Wings and the Child: or, The Building of Magic Cities

CHAPTER V
Materials

You wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house where beautiful things are. I will tell you afterwards what to do in the house where beautiful – or at any rate costly – things are not. It is best when the owner of the house is an enthusiastic member of the building party; then she will grudge nothing.

In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be passed by, nor bronzes. A vase of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or Egyptian gods that have lain a thousand years safe in their bronze amid the sands of the desert, cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in the shadow of the tent, and now decking the mantelpiece of the room you are looting. Little silver figures of knights in armour and what not – take them if you get the chance. Chessmen, too, as many as you can get, the carved ivory ones, of red and white, and the black and brown kind where the heads of the kings and queens are so like marbles and those of the pawns like boot-buttons; draughts too, and spillikins, and those little metal animals, heavy and coloured life-like, which you see on glass shelves in the fancy shop: take them too. They will serve other uses than those to which you will dedicate your Noah's Ark animals. Card counters, especially the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and dominoes, and the willow-pattern pots and a blue cup or so from the glass-fronted cupboard. Take all these, always giving preference to the things that you will not be asked to put back the same day. Little Japanese cabinets, tea-caddies of tortoiseshell or wood or silver, silver boxes – and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do not take the playing cards that people play bridge with: these are never quite the same after they have been used in magic cities, and the Queen of Hearts always gets lost. You can usually acquire odd packs of cards that nobody wants. Those with black and gold backs are the best. They make gorgeous pagodas, and a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it should be.

In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps, at least you can in mine, brass finger-bowls, and the lids of urns and kettles from the dresser – egg-cups and mugs and basins of lustre and of blue. Also those very little pewter liqueur-cups from Liberty's, and the tumblers for your towers of light, if you are going to have any. The library will yield you books and atlases – very useful for roofs these last, if they do not slope too much from back to edge; if they do, you can get even with them by wedges of paper laid in on the thin side.

But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground, and here you will make a good bag even in those houses where you are not allowed any of the treasures from the drawing-room or the dining-room.

Tins – tins of all kinds and shapes, from the tin that once held Bath Olivers and its lesser brother where coffee once lived to the square smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard, pepper, and so forth.

A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter, patty pans, and those little tall tins that you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and swans upon pats of butter, the kitchen mortar, especially the big marble one, so heavy that cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware bowls and stewing-pots, the lids of tea-pots, clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and jars that have held jam – especially the brownish corrugated kind of jar – all these things and many more you may glean in a kitchen whose Queen is kind.

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever made was built of kitchen things, and bricks and the boxes of bricks, a few shells, and a few chessmen.

The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black passe-partout, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for binding pictures and glass together when you don't want to have picture-frames. On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver urn, a silver butter dish, and a silver jam-jar. A salt-cellar (wrong way up, with a white chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with passe-partout doors and windows stand at the base of the tower, and turrets are made of round bricks and draughts, with the chess castles on the top. The porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white chess king on it, and on each side two books with a binding of white and pale gold. Along the top of the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes; on these are two rounds that happened when the arches were being cut out. On these little pearl shells are glued, and little roofs of blue tiles complete the porch. Behind these more books, white and pale gold with marbled sides, lead up to the platform on which the great tin towers rise up against the snowy background (linen sheets over the backs of chairs). The lower building is of the boxes of bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large blue jar crowned with a silver egg-cup, a flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and some blue and white tiles. An Egyptian god stands at the corner of the upper and the lower building, and two green trees with white roses grow out of a tomb at the left. The pathway is of tiles edged with fir cones, and two rose-trees within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its beginning; the whole thing was blue and silver and black, and I wish I could show you a coloured picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up for you to see.

The lower platform on the right is a box faced with silver seed-vessels of honesty, and the arches and court are red. The steps are made of blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red bricks and the water where the seal swims is silver paper. In front is a pavement made of mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside of the court is made of one large red tile with a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with a square board painted red, and counters laid on it.) The fountain in the middle is a brass match-box and the waters that rise from it are silver paper; but in the picture the water of the fountain seems to have been blown aside by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those desolate regions of snow." You can build just such another tower and castle with the things you have, but when once you start building you will most likely think of some other way, quite different from mine, and just as good.

Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you have an uncle who is an architect he will have any number sent to him as samples, and he will be rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles are all eminent in other walks of life it is a pity, but you are probably friends with the man who papers and paints your house, or the man who comes when the pipes burst at Christmas, or the man who comes about the gas, or the man who knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen range. It will be strange if none of these can get you a few coloured tiles when once they know you want them. It is well, if you are a child with a taste for building, to take pains to become acquainted with all the men who come to your house to do interesting things with tools and wood and iron and lead. Quite apart from the joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes, and thinking how easy it would be to be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself, there are all sorts of things left over from their work which are of no use to them, but may be of much use to you. All sorts of screws and nails, for instance, these generous men will now and then bestow – little screws of dry colour, little pieces of brass, door-knobs and finger-plates, thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers, lengths of pleasantly coloured wall-paper – the wrong side of which, being plain, can be used for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful too, especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths – and cut straight. The sections make excellent and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of brass tubing are useful too – in fact, brass objects of all sorts deserve your careful consideration. Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must have a good deal of metal about it, as the cities in Atlantis did.

As I write I see more and more clearly that a sharp distinction must be drawn between cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and cities that can be kept going and added to day by day for weeks. You may often be fortunate enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room and to use the spoils for a building that only lasts a day, but no one will strip her rooms of all the pretty things you want and let you keep them for weeks. Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will gradually amass the things you need. I know well enough that there will have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the building of cities.

CHAPTER VI
Collections

First in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably have. Odd chessmen – quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few pence – are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Glass drops off old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for grass plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very realistic grass lawns can be made by chopping up the long green grass that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up, and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you sprinkle your chopped grass thickly all over it and leave it to dry. Next day, not before, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over so that the loose grass falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your grass plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard rose-trees of loofah – dyed green, and the stalks of long matches painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.

Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back level, cut the stem.

For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming little trees.

Shells are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of carving. Almost all shells will be useful in one way or another, but I have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly shells which you find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly shells that lie on the rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.

Keep your shells in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds of shells. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate. The work of sorting out the shells is very damping to the eager enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.

As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed, and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice exactly the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however small.

I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan, framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with elephant tusk shells and others, and below with carved ivory card counters.

There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar – a wooden box – on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red fairy lights, hidden by buttresses from the human eye which peeps through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red books —Sheridan's Plays, Tom Jones, and Boswell's Life of Johnson. The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk shells. There is a door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case of a much-loved aunt, who nobly contributed it to the Temple. Above this door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.

And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden bricks. The other side shows between dark buttresses the red of the books, and towards the back of this side are small square buildings – wooden boxes stained brown – with brass domes and mysterious doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.

The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark buttresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved chessmen. The gate is of pierced brass – two finger-plates for a door, and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which support a brass inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen. On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl – the kind that nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a brass rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid brass, crowned with a black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-knobs on them, and round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of dark bricks with chessmen on the top.

In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the space at the side are paved with mother-of-pearl.

I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details are changed a little every time I build it.

If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful pavement by pasting the shining pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones, to show off, by contrast, the massive splendour of your Temple. These honesty pods are a most useful substitute for mother-of-pearl. You can paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean) or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up. But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A grass garden with paths of honesty, or a shell-built fountain basin in the middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be afraid of open spaces. Have as many buildings as you like, and mass them together as you choose, but let there be open spaces. They will be to your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the qualities your city may possess.

There are cardboard models of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, and the Temple at Jerusalem. These are interesting in themselves and it is good to put them together. The Temple, which is sold by the Religious Tract Society, is really beautiful, and when you have set it up it looks like a model in ivory. The bridge and the Cathedral are of dull brown pasteboard – but they are interesting for all that. But when you are tired of these things as models, parts of them can be used with great effect in your building, especially if you paint the brown ones with aluminium paint, or even whitewash them.

In the foreground of the picture of the Astrologer's tower you will see a little house which doesn't look as if it belonged where it is. And no more it does. It was put in just to show you what these little cardboard buildings are like – it is one of the gate-houses of the Tower Bridge, and the little white house on the parapet above the steps in the picture of the silver towers is a little gate-house out of another model.

When you are collecting shells, you will find smooth flat stones of pleasing colours. Collect them – the thinner the better – you can make mosaic floors of them, fastening them in their place with glue or a very thin layer of Plasticine. Fir-cones of all shapes and sizes are useful, from the delicate cones of the larch to the great varnished-looking cones that fall from the big pine trees on the Riviera; they call them pineapples there —pommes-de-pin– and they use them for lighting fires. But you can use them for the tops of towers.

A little, and only a very little, red tinsel paper is good to use, for the backs of shrines. It gives a suggestion of the glow of hidden lamps – or, put as windows near the tops of towers, it suggests the glow of sunset falling on jewelled casements. You can get it, and also bundles of stamped strips of gold paper, which should be used very sparingly indeed, from Mr. Bousquet, of the Barbican, in London City. There are other things which could serve for part of your collection, but I have told about these in the chapter on poor children's cities, because the poorest child can get them. But they are desirable in any collection, such things as tobacco-tins, jam-jars, clothes-pegs, and the different kinds of common things that you can use for decorating the fronts and backs and sides of houses, if you have not enough bricks to build façades to them all. And remember always to make the backs of your houses as beautiful as the fronts. They may – and should – be plainer but not less beautiful. Do not be like the jerry-builders who spend all their decoration, such as it is, on the flat fronts of their villas, and leave the sides and back flat and ugly, and so that when you see the row of them from the railway they look miserable and dejected, as though they knew how ugly they were and were sorry.