An Amateur Builder
Home-Made Home. By Ronald Duncan. (Faber'and Faber. 10s. 6d.) THE declared purpose of this book is to help the man who wants to build a house for himself in the country. About half of it records the author's experiences as an amateur builder, with honest admis- sions of some mistakes. The rest, mixed in artlessly, is a miscel- lany of propaganda for part-time-subsistence farming on three acres with two cows, dissertations on the family ideal and a numerical aesthetic of architecture, and routine sniffs at the stupidity and cupidity of contractors, councillors and bankers.
An intending home-builder might take from the book useful hints on what to look out for in choosing his site and making his plan. But he would be wiser to follow Mr. Duncan's advice to employ an architect, treating the quasi-technical chapters with caution. These are not valueless to an expert, but the experience is too limited in scope and district to be a safe guide. No short book can put an amateur wise on the complex business of building construction, and all the books in the world cannot transmit the " know-how " of a craft. There are signs that Mr. Duncan himself has the resourceful- ness and intuitional understanding of materials of a good handyman. He is the sort of man who, in a savage land, would make himself a habitation, coax the soil to feed him, and teach the convention- bound natives a thing or two. But he could not write a text-book on these things. A non-intuitional man who tried to follow his instructions would die of exposure and starvation.
The occasional chips of farming lore are lively and interesting. Townsmen are respectful when farmers, by vocation closer to the basic cycle of life, talk shop. So I am awed when Mr. Duncan, on his devious way to telling me how to build a house, tells me how to kill a pig. I fall into an attitude of trust. If a pig comes my way,
I resolve, I shall consult this book and impress the neighbours with my style. But then he goes on to pontificate with. equal assurance about the national living policy, asserting absurdly that half the four million dwellings are to be flats ; about dispersal policy, confusing new towns with suburbs and assuming green belts are a subtraction of land from farming ; and about history, citing Dinocrates' silly scheme for " Mount Althos " as an example of good classical plan- ning. He is so wrong, and so conceitedly wrong, on things I know about that I begin to doubt whether I shall get the best of it with that pig.
Still, I am left with some respect for the more solid half of the book on the lay-out, design and construction of a small-holder's home- stead. Though laymen should not take this as authoritative, the ex- perience is genuine and has evidential value for technicians. The case for rammed earth as a walling material is restated forcibly and suggests another look at the Amesbury experiments of 192o. There is also a good deal of sense, if nothing new to housing experts, in what Mr. Duncan has discovered about the internal arrangement of
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