Blandings Redivivus
In the latest report of the Historic Buildings Bureau, Sir Alan Lascelles points out that it is one thing to preserve a fine old house from demolition or decay, but quite another to find somebody who is prepared to live in it. This raises (in my aberrant mind, at any rate) the question of whether we ought not to stock these houses on much the salne principles as their owners often used to stock the parks surrounding them. In most parts of the country a deer-park, even if it did not include any exotic species, was a sanctuary where a number of decorative animals survived under artificial conditions. In Elizabethan times they had provided a certain amount of rather unsporting sport and a welcome alternative to salt beef in the winter; but latterly, what with the advent of cold storage and the increased cost of upkeep on the park fence, the deer had clost all pretensions to being an economic proposition and were only there, in the last analysis, out of deference to tradition and because they looked rather jolly. Under the Strix Plan, instead of deer being kept outside the houses, human beings would be kept inside them, for very much the same reasons. Immune from • the attentions of their natural predators, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, subsidised in hard times as the deer used to be fed in hard weather, and subject to a certain amount of benevolent supervision in the matter of breeding. these little enclaves of Homo sapiens edwardiensis would breathe new life into august but dying mansions and prove a considerable attraction to the tourist industry. The fact that the principal beneficiaries under this scheme would not be dumb animals like the deer must, I quite realise, impair its prospects of gaining widespread popular support; but it can have done no harm to broach it.
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