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diaries were mine too, published and unpublished, printed and still in manuscript, translated and untranslated. Those, I’m sure, are what most people in my position would have thought of first. And if I’d stayed in Swanny’s house I expect I should have been tempted to look for them. Not knowing where Swanny kept the originals, I should have had to find them and do what I had never yet done, look on them alone and touch them.
    Of course, if I’d done that after Mormor died or even fifteen years ago, it would have meant nothing to me. They would just have been an old woman’s jottings, an old woman with no pretensions to being a writer beyond a fondness for telling stories. Since then they had undergone a metamorphosis, not only their contents but the materials of which the notebooks are made too, their physical substance, so that this has somehow been hallowed and taken on the quality of a First Folio or a copy of the Vulgate. Thinking of them made me want to see them. I did the next best thing and went to look at the doll’s house.
    The place I was living in had an exterior room separate from those which comprised the flat. A flight of steps and two landings were between my front door and the door of this room which had its own Banham lock and key. The previous owner told me with commendable honesty that he had found it quite useless. You couldn’t give it to a guest because in order to reach the bathroom he or she would have to put on a dressing-gown and slippers, let themselves out of one front door, climb a flight of stairs and let themselves into another front door. I said I should find a use for it. It would be somewhere to keep the doll’s house.
    Two or three months had passed since I had last looked at it. Feeling guilty over this neglect, I took a duster down with me, unlocked the door and let myself in. It was early spring and quite dark. I put the light on and closed the door, not wanting to be seen by other tenants passing up the stairs.
    It was stuffy in there because the windows had been kept shut and the blinds down. There was a little black gritty dust on the windowsills but none on the doll’s house. I thought of Swanny, a girl of ten when Morfar began to make it, I thought of her watching him work after my mother had gone to bed and I wondered, by no means for the first time, what she had thought. Had she minded? Had she felt rejected? Or did she consider herself at her age too old for such things and the little sister welcome to it?
    The first page of the first diary had been started a decade before but from then on the diary-writing never stopped for very long, so Mormor must have been setting everything down in her notebook at the time Morfar was carving miniature wood panelling and sculpting tiny stone fireplaces and laying bits of velvet for carpets. I opened the back of the doll’s house and looked into the drawing room where I knew the only books were. The ones in the two bookcases with mica fronts that looked like glass were simply rows of spines painted on to card, but a real book lay on the console table, a tiny object half the size of a postage stamp which nevertheless had real pages and a real leather cover. It was very ingenious, but if you look at it you can see how he has done it, how he cut a half-inch square from the thickness of a notebook—one of hers?—and bound it with a strip of kid glove. Perhaps that was one of hers too. Remembering them, I could imagine her berating him. She never had any time for the doll’s house.
    For all that, the diaries, notebook one or two or five, come to that, should have lain on that table. The tiny pages of his book were blank. Morfar had not been a literary man. I was standing there, thinking about Swanny witnessing all this craftsmanship and wondering if I could get a kind of micro-version of the diaries made for the doll’s house, if it was worth it or if it would be silly, when the phone started ringing in the flat upstairs.
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