Just as the book arrived I found out that Tutti Frutti Productions, a UK theatre company whose work is aimed specifically at family audiences was about to start touring with a stage version of When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat. Such a lovely coincidence ensured we read the book straight away, and were then quick to buy tickets for the production which is touring to a theatre local to us in a few weeks’ time.

The auspicious signs didn’t end there – upon reading the book for the first time with M and J I experienced a rather strange sense of deja-vu – as if the book had been written for me, right here, right now.

Photo: erix!

When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat is a series of cameo descriptions of different homes a family has lived in, in their search for the right place for them, the home that would suit them all. They try living in the forest, on the church roof, in a hotel and even on the moon, amongst many other places, before finally ending up in a house that makes the perfect home for them. The book closes with the lines:

Now our house has four corners.
And our year has four seasons.
We moved here four years ago…
So … this is where we’ll live for a very, very long time.

This book spoke to me as I too have moved very many times in my life – on average staying in any one place for only three years. But it just so happens that this month we’ve been in this home, where we are now, for four years. A funny case of life mirroring art, but one which further endeared me to this book.

The structure of the book opens up lots of opportunity for flights of imagination and connective moments of empathy. What different places could you live in? What would it be like to live in given circumstances? For example, at one point the family find themselves living under a bridge, where “it smelt strange and the names of people we didn’t know were written on the pillars.”

The simple illustrations using a lot of coloured pencil (in addition to watercolour and collage) didn’t immediately grab me. Perhaps my expectations were too high given her recent accolade? They did, however, intrigue me. I imagine there were some interesting editorial discussions as a result of the content: several illustrations include German words, and these have been left in German in the English language translation, and there is also a (very small) drawing of a naked woman sunbathing – not something I imagine would be welcomed with open arms by most English publishers of picture books, although I have no worries about it at all.

If you like the work of Bruce Ingman I think you’ll enjoy Jutta Bauer’s illustrations – both have a certain “guileless innocence” about them. My girls certainly love searching out the details in both illustrators’ work even if they don’t set my heart on fire.

To go along with this book, and to prepare ourselves for our night out at the theatre (actually the show starts at 11am, but I’m sure we’ll still use it as an excuse to dress up!) we decided to try our hand at hat making. I found this wonderful, very easy to follow, charming video tutorial on YouTube all about how to make your own felted hat. The girls loved watching the tutorial – seeing another little girl do it all (with a guest appearance from a cat!) was very exciting for them, and made it seem like a very do-able project for us all. Here’s the video, which I encourage you to watch even if you’re not about to make your own hats:

The only tidbits I’d add to the instructions given in the video are these:

Here’s M covering the ball with the mohair.

Here she is having lots of fun spraying soapy water on the mohair.

Water, water everywhere, but oh so much fun for both girls (and nothing that a few towels couldn’t deal with).

The fact that the process of making the hat is quite a physical one is something that I knew would appeal to my girls. The mohair covered ball was bounced around a lot, and later on the felt got given a good beating too – both energetic activities which suited my girls to a T.

And here’s M modelling her hat!

M is very proud of having recently lost her first milk tooth…

When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat: ** (2 stars)

Songs we’ve been listening to the past few days include:

Other activities that would be fun to do after reading this book include:

Whilst Bauer is prolific illustrator, and also an author in her own right, very few of her books are available in English translation, though in yet another funny, lovely coincidence her book Grandpa’s Angel was reviewed this week on Saffron Tree.

Reading this book with my girls reminded me of a poem I love – House for Sale by Andre Frenaud (translated from the French). Its opening lines are “So many people have lived here, who loved / love, waking up and kicking up the dust.” You can read the poem in full if you scroll to the bottom of this page.

What do you love about the house where you live? If you could live in any sort of house, what would it be?

Although we’re happily back home now, one of the many treats for M (and me) whilst we were at my parents was being allowed to play with the dolls’ house that used to belong to my sister. As it is full of rather beautiful but fragile fixtures and fittings this was the first time it had been brought out of storage for playing with, and M just lapped up the specialness of it all. Almost every afternoon whilst her sister slept she was up in the loft room unpacking all the treasures (so many of them had been lovingly packed in soft bits of fabric scraps or coloured paper tissue) and gradually filling each room in the dolls’ house. I was amazed with her dexterity at setting it all up.

Once everything was unpacked and in place M wanted to play “Hunca Munca” with the dolls’ house. This entails pretending to be mice (called Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb) who steal a feather bolster and other bits and pieces from a beautiful dolls’ house to use in their own mousehole behind the skirting board, just as in Beatrix Potter’s wonderful story The Two Bad Mice.

Of course we pulled out the original Beatrix Potter story and re-read it (there once was a time when for several weeks it was the only story M wanted to listen to and it is always fun to return to books that were once so all consuming), and then we had fun making sure all the details from the original appeared in our playing – trying to smash the food was especially fun…

When I finally needed a break from being a murine thief I got out Cynthia Rylant and Wendy Anderson Halperin‘s Let’s Go Home and we had a very cozy afternoon reading that and exploring each room in the dolls’ house just as they are described in the house.

Let’s Go Home reminds my girls and me of the beauty and love to be found in little corners around our home, from the living room where “there is usually a big sofa, and it is meant to ask you to sit and stay awhile” to the bedrooms (“they shelter us from the world like no other rooms can“) and the attic (“filled with the past“). Special attention is paid to the heart of many homes, the kitchen, “the room that reminds people to look after each other“.

The poetic text balances lines of a more philosophical nature with astute observations that ground the description of the house in something very real, not just an abstract notion of home, such as dogs not liking refrigerators with freezers at the bottom “as their noses get frosty” or finding toy dinosaurs in the bathroom.

For M I think it is the illustrations by Wendy Halperin that draw her back to this book again and again. They are full of details which remind her of her own home (eg the plastic animals in the flower border, baking cookies in fancy dress, the cutting and gluing taking place on the kitchen table), and other details which she would love us to adopt – beautiful mobiles or fairly lights in just about every room, a litter of kittens running amok, or being allowed to play with mummy’s makeup in the bathroom.

The use of colour in the illustrations is clever – the house is full of it, creating a happy and creative atmosphere, and yet it never appears intense or frenzied.

The house depicted so warmly in this book seems to me (a non-american) to be something of the idealized American homestead – a rambling, detached clapboard house with a large porch and garden all around – but this book nevertheless says something about all our homes, whether high-rise flats or new builds: “no matter the kind of house, it is the living inside that makes it wonderful“.

Let’s Go Home :
Whilst we’ve been playing with the fixtures and fittings and all the little dolls we’ve been listening to Our House by Madness (see below) and another Our House this time by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. We’ve also had on Doll House by Mr. Kim Webster.

Our House by Madness

There are lots of wonderful dolls house related activities we’ve found since coming home. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll be able to get up to some of these:

It would be lovely to hear about some of your favourite books which feature houses and homes