To a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week. That was the day we came to the village, in the summer of the last year of the First World War. Come down 'ome and we’ll stuff you with currants.'Īnd Marjorie, the eldest, lifted me into her long brown hair, and ran me jogging down the path and through the steep rose-filled garden, and set me down on the cottage doorstep, which was our home, though I couldn’t believe it. 'There, there, it’s all right, don’t you wail any more. They leaned over me– one, two, three– their mouths smeared with red-currants and their hands dripping with juice.
Faces of rose, familiar, living huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky faces with grins and white teeth (some broken) to be conjured up like genii with a howl, brushing off terror with their broad scoldings and affection. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting the long grass found me. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.įrom this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. For the first time in my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict or fathom: a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.įor the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. I was lost and didn’t know where to move. It was knife-edged, dark and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. I had never been so close to grass before. The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept.
I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
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