The English Home

Many English families live in flats, but most live in their own houses.

On the ground-floor they usually have the dining-room, the sitting-room, the kitchen, and the hall. In the hall there is a stand for hats, coats and umbrellas. A staircase leads from the hall to the landing on the first floor. On this floor there are bedrooms, a bathroom and a lavatory.

In front of the house they usually have a small garden, in which they grow flowers. At the back of the house there is a much larger garden with a lawn and some fruit-trees. There is also a vegetable garden where they grow all kinds of vegetables, such as potatoes, cabbages, onions and tomatoes.

Lots of people live in flats: sometimes the flat is one floor of a house, sometimes it is a big block of flats, when a person lives in one room, we call this a "bed-sitter" (a bed-sitting room): the bed-room, the sitting-room and the kitchen are all in one.

Although Britain has done much to improve the housing conditions in its country, there are two sides to every picture. One which is the face side, or the sunny side, and the other — the shady side of English reality, the slums of London's East End and other big industrial centres, where none of the above mentioned features can be seen.

There you will not find flowers in front or behind the houses. Bad sanitary conditions, with practically no conveniences whatsoever, no playgrounds for the children. The streets are long lines of brick houses black from soot that reminds one of the days that the houses were heated by coal. The inhabitants of East End have never known central heating. Now instead of coal stoves there are gasheaters which the family budget cannot allow. So the only heated room in the house is the sitting-room. Rent in England is exceedingly high, so is electricity.

Such is the lot of a large percentage of the population of Great Britain.

Fireplaces
In English homes, the fireplace has always been, until recent times, the natural centre of interest in a room. People may like to sit at a window on a summer day, but for many months of the year they prefer to sit round the fire and watch the dancing flames.

In the Middle Ages the fireplaces were, in the halls of large castles, very wide. Only wood was burnt, and large logs were carted in from the forests, and supported, as they burnt, on metal bars. Such wide fireplaces may still be seen in old inns, and in some of them there are even seats inside the fireplace.

Elizabethan fireplaces often had carved stone or woodwork over the fireplace, reaching to the ceiling. There were sometimes columns on each side of the fireplace. In the eighteenth century, space was often provided over the fireplace for a painting or mirror.

When coal fires became common, fireplaces became much smaller. Grates (metal frames like baskets) were used to hold the coal. Above the fireplace there was usually a shelf, on which there was often a clock, and perhaps framed photographs.

Now coal fires are forbidden and gasheaters are used instead.

The Englishman's Garden
The English are obsessed with flowers. If you don't believe it's true, look at all the gardening books in the bookshops, find out how many flowers arranging societies there are in England - thousands and thousands. It's a useful obsession because it doesn't harm anyone. In winter, people tell us, the most romantic thing is to pick up a seed catalogue and gaze at the brightly coloured pictures of summer flowers. Even people with a tiny patch of ground in towns like to grow things, and people who have never seriously tried to speak any foreign language carefully learn the Latin names of the flowers they plant, so that they can tell their friends.

If you want to please an Englishman (or Englishwoman) be very polite about his (her) garden. It is almost as much his "castle" as his house; he cares for it methodically. March is a busy month for the gardener. He has a great deal of preparing to do. The daffodils, and small, stiff blue, purple, yellow or white and striped flowers called crocuses are already blooming, but all the planting, sowing, and pruning for the summer has to be done. Many English gardens have a section devoted to herbs like mint, thyme, sage, parsley and rosemary, and other plants used for seasoning dishes.

The English garden is internationally famous. Some of them are very beautiful, especially the big ones that are open to the public.

Е. Р. Ліндер, "Чи знаєте ви?"