DORIS LESSING “ The fifth child” ( p 13-16 “ If I’m pregnant), Harper Perennial
Intro: up to you / put this passage into its context recall what happened in the first extract studied
The question we shall try to answer: will the house Harriet and David have found be their home sweet home, the house of their dreams?

1) LONGING FOR A HOUSE AND A KINGDOM
a)David’s love for his room and his desire to find a new one:
-elements we have in the passage just before this one ( p 12) + David’s wish now liked “his old room in Oxford”which was “large” , “shabby” and “full of his boyhood” => wants to create with Harriet and “extension and amplification of it”.
L 13, we can read “what he was working for was a home”: his main aim in life
b)The meaning of a home in general and more precisely for David and Harriet:
-In general home means much more than the house one resides in. Home = a safe an protective place, a shelter, a haven, a refuge where you feel comfortable a place where, family, relatives, friends gather ( a spirit of communion) and where important events are celebrated (birthdays, and New Year’s Eve, religious feasts like Easter).
-In Harriet and David’s case, the home is directly associated with the founding of a family ( l 25: “ But they meant to have a lot of children” ). Both Harriet and David regard their future life as a “kingdom” l 3 and l 61. The house must be the seat of this kingdom.

2)THE HOUSE OF THEIR DREAMS
So both Harriet and David are on the lookout for the house of their dreams and one day they seem to have found it.
a) The house has all the criteria they were looking for and corresponds to who they are
-a smallish town within commuting distance from London: this fits their distaste for the bustling and noisy life of the city
-an overgrown garden: reminiscent of nature , once more in keeping with their distaste for big bustling cities, this reminds us of the narrator remarking that Harriet was probably more at