Excerpt from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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A Room of One's Own

In the summer of 1978, a helicopter carrying a party of geologists across Siberia hovered over the taiga near the Mongolian border, looking for a place to land. There, almost 250 kilometres from the nearest village, in a supposedly entirely uninhabited region, the pilot saw that most domestic of sights, a kitchen garden. The scientists decided it was worth investigation, and landed. After walking 5 kilometres up a narrow path they came to two wooden-planked storage sheds on stilts, stuffed full of potatoes in birch-bark sacks. Continuing, they reached a yard 'piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish – bark, poles, planks'.

At the centre of the yard was a hut, although they thought it barely worthy of the name: weather-stained black, with a single window 'the size of my backpack pocket', it was ramshackle and altogether 'not much more than a burrow' – 'a low, soot-blackened log kennel'. Inside, the hut's single room could be crossed in seven steps in one direction, five in the other. It held just one item of furniture, an axehewn table. The floor was earth covered with a layer of tamped-down potato peelings and crushed pine-nut shells for insulation, but even so the room was 'as cold as a cellar', heated by a tiny fire and lit at night by a single rushlight.

This 'kennel' was the home of the five members of the Lykov family. Karp Lykov and his wife Akulina were Old Believers, a seventeenth century Russian Orthodox sect. After the 1917 Revolution, persecution led many Old Believers to relocate abroad. (Large communities survive in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, and many smaller ones elsewhere.) The largest group, however, was and still is in Siberia. In the 1930s, during the Stalinist terror, Lykov's brother was murdered, and Lykov fled to the taiga with his wife and two small children. Two more children were born subsequently, and by 1978, when the geologists stumbled across them, the surviving members (Akulina had died of starvation one particularly hard year) had lived in isolation for nearly half a century.

Five people living in one room, with no sanitation, lit and warmed by firelight, 'cramped, musty and indescribably filthy': although the geologists failed to recognize it, what they were seeing were not conditions of unimaginable harshness, but the ordinary living conditions of their own history. And ours. A world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was not only not desired, but almost unknown. For most of human history, houses have not been private spaces, nor have they had, within them, more private spaces belonging to specific residents, nor spaces used by all the residents in turn for entirely private functions.

The Anglo-Saxons had no word for a house, but used heorp, hearth, as a metonym for the entire building. (The word 'hearth' is itself elemental, deriving from the Anglo-Saxon word for earth.) Legally the hearth also stood in for its owners: astriers were tenants with a legal right of inheritance, 'astre' deriving from the Norman French âtre, or hearth – the right of inheritance was here linked not to the people, nor even to the house, but to the fireplace. In the houses of the gentry and the prosperous, through the medieval period, the single most important space was the hall, the space where all social, familial, official and professional life transpired, night and day, living and sleeping. And the core of that room was always the open hearth, both a physical and an emotional centre, the focal point of the room. (It is not chance that focus is Latin for hearth).

The well-to-do peasantry at the time lived in longhouses with byres that measured from 10 to 20 metres long, and up to 6 metres wide. Poorer inhabitants had cotts (cottages), without any space for animals. Both these types of housing had open hearths in the main room, with possibly a second room at one end; byres, in addition to the space for animals, generally contained another area for sleeping or for storage.

Excerpted from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders. Copyright © 2015 by Judith Flanders. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.