It is nineteen years since I lived in a house; nineteen years
since I went upstairs to bed and came downstairs to breakfast. Of
course I have done these things in other people's houses from
time to time, but what we do in other people's houses does not
count. We are holiday-making then. We play cricket and golf and
croquet, and run up and down stairs, and amuse ourselves in a
hundred difierent ways, but all this is no fixed part of our
life. Now, however, for the first time for nineteen years, I am
actually living in a house. I have (imagine my excitement) a
staircase of my own.
Flats may be convenient (I thought so myself when I lived in one
some days ago), but they have their disadvantages. One of the
disadvantages is that you are never in complete possession of the
flat. You may think that the drawing-room floor (to take a case)
is your very own, but it isn't; you share it with a man below who
uses it as a ceiling. If you want to dance a step-dance, you have
to consider his plaster. I was always ready enough to accommodate
myself in this matter to his prejudices, but I could not put up
with his old-fashioned ideas about bathroom ceilings. It is very
cramping to one's style in the bath to reflect that the slightest
splash may call attention to itself on the ceiling of the
gentleman below. This is to share a bathroom with a stranger--an
intolerable position for a proud man. To-day I have a bathroom of
my own for the first time in my life.
I can see already that living in a house is going to be
extraordinarily healthy both for mind and body. At present I go
upstairs to my bedroom (and downstairs again) about once in every
half-hour; not simply from pride of ownership, to make sure that
the bedroom is still there, and that the staircase is continuing
to perform its functions, but in order to fetch something, a
letter or a key, which as likely as not I have forgotten about
again as soon as I have climbed to the top of the house. No such
exercise as this was possible in a flat, and even after two or
three days I feel the better for it. But obviously I cannot go on
like this, if I am to have leisure for anything else. With
practice I shall so train my mind that, when I leave my bedroom
in the morning, I leave it with everything that I can possibly
require until nightfall. This, I imagine, will not happen for
some years yet; meanwhile physical training has precedence.
Getting up to breakfast means something different now; it means
coming down to breakfast. To come down to breakfast brings one
immediately in contact with the morning. The world flows past the
window, that small and (as it seems to me) particularly select
portion of the world which finds itself in our quiet street; I
can see it as I drink my tea. When I lived in a flat (days and
days ago) anything might have happened to London, and I should
never have known it until the afternoon. Everybody else could
have perished in the night, and I should settle down as
complacently as ever to my essay on making the world safe for
democracy. Not so now. As soon as I have reached the bottom of my
delightful staircase I am one with the outside world.
Also one with the weather, which is rather convenient. On the
third floor it is almost impossible to know what sort of weather
they are having in London. A day which looks cold from a third-
floor window may be very sultry down below, but by that time one
is committed to an overcoat. How much better to live in a house,
and to step from one's front door and inhale a sample of whatever
day the gods have sent. Then one can step back again and dress
accordingly.
But the best of a house is that it has an outside personality as
well as an inside one. Nobody, not even himself, could admire a
man's flat from the street; nobody could look up and say, "What
very delightful people must live behind those third-floor
windows." Here it is different. Any of you may find himself some
day in our quiet street, and stop a moment to look at our house;
at the blue door with its jolly knocker, at the little trees in
their blue tubs standing within a ring of blue posts linked by
chains, at the bright-coloured curtains. You may not like it, but
we shall be watching you from one of the windows, and telling
each other that you do. In any case, we have the pleasure of
looking at it ourselves, and feeling that we are contributing
something to London, whether for better or for worse. We are part
of a street now, and can take pride in that street. Before, we
were only part of a big unmanageable building. It is a solemn
thought that I have got this house for (apparently) eighty-seven
years. One never knows, and it may be that by the end of that
time I shall be meditating an article on the advantages of living
in a flat. A flat, I shall say, is so convenient.