Read Online Circus by Claire Battershill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Claire Battershill
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appreciate the craftsmanship, I’d like to take you through each room. To offer you a tour within the tour, so to speak, and make sure that you appreciate the key details that set these models apart from your average child’s plaything.
I always begin with this particular building because it’s my favourite. It’s not the most lavish – that would have to be the Taj Mahal – nor is it the most complicated – the English country manor to our right might take that title on account of the fully functional watermill. The museum is not organized chronologically. We’ve gone for a thematic approach: dollhouses and domestic spaces here on the ground floor, natural and man-made wonders upstairs, and in the attic is outer space and the ocean. Other tour guides might organize the visit differently, starting with the European castles montage or the moon landing with all of its black-lit stars, but sometimes the most important details are the ones people overlook when they rush through. I prefer to draw your attention down to the level of a mole painted on a doll’s cheek or to a shrub that conforms to accurate botanical descriptions. As you can see, Jemima could glitz it up with the best of the artisans, but her own taste tendedmore towards the small moments one might instinctively forget. Besides, I like to think that half an hour per tour is a loose time guideline, not a hard and fast rule.
At the top of the house is the attic, which hides in the peak of the pointed roof. No one lives there, but it’s not an attic stuffed with heirlooms that might one day be uncovered. There are no trunks full of letters or black-and-white photographs, but there is speculation in the scholarly community that Jemima may at one point have constructed the trunks and then removed them. Professor Norbridge, an expert from the University of British Columbia in the history of early twentieth-century domestic hobbies, visited the museum in 2010 and showed us some historical reconstructions of an early version of the room. Or, as much as the academics can recreate it from descriptions in Jemima’s personal papers, anyway. But let me just say
I
had a lot to teach
him
, which was a real treat for me since he’s an actual expert.
As I’m sure you can see, the walls are constructed to look incomplete, with exposed beams fashioned from whittled, walnut-stained unsharpened pencils and pink insulation made of hand-dyed cotton wool. Note the single bare light bulb. If you look closely, you’ll see that instead of a light switch, there’s a string hanging from the ceiling just behind the bulb. If you pull it, delicately, using only your thumb and index finger, the bulb wakes up, even now, like a sleepy glow-worm, and the string dances as it catches the new light. No, ma’am, you can’t pull it. As you can see, the entire house is behind glass, beingkept safe in the cabinet. Even I have turned the light on only once by hand, as a reward for being Miniatureland’s most committed tour guide in 2007. I also received a complimentary spa visit for two at The Oasis. I took the runner-up tour guide, Jenna, because that’s how much of a team player I am.
The electricity in the house works, by the way. Every filament of every bulb can produce a little glimmer of light. See that green button on the wall to the left of the display case? If you’d like to press that, sir, you’ll see all the lights of the house come on. Yes! There we go. Don’t worry, it’s not witchcraft. I’ll explain the masterful engineering later. On the attic floor is a trap door with a matchstick ladder that folds down, but no one ever uses it on account of how tiny the crawl space is, and also because all the inhabitants of the house are rather restricted in the mobility department. They are confined to their rooms, each glued into a single daily activity for all eternity. Even the houseguests never leave. They also never overstay their welcome.
The Hendricks were a church-going
I always begin with this particular building because it’s my favourite. It’s not the most lavish – that would have to be the Taj Mahal – nor is it the most complicated – the English country manor to our right might take that title on account of the fully functional watermill. The museum is not organized chronologically. We’ve gone for a thematic approach: dollhouses and domestic spaces here on the ground floor, natural and man-made wonders upstairs, and in the attic is outer space and the ocean. Other tour guides might organize the visit differently, starting with the European castles montage or the moon landing with all of its black-lit stars, but sometimes the most important details are the ones people overlook when they rush through. I prefer to draw your attention down to the level of a mole painted on a doll’s cheek or to a shrub that conforms to accurate botanical descriptions. As you can see, Jemima could glitz it up with the best of the artisans, but her own taste tendedmore towards the small moments one might instinctively forget. Besides, I like to think that half an hour per tour is a loose time guideline, not a hard and fast rule.
At the top of the house is the attic, which hides in the peak of the pointed roof. No one lives there, but it’s not an attic stuffed with heirlooms that might one day be uncovered. There are no trunks full of letters or black-and-white photographs, but there is speculation in the scholarly community that Jemima may at one point have constructed the trunks and then removed them. Professor Norbridge, an expert from the University of British Columbia in the history of early twentieth-century domestic hobbies, visited the museum in 2010 and showed us some historical reconstructions of an early version of the room. Or, as much as the academics can recreate it from descriptions in Jemima’s personal papers, anyway. But let me just say
I
had a lot to teach
him
, which was a real treat for me since he’s an actual expert.
As I’m sure you can see, the walls are constructed to look incomplete, with exposed beams fashioned from whittled, walnut-stained unsharpened pencils and pink insulation made of hand-dyed cotton wool. Note the single bare light bulb. If you look closely, you’ll see that instead of a light switch, there’s a string hanging from the ceiling just behind the bulb. If you pull it, delicately, using only your thumb and index finger, the bulb wakes up, even now, like a sleepy glow-worm, and the string dances as it catches the new light. No, ma’am, you can’t pull it. As you can see, the entire house is behind glass, beingkept safe in the cabinet. Even I have turned the light on only once by hand, as a reward for being Miniatureland’s most committed tour guide in 2007. I also received a complimentary spa visit for two at The Oasis. I took the runner-up tour guide, Jenna, because that’s how much of a team player I am.
The electricity in the house works, by the way. Every filament of every bulb can produce a little glimmer of light. See that green button on the wall to the left of the display case? If you’d like to press that, sir, you’ll see all the lights of the house come on. Yes! There we go. Don’t worry, it’s not witchcraft. I’ll explain the masterful engineering later. On the attic floor is a trap door with a matchstick ladder that folds down, but no one ever uses it on account of how tiny the crawl space is, and also because all the inhabitants of the house are rather restricted in the mobility department. They are confined to their rooms, each glued into a single daily activity for all eternity. Even the houseguests never leave. They also never overstay their welcome.
The Hendricks were a church-going
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