Housing Problems

Whenever I tell people something that really happened to me, they always say I’m making it up as I go along. I am the Poster Girl for “Tell the truth, and nobody will believe you”.

I spent my summers in what the townsfolk called the Ancestral Mansion. To me, it was just Nanna’s House – a rambling building built on a hill, with a whole wing preserved as it used to be in bygone times. There was just one room that was out of bounds – a room that was said to be haunted. This room was always cool in summer, and warm in winter. Whenever anyone entered, for a dare, I was told, they felt out of breath, and a pins-and-needles sensation (a phrase I could not understand) all over their body. Frankly, it intrigued me… and I was determined to find out for myself what this eerie thing was.

The sign in the Front Yard said “National Treasure”.

My parents asked me, each year after I turned six, whether I would rather go on a cruise with them, or stay there, provided I behaved – whatever they understood that word to mean. I said the “cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die” magic formula, and they packed my bag (with a sigh of relief, I think because they had always hated to explain my autism to people who either assumed I had a mental disability, or that I was rude and crotchety because I was spoilt rotten, for the first five years of my life).

At Nanna’s, I flourished. I was allowed to do what I wanted, within reason – I could even help Cook and her underlings, as long as I used a clean spoon each time I wanted a taste of something. That is why Cook bought a 100-pack of spoons, and put them in a special jug with my name on it, in letters of gold. Once the jug was empty, I had to stop. It was an exercise in self-disciple, she told me later, when I could comprehend the meaning of the term.

Tour Leaders stopped at the Mansion on their way to the Early Christian Catacombs on the other side of town. The visitors bought honeys and jams, pickles and jars upon jars of the traditional candied watermelon peel – and the income helped with the upkeep of the whole place.

And they bought jewellery – my designs! I will get to that, later. I was lucky, I suppose, because I was allowed to use the Annex - it was like a posh Garden Shed attached to the house – as a combined atelier and shop.

But this is also about the Dolls’ House.

It…felt…different. I put it down to the acrid smells of glue and new paint. Yet deep down, I knew that the sensation was far more complex than that. It was more of a gut feeling – like when you sense someone following you, just out of your line of vision, or that aura you get just before a migraine strikes… a perception that the very soul of my great-grandmother’s dollhouse wanted to tell me something.

I was told - by the antiquarian I called in, no less - that the dollhouse would totally depreciate in value as soon as I touched it. If I did what I told him I wanted to do, i.e. lift off the roof and first storey, and work on each and every room, it would be instantly downgraded from an antique to a toy.

Was I bothered though. I wanted something nice and snazzy, something colourful and eye-catching… a talking point for my shop-window. I intended to enter the dollhouse in the National Upcycled Artistry Contest, come Christmas. I knew I would win, because I had sussed out the other projects, and I knew that I was no expenses spared for some of the competitors, albeit no project was as elaborate or beautiful as mine. I knew it would be cheating, because most of the groundwork had been done for me – but it would have been stupid not to take the chance – or so I thought at the time.

But I had a recurring dream of Nanna – she didn’t speak; she just kept looking at me and admonishing me by wagging her finger, as she used to do when I was a little girl.

I tried to ignore the dreams. The idea, meanwhile, was to get people to stop and look… and make a purchase, of course.

The bee in my bonnet about visiting the ‘haunted’ room kept buzzing so consistently and loudly, that I could not ignore it. So, I tiptoed into the room, expecting to feel something, anything – only, I didn’t. I explored the room, opening drawers and sideboards… and in a tallboy I found a cache of beads, and several types of string and findings.

I filled my shirt pocket with samples and ran to Nanna, to ask her whether I could use them to make stuff; she didn’t even ask where I had found them, because she knew. So she just smiled and nodded – and the rest is history.

This was well before I had patented Thumb Thacks; those rice-filled dolls no larger than a thumb, with clothes and accessories. They’re famous now, I know… but back then it was just my start-up cottage workshop industry. I wondered whether I could cope with both making the jewellery and sewing Thumb Thacks – but I did.

Temple Gradin is my hero, so I wanted to emulate her, and become world-famous. And I am!

When Nanna died, we (her children and grandchildren) inherited shares in the Mansion, as a going concern. Each of us was free to buy out the other heirs, of course, but no one had that much money.

I couldn’t believe my ears when the solicitor called me and said they had discovered a new will, in which it was stipulated that I, as the first descendant to be called by the name, or a derivative thereof, of the testator, was free to select whatever I wanted from the Recreations Room at the Villa. It was Nanna’s way of making sure I one-upped my cousins.

I told him that I had a gut feeling my relatives would, as we spoke, be trying to swindle me out of that perk – so I told him I’d meet him there in ten minutes flat, before they could lay their pudgy fingers on what was potentially my stuff.

Indeed, one of my cousins was dancing around the room, singing tra-la-la, when we opened the door. She stopped abruptly, and looked like she’d seen a ghost – well, I do look like my Nanna, with my big cornflower blue eyes and cupid-bow lips.

So, to cut a long story short, as soon as I walked into the room, I made a beeline for the dollhouse, which I had yearned for from the day I saw the sepia daguerréotypes in the family album. I could practically hear all the vulgar words on a loop going through my cousin’s mind…

So, to spite her, I suddenly decided I wanted all the board games too, as well as the dartboard and calligraphy set. In any case, they would serve as window dressing after Thumb Thacks got off the ground.

The reason I smashed €5,000- worth of restored dollhouse to smithereens, just a month after lugging it to the workshop, is simple.

I was the only one with a key to my shop. Each morning, I’d find the Thumb Thacks dolls in different places from where I would have left them…and the dollhouse curtains open… and the garden furniture moved around. After a week, I could not take it any more.

I went ballistic. I pushed the dollhouse off the plinth, picked up all the Thumb Thacks and put them in a box with the rest, and jumped up and down on the broken house till it was reduced to splinters.

That night, I dreamed that Cook had made me my favourite Lemon Meringue Pie, and that as I was going to take a spoon out of my jar, I saw Nanna through the window, giving me a thumbs-up sign.