A See Through House?
Would it help with the clutter?
One of the many pleasures of belonging to a Reading group is that we often read books that we would otherwise not choose for ourselves which means a lot of the time (not all, don’t get me started on Possession* by AS Byatt) we can make some pleasant discoveries. And while there is no obligation to read the book chosen for each month I do try to read and finish them all (I got to page 304 in Possession before I decided I really didn’t have enough years of life remaining to waste another minute, especially as given this was my second attempt). The other pleasures include the friendship, laughter, red wine and the ridiculous, usually literary themed games we play at our annual parties, but I digress.
A recent book that I would never have picked for myself was The See Through House by Shelley Klein. Although essentially it is the story of a unique house in the Scottish borders it is also a memoir about love, grief, belonging and letting go against the backdrop of a sometimes difficult relationship with her father Beri.
A Bernat Klein woven fabric sample
Born in 1922, Shelly’s father Bernat (Beri) Klein had a strict orthodox Jewish upbringing in Serbia and looked destined to become a Rabbi, following religious studies in Jerusalem until disenchantment set in. Fortunately a place in art school kept Beri safe in Jerusalem during the second world war while many of his relatives were murdered at Auschwitz. In 1945 he came to Leeds to study textile design where he also met his future wife Peggy. In a career that spanned six decades, Beri began by establishing a textile manufacturing business in Scotland.
Bernat Klein woven fabric sample
What followed was an illustrious career in textiles where his fabrics were used in the collections of Coco Chanel, Pierre Carin, Yves St Laurent, Christian Dior and Hardy Amis amongst many others. His signature style was rich painterly tweeds showing his love of colour, something that could also be seen in his fabulous textured paintings.
‘Tulip’, oil painting by Bernat Klein, 1962
In 1957 Klein commissioned architect Peter Womersley to design and build him a house near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. Built on a single floor, with no attic nor cellar, the house, High Sunderland, was a modernist design, a modular mix of glass and wood influenced by the great 20th century architects Mies Van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. The minimalist house in its beautiful woodland setting, was to play a part in Klein’s success as it was where he often hosted fashion shows and photographic shoots within its brightly lit interior. It was designed to be as open plan as possible to allow maximum light, with no doors or hiding places, something the teenage Shelley rebelled against.
High Sunderland
The conflict between father and daughter is something that crops up frequently in the book, yet following her mother’s death Shelley returns to the house, which was her childhood home, to look after her 85 year father and despite his criticisms their relationship is obviously very close. When she first arrives to care for him with a much loved but battered Victorian chair her father refuses to let her keep it and declares it to be “ghastly”. Nor will he let her put her potted herbs on the kitchen windowsill as they spoil the line of the house and she has to keep them in the bedroom rather than the room where they will be used. As you read the book in which subsequent chapters are each based on a room allowing us to travel around the house, Shelley’s memories give us an insight to her father’s behaviour which personally I felt was controlling to an unpleasant degree. It’s one thing to have a clear design aesthetic as a guiding principle to one’s work but allowing it to dominate every aspect of life seems to be very extreme.
After her father died in 2014, Shelley was faced with clearing and selling High Sunderland, which was something she found almost impossible to do. She says:
“My father was the house, and the house was my father”
She has idealised the house, her childhood and her father and the pain of clearing and selling the house proves too much for her as she descends into a spiral of depression and grief. It was over three years before she was able to sell it and move on.
As a book, it provoked some interesting discussion within our reading group and I loved the fact that it introduced me to Klein and his work which was unbeknown to me before, despite being vaguely familiar with some of his designs. But it was this idea of having to clear the house of a parent or loved one that struck a timely chord as we were reading the book at the point at which it became apparently I was going to have to clear and sell my own mother’s house.
To be fair, my situation is different as my Mum hasn’t died and I’m not clearing what was my childhood home as Mum moved from the family home of almost fifty years shortly after my Dad died in 2012. Although we helped her with the packing and trips to the dump etc, as she moved from the three bedroomed house into a much smaller flat, she undertook most of the sorting and clearing herself. And since then she moved once more to the current flat to be nearer us. So although I am in the process of clearing things out room by room it is not fraught with emotion and memories, although I am still having to sift through items one by one, deciding what is worth keeping, either as a keepsake or because it is useful, and what just needs to go.
It has made me acutely aware that this was a life interrupted as Mum hadn’t expected to leave her home so suddenly, although with her gradual cognitive decline it does feel like life has been slowly interrupted. Mum had a successful career as a florist and flower arranger in later life and she has kept folders full of photographs and testimonials, as well as various awards from her local horticultural society. I found the certificate that accompanied her Chelsea Gold Medal stuffed in a random envelope addressed to someone else, which has confirmed that I really do need to go through every single slip of paper. The photograph of the medal winning floral display was in a completely different box. Fortunately I have the actual medal which she gave to me several years ago.
There are literally hundreds of photos that mean nothing to me, and I suspect Mum won’t recall where they were taken or who she was with, yet in amongst the holiday snaps there are also some gems like this beautiful photo of my mum with her two sisters (Mum is on the right). Sadly there is little evidence of either me or my brother from when we were children, apart from a handful of photos.
Snaps of me and my brother as children… Dad built our go-cart! (We lived at 75 Ramsgate Drive)
I suspect nothing was ever kept as Mum has never been one for sentimentality, yet despite there being nothing from the hands of my brother and I, I found many of the hand made cards that my children sent to both her and my Dad which she never threw away. My greatest sadness is there is virtually nothing to remind me of my Dad except the hundreds of holiday snaps. It’s though he has been completely removed from my Mum’s life.
Despite the lack of keepsakes and sentimentality, there is still plenty of unnecessary stuff that has been kept and hoarded, circulars, receipts and junk mail tucked into the same envelopes as the floristry awards (Can I tempt anyone with fifteen Damart catalogues?) and my big take away so far is that we all keep too much and lead lives that are too cluttered with stuff. Does anyone really need half a dozen emergency sewing kits, the type given away on airlines at a time when it was deemed safe to give away sharp objects for free on planes? I’m about halfway through, so progress is slowly being made and the sentimental keepsakes that I am actually finding will be pasted into a single scrap book which I plan to give to mum for her 90th birthday next month, for her to keep in her new home and that can be passed on to future generations. And when I finish with Mum’s stuff I want to start on ours because I don’t want our children to have to do the same for us.
I’m beginning to think that maybe Bernat Klein was onto something with his see through house and minimalist aesthetic.
*Although there were members of our reading group who enjoyed Possession, I found it utterly pretentious, and I wasn’t alone. It felt like one long exercise by AS Byatt to convince the reader of how intelligent, superior and erudite she is and frankly I wasn’t impressed, Booker prize winner or not!
The keepsake book for your mum’s 90th sounds like a lovely idea.
It’s a hard task, going through someone else’s stuff, trying to decide what to keep and what to get shot of. We had to do that recently when an elderly aunt moved into a care home.
However, off the back of this experience, when we moved to Devon 18 months ago we decided that nothing was going in the loft in our new home. And the removal guys also suggested we have all but the essential boxes delivered to the garage, to be unpacked as and when we needed specific items (I had catalogued each box carefully so we knew where to look). This way, we ensured that only essential belongings have made it into the house. The rest went to charity or was sold or dumped. And still we try to be mindful of what we need and what we can do without, so that when the time comes our daughters have an easier task than might otherwise have been the case. In fact, keeping this in mind has made me much more ruthless than I (a bit of a hoarder) have ever been!
The music choice did make me laugh! Thank you for the book recommendation too as it is lovely to make a discovery such as this.
Clearing belongings like this is so hard. We have recently done it for my father in law and it was such a difficult process, and though he was incredibly organized and everything was carefully labeled, there were some wonderful discoveries.