The Mute's House and Other Lessons in Imagination

I have always felt a particular affection for the illustrations of the French artist Michel Thomas. A few small reproductions mounted on wooden boards hung in our home. They depicted wide-eyed Parisian street children in oversized caps, standing beneath lampposts or wandering along cobbled streets. As a child, I found them captivating.

My brother would look at these pictures and invent funny lullabies inspired by the scenes. They were supposedly for our younger sister, but all of us laughed and listened. I was fascinated by the idea that an image could unfold into a story. That idea never left me.

The illustrations by Michel Thomas

 

One of many performances. Costumes, theatre, and invented characters were a regular part of childhood.

 

The pictures also remind me of my siblings. Whenever I think of them, I think of our laughter, the noise of the house, and the endless ways we entertained ourselves. They belong to a larger memory of childhood, one connected to a place that shaped me more profoundly than I understood at the time.

The house next to our family home had belonged to my great-great-uncle, whom everyone called Niemy — the Mute.

He lost his hearing in a childhood accident and never learned to speak. He lived alone and never married. He was a skilled carpenter who made wooden picture frames and mounted deer and roe antlers he found in the forest.

As children, we did not understand him very well. His gestures seemed mysterious to us, and the sounds he made were not words we could recognise. We were a little afraid of him and, regrettably, not always kind. During our games, we turned him into a villain from our imaginary worlds. While he was mowing the grass outside his house, we would throw toys at him from a safe distance, including a collection of small horse figurines that belonged to us.

One day, Niemy finally lost patience and took the horses into his house.

Instead of simply hiding them, he arranged them carefully between the window panes. No apology persuaded him to return them. Not even my father's intervention helped. In winter, he placed them on cotton wool so they looked as though they were standing in snow.

Years later, I realised that he had turned our punishment into a kind of display. He had framed the whole incident much as he framed photographs and antlers in his workshop. It was a perfect response: imaginative, firm, and entirely his own.

Yet there was also a gentleness to him that I recognised even then. He had a cat and built a wide wooden shelf beneath the window so he could see when it returned home. Since he could not hear its meowing, the cat would jump onto the sill and wait to be noticed.

 

Jan Pietrykowski, known in our family as Niemy (the Mute), outside his home.

 

After Niemy died, my siblings and I were given the keys to the house for the summer.

Although he was gone, his nickname remained. It echoed through our conversations and across the yard because we continued to call the place U Niemego — The Mute's House.

At first, it was not particularly inviting. There was dust everywhere, cobwebs in the corners, cracked paint, and creaking floors.

The first thing we did was rescue the horses from the windows.

Looking at those small horses, I found myself thinking about what an unusual person he had been and about the lesson hidden within that mixture of stubbornness, humour, and imagination.

Over time, my siblings and I made the place our own. We brought in posters, books, magazine cuttings, candles, and all the small treasures that seemed important at that age. One wall became a place for notes and scribbles.

 

One of our many transformations. This time we were The Beatles, and I claimed the role of Paul McCartney.

 

I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by other children: my siblings, cousins, neighbours, and friends. We drifted constantly between houses and gardens, always inventing and building something, or planning the next game. Much of it unfolded in The Mute's House.

Our rooms became whatever we needed them to be. One week, they were theatre stages. Another week, they became concert halls, film sets, workshops, or secret headquarters.

We spent hours performing stories we knew from books and radio plays. We wrote scripts, built scenery from whatever materials we could find, rehearsed diligently, and then staged grand premieres for our parents. Thanks to my mother and grandmother, who both knew how to sew, costumes were rarely a problem.

At one point, we became fascinated by our older cousins, who had formed a punk band. We responded by creating one of our own. We called ourselves The Afers and staged performances for our friends.

The whole thing was wonderfully ridiculous. At the time, however, we took it very seriously. That was simply who we were. Even an ordinary gathering rarely remained just a party. Before long, it would become a performance, a project, or some unexpected adventure of our own making.

The Afers, our homemade punk band. For a brief period, The Mute's House became a concert venue and we became stars in our own imagination.

 

Not every day was loud. Sometimes the house would fall quiet, and each of us disappeared into our own corner. Some read books. Others drew or wrote. I often made notebooks, designed bookmarks and copied paintings by artists I admired.

The Mute's House gave all of this room to happen.

The mysterious place we had once feared became our creative refuge.

The house no longer exists. Today, there is only grass where it once stood. Yet it remains vivid in my memory. I remember the smell of old timber, the coloured tiles on the stove, and drawings pinned to the walls, including copies I made after Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec.

For a few summers, it felt as though The Mute's House belonged to us and to our imagination.

 

My sister, cousin, and me in The Mute's House, surrounded by music, drawings, and the improvised world we created there.

 

Today, I sometimes think about how strange it is that one of the people who influenced my imagination was someone I barely understood. As children, we saw only his silence. What I recognise now is his attentiveness: the care he brought to making things, arranging things, and noticing details others might overlook.

I suspect we understood each other far better than I realised at the time, and we did so without words.

 

Our cat on the roof