Circus (8 page)

As your guide, I feel it’s important that you all get to know
Jemima. A lot of tourists come through here without ever learning a thing. Those are the people who make the regrettable decision to decline this tour – or to go with one of the less qualified guides here, but don’t tell anyone else I said that. I don’t mean to be catty but honestly, you met Cody at the front desk on your way in, right? Just look at him out there now: standing by the door, smoking a substance that I suspect from the particular cock of his wrist is not a cigarette. Paragon of emotional maturity, he is not! I hope you weren’t turned off by that first impression. But I shouldn’t be so hard on him: I wouldn’t choose to be a teenager again for all the money in the world, would you?

Our wander through the wonderful world of the tiny will take about sixty minutes, but you can stay afterwards and look around all day if you want. The ticket price includes unlimited entry. The tour shunners don’t take advantage of the full-day policy. No, they prefer to breeze by the fairy-tale castles and the battleships and the model railway, pose like amateur catalogue models in front of the mini Colosseum, and take pictures with flash. Some holiday-makers are in and out in less than half an hour. Refusing the tour strikes me as especially rude since the gorgeous specimen of Arts and Crafts architecture in which you now stand used to be Jemima’s home. So, I appreciate the time that you are taking with me today. You three are going to get the best experience that this place can offer.

Jemima was born in 1932 and started her work in miniatures when she was nine years old. The first of her models was a gift
from an English uncle who claimed to be called Barnaby Supple, though everyone knew that this wasn’t a family name. She met him only once, when he showed up unannounced at the door of her family’s home in the summer of 1941. He likely declared his presence using the original feature you no doubt noticed on your way in, the brass monkey’s head knocker. Although Mr. Hendricks had not seen his older brother since before Jemima was born, I like to imagine that he opened the door slowly and shot a worried look at his wife, as if Barnaby might try to sell them an afterlife they didn’t want.

Barnaby was a barber by trade, which anyone could see by observing his own luxuriant waxed mustache. Years later in her diaries, Jemima reflected on that day and wrote that she had never met anyone like him – and certainly no one who seemed to have thought more about the appearance than the function of his clothes, or who had a sense of style beyond the necessities of day-to-day life. She could not stop staring at his striped trousers and his tweed waistcoat with its flat ivory buttons that sat smooth even over his rotund tummy. He looked like a sea-bedraggled walrus in its Sunday best, bringing the whole ocean in with him. Jemima’s mother scolded her for staring, and sent her to fetch the tea, which Jemima made and carried back to the living room as quickly as she could. Once he’d settled in and the tea was steeping on a tray beside him, Barnaby knelt down on the floor beside Jemima and shook her hand with the same level of formality he had offered her parents. Then, he reached into his battered suitcase and handed Jemima a Make-Your-Own Victorian Dollhouse kit. On the box was an illustration of a girl prettier
and sweeter and blonder than Jemima, holding up a giant pair of craft scissors.

Along with the dollhouse, Barnaby gave Jemima bangs that made her face look as round as a dinner plate. Her new ragged haircut accentuated the worry lines she had already developed on her forehead, and she tried unsuccessfully to blow them out of the way when she sat with the grown-ups at dinner. The wrinkles deepened when she opened the box carefully and started to lay out the pieces of her first project on the floor. This very floor, in fact, where we stand now, though at that time there was an ornate floral-printed area rug. She wanted to unpack the toy in just the right way, and was nervous about disappointing Barnaby, who sat close by, waiting expectantly for her reaction to the present. The people in the kit were two-dimensional figures cut in perforated lines and all she had to do was pop the shapes out of thin wooden sheets as you would with a paper doll. The house had clear instructions: slot A fits into B, then C into D, then on go the two pieces of the roof and there you have it! A bungalow! The house came together so quickly and looked so professional that for a moment Jemima could almost imagine that she was not herself after all, but was the girl on the box: all ribbon and satin and handmade glory.

Uncle Barnaby helped with the kit by galumphing onto the floor, settling on the carpet beside her, and holding the house still as well as his trembling hands would allow him while Jemima daubed glue onto the chimney. (Apparently, he also played with the dolls and made them kiss each other, which scandalized Jemima, who even in her youth preferred
construction to play-acting.) No adult before Barnaby had ever knelt on the floor with Jemima and made knowing eye contact with her, as if she too were grown up. Her parents, for instance, preferred the safe distance of the sofa, where they existed slightly above Jemima, in a private world of anxious murmurs about fish and finance. In fact, Jemima imagined growing up as a process of ascending – floating up from the carpet to the couch.

When the dollhouse was assembled, Barnaby praised it lavishly. He lifted Jemima’s arms up in victory as if she’d won a wrestling match, and she felt, for the first time, like she’d accomplished more than she’d set out to do. Unfortunately, Barnaby was unable to assist Jemima with any more of her projects, since he left as abruptly as he arrived, a matter of days after he first appeared at their door. He departed in such a rush that he left behind a trail of stray objects: a book of the seven wonders of the ancient world, into which he had pasted photographs and written notes from his own travels, a flask half full of pungent liquor, and a single, size twelve, black-and-white wingtip shoe. As you’ll see upstairs, the seven wonders book provided the inspiration for at least, well, seven of the dioramas we exhibit. Barnaby’s dollhouse will be the last item we’ll see on this floor before we head upstairs. It’s displayed alongside the book, the flask, and the shoe.

Even with this earliest model, Jemima went beyond the kit’s instructions. The parts provided were delightful, but after Barnaby’s departure she couldn’t help but feel that there was more work to do. She added to the house gradually over the following three years, constructing a bathtub, for instance, out
of an old sardine can and papering the walls in layers of bright candy wrappers. She painted expressive faces on the dolls and clothed them in printed dresses and tailored suits made out of scraps from her mother’s sewing basket. In her early teenage years, Jemima began to add extensions to the house, including a cellophane greenhouse containing a single bird of paradise fashioned in origami from a postage stamp.

Needless to say, Jemima’s juvenilia were steps towards a more refined version of her craft. After Barnaby’s dollhouse came miniatures of each of the seven wonders in succession. At first she relied on mail-order catalogues for pre-made dolls and tiny rolltop desks and stove-top kettles. These she combined with more inventive furnishings of her own construction made from seashells, beach glass, and elastic bands.

You’ll notice as we work our way through the exhibits that over her career as a miniaturist, Jemima’s creations became smaller and smaller. By 1988 she was working with a laboratory-quality microscope and using implements designed for the dissection of insect wings. The smallest artifacts you’ll see in the museum are in this display to our right, which has been set up with microscopes so that you can appreciate the intricacy of these late works. If you take a peek – yes, don’t be shy! Have a good look! – you’ll see a lighthouse made out of a grain of rice. Then, next to it in the display case are four balsa-wood elephants and a plastic elephant trainer inside the eye of a needle. Finally, you have a summer cottage that’s no larger than a crystal of sea salt. By the time she was working at this minute scale, it took Jemima six months to produce one figurine. The cottage, for example, consists of 107 individual polymer clay
pieces, which are completely invisible to the naked eye. Legend has it that she spent a year and a half rendering the shell of an oyster, complete with a single pearl, only to have it vanish when she sneezed.

I’d like us to pause by the second display here. Why don’t you find a spot with a good view? This magnificent house, which you’ll see is larger than most of the miniatures in the museum, has six rooms and measures exactly two feet tall from the tip of the roof to the foundations. In order to fully appreciate the craftsmanship, I’d like to take you through each room. To offer you a tour within the tour, so to speak, and make sure that you appreciate the key details that set these models apart from your average child’s plaything.

I always begin with this particular building because it’s my favourite. It’s not the most lavish – that would have to be the Taj Mahal – nor is it the most complicated – the English country manor to our right might take that title on account of the fully functional watermill. The museum is not organized chronologically. We’ve gone for a thematic approach: dollhouses and domestic spaces here on the ground floor, natural and man-made wonders upstairs, and in the attic is outer space and the ocean. Other tour guides might organize the visit differently, starting with the European castles montage or the moon landing with all of its black-lit stars, but sometimes the most important details are the ones people overlook when they rush through. I prefer to draw your attention down to the level of a mole painted on a doll’s cheek or to a shrub that conforms to accurate botanical descriptions. As you can see, Jemima could glitz it up with the best of the artisans, but her own taste tended
more towards the small moments one might instinctively forget. Besides, I like to think that half an hour per tour is a loose time guideline, not a hard and fast rule.

At the top of the house is the attic, which hides in the peak of the pointed roof. No one lives there, but it’s not an attic stuffed with heirlooms that might one day be uncovered. There are no trunks full of letters or black-and-white photographs, but there is speculation in the scholarly community that Jemima may at one point have constructed the trunks and then removed them. Professor Norbridge, an expert from the University of British Columbia in the history of early twentieth-century domestic hobbies, visited the museum in 2010 and showed us some historical reconstructions of an early version of the room. Or, as much as the academics can recreate it from descriptions in Jemima’s personal papers, anyway. But let me just say
I
had a lot to teach
him
, which was a real treat for me since he’s an actual expert.

As I’m sure you can see, the walls are constructed to look incomplete, with exposed beams fashioned from whittled, walnut-stained unsharpened pencils and pink insulation made of hand-dyed cotton wool. Note the single bare light bulb. If you look closely, you’ll see that instead of a light switch, there’s a string hanging from the ceiling just behind the bulb. If you pull it, delicately, using only your thumb and index finger, the bulb wakes up, even now, like a sleepy glow-worm, and the string dances as it catches the new light. No, ma’am, you can’t pull it. As you can see, the entire house is behind glass, being
kept safe in the cabinet. Even I have turned the light on only once by hand, as a reward for being Miniatureland’s most committed tour guide in 2007. I also received a complimentary spa visit for two at The Oasis. I took the runner-up tour guide, Jenna, because that’s how much of a team player I am.

The electricity in the house works, by the way. Every filament of every bulb can produce a little glimmer of light. See that green button on the wall to the left of the display case? If you’d like to press that, sir, you’ll see all the lights of the house come on. Yes! There we go. Don’t worry, it’s not witchcraft. I’ll explain the masterful engineering later. On the attic floor is a trap door with a matchstick ladder that folds down, but no one ever uses it on account of how tiny the crawl space is, and also because all the inhabitants of the house are rather restricted in the mobility department. They are confined to their rooms, each glued into a single daily activity for all eternity. Even the houseguests never leave. They also never overstay their welcome.

The Hendricks were a church-going family. Mr. Hendricks worked for thirty-eight years in the local fish cannery. Jemima wrote that his beard smelled like the inside of a mussel shell and his hands were the colour of sockeye salmon. Mrs. Hendricks made her famous Bakewell tarts for every church bake sale and did some bookkeeping for the cannery when the usual girl was on holiday. Jemima was their only child. Mrs. Hendricks suffered four miscarriages before her daughter was born, and two more afterwards. We know all this
because she kept a diary. The forty-seven volumes are housed next door in the same building as the oldest, largest, and most wonderful cabinet of curiosities in British Columbia. I’m supposed to tell you that you should check that out after your visit with us. The diaries are still restricted-access files, because of their age and fragility, but I was lucky enough to receive permission to enter the archive last summer.

I’m sad to say that reading Mrs. Hendricks’s diaries was not an altogether scintillating experience. In fact, I think I’d better stop calling them “diaries” so no one gets too excited about them. When I sat down at the desk in the archive and opened my first little navy leather book, I found that Mrs. Hendricks’s daily records were in fact ledgers, and contained point-form lists of what she cooked each day, who came calling from her church group, the entire family’s medical history, and a record of every penny she spent. No, sorry, I don’t know how the currency would convert based on inflation, so I can’t tell you what the numbers mean, but I don’t get the impression that she was a big spender. The cabinet of curiosities attracts more visitors, because of the preserved bull testicles and the camera obscura, but I know when I’m in there with those leather books that I am the beholder of historically significant, if outwardly tedious treasures. Anyway, it’s a good thing we have the notebooks, because they tell us, through the indisputable logic of cake recipes, that Jemima was a cherished daughter indeed.