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<title> Did we not tell you! </title>
In our everyday life there exist those unspoken rules that you should not expect to much from life, and be happy with what you got, because sooner or later something bad will happen. The theme in the book - The fifth child, can not be told by one simple answer, because I think that the story is created by diffrent themes that go together. The one that I see as the main theme is the unspoken rules about life where Harriet and David goes against the world, and in the end everybody around them can say I told you so. They dream of the perfect, happy family, and are determined to make their dream come true, and they refuse to listen to anyone who has another opinion then their's. They buy this enormous house that they actually cannot affort, and the house in which most of the story takes place, plays an important role for the theme. I will try to point at the connection between what I see as the theme in Harriet and David's happy-family-dream, and the large Victorian house outside London.
	 Both Harriet and David carries the dream of a happy family, but they have diffrent reasons for it. Their diffrent backgrounds are a part of the seeting, and it helps to create the theme. Harriet's parents had lived a happy life, but now Harriet's mother lives alone since the father is dead. The parents seem to be the reason for Harriet's happy-family-dream "Harriet's parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy life" (12), and of course this is something that Harriet thinks of. She also explains that children going through a divorce do not grow up to be like everybody else, "for many of her friends had divorced parents..... and tended to be, as it is put, disturbed. Harrieth was not disturbed" (11). This make me wonder if Harriet sees David as disturbed too, since his parent are divorced. I do not have a simple answer to that, but she does really love him, and perhaps she thinks that she can help him in some way. Anyway, David on the other hand thinks of his childhood as something that he does not want his children to go through, "for his own children it would all be different" (12). So with their diffrent experiences they think they easily can built a happy family together, which they later realise was not as easy at it seemed. 
	 Everyone around Harriet and David tries to get them to realise the reality, a big family is not always a happy family, but they refuse to listen. "what mattered was the house and the life that would be lived in it" (18). So it seems like they think that as long as they have the house nothing bad can happen to them. They also think that a happy life is what they deserve, and they take it for granted."The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved" (28). 
	 Harriet and David do not seem to care about the world outside there house "Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and battered the storms of the world" (29). One can say that they are very egocentric in a way since they do not care about others then themselves, and they have this strange believe that if something bad happens to a family then that is their own fault. So, when Harriet's sister Sarah had a baby with Down's syndrome Harriet said that, "she did not belive it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the mongol child" (29). When Harriet's and David's happy family starts to break down the day they have their fifth child Ben, who they cannot handle, nobody wants to be in the house. Their other four children do not want to be at home. Harriet starts questioning what their life has become and she thinks that they are punished for taken a happy family for granted. "She said to David, We are being punished, that's all......For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we could be" (141). So here in the end she realises that maybe they have done something wrong by not being realistic, and listen to their friends and relatives, and now it is to late.
	 In the beginning the house seems to be a fortunate and sweat place and in the end it is horrible, and empty. The children do not want to be home and in the end there are only Harriet and Ben in the large house since David works all the time to pay for the house. Although their family do not longer exist they hold on to the house as a last hope "I agree with Harriet, we shouldn't sell the house yet" (143). It seems as Harriet and David still in the end keep holding on to their dream of a happy family, and the house is a part of their dream. So in the end the house is still there to create the setting for the theme, and all their relatives tell them with their absence that they were right from the beginning.
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