I have fond memories of visiting Sir Paul McCartney’s old house in Liverpool. There was a man living alone there and giving guided tours, having got the job through an advert in the Big Issue. The house is made to look as it did when the Beatle grew up, so the resident has to live permanently amid 1950s fixtures and fittings, with only one room permitted a television and other mod cons. As it happened, he looked like McCartney too.
Last week I met a woman living alone inside another time capsule.
Katharine Love’s 99-year-old house in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, is an operatic rush of Victoriana. It contains thousands upon thousands of 19th- and early-20th century antiques, appliances, arts and crafts, fashions, photographs, toys and household bric-a-brac. Each of the 22 rooms is fully furnished and equipped, as if its long-dead dwellers might return at any moment.
Love, too, opens her house to the public. She greeted my tour group wearing the black-and-white uniform of a parlour maid and led us into the hall, pointing to mother of pearl and tortoiseshell cases with calling cards inside. The ladies’ cards are slightly bigger so they could write the names of husband-seeking daughters just below their own.
We entered the ladies’ drawing room: two pianos decked with old photographs, armchairs before a fireplace, busts and paintings and half-finished embroidery. It’s straight out of William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience. There’s a tea set with wide shallow cups, designed that way so the liquid would cool quickly and discourage guests from overstaying their welcome. Tea leaves were so expensive that they were kept under lock and key lest they be stolen by servants.
In the dining room the table is laid for an opulent Victorian feast of about a dozen courses. Men thought nothing of using a chamber pot to relieve themselves to make sure they missed none of the conversation.
What did a Victorian fridge look like? In the kitchen there’s a wooden ice chest, to be filled by a block of ice that would be delivered weekly. Mrs Beeton’s Household Management is on a nearby shelf. In the pantry there are wonderful old food packages with brands such as Colmans, Nestlé and Vinolia.
On to the smoking room, where men wore smoking jackets, slippers and caps that were removed to avoid carrying the smoke smell to other parts of the house. There are peacock feathers in the fireplace, rows and rows of musty old books and a collection of 78rpm records, lovingly catalogued in a giant yellowing tome with neat handwriting and exquisite cut-out pictures of the artists.
And so it goes on. An airy music room in the Edwardian style. A room of curios including a crab, elephant’s foot, human skulls from Tibet and an Egyptian jar from about 5 000BC. Then the coup de théâtre: a stupendous doll’s house with almost as much detail as Lindfield House itself, right down to a kitchen where two mice are eyed by a cat.
In a young lady’s bedroom Love displays the fashions of the era, including corsets, crinoline hoops, dresses and the accoutrements of a night at the opera. In a young man’s bedroom there’s a glass case containing miniature figures of women in not especially revealing bathing costumes, the closest thing he had to FHM.
In the main bedroom there’s a box of cut-throat razors, one for each day of the week. On a table is a copy of The Queen, each tiny typeset page bordered in black to mark the recent death of Victoria. An advert offers garments ranging “from the merest tinge of regret to a total protestation of mourning”.
I was struck by the ornate decorum and artifice of the Victorians, but also by their intense practicality and inventiveness. Every little irritation had a solution. There are moustache cups to keep tea out a gentleman’s moustache, and banner screens to shield ladies’ faces from the fire so they don’t get a flushed complexion.
But most of all, I was curious about Love herself, born just down the street 56 years ago, and living in this house since she was 13. Two years ago she had her first holiday, first flight, first train journey and first visit to England, which she describes as “the most wonderful journey of my life”.
She told me: “I’ve always regarded myself as English, although I’d never been there before. At first there was nothing to see as we were travelling underground, but then the train emerged from a tunnel and I saw banks of foxgloves, buttercups and elder trees in full bloom, and rows and rows of terrace houses. I was brought up on Enid Blyton and Rupert Bear — England always seemed more real to me.”
The house is named after the English village of Lindfield and its contents, mainly collected by Love’s late mother, are a curious glimpse of an England that no longer exists even there. Love fears there will be no desire to preserve her lifetime’s work after she’s gone.
She said: “There is no way I can leave it to the country. There is no interest whatsoever in European history. I’ve been advised to try Europe because nobody here wants to preserve the past.”
At the end of the tour she makes a tea, sausage rolls and scones with cream and jam in an antique oven. She told me: “When I can use old appliances instead of new ones I do because they work much better. When I’m here I’m in the Victorian period, but when I’m in the supermarket I’m in the modern.”
Love sleeps on a 150-year-old bed but permits herself to use an electric blanket and has a TV hidden from visitors’ gaze. She was a target for burglars until a local school raised funds to give her an electric fence. Her burglars were usually disappointed.
She recalled: “One time they took my carving knife and threatened to stab me with it. They tied me up and locked me in a wardrobe. They kept saying, ‘Where’s the cellphone, where the microwave?’ They looked puzzled and only took a hat and a few Victorian coins.” – guardian.co.uk