Louis

Louis came from round by the Matterhorn, in a village where the best-chiselled stair-banisters came from – with the most creative designs, with finest quality finishing.

            Louis was not a maker of one of these, however.  He was a doll-house maker.  And all the little girls in the village and all the little girls living on the other side of the mountain range and in the dells and valleys asked their mothers or father or their grandparents if they might stop by at his shop and have a look at what he was crafting: the little rooms, the little dolls, the strange clothes the dolls wore, the strange rooftops and chimneys.

            When Louis would take breaks from his work, he’d sit outside and smoke his pipe.  He could speak all the languages of Switzerland and he also knew the language they speak in Scotland because he had been born there.

            He told the children who came by that on his way to the mountains here, he had had to jump off his home island of Scotland, just off a cliff along the coast, and make it over the moon.  And falling back down again from the moon, he had landed here, and he thought it a new and interesting folk to see.

            Louis told every Alpine citizen, young or old, when he first met them, “I was most surprised coming to this marvellous place when I saw the girls wearing skirts and the boys wearing trousers.  Because where I come from, everybody wears skirts.  The men and boys wear them shorter than the ladies.”

            “You don’t mean above the ankles!” someone would wonder out loud, in a hush – someone who had only just turned from a young girl to a young lady wearing long dresses.

            Louis would say in reply, “Yes, I mean just at the knee!  And you know what else?” the slow pipe smoke towering up in the shape of mushroom heads.  “Not a single man would wear bloomers under his skirt, and no silk stockings!”

            “We all enjoy the way people dress in Scotland!” all the children piped out on the village streets, after visiting the dollhouse shop.  And so Louis made the dolls in the doll houses all wearing kilts.

            One day, he decided he was going to make real, live, life-sized doll houses.

            Everybody thought them fascinating . . . incredible . . .  ingenious.  And as the dolls, Louis took volunteer men, women and children in the village to dress up and live in these life-size doll-houses.

            With the years, he made one life-size doll house after the other, so in twenty-years – just before he died, he had completed building three new villages, all around the Matter horn.  And most of the Alp people had moved into them; the men and boys wearing kilts.

            And today, if you go to these villages in the Alps, they are called Little Scotlands and the village father’s name is Louis from Scotland.

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt