What is Being Built in the Quiet

I want to tell you about the people who are already, quietly, doing what the last piece described. I have heard about some of them. I have met a few. They are not in the news. They are not on the television. They are in smaller places, doing smaller things, that add up.

The four people I am about to describe — Margaret, Tom, Ruth, Jamie, and the seven families — are composites, assembled from real things I have heard and seen. I will say more about that below, after you have met them. I am telling you up front so that you can read what follows knowing the faces are invented and the patterns are not.

There is a woman called Margaret who runs a small school in a barn outside a village called Wick. She teaches seven children, from four families, four days a week. Her dog, a black collie called Ned, sleeps in the corner while she teaches. She teaches the children to read and to write and to do sums, and also to cook — actual food, from ingredients — and to grow things in the garden behind the barn, and to sit quietly, and to be bored without reaching for a screen. The families that send their children to her barn are not wealthy. They pay her what they can. She is not getting rich. She says she is doing the most important work of her life, and that she should have started twenty years ago.

There is a man called Tom in a town I will not name, because he asked me not to. He lost three fingers to a lathe when he was nineteen and spent twenty years bitter about it. In his forties, he bought an old workshop and started teaching anyone who came in how to fix broken things. Toasters. Chairs. Clothes. Bicycles. Wooden furniture. He does not charge. He says the ability to fix things is itself a form of wealth, and that when it returns to ordinary people, something else will be possible that is not currently possible.

On Saturdays his workshop has twelve people in it. Some weeks it has four. Some of them are children, sent by parents who want them to know how a toaster works. One of them is a retired engineer who has become Tom's second teacher, because Tom is very good with wood and bad with electrics and the engineer is the opposite. One of them used to come every week and has not come for three months. Tom knows why. He does not say. He has hard days still. The hand aches when the weather turns. He told me, the last time I saw him, that the work does not fix what it does not fix. But it is the best use of the hand he has left, and he intends to keep making it.

There is a couple called Ruth and Jamie, on the street behind mine, who host a Sunday lunch every week for anyone who wants to come. Every week. Same time. Three o'clock. They cook for twenty and sometimes five people come and sometimes thirty. The regulars bring wine. A widow from two streets over comes every week. A student from the university whose family lives in Pakistan and who cannot go home for holidays comes most weeks. A young couple with a new baby who would otherwise not see another adult from Monday to Friday come every week. What Ruth and Jamie are making, at their table, is not just a meal. They are making the thing a neighbourhood used to be, rebuilt from nothing, one Sunday at a time.

There is a group of seven young families who, over the last four years, have moved onto the same short street in the same small city. They are not a commune. They are not a religion. They are not a political project. They bought or rented houses next to each other on purpose, because they had worked out that they did not want to raise their children the way they were raising them. They take turns picking up each other's children from school. They eat together on Fridays. One of them teaches the others' children piano. Another runs a small reading club for the ten-year-olds. They have, between them, eighteen children. They say the children are like cousins. They say they did not expect this to work as well as it is working. They say they wish more people knew it was possible.

I should be honest with you about these people. Margaret, Tom, Ruth and Jamie, the seven families — none of them is a specific person I can take you to meet. They are composites, assembled from many smaller real things I have read about and seen. I know this is the chapter where that admission is most costly. You were looking for evidence and I gave you four small stories. The stories are invented. The patterns are not.

If you want real versions, they exist. Martine Postma started a thing in Amsterdam in 2009 called the Repair Café, where ordinary people come to fix broken things with the help of someone who knows how. There are now more than two and a half thousand of them, in thirty-five countries. Any of them could be Tom's workshop. There are forest schools and barn schools in the parts of the countryside I have visited, run by women like Margaret. There are Sunday tables like Ruth and Jamie's in most of the towns I know well enough to ask. I made up the specific faces, but I did not make up the movement. If you go looking, in the town where you live, you will find your own Tom. You will not find mine.

Margaret. Tom. Ruth and Jamie. The seven families.

None of them is famous. None of them is being funded by anyone. None of them has a grand theory. They are just doing, with their own hands, what used to be done by institutions that no longer work. They are not waiting to be saved. They are not waiting for a better government, or a better economy, or a better technology. They are building, now, the small specific things that can hold people through difficult times.

There are more of them than you would think. You will not find them on the news. You will find them by looking around where you live. Some of them are half-built. Some will not last. A few will turn out to be the seeds of what comes next.

If any of this book has made sense to you, go find them. Or begin one yourself. It does not have to be a school, or a workshop, or a Sunday lunch, or a shared street. It can be something smaller. A weekly call to someone lonely. A skill you teach a child who is not your own. A beautiful thing you make that people can use.

The next world, if there is to be one, will be built from things like these. It is being built now. You can join.