I am just in the process of reading a novel which is set in an English suburb in the years ‘twixt the two WOrld Wars, and in a house that has a name – The Grampians. Got me thinking about all the houses with names that i’ve encountered, both IRL and in literature – and it seems to be a lovely ENglish thing, with Cottages With Character being christened with their own identity (like Rose Cottage, or the like) It can also get entirely pretentious, like something called “The Willows” with no willows in sight (might be a throwback to a halcyon time when there were some but now they’re a memory) or “The Meadows” (likewise). I’m not talking about estates here – nothing like a Downton Abbey stately home kind of thing, great clods of palaces in their own personal private parklands and the like – I mean the little ones, the homes where, behind the name, one might still expect to find residents indulging in rituals like afternoon tea which is drunk out of fine china cups and poured out of an actual tea pot instead of futzing around with teabags. There has to be a story, there is always a story, houses with names always have stories, they got their names because someone wanted to make those stories real and alive in the quotidian world, a little slice of dream to get by on.
My own house has a name, of sorts. Part of what bought it were the proceeds from my “Secrets of Jin Shei” book, and so it has a brass knocker by the front door with “Jin Shei” engraved on it. (it also has a little plaque that declares the grounds to be “Dad’s Garden”, because he used to come and potter around in it, wearing his eternal tie which he never took off not even to grub around in the dirt, my born-preppy dad…) It’s a private name, featuring on no address – unlike that aforementioned “Rose Cottage” which a local mailman would probably know by that name and deliver the mail to it as an address that probably doesn’t need any more defining information like a street name or a house number.
Do houses have names like cats do? You know, the T S Elliot explanation of cats’ names – the public one that everyone knows and uses, the private one known to a few, and the secret one known only to the cat itself. Does every house have a public name (its address, its street and its number), its private name (something like “chez ours”), and its secret name which is wrapped around the souls of the people whom it shelters… and if so does that secret name move with the people, when they move house, or does it expand to include any new tenants if the previous ones move way?
I’m, yanno, a writer. Things like this pop out of the ether and engage my story brain. Do with this information and idea what you will.