CHAPTER II
Building Cities
The devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write that epic. Give me leave, however, to say that of all the heroic acts of the devoted aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than the self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful ladies to settle themselves down to play, in cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games bought at a shop, games in boxes. I am not talking of croquet, or even badminton, though these may be, and are, bought in boxes at shops. Nor do I wish to depreciate chess and draughts, nor even halma, the poor relation of draughts and chess, nor dominoes, which we all love. These games, so precious on wet days, or when other people have headaches, cannot be too highly prized, too assiduously cultivated.
The rigours of the seaside holiday, too often in wet weather a time of trial and temper, would be considerably mitigated if chess and chess-board, draughts, dominoes, and halma were packed in the trunks along with the serge suits, the sandshoes, and the sun-bonnets. The games which I do so 'wonder and admire' to see aunts playing are the meaningless games with counters and dice: ill-balanced dice and roughly turned counters and boards that look like folding chequer-boards till you open them, and then you find all the ugliest colours divided into squares and circles or slabs, with snakes or motors or some other unpleasing devices on them. These games are all exactly the same in their primary qualities: the first of them that was invented had all the faults of all its successors. Yet dozens of new ones are invented every year, just to sell, and helpless children try to play them, knowing no better, and angel aunts abet them, knowing all.
Grown-ups suffer a great deal in playing with children: it is not the least charm of a magic city that a grown-up can play it and suffer nothing worse than the fatigue incidental to the bricklayer's calling. Of course, most grown-ups will say that they would rather be burnt at a slow fire, or play halma, than be bothered with magic cities. But that is only because they do not understand. Try the experiment the next time you are spending a wet week-end in a country house where there are children. Get the children to yourself and ask your hostess whether you may borrow what you want for a game. The library is the best place for building: there is almost certainly a large and steady table: also there are the books. I need not urge you to spare the elegantly bound volumes, and the prized first editions, and the priceless folios and duodecimos in their original calf and vellum. You will find plenty of books that nobody will mind your using—the old Whitakers, bound volumes of the Cornhill and Temple Bar—good solid blocks for the foundations of your city. If there be a pair of candlesticks or an inkstand which match, you may make a magnificent archway by setting up the candlesticks as pillars and laying the inkstand on the top. You can see how this is done in the picture of the Elephant Temple. Get the children to bring down the bricks and enlist a friendly parlour-maid to let you have the run of the china cupboard, or a footman, if you are in that sort of house, to bring you the things you want on a tray.
But it is much better if you can go alone over the house and choose what you really want. You invite the children to help you build, and to build themselves. If they have never built a magic city you will find that they will presently desert their plain brick edifices to watch the development of your palace or temple. They will offer suggestions, and quite soon they will offer objects. They will begin to look about the room with their sharp eyes—and about the house with their keen memory and imagination, and produce the sort of things that look like the sort of things they think you might like for your building. They will wander off, returning with needle-cases, little boxes, shells—and "Would this do for something?" is the word on every lip. They are soon as much absorbed in the building as you are—and I take it you are an enthusiast—and your magic city grows apace. Then after a little while a grown-up, bored and out of employment, will stray into the library with "Hullo! what are you kids up to with all this rubbish?" and stand with his hands in his pockets contemplating the building industry. If you answer him simply and kindly, and don't resent his choice of epithet, it is almost certain he will quite soon withdraw a hand from his pocket and reach out to touch your magic walls with "Wouldn't it be better like that?" Admit it, and in hardly any time at all you have him building on his own account. Another grown-up will stray in presently with the same question on his lips. He too will come to be bored and will remain to build, and by tea-time you will have collected every grown-up of the house-party—every grown-up, that is to say, with the right feeling for cities. It will surprise you to find how keen you will yourself become as the work goes on, and how it will call into play all your invention and your latent craftsmanship.
GUARDED ARCH.
You will be amazed at the results you can achieve with quite dull-looking materials, and still more will you be surprised at the increasing interest and skill of the grown-ups. When it is time to dress for dinner you will feel a pang of positive despair at the thought that your beautiful city, the child of your dreams and skill, must be taken down. It is like the end of the magic of Cinderella when her coach became a pumpkin, her horses mice and her coachman a fat rat. Now your domes are once more mere basins, your fountain basins are ash-trays, your fountains are but silver pen-cases and their gleaming waters only strips of the tin-foil that comes off chocolate or cigarettes. The walls of your palaces go back into the book-cases, and their façades return to the dull obscurity of the brick-boxes. The doors and the animals who stood on guard at the door-ways and terraces, on plinths or pillars, share in the dark rattling seclusion where many a wooden tail has been broken, many a painted ear lost for ever, but the tidying up has to be done: unless your hostess is one of those rare and delightful people who see what their guests like and lets them do it. In that case she may say "Oh! what a pity to disturb the pretty thing! Why not let your city stay for a day or two, so that the children can build some more to it to-morrow. No, of course it won't be in the way—and wouldn't it be pretty if we lighted it up with fairy lights after dark?"
Then your city really has a chance. The children will think of it till bed-time and fall asleep in the happy throes of their first town-planning.
You may think that I exaggerate the charms of magic cities, because I happened to invent them, and you may be afraid that my swan, if you ever make up your mind to adopt it, may turn out to be an ugly and dispiriting duckling. I assure you this is not so. I have never met a child who did not like building magic cities, and not many grown-ups. Of course the love of them grows, like other loves, and the longer you can keep the city standing, the fonder you and your playmates will get of it. It will grow more and more finished in detail, and the ugly make-shifts will be reorganised and made neat with an irreproachable neatness. If the magic city game were played in schools, as I think it ought to be, a long table—or series of tables—could easily be kept for it, and the city kept standing and be added to from day to day. But it will not be the same sort of city as the one you build in the house where the parlour-maid lives and still less the sort that happens in the house where there is a butler and many silver boxes and cups and candlesticks.
Now I come to write all this down it seems very trivial, and it will perhaps seem even more so when I come to tell you about the different things we made and used for magic cities. But it is not really trivial. I do not think I claim for the magic city game more than it justifies, and I will tell you, presently, why I think this. Of course, when you have finished your city, if you ever do finish it, you make up stories about it, and always, even when you are building it, you imagine how splendid it would be if you were small enough to walk through the arches of your city gates, to run along the little corridors of your city palaces. Of course, it would do quite as well if your city became big enough for you to run about in while still keeping your natural size—but it is somehow not really so cosy to think of.
When I had built my first three or four magic cities this idea of getting into the city—being, of course, correct citizen-size—lived with me so much that I wrote a story-book about it called The Magic City,[A] in which a boy and girl do really become the right size and enter into the city they have built. They have there all the adventures whose wraiths danced before me when I was building courts and making palm trees and finding out the many fine and fair uses of cowries and fir-cones.
This book, The Magic City, produced a curious effect. I hope I shall not look conceited (because really I am only proud) when I say that about my books I have had the dearest letters from children, saying pretty things about the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of the most heart-warming things in the world to get these letters and to answer them. And if I had letters like these I should have been only pleased and not disturbed. But the letters about the Magic City, though they were full of the pretty, awkward, delicious things that children write to the author of the books they like, held something else—a demand, severe and almost unanimous, to know how magic cities were built, and whether "children like us" could build one, and, if so, how? I got so many of these letters that I decided to build a magic city where any child, in London at any rate, could come and see it. And I built it at the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the Daily News arranged last year at Olympia. The history of that building would make a largish and intimate volume. The difficulties that beset a home-dweller when she goes out into the world, the anguish of misunderstandings which arise between the builder of magic cities and the people who lay linoleum and put up electric lights, the confusion which results from having packed in boxes and all mixed up the building materials which you are accustomed to look for as you need them in your own home, the extraordinary mass of people, the extraordinary kindness of people; for after all, it is the kindness which stands out. It is true that the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed the electric lights, behaved exactly like an earthquake, upsetting two temples, a palace, and a tank with an educated seal in it. But then how more than a brother was the man who did the whitewash! It is true that the dictator with the linoleum—but I will not remember these things. Let me remember how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a great personage of the Daily News came with his wife at the last despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their dining-table, how the Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get me some cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the Deity from the Daily News looked on benign.
These are things I can never forget. When the show opened I was feeling like a snail who has inadvertently come out without his shell. Think how all this kindness comforted and protected me. And then came the long stream of visitors—crowds of them—I don't know how many thousands, who came and looked at my magic city and asked questions, and looked and looked at it, looked and said things. It is because of what they said that I am writing about that show at all. They all liked the city except two, and I cannot think that those two were, in other respects, really nice people. And more than half of them asked whether I would not write a book about the magic city which I had built there, and which lay looking so real and romantic under the soft glow of the tinted lamps: not a story-book, but a book to tell other people how to make such cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in a book. And when I came to write I found that there were many other things that I wanted to write about children, and other things than magic cities, and I wrote them, and this is the book.
And the reason I am telling you all this is that my big magic city at Olympia showed me, more than anything else could have done, that the building of magic cities interests practically every one, young or old.
It is very difficult to say all this and yet not to feel that you will think that I am boasting about my magic city. But I want you to believe that it was very beautiful, and that you can build one just as beautiful or much more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such an easy game. Every one can play it. And every one likes it—even quite old people. By the way, I have been asked to build another city at Olympia in April, and I hope that it will be a prettier one even than the other which I loved so.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Macmillans.