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.
CHAPTER VII
The Poor Child's City
When my city was built at Olympia a great many school-teachers who came to see it told me that they would like to help the children in their schools to build such cities, but that it would not be possible because the children came from poor homes, where there were none of the pretty things—candlesticks, brass bowls, silver ash-trays, chessmen, draughts, well-bound books, and all the rest of it—which I had used to build my city. So then I said I would build a city out of the sort of things that poor children could collect and bring to school. And I did. My friends Mr. Annis and Mr. Taylor, who were helping me to explain the city and show it to visitors, helped me with the building. We did it in a day, and it was very pretty—so pretty that the school-teachers who came to see it asked me to write a book to say how that was done. And so I did.
There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy, their devotion. When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all those who work for money—when we think how rich people have money to throw away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver collars, and eat chicken off china, while the little children of the poor live on bread and tea, and wear what they can get—often enough, too little—when we think of all these things, if we can bear to think of them at all, there is not one of us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if by our death we could secure for these children a fairer share of the wealth of England, the richest country in the world. For wealth, by which I mean money, can buy all those things which children ought to have, and which these children do not have—good food, warm clothes, fresh country air, playthings and books, and pictures. Remembering that by far the greater number of children of England have none of these things, you would, I know, gladly die if dying would help. To die for a cause is easy—you leap into the gulf like Curtius, or fall on the spears like Winkelried, or go down with your ship for the honour of your country. To lead a forlorn hope, to try to save one child from fire or water, and die in the attempt—that is easy and glorious. The hard thing to do is to live for your country—to live for its children. And it is this that the teachers in the Council Schools do, year in and year out, with the most unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody applauds or makes as much fuss as is made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten. In the face of enormous difficulties and obstacles, exposed to the constant pin-pricks of little worries, kept short of space, short of materials and short of money, yet these teachers go on bravely, not just doing what they are paid to do, but a thousand times more, devoting heart, mind, and soul to their splendid ambition and counting themselves well paid if they can make the world a better and a brighter place for the children they serve. If these children when they grow up shall prove better citizens, kinder fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than their fathers were, we shall owe all the change and progress to the teachers who are spending their lives to this end.
And this I had to say before I could begin to write about how cities may be built of such materials as poor children can collect and bring to school.
For I have to own that poor children live in such little crowded houses that there is no room for the building of cities, and in the courts and streets where they play they cannot build, for the passers-by would tumble over their cities, and the policemen would call it an obstruction. So if they have a city at all it must be where they have most of their pleasant plays—at school. Besides, the children I have in mind are so very poor, that no one child could possibly collect enough materials for a city. But a number of children could each of them bring a few things, and thus make up enough for the building. And in most schools there will be some children not quite so poor who can afford a penny or so for tinsel paper and the few things—colours, paints, and so on—that do not occur naturally in a house, even a well-to-do house. These, let us hope, will be able to furnish a few old chessmen, for there is nothing like chessmen for giving an air of elegance to domes and minarets. If you cannot get chessmen, small clothes-pegs are good. You can cut them in halves and then you have two kinds of minaret. They can be coloured red or dark brown, or, if your city seems likely to lack metal, you can paint them with gold or aluminium paint. They look well when cut shorter as the battlements of buildings, rather like halma men, but of handsomer and more rotund proportions. Your halma man as you buy him in a box is ever a bit of a starveling. If you cut your peg into three, the middle section will make short round pillars to support little galleries, the roof being a strip of mill-board or the lid of a narrow box.