Architectural bonsai

In the summer of 1961 I was in my second year at Magdalen College, Oxford with rooms in the 18th-century New Buildings. One of my neighbours there was a quiet man called Jonathan Green-Armytage. Sitting out on the steps of the building’s colonnade, in the sun, we became friends. He was already a distinguished photographer. He showed me photographs he had taken of Edith Sitwell, with her medieval face and gnarled, beringed fingers. They were at least as good as Cecil Beaton’s portraits of the old poet.

One day, Jonathan said to me: ‘I think you’d enjoy to meet my god-mother, Vivien Greene; and I think she’d like to meet you. She’s Graham Greene’s wife — they’re separated; but because they’re Roman Catholics, they don’t get divorced. She has an amazing collection of dolls’ houses in a rotunda at the end of her garden.’

(It was said that while her husband wrote novels, she went in for ‘short storeys’.)

The visit was made. Mrs Greene lived in a verandah’d 1790s house at Iffley Turn, Oxford, that had once been the home of Cardinal Newman’s mother. The dolls’ house museum was ravishing. The great thing about these mini-mansions, as opposed to life-sized architecture, is that some of them still contain their original inhabitants, with all their accoutrements. Where they didn’t, Vivien Greene was not, strictly speaking, a purist. But she made considerable efforts to scour antique shops to find the right-sized dolls and miniature furniture of the correct date. There were 18th-century houses, Victorian Gothic houses and one art deco example.