The Doll's House

My Dad was a furniture designer inside an accountant’s body. Particularly, he was very concerned with the future of furniture. “In the future”, he used to tell me, “There will be sliding doors and neon lights everywhere”. This was the 1960s. He did have a point.

He worked as one of the chief accountants for a very renowned old establishment company with headquarters in Piccadilly in London. He had his own large office and secretary. I know, because when I was little I used to pretend to be sick once a month so that he would take me to work. I think we both knew I wasn’t sick. I used to sit in the secretarial pool and write poetry on a typewriter. And in the lunch hour we used to buy sandwiches and eat them in Hyde Park.

Working as an accountant, my Dad had access to a lot of old scrap paper which had one side full of old printed ledgers but the other side blank. He used to bring piles of this paper home, so that I could use it to write my stories on and he could use it to draw his furniture designs on. I honestly think my Dad must have got the job in Piccadilly through the old boys’ network, because I don’t think he was really a very good accountant. He was no good at managing money and we were always terribly hard up, even though he must have been paid very well.

On the back of the old ledger paper, he drew chairs, cupboards, wardrobes, shelves, desks, bookcases, chests-of-drawers. They were all sleek, slim, trim, lots of very straight lines and quadratic shapes. Perfect symmetries. Beautiful, smooth, flowing. He drew everything with a propelling pencil. He gave me a propelling pencil and told me that in the future, everyone would be using them.

My Dad made sliding doors, hung neon light tubes and made a futuristic table for our kitchen that did not have any legs. He made me wooden jigsaw puzzles with his jigsaw, with pictures of flowers from old calendars. Then he did a carpentry course at evening school and filled our entire garage with wood. So much wood that you could no longer move in the garage. And a large carpenter’s workbench. And every night, he went into the garage after dinner and worked on something that he had spent time during the day (probably when he should have been accounting) designing.

When I was 8 or 9, he made me a doll’s house. True to the form of the future, the doll’s house was a large, square bungalow on an even larger square of chipboard that contained squares of green felt around the outer edges (the lawns). You could lift up the square in one piece and put it down again. You had to be careful when you did that. The square consisted of 8 pieces of wood that were fixed together by dovetail joints. My Dad learned how to do them at carpentry class. It did not have a roof, which made it easy for me to play with the dolls from above.

My Dad used to go to Selfridges store in London in his lunch hour to buy the doll’s furniture. I got it a few pieces at a time. And he also bought the doll’s wallpaper there. My doll’s house was perfect.

I populated the house with a family of dolls that came in a plastic bag from the local newsagent. It was the same shop where I bought stamps for my stamp collection. Really, I suppose my Dad should have bought the dolls at Selfridges as well. Because my house was so posh, it really should have had posh dolls in it, but these dolls were very cheap, all I could afford with my pocket money. But perhaps someone needed to save those poor dolls from the shop, and give them a nice home.

I named the dolls after the dolls in Rumer Godden’s book “The Doll’s House”. There was Mr. Plantagenet, and his wife Birdie. And there was Apple Plantagenet, their teenage daughter (in the book it is a little boy) and Tottie, who was the maid (in the book she is the daughter). Tottie the maid was dressed in a maid’s costume. That’s what it was like in the 1960s. Doll manufacturers still thought that all middle-class families had a maid.

The dolls were made head-to-toe of plastic from a plastic mold. Not one bit of them could move. Mr. Plantagenet was unfortunately stuck in a sitting position. He could never ever stand up. I put him mostly on the sofa and made him little newspapers to read (he could never go to bed either). Birdie Plantagenet was forced to stand, so I had her walking round the house a lot, or sleeping. Poor Birdie, she could never sit and read the paper with Mr. Plantagenet. Apple and Tottie were also fated to a life of permanently standing or lying down. They shared a room, even though Tottie was the maid.

When we moved house when I was 14, the doll’s house was thrown away in a skip that we had delivered outside our house. It makes me very sad to think of that now. I kept Apple but the other Plantagenets went into the skip I think. My Dad went on to make me a desk, with a “secret section” (I know he had made a mistake in judging the size of the drawer, and the secret section was just an extra bit at the end), two large bookcases, two small sitting room cabinets, a coat stand, an L-shaped office workplace for my mother, a wardrobe and a large chest of drawers.

My Dad covered everything in Formica. He said Formica was the future. And it was easy to keep clean. It is funny, but now that it is the future, I’m not seeing so many of the propelling pencils or so much of the Formica. Although I grant you, there are quite a lot of sliding doors and neon lights.