Growing Up

I came to the big city. I had a job. My father got it for me, and I was just married. You might say that I had my husband to comfort me and stuff, but in truth, he really didn’t. He was away, and then he came back, then he went away, then he went to India, which he loved. I probably would have loved it too, but I didn’t have the option. So anyway, I got married, and I left for my honeymoon as it were, and I could see that my father, who was sort of seeing me off, was terribly worried, but I didn’t realize that Peattie hadn’t made any provision for me really. He got me the key to this apartment, which it so happened that there was probably some difficulty about that too.

All this time we were living in this odd arrangement where we had the use of an apartment that didn’t have much in it, and I used to get up every day and climb down a ladder to get the breakfast. Anyway, there we were

I took the coach [train] down to Washington. It was pretty jumbly because it was wartime [WWII]. I slept curled up on a folding table, a card table, in the coach, and the guy on the next table was stroking my ankle the whole way. That was quite pleasing. It was just one of the peculiarities of train travel in those days. Those were the days it was.

So I got to this apartment, and I had a key! I don’t remember how I got the key, if Peattie had mailed it to me or what, but in some manner he had gotten me the key and so I let myself in, and there I was. And it was an actual apartment. We’d been living in the peculiar way in Cabin John.

But it wasn’t even an anonymous apartment. It was the apartment, actually, of this couple Peattie knew who worked at the Map Service. They had gone off, they’d departed. That was a whole set of complications. There were no apartments because of the war. Nobody could get anything. It was absolutely a triumph to have an apartment. Although it didn’t trickle down too well, I had the apartment, I had the key.

Peattie had been getting ready to paint the apartment, but he didn’t get so far as to paint it. He enrolled in this thing [AFS] and he was gone off, and I had the apartment, which I must say was quite pleasing after the peculiarities of life in Cabin John, and it turned out that Peattie had left a gallon of paint, and he had pulled everything out of the kitchen to be ready to paint, but that was as far as he’d gone.

It was the saddest I’d ever been. I was terribly lonesome. I wanted somebody to greet me, to give me a big hug. If I had known anybody at all, I would certainly have rung them up and said “Let’s go have coffee” but I didn’t. So I just stood there for a while sort of with my finger in my mouth, and then I pulled myself together and got ready to paint, and I guess I began painting.

I was like a newborn babe. I didn’t have ambitions, I didn’t have plans, I didn’t have experiences you could replicate…. I was just a beginning person.

It was a moment of growing up. It was just me, and there wasn’t going to be anybody else. I wasn’t mad at Peattie, either. I just felt like there wasn’t anybody in the world I could reach out to, and there wasn’t.

Greenham Common

[Greenham Common]

There were benders, and people living in the benders, and you just walked in, and they gave you a bender. They were very generous. You could just go there and join in, no problem, they didn’t ask for your credentials or anything like that, they gave you tea, naturally tea, whatever you need, they’d look after you. And then from time to time, the Authorities, known as the Authorities, although of course the whole point was not to accept their Authority, every so often the Authority came in with large wheeled vehicles, knocked down all the benders, ground up the remains so that they were left sitting in the mud, and went away. And then the protesters, shall we call them? They didn’t call themselves protesters. But anyway, they had great equanimity (and of course many of them had children at home, and so on, so from time to time they’d go, you weren’t required to stay there all the time) They’d go back and make dinner for the kids, so it was sort of a continuing… It was totally ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than the Cruise missiles, when you come down to it.

I think that the symbolic charm of Greenham Common (and it was sort of charming, women camping out in these little benders, these little shelters that they put up), was that symbolically it was the counterpoint of these fragile benders and the women, who were considered more fragile than men, who were out there in the mud, and the alternative which was these cruise missiles; and they were of course extremely powerful and devastating, and they were put up by men, basically, and furthermore, by invasive men, because they were American men. It was part of the whole powerful American power, or something like that. So there was this contrast, and the women kept continually exaggerating it by ornamenting the fence with bits of yarn, which naturally drove the enforcing men mad. It would have driven me mad too, it was so foolish, but that’s what they did, they kept putting these bits of ornamental yarn and stuff on the fence. And then they were camping out there. I think that there was actually a baby born there at Greenham. It was born in a truck or something, it wasn’t just on the ground, but it was their weakness, their lack of power, that they were playing off of. It was quite sweet.

That’s what it was. I loved the fact that you could just go there. You knew where it was, you could read about it in the paper, you could go around, and they just pointed you to a bender you might care to occupy, and there you are! It was easy approach.

`I loved being there in the mud because it was so foolish, and they were so foolish, and the whole thing of course was totally foolish, and the idea of nuclear missiles in Europe was totally foolish, but they were capable of rising above it, or not rising above it, just running along with it, putting yarn in the fence, why not?

[On 11 September 1992, the USAF returned Greenham Common airbase to the Ministry of Defence. On 9 February 1993 the Greenham Common airbase was declared surplus to requirements by the Secretary of State for Defence and the facility was closed and put up for sale.]
 

My Own House

I couldn’t tell you how it came about that I was convinced that I had to build the little house of my own, but if you think about the circumstances, I truthfully never really felt like the other house in Vermont was my house. It was Margaret’s house and in fact the flower beds were her flower beds. I liked them, I liked the house, I liked the flower beds, but somehow I was left with the desire to do something of my very own. I remember mostly the process. The process was what I loved about it.

I took this class about ecologically sensitive design, and that was fun, taking the class. I think I was the only person in the class who had an actual place they were going to build. Anyway, the whole thing was fun. So I did that.

I think that actually I drew up the plans afterwards. They weren’t too much on drawing plans in the class.

The Plan

I was very strict about the proportions. I decided that the way to get it to be organized is to have a standard dimension, so it was four feet. Everything had to be a multiple of four feet, and the four feet were arrived at because that’s a standard size. It was all four feet or eight feet, take your choice. The four foot module was important, because there were things I couldn’t alter that I should have. Eight foot across allowed you just so much space, and then you had to get in the bed, and then you had to get in the stove, and you couldn’t weasel in another foot in there somewhere.

Then I remember picking the place where it was going to be. We started out by putting up some panels in the place where I thought the house was probably going to be. I don’t remember who helped me. It was some woman, Dee maybe. I don’t remember who it was, but it was another woman friend, and we put up these panels, and then we went down below, to see if this not-yet-existing object would be disruptive in the landscape. I didn’t mind if you could see it a little bit, but I didn’t want it to interrupt the landscape.

So we did that. Then, I remember, there was this huge stone. I can’t remember if we moved it, or if it was just there in the first place, but I always had the idea that I would be able to lie in this little cup of space and sunbathe, unobserved, right? That was my notion.

What else? I remember setting out with a chair, I remember sitting on a chair with the house half-finished; I wanted to figure out how high the windows should be. I did that by trial and error.

Window onto a pool

I do remember thinking early on that Brad would be the person to build it, and I distinctly remember that I had this discussion with him, where I asked him if he would be willing to build this house, and I showed him what I had drawn up, and he was very reluctant, but he thought about it, and he said: “I think I could build that”. So that was very personalized.

Another thing I remember a lot about was the question of the goddamn bathtub. I wanted to get something big, and the place was so small, that I wanted it under the floor, and somebody recommended to me some local person who made wonderful barrels. But I thought it was risky, the goddamn things were going to leak, and then somebody said: “Why don’t you try roofers? They work with copper”. So I went to see some roofers. And I said that I wanted this round thing, and so on, “Oh, no problem”, they said, “Tuesday”. It was very cheap besides. It was just miraculous.

As soon as I started the process, the first thing we had to do was to make an electric line, and to do that we had to get a device which I think was called a “ditchwitch” or something like that, which ran a trench up the hill. That was to me very exciting; I wasn’t even pleased about it, it seemed very disruptive, on the other hand I wanted to have the electric line and the telephone line up there, and they had to be in, they had to be underground, so they had to have this trench in which these lines could lie. It was something I resented, but it turned out it was exactly the thing to do.

So the whole time we had the electric lines running up there, which was aesthetically not good, but on the other hand, you need electricity.

My original idea was to roll and carry the foundation stones up by hand, and then Brad pointed out that you really couldn’t do it. So we mechanically transferred the stones.

It was a great success in its funky way.

The little greenhouse was given to me by my colleagues; I had told them I would like it, so they got it for me.

Doing that house was really wonderful for me. The whole process was marvelous.

The Tarpaper Shack

When I wrote “An Argument for Slums” Mr. Hrapek’s little house in Chicago was one of the places I thought of. This was in the days when the Second World War had started, but we weren’t yet in it. Mr. Hrapek was an unreconstructed Pole.  He had a little piece of land on the outskirts of the city that he tried to farm, and in the meantime he kept chicks in his property in town, in the basement where it was warm.  He had a small rental property on 57^th street in Chicago, near the University.

A couple living there, the Hermanns, had a child. Mr. Hrapek felt that they should have a place of their own, so, being used to managing things, he built them a little house in the backyard, all improvised, all scavenged; There was nothing in it he had bought. I adored this house; I was living in the basement of the larger house (the rent was only $20 a month, a ridiculous amount even for the time), and when George Hermann got a job at the University of Kansas (it paid $3000 a year) I inherited it.

It was all made of odd pieces he’d found, tarpaper on the outside, windows in all shapes, the floors made of used flooring, everything hand hewn, the wood all oiled, not painted, because Mary Hermann was philosophically or artistically opposed to painting things. The foundation was made out of bottles set in concrete – it was a student neighborhood, there were plenty of bottles. Right across the street was a bookstore and a drugstore, and the Tropical Hut restaurant was next door, but this little house was by itself on its little plot of land, and there were trees in every window. On one side was the Tropical Hut, with its backyard, and rats for wildlife, on another side was a semi-enclosed terrace with stones, on another was a completely enclosed, private patch of grass.

All the electricity was on one line, a line to one outlet in the basement, and then to all the apartments and the shack through a long series of extension cords. The heat was something equally dangerous involving gas, and the whole thing complied with no city building codes or permits whatsoever in any way. He couldn’t afford sewer pipe, so he instead laid in a roll of tarpaper which disintegrated the week I came home with a newborn baby.

Eventually the city improved the area by removing irregular construction, and they tore it all down. When I went by years later, it was still an empty lot.

Peattie [her first husband, R.E. Peattie] had scrounged some giant sepia photos from the Oriental Institute trash, and one day he was admiring a photo of the Great Square of Isfahan, and said “I’d love to go there” Mr. Hrapek said “You wouldn’t like it”  “Why not?” “They aren’t friendly there.” It seemed that he had picked up some horses in the East for a Polish nobleman, and had returned, by a circuitous route, through Isfahan.

 Pictures of the tarpaper shack –

Thank you, Julia Peattie!

The House in the Dunes

Dunehilda was considered my godmother, although I was never baptized. She was a failed opera singer. She was called Dunehilda because she lived in the dunes, the sand dunes off Lake Michigan. She had a marvelous house in the dunes with a big window to look out over the lake. Inside was a big stone fireplace decorated with a rather lewd Balinese frieze. At either end of living room was a spiral staircase leading to a small bedroom on the second floor. There were skin rugs on the floor and a grand piano, in tune I think, for her protégé, a pianist. He would play “Jardin sous la pluie” 

She would serve mint tea from a big brass samovar. There was no road, so the piano and everything else would have had to be carried out there over the dunes.

She had an academic buddy, Ernest Burgess, an expert in statistical projection and failure in marriage. He never married and lived with his sister. They had built a little house next to Dunehilda’s. In between was a little declivity and in it was a little pool, completely circular, with tile edging, and lilies planted naturalistically, the first I’d ever seen planted like that, and moss all around it. She must have gone out and collected and planted all that moss. In the pool she had goldfish, and when she fed them, she would dabble her fingers in the water, and call “fissy, fissy” and they would all swim over. Fish are smarter than you would think.

There were fir trees out on the dunes, and she had named all of the nearer ones after Wagnerian characters. During storms she would address them “Oh Wotan!”

At her dinner parties no one was permitted to get up from the table, not even to go to the bathroom.
It was all elegant, but artistically elegant.
She also had a house in Chicago, over on the South Side , very decayed. Every Christmas she would give a party at which everyone would process in behind a big punch bowl. There was dancing, with Dunehilda shouting “no hopping, no hopping” because there was a big hole in the floor, and if you hopped you were liable to go through the floor. What supported all of this extraordinary artistic stylish lifestyle I have no idea. I think that a guy she married early ended up paying for all of it. That sort of thing used to happen then.
I never understood how she became a buddy of Chicago intellectuals, my parents and Helen and my father, Everett and Helen Hughes and that whole group. They always came to her parties and tried not to hop around.