Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  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.

  CLOTHES PEGS.

  Cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes and shapes are always easy to get. These can be coloured as explained in another chapter, and little doors and windows cut in them. But be sparing of windows; too many windows detract from the dignity of your tower, and make it look like a factory. In poor schools there will not be many bricks, and something must be done to add variety to the façades of buildings when there are not enough bricks to cover or decorate your boxes. A good deal can be done with haricot beans, tapioca, and sago. Fasten the beans round the doorways and the windows with glue or seccotine or Plasticine. If you use glue let the bean-work be quite cold before you do anything else with it. “Next day” is an excellent rule. When the beans are quite firmly fixed, glue the surface all over and sprinkle thickly with tapioca so that not a bit of the box shows. Leave the tapioca lying on the surface till next day, then turn it up; the loose tapioca will fall off and leave a pleasant rough-cast-looking surface. Round cardboard boxes, such as muff-boxes or biscuit-boxes make splendid towers treated in this way. If you cannot get the little round yellow periwinkly shells, maize is very good if you cut each grain flat with a sharp knife, and fix the grains with glue as pillars and arches. Tin boxes or round tins polished to silvery brightness, with doors and windows and crenellations of black passe-partout, can be built into palaces of astonishing splendour, as you can see in the picture of the silver towers. But always beware of too many windows. Other excellent towers are jam-pots: you can paint them any colour you like, but I advise you to stick to terra-cotta, cream colour, and dark brown. Very pretty towers can be made of white jam-pots with windows and doors and crenellation of gold paper. Only you should outline the gold with ink or dark stain to make it show up against the white. Basins that are cracked make good domes, and you can almost always get a cracked basin, however poor you are; tea-cups that have lost their handles, or had a piece bitten out of them, are also not hard to get, and the lids of teapots that are broken, and of saucepans that have been burnt through, come readily enough to the hand of the collector. Honey pots and the little brown jugs that cream is sold in are easy to come by, and make Moorish-looking domes for buildings.

  When once you begin to build, you will find that all sorts of things that before looked neither useful nor beautiful become both, when they are built into your city. Look at the bedstead-knobs in the Elephant Temple, and the pepper-pots and the tea-cups on the top of the tower of pearl and red.

  TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE.

  Those children who are lucky enough to go into the country for a holiday can collect fir-cones and acorns; nicely shaped bits of wood are more easily come by in a country village than in a London slum. Acorns are most useful, both the acorn and the cup. A brown building with doors and windows outlined in acorn cups with their flat side set on with glue looks like a precious work of carved wood. If you can’t get acorn cups, the shells of Barcelona nuts are good, but they are difficult to cut into the needed cup shape. The shells of pea-nuts on a stone-coloured building look like carved stones, but always the nutshell must fit its edges tightly and neatly to the surface and show as a little round neat boss. Your own observation will supply you with other little and
valueless things, which will become valuable as soon as you stick them evenly and closely on a foundation of their own colour. The periwinkly shells and the maize grains look best on white wood. The shells of the cocoanut have a value all their own. The larger ones, sawn neatly in halves, make impressive domes for brown buildings, and half a small cocoanut shell will roof a cardboard box that has held elastic bands, and you can call it a thatched cottage or the hut of a savage chief. I called mine Cocoanut Cottage, and the Curator of my Botanical Museum lived there. The Chief Astrologer, of course, lived at the top of his tower, which was a photographic enlarging apparatus. Ponds and rivers can be made with the silver paper that comes off cigarettes, and I have made a very impressive tower with match boxes, painted black and piled one on another so that the blue side shows in front, with a touch of red at each side. Black windows if you like. If you cannot get any chessmen the pinnacles of your buildings must be clothes-pegs, acorns, and fir-cones, with a very occasional piece of lead pencil or short piece of brass tubing with an acorn or a fir-cone on the top. Fir-cones, too, look quite baronial stuck upright on the posts of gates — and they are good edging for paths and roads. Pill-boxes make nice little turrets, and cotton reels, coloured to match the bricks and the boxes, are the finest flower tubs in the world. With sprigs of evergreen stuck in them, or a little made rose-tree, they look quite life-like and convincing, especially if you paste a circle of brown paper on the top of the reel, to look like mould, before you stick your shrub in the hole so conveniently placed in the reel, apparently on purpose to have shrubs planted in it. Cotton reels with acorns or fir-cones on them are good on the top of gate-posts.

  COTTON REELS.

  LATTICE WINDOW.

  These are just a few of the things that poor children can get and the way they can use them. The moment you begin to build you will think of a hundred things that I have not thought of, and a hundred ways of using them that I should not have thought of trying.

  If you can so arrange the site of your city that it need not be disturbed, it will grow in beauty day by day, and you will presently have to name a day to satisfy the children who will want to bring their parents to see it. If you give a school party no other attraction will be needed, and you will find that neither children nor parents will tire of examining your city as a whole and in detail, exclaiming at its beauty and marvelling at its ingenuity. And the children will love it. And so will you.

  If you are disposed to take a little more trouble with your towers, you can cover them with cement, and mould the crenellations and windows with your fingers. The cement is made of newspaper, size, and whitening. Tear up two newspapers and boil them in four quarts of water for three hours. Then pound the paper in a large mortar, or squeeze it in your hands till it is all pulp. It will have an unpleasing grey colour at this stage, but in the end it will be creamy white. Then add equal quantities of size and whitening and a pinch of yellow ochre, mix thoroughly and let the mixture get cold, when it is ready for use. If it is too thin

  warm it again, and add more whitening, but do not let the mixture boil after the size has been added. When the mixture with which you have covered your tower is dry, — it takes some days — it will be as hard as stone. A cocoa tin set on a treacle tin makes a very neat tower, as you will see by the picture. Square towers can also be made in this way, by covering square tins with the cement. In fact, with a little trouble and some tins of different sizes and shapes you could build a whole palace in this way. Doors can be made of black paper, and lattices of paper cut and folded, with black paper behind it, as you can see for yourself by the picture.

  CHAPTER VIII. The End

  You will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as though the needs of all children were the same. That is because, in the body of this work, I have been dealing with the needs of children as a genus, and not with those of the individual or species. There are certain needs common to all children, needs as universal as the need for food, raiment, warmth, and light. Such are the needs for sympathy and justice, leisure and liberty. These things are admitted by all but the driest economists to be the rights of adults, but not, alas! always admitted as the rights of children. And I have tried to show a little what it is that is essential to the true well-being of all children. The hungers and thirsts of the individual spirit cannot be dealt with by any but those in close relation to the individual child. I have tried to lay down broad outlines — to make suggestions, to point out pleasant ways leading to pleasant places. Parents, teachers, pastors and masters will make the application — or the variation — in every individual case.

  One of the things that is the matter with modern education is the absence of the conception of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character and temperament. For the matter of that it is this indifference to personality which makes the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain. Our education treats children as though they were all cast in one mould; it treats men and women as though they, in their sphere, differed not at all one from another. You will say that it is impossible, in a great country and a great school, to find out the personal tastes and wishes, hopes, dreams, powers, and possibilities of individuals, and you are quite right. That is why large schools and large communities fail so detestably in the very objects of their existence. Schools are intended to educate, and they merely instruct. Communities are, at least I suppose they are, intended to enable their members to live happy and useful lives as free citizens, and they only succeed in making slaves of the many and tyrants of the few. The machinery of government and the machinery of so-called education is too big — what it has to deal with is too big — for any fine result to be possible. If we are ever to get out of children, and men and women, anything like the best of which they are capable, we shall have to have much smaller schools and much smaller communities. Some sort of beautiful and useful corporate life is possible in a place the size of Bedford; it is not possible in a place the size of London. Ten or twenty children in a class can be treated as individual human beings, and the best that is in them drawn out by a sympathetic understanding of personal traits and characteristics. But a class of seventy or eighty must be treated as a machine of which the little live units are but wheels and cogs. It can, as a machine, be made to do certain things; the component parts of it can be made to contribute their share to the general result, even as the bright and helpless parts of a machine contribute to its activity. But you can never get out of the children composing such a class anything approaching the fine result which can be achieved by an education based on the broad lines of what is good for children, with a superstructure of delicate perception of what is good for the individual child. Dick, Tom, and Harry can join in certain lessons and certain games, but there will always be some matters in which Dick is not in the least like Tom, and Harry is quite different from both the others.

  The people who govern us talk about education — they talk greatly, and a little they do. But they will not do the one simple, straightforward thing which is as essential to the growth of the mind as vital religion is to the growth of the soul. Any teacher in any elementary school knows what is needed, but those in power do not know it. They will make scholarships as plentiful as blackberries, they will do all sorts of fine things for secondary education. The one thing they will not do is to reduce the size of the classes in elementary schools. And so long as this is not done the millions we spend yearly on education are, to a pitiably great extent, millions wasted. We might almost as well take at least half the money, put it in bags, tie it up with red tape, and drop it over London Bridge, or, still better, spend the money in monthly exhibitions of free fireworks, which would at least give the children and the grown-ups one jolly evening in thirty.

  A small class can be taught, and taught well, by a teacher of as average a
bility as ever tumbled head over heels from London to York, but a large class your average teacher will never get at at all. It takes a genius and an orator to speak intelligibly to more than fifteen people. I sometimes wonder if teachers know how much of their teaching their scholars miss altogether — fail to see, fail to grasp, do not know is there. Between the careless or overworked teacher and the timid and rather stupid child there is a great gulf fixed. To such a child the voice of the teacher is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, crying quite aimlessly, in a wilderness of unintelligible jargon. Many boys — in public as well as elementary schools by the way — go through their whole school life “scraping through somehow,” and never once having a clear idea of anything that they are doing, hardly ever a glimpse of what anything is about or that anything has any reasonable relation to anything else. It is rather like a miracle, whichever way you take it, but there it is, and a miracle which might be made impossible and unnecessary by a little sensible commonplace legislation. We want smaller classes, and we want those classes better taught. That is to say, we want more teachers, and better-paid teachers; we want our teachers to be placed in a position of certain comfort, that they shall not be living in the House of Poverty with the wolf of Worry always nosing round the door, distracting their attention from what should be their chief thought — for most of the months of the year. We want longer holidays, and a better provision for happiness in those holidays, both for teachers and children. We want every teacher and every child to have a real holiday, not merely an absence from school. In a word, we want more money spent on schools and less on gaols and reformatories. It cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don’t seem to mind so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they really hate seems to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending would pay us! “There is no darkness but ignorance,” and we have now such a chance as has never been the lot of men since Time began, a chance to light enough lamps to dispel that darkness. If only we would take that chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.