wages. It is houses. Mr. Aneurin Bevan boldly envisages the possibility of erecting sky-scrapers in the rural districts. No doubt a fierce cry will go up about ruining the natural beauties of our scenery, but would it be justified? If the mass outline of a sky-scraper be judiciously designed, I see no reason why it should be any more of an eyesore than a baronial castle or mansion, and it will certainly be much less of one than the sort of uncontrolled ribbon development to which we have unfortunately become accustomed. Besides, it will afford some possibility of housing the workmen where they are wanted.
In any case, it would seem that the horror of the dreary rows of side-to-side, if not back-to-back, little houses—you cannot call them cottages—which certainly have destroyed much of our landscape, is no longer an even economically profitable speculation at the present value of land and building. So that, in the future, we are likely to see a great deal more communal living in the open countryside itself.
Is that going to alter the national character?
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