Going Home - Doris May Lessing [95]
He was a man of 45 or so, heavily built, an open good-fellow’s face. He was well dressed, very neat about the wrists and collar. He used to talk, without interest, of the weather and so on, until he was asked a direct question about himself, and then his polite eyes took fire and he shifted himself in his chair, to a talking position, and began.
It was a question of several people grouping together to buy a large piece of ground, and building houses on it instead of buying houses already built by a company. It would be cheaper this way. Why should one put money into the pockets of the capitalists? About ten people would be the right number. He knew of a good piece of ground, in the path of the town’s growth, but one needed to raise at least £10,000. It was after the ground was bought that Mr McCarran-Longman’s special talents would come into play. For he had thought of a wonderful invention. One took a large tank, which should be square, more like a swimming bath than a fish-pool, and one filled it with water. Then one shook into the water some chemicals, like shaking salt into soup. Then one stirred the mixture with a large stick or spoon, and behold, it would foam into a myriad bubbles, like the baths of Hollywood film stars. This would set solid in about twenty-four hours, and one should cut it into suitable bricks or pieces with a very large sharp instrument. The resulting walls, or roofs, or portions of house would be rain-proof, dirt-proof, sound-proof, wear-proof—proof against any risk one might tentatively mention, only delicately, however, to Mr McCarran-Longman, who grew tense and uneasy when one made such suggestions.
Water, he said, would cost nothing, particularly if we were prepared to wait for a receptacle to fill with rainwater. And the chemicals were dirt-cheap. He would tell us the ingredients if it were not that he had applied for a patent. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust us, but it was a legal matter. The problem really wasn’t the consistency of the bricks the houses would be built of, but the tanks to put the water and chemicals into.
He said he had considered having made several dozen shapes or forms, some ordinary brick-size, and some wall-or roof-shape, into which one could pour the water and then the chemical, so as not to have to cut the stuff with a knife or saw afterwards. But if you considered the thing practically, he said, perhaps fifty or a hundred receptacles, lying side by side in some barn or shed, or even in the open air, with water in them, and then shaking chemical in, it would be a tricky thing, and unless one was very careful, the stuff of the walls, roofs, etc., would come out a different consistency each time. Much better to have a large, square tank, big enough to give the stuff a thorough-going stir, and be done with it. So, in addition to the £10,000 needed for the ground for the building stands, and for the lawyers, one would need about £500 to buy or have made a really large square or perhaps oblong tank.
Having got the roofs and walls and floors ready—and the beauty of the thing would be that we could make our houses exactly to our own fancy, even colouring the foam mixture bright original colours, then one would need only to stick them together with a sort of glue. Mr McCarran-Longman was working on the glue now. It was quite good enough as it was, but scientists are never satisfied with less than the best. Another two weeks would see him through. He had the test-tubes on his washstand in the hotel; but the proprietor was getting unpleasant, and the sooner we all bought our bit of ground the better, so that he could build a little shed to do the research in.
So far, Mr McCarran-Longman had only found Bob Wharton and two other families interested, all people desperate to have homes of their own; but none of them had any capital at all.
I was fascinated by the thing, but it was a dilettante’s interest. Having spent so