ISLAND MAGIC

CHAPTER I

Wells

Have you seen but a white lily grow before rude

hands had touched it? Have you seen but the fall of the snow before

the earth hath smutched it? Have you felt the wool of beaver, or swan's down ever? Have you smelt of the bud of the briar or the nard in the fire? Have you tasted the bag of the bee?

THE BEGINNING OF BEN JONSON'S LOVE SONG could be the opening of a happy nunc dimittis. Have you seen, felt, smelt, tasted the beauty of this world? If your life has been lived in such pleasant places that you can answer, yes, then you are one of the lucky ones. I am one of the fortunate for I have never lived in a place that was not beautiful, and if at the end of my life I appreciate roses more than snow that was not the case at the beginning. Then, in company with all children and most dogs, I thought snow the wonder of the world. The snow-light filling the house with magic as the white flakes drifted down in windless silence, the splendour when the sun came out and hills and fields and trees sparkled under the arc of blue sky, the thought of the things one did in the snow, tobogganing and snowballing and building a snowman; it was all ecstasy. And somewhere tucked away at the back of one's mind was the knowledge that every crystal in the vast whiteness, though too small for the human eye to see, was fashioned like a flower or a star. How could snow not be the wonder of the world?

It was not myself as a child but the daughter of a friend of mine who gave me the title for this book. Her mother, accompanied by the dog Coach, had ploughed her way through a deep fall of snow to fetch her youngest home from nursery school. The hard going had been a weariness, the cold a misery to the flesh. Ploughing back again, her youngest attached, a small voice sang out beside her, "Look, Mummy! Look at Coach and the !" Coach was leaping and rolling in the snow, his eyes like stars, his tail a banner. The little girl's eyes were as bright as his, her face pink inside her hood. She glowed like a flame. Coach glowed. The mother for a few moments looked at the snow through their eyes and the earth had not smutched it.

Old age, I find, is a time when you start doing all the things that in earlier years you reprobated in older people, and were quite certain you would never do yourself, and if there was one thing more than another that I was determined not to do it was to write an autobiography. But the request that I should do so came from a few of those people to whom one can only say, in the words of Philip Sidney, "Your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment." And so I obeyed. Yet this book is hardly an autobiography, it is more an attempt to recapture happy memories and with them some of the joy ,in places and people that I have known, and to share them. And to share, too, some of the conclusions I have come to about work and life. Neither will be in the least exciting and so my hope for this book is that it will be a good bedside book, and keep nobody awake.

To find that one has reached and passed the biblical three-score years and ten has a sobering effect upon anyone brought up on the Bible, for the Bible thinks you have about had it by then. And so you have. You have almost closed the circle and like a ship that has sailed round the world you see the last stretch of water narrowing at a startling pace. But the coast of the country to which you sail is obscured by the spray of breaking waves, and the rainbows in them show you the shapes and the colours of your own childhood. What the poets say is true. The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.

What do I remember first of the rainbow days? Someone years ago told me with great seriousness that our first memory is significant; it tells us much about ourselves. I remember I listened with polite unbelief, since my first memory is concerned with raspberries, and apart from the fact that I do not like them there seemed no significance at all. Yet now that I take a good look at that memory I am not so sure. It is a vivid one. I must have been very young at the time because the raspberries grew in the old walled garden of the house where I was born, Tower House at Wells in Somerset, and we left that house when I was two years old. I was standing on a pathway in a forest and on either side of me towered green trees. I looked at them with awe. The pathway stretched before me straight as a ruler, the trees converging to a mysterious vanishing point. My ambulatory powers at that period were those of a very ancient crone. One swayed on the feet, balanced precariously, then gathered courage and staggered forward. But I was not afraid either of my own unbalanced state nor of the towering raspberry canes on either side, nor of the mysterious vanishing point, because ahead of me on the path was my father picking the raspberries.

He took no notice of me and I had probably staggered after him without his knowledge; but he was there, just ahead of me, and so I was safe. A slim, upright, agile young man, he picked the raspberries with concentration, for he disliked domestic chores and when cajoled into them (my mother was always in complete control throughout their blissful married life) got them out of the way as quickly as possible. His figure grew smaller and I lurched forward, for I must keep him in sight. And then suddenly he had reached the vanishing point and was gone. Actually of course only round the corner into the next raspberry aisle, but for me totally gone. The one I had to follow, the one without whom I was lost, had vanished. The darkness of total fear fell upon me, and falls also upon the memory. Just as I do not remember how I got into that green aisle I do not remember how I got out. I would like to think that I was a brave child and turning round found my own courageous way back to Nanny sewing under the mulberry tree, but I know myself and my cowardice too well for that. Without remembering what I did I know perfectly well that I sat down suddenly and howled blue murder until rescued.

That memory gives me an accurate and humbling bit of self-knowledge; a woman full of irrational fears and always preferring to be rescued by others in my predicaments rather than tackle them myself; and it also puts into perspective my relationship to my father. This always was the one I wanted to follow, this was the shining example. But he was always so far ahead, moving so quickly and with such agility. A time did come when we were close to each other; not because I progressed but because in a time of trouble for me he turned round and came back to meet me. Then he turned away again, moving to the vanishing point. I am able now to read a happy symbolism into that memory. He appeared to vanish but he was actually only on the other side of the green barrier that separates one mode of living from another. I have heard this described by someone who had entered it, and had been brought back to life again, as 'a green peace'.

Equally vivid is my first memory of my lovely mother. It is a little later in date for it is a memory of our next home, the house across the road to which we moved when my father, at the time of my birth Vice-Principal of the Theological College, became Principal. Standing on one of those typical woolly Edwardian hearthrugs she was holding me in her arms, showing me a vase of flowers on the drawing-room mantelpiece, trying to make me say the word 'pretty'. I tried and failed. P followed by r was quite impossible. That memory goes out like a blown candleflame and there is another. The three of us were on the same hearthrug together, our arms about each other and my mother was saying in her clear voice, "A three-fold cord shall not be broken."

No child can have lived in lovelier houses than my first two homes, or in a more enchanted city than Wells at the beginning of the century. Since the world became the noisy and noisome place it now is I have not returned because I have a phobia about going back to places where I have lived and that I have loved. I cannot bear to see them changed; an idiotic phobia since change is almost another name for life itself.

As I look back on my life I realise that together with the beauty of the world that holds them I have loved places too much and people not enough. Old age should enable us to redress, as far as possible, the imbalance of a life; in the case of earth lovers like myself, to detach ourselves as much as we can from the soil and wood and stone that will not endure, and to live more deeply in eternal human beings. But there is no reason why grateful memories should not accompany and memories of Wells are mixed up with my gratitude that I was born when I was, and can remember the place in the days when the passage of the water cart, spraying cool refreshment in the dust of Chamberlain Street, was an earth-shaking event; as exciting as the passage down St. Thomas's street of the lamplighter, and the sound of the muffin man's bell.

We are probably better off without the white summer dust, yet I remember it gratefully. It could be so thick in the country lanes about Wells in high summer that the slow trot of the pony's feet, pulling a governess cart full of children to Wookey Hole for a picnic, could hardly be heard. Quietness was complete in the countryside. If you stood and listened in the lanes in those days it was so still that you could hear a dog barking a mile off, and at times it could be complete in the streets of the city. And
sound, when it came, was much the same as it had always been; children coming out of school, bells pealing, dogs barking, the baker's boy whistling, someone singing within a house at evening, the sound drifting through an open window. It had hardly changed for centuries.

Even the houses had hardly changed. There must have been a few Victorian villas built here and there on the edge of the old city but I do not remember them. I only remember the changelessness of the place and the sense of safety that it gave, its only contacts with the outside world the few trains that slithered slowly and peacefully as earthworms through the valleys, stopping every ten minutes to pick up milk churns from under the lilac bushes on the station platforms, and to deposit in their place two sleepy passengers and a crate of hens.

The two houses seemed as impregnable as the place. To enter Tower House, down steps into a cool dark hall, was like going into a cave and it had, as its name implies, a stone tower with little rooms like monastic cells leading from the spiral stone staircase. It was my parents' first married home and when they went there, young and agile, they would drag a mattress up to the highest of the little rooms, lay it on the stone floor and sleep there on hot summer nights. I can imagine them laughing together when the spiders ran over their faces, and listening to the bats squeaking. The garden was enclosed within high stone walls and that too gave a sense of safety as well as privacy. I think Edwardians must have loved privacy more than we do today for if they had no stone walls they would shut themselves in with ramparts of shrubbery. The Principal's House, across the road, had no walls, only railings, but there was a great deal of shrubbery which I remember as dark and dense as a forest, so much so that when I had been playing there for some while alone a numinous dread would suddenly fall upon me and I would make a hasty exit out into the sunlight again.

The sunny south side of the Principal's House had mullioned windows and the whole of its face, apart from the eyes, was covered with wistaria. Drawing room, dining room and study had french windows leading to the garden and the bedrooms upstairs were decorated with carved cherubs of stone or wood. When I wrote A City of Bells I placed my family in Tower House but fetched the cherub population from across the road to be with them.

This seems the place to apologise for a maddening habit of which I think most novelists are guilty. We give a story the setting of a place or countryside that we love but we are not accurate. Our memories go down into the subconscious, get overlaid with one thing and another and are fished up again anyhow and pieced together with the glue of sheer inventiveness. I know perfectly well that if we are writing of a real place we should get the map out and check up on our facts. But then we are not writing history, we are writing a story, and the temptation to alter or improve on the facts for the good of the story is impossible to resist. We give the real place a fictitious name but that does not prevent it from being recognised, and I have had in the course of my writing life many letters from irritated readers who have gone on pilgrimage to the setting of a book they have liked, and then found fields and woods either in the wrong place or not there at all. They have every right to be irritated and I am sorry.

I think the fictitious name may be at the bottom of the trouble. It is there because to use the real name might cause the inhabitants of a town or village to wonder if real people were being portrayed, and it is a matter of pride with us that we should portray entirely imaginary people. At least we think they are imaginary. My first novel was written about my mother's childhood and portrayed real people but otherwise, speaking for myself alone, while I am writing a story I think each character is my own creation; it is only when I read the finished book over afterwards I see that people I have known have all made their contribution to my characters. There is not a complete portrait of a real person but many shadows and reflections of real people.

And so the fictitious name and characters compel as it were an alteration of the furniture. In our hearts every one of us would like to create a new world, less terrible than this one, a world where there is at least a possibility that things may work out right. The greatest writers are able to do this. In the Lord of the Rings Professor Tolkien has created a world that is entirely new and if the book ends in haunting sadness Frodo and Sam do at least throw the ring in the fire; if it had been in this world that they embarked on their terrible journey they would have died half-way up the mountain. And so, even with lesser writers, a story is a groping attempt to make a new world, even if the attempt ends in nothing better than the rearrangement of the furniture.

Speaking of ideal worlds makes me ask myself, do I remember the world of my childhood actually as it was or do I rearrange my memories to make a more beautiful world than the one I really inhabited? Probably I do, since memory is never trustworthy, but if I do it is unwittingly. It is truth now and not fiction that I am at least trying to write.

I think I am correct in thinking that the garden of the Principal's House was a marvellous one. It was in those days large and as well as the shrubbery it had everything in it that a garden should have; grass and trees, flowers and vegetables, and it had something else in it which few gardens can boast; a cathedral for one of its walls. Beside the Cathedral, under an archway, a gate opened into a small graveyard and from there another archway led into the cloisters. Whenever I liked I could run through the green garth to the cloisters, and I often did. I liked being there alone and gazing out through the arches at the central square of green grass that seemed to breathe out cool quietness as a well does. Years later, when I lived at Oxford, I would escape in the same way to the small cloister at Magdalen College. It had the same sort of stillness.

From the Wells cloisters steps led down to a place of grass and tall trees, and beyond was the outer wall of the Bishop's Palace, and the drawbridge over the moat where the arrogant swans pulled a bell when they were hungry and bread was immediately thrown to them.

But I had a nearer way to the palace than that. On the south of our garden a low wall separated us from a peaceful curve of water, a kind of lake, with flowers growing beside it, that stretched out like a friendly arm from the main waterway of the moat. Beside it was a green watery place that was then an extension of our garden, but I think is separated from it now. It was reached through a low gate just the right size for a child. Some of the wells that gave Wells its name were half-hidden in the long grass. One, to me the most mysterious, was surrounded by bushes and barbed wire but a bigger one formed the large pool where we tried at one time to keep rainbow trout. But alas our pool was not still but living water, and the trout vanished down to the deep hidden place from which the water welled. It was a disaster that should have been foreseen, and worried me dreadfully, uncertain as I was as to the ultimate happiness of the trout. Irises grew in the long grass, and enormous blue periwinkles. I have never seen such periwinkles, not even in Devon. A country name for them is Joy of the Ground and I loved them dearly; not least because of the fairy brooms that grew in their hearts.

The path that led through this wild green place ended at a door that led into the palace gardens, and we had been given a key of the door so that Nanny and I, and any visitors who might be staying with us, could go into the palace gardens whenever we liked, and my mother used to give me the key and allow me to go by myself to visit Mrs Kennion in the Long Gallery of the palace. And now I am sure that I am remembering not what was there but what I thought was there. A locked door and a key in one's hand, and the power to unlock the door and pass from one world to another, is enough to send any child's imagination off at the gallop. For it was another world on the other side of the door. There was a palace there, enchanted gardens and the ruins of a great banqueting hall. And with the turn of a key I could enter this kingdom.

Now what I am sure was not there was the thick dense wood into which the door opened after I had turned the key. Nor do I think that a door could have been set not in a stone wall or wooden paling

but in the living wall of the wood, a dense wall of twisted briars and plaited branches, thickset with crimson thorns and pointed leaves as firm and hard as onyx and chrysoprase. One opened the door, went through it and beyond was the darkness of the wood. I was often frightened in the darkness of the very ordinary shrubbery in our own garden but not in the wood that I am sure was not there.

The darkness of that wood has fallen upon every memory except one of the gardens through which I ran to reach Mrs Kennion in the Long Gallery. I know that they were beautiful but I have only that one memory. It is of a mossgrown garden path arched over by nut trees in full leaf, the green moss a soft carpet under the feet, the cool green leaves making the place as secret as a shrine. There is no one to be seen but an ecstasy of joy is alive under the trees. But did I really run along that path?

My mother had told me that it was in the palace gardens that she had finally told my father she would marry him. When first proposed to she had said she would consider the matter. She had said, in the true Victorian manner, that it was very sudden, as indeed it was. She had been sent from her Channel Island home to college in England and there she had made friends with the daughters of one of the canons of Wells Cathedral, Canon Church, and sometimes in the holidays she went to stay with them. It was in their home that my father, then Chaplain of the Theological College, met her and fell in love with her. This to her was nothing new for she was vivacious and gay and according to her less attractive sisters she could be a heartless devastator. But she did not want to be married. She had doctors on both sides of her ancestry and she wanted to be one herself, the first woman doctor in the family. She scandalised people both by her ideas and the things that she did. Interested in anatomy as she naturally was she carried human bones about in her handbag and tipped them out upon the seats of railway carriages when looking for her ticket. She was an intrepid bicyclist and whirled downhill with her feet up like any errand boy. She was a keen fencer and practised the art in very masculine costume. She was altogether shockingly modern.

My mother told me that she had to think hard when she was first proposed to by my father. She did not want to give up studying to be a doctor and if she had to marry the very last she wanted to marry was a clergyman. Nevertheless before my father had seen her she had taken a good look at him. He had come one evening to see Canon Church in the house in the Liberty, after my mother had gone up to bed. With her bedroom door still half open she had heard his voice in the hall, had whisked into her frilly dressing-gown and run to lean over the banisters unseen. She had had a good look at the young man below. He had just come from compline in the chapel at the top of the Vicars Close and his long black gown became his erect slenderness. He was good-looking with dark hair and eyes. My mother herself was a golden girl with fair hair and golden-brown eyes. She went back to her room not only thoughtful but for the first time considerably shaken, and when later she had to consider what life would be like parted from this man she knew it would only be dust and ashes. So at a palace party she had beguiled him into a secluded part of the palace gardens and said she would do it. They were married as quickly as possible as my

still in the earth of Devonshire) when an impulse sent me to the window of the sitting room. It was spring, and cold, but the air had that special quality of a cold spring, the coldness of living water, and was scented with the wild violets that grew in clumps about the old garden. I was looking out at the garden, and over the sweetbrier hedge to the field beyond, and feeling the first twinges of love for the place, when a woman came down the narrow path in front of the window. She came from the place where the path ended abruptly in the hedge and I was told later that there used to be a gate there leading to the lane. Her name was Froniga. Some while later, after I had had time to absorb the beauties of my new home, I wrote something of her history and that of the cottage in a book called The White Witch. How accurate it is I have no means of knowing, since only the last sixty years of the life of the cottage is known and Froniga lived here in the seventeenth century. It seems to me entirely accurate but I may be mistaken. However that is the sort of way in which a book begins for most storytellers; with a light in the mind. But this glimmer is certainly not inspiration. As I understand the great word only the great ones have it. Blake was inspired. Wordsworth was inspired. But the great flood of light which poets and mystics pour into the world has nothing in common with the glowworm sparks of the small fry; except for the fact that something, or some being, must have lit it in the first place.

I have never tried to do carpentry but I am sure the process is much the same. The love of the wood, the feel of it in the hands, the glow in the mind and then the slow labour of craftsmanship. With a book this labour is so slow that though writers will tell you they love their work, yet they never want
to do it. A book existing in the mind is one thing, enclosed there it is delightful company, but when the glow becomes an explosive personality demanding to get out that is quite another. It must be got out, or the writer will go mad, but getting the thing down on paper is a grinding slog. The thought of starting the process yet again fills one with dark despair. Anything not to start. I heard Joyce Grenfell say once in a broadcast that whenever she knew she must get down to writing a sketch she remembered it was her duty to do some very elaborate cooking. I have heard of writers who had to be locked in their workrooms by their irritated relatives before they could be induced to make a start.

I don't know what other writers do in this miserable condition. I only know what I do. Sit down at the appointed time for work and stare in terror at the empty sheet of paper before me. How many of these blank white papers must be covered with hideous black marks before the book is finished? Hundreds of them. But what a crazy way to earn a living, making dirty marks on clean paper. Of what use can they be to anyone when made? None. Yet what else can I do? What else am I fit for? Nothing. Better make a start, turn the tap on (that means grip the pen with loathing) and see what comes. Nothing comes. There is an airlock somewhere. No good. Try again tomorrow. One tries again tomorrow for several days and then the airlock suddenly yields and there's a small trickle of water. A couple of pages are made a mess of. Next day they are read over, found to be hopeless and torn up. The process is repeated and then suddenly one happy day the tap is running freely; unbelievably one is once more writing a book. For a short while that is. Then comes another airlock, and then another, until the first draft of a book is finished at last. Now it is there, out of us, and we feel what the carpenter feels when the chair is formed and in being. Now he has only to correct his mistakes as well as he is able, to smooth the wood and polish it. The rewriting of a book, and when the time comes the correcting of the proofs, is pure joy.

Do we put ourselves in our books? Speaking for myself I do not put the woman I am into them but after I had been writing for years I noticed the regular appearance in story after story of a tall graceful woman, well-balanced, intelligent, calm, capable and tactful. She is never flustered, forgetful, frightened, irritable or nervy. She does not drop bricks, say the opposite of what she means, let saucepans boil over or smash her best teapot. She is all I long to be and all I never will be. She is in complete reverse a portrait of myself.

How long do writers have to slog at it before they can earn a living? An unanswerable question. Some (especially very clever young men) succeed almost at once. Others work for years before success comes. Some, richly deserving, never have it. Others, undeserving, do. I have been told, and I think it is true, that the worst thing that can happen to a writer is to succeed too soon. Success too quickly attained is hard to hold. The longer you have been working when it comes the more likely you are to hold it. I was one of the latter lucky ones. I started writing in childhood, my first novel was published when I was thirty-two. I was forty-five before I found myself a best-seller on the strength of one book only. I think the reason for this is that writing is more a matter of practice than anyone realises. Words to a writer are the same as bricks to a builder. It is necessary to learn about their size and shape and how to put them in place. The imagination and vivid life of someone young, poured into a first book, or even a second or third, can sometimes shape the bricks into place by sheer instinct and good luck, but when the fire dies down a little the building is not so easy. But perhaps this is no more than conjecture. The process of creation, however humble it may be, is always mysterious.

Do I mind when the critics give me hard knocks or, as is more often the case, dismiss me with contempt? When I was younger I minded dreadfully, now that I am older and I hope more humble I think they are probably quite right and so I mind less; though I am still almost overcome by joy at the rare good criticism and think the critic an extremely intelligent man or woman. I think the sensible writer should sit easy to adverse criticism. It is foolish to mind because if you work hard to the best of your ability, and with all the honesty of which you are capable, you have done all that the most brilliant writer alive could have done. The results unfortunately will not be as imposing, but no worker of integrity should consider results unless he has a wife and six children to support. If he has he is in a dreadful fix and only he can sort it out. But such is the contrariness of life that so often the lone wolf, setting out upon the trail in the happy knowledge that he has only the one mouth to feed, finds himself to his astonishment earning enough to fill half a dozen. Then he too is in a fix but what he does about it is nothing to do with minding what the critics say. Another reason for not minding is that you are not writing to please the critics but to please yourself and your readers. Yourself first, because basically we all write because we must and all other reasons are subsidiary to the need for self-expression, but for our readers with all our hearts because without them we are lost and we love them more than they know. For we have to earn our living by doing this work and how could we do it if these beloved people did not buy our books?

I think it is a part of our gratitude that, perhaps unconsciously, and without knowing it, we want to share our faith and what it has done for us and to make contact with those who think as we do. I say unconsciously because in my own case when a book comes into my mind it comes simply as a story; personal belief is something that comes in apparently without my knowledge or contriving. But I think it is this latter unintended thing that makes the strongest link between reader and writer. We all hold our faith with a certain amount of fear and trembling (even Blake wrote, "My hand trembles exceedingly upon the Rock of Ages") and to find that others share our faith has a steadying influence, especially in these days when the Rock of Ages himself is for ever being prodded and sounded to see if he is still there. To those of us who think the tapping hammers would not sound so loudly if he were not there the likemindedness is a very special joy.

And so if it is your readers you are writing for why mind about the critics? They are highly intelligent people and you could only please them if you and your readers were as intelligent as they are. Yet that sentence as it stands is not entirely true since some of my readers have intellects that make me tremble with awe. They read me, I imagine, because of this likemindedness that has nothing to do with the intellect. And this brings me to something which I have a great wish to say. I owe my readers an incal
culable debt, which I shall never be able to pay. I am not only grateful that they need me at all, I am even more grateful for the affection which for forty years they have expressed in so many delightful ways. From among them have come some of my greatest friends. And there is one more thing, which humbles me to the ground. Sometimes, and there is one reader in particular of whom I think, there comes to me an anonymous gift, and I always have a conviction that the gift comes from someone who cannot easily afford it. But that is the way things are in the kingdom of heaven, whose presence with us here on earth is shown in such ways as these.

I come to the last question my readers ask me, have there been other writers in your family?

The only writer was my father but the single likeness between us was an inability to compose on a typewriter; neither of us could think without actually holding a pen in the hand. My father was a theologian, and his books were works of scholarship. I had written only four books before he died and though paternity demanded of him that he should read them he found the first three very hard going indeed, but though I begged him not to waste his time he persevered, taking a chapter a day with determined patience. A fourth, a book about sixteenth century Oxford called Towers in the Mist that I dedicated to him, he liked better, because he was interested to see to what use I had put the historical books he had borrowed for me from the Christ Church library at Oxford, where we were then living. "You

There was a second storyteller in the house, Sarah our cook, and she also reigned supreme beside a fire and a woolly hearthrug. The rug spread before the kitchen range was black, not white, but just as comforting to bare legs. I believe that in her own way she was as fine a storyteller as my mother, though their styles were perhaps as different as those of Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell. Going about her work Sarah was a gentle, sweet-voiced little old woman, a marvellous cook, utterly selfless, her only object in life to work for her family, but like my mother she must have had power for when she was enthroned in her rocking chair, a clean white apron tied round her waist over her print frock, she seemed to grow in stature. Her stories were taken from the Old Testament and all the fire packed up within her gentleness flowed out in them. She used her eyes and hands with wonderful dramatic effect and as the story gathered momentum she would rock faster and faster. One day she told me the story of Elijah going up into heaven in his fiery chariot. It grew more and more exciting and when the climax was reached and Elijah was whirled to meet his God she urged the rocker to its utmost speed, crying out loudly, "The chariots of fire and the horsemen thereof!" and flung her apron over her head. I was terrified. I scrambled up from the hearthrug and fled from the lightnings and thunders that filled the big old kitchen.

Storytellers, writers, readers aloud, I think they come in that order, for until the story is written down the readers aloud cannot come into action. But theirs

is a splendid gift, akin to that of the actor; and perhaps the actor came upon the stage of history very early indeed and was acting out in song and dance the splendour of war and the glory of the beasts even before the painters portrayed them in line and colour on the walls of their caves. However it came into being reading aloud is one of the arts, and proficiency in it is something that children have always demanded from their elders; even today if the telly happens to be out of order. My mother never read aloud. There was no need. Had she done so it would have been as though William Blake (whom she loved deeply) had set himself down with his delicate brush and pen to copy other people's visions instead of revealing his own. Certainly Sarah never read the Bible aloud. I doubt if she had even read it; though she must have listened with her whole being when she had heard it read by some master of the art in her village church, some reader of the calibre of my father, who would make every character in the books he read to my mother and me as alive as though they were living with us in the house.

Mrs Hollis was also a reader aloud. My mother's two great friends in her college days, Margaret Hollis and Lily Church, at whose home she had met my father, were still her great friends at Wells. Lily Church did not marry and in Wells days was Aunt Lily to many children; as were my mother's sisters, Marie-Louise, Emily and Irene. There are no aunts today and I sometimes think that is partly what is the matter with us. There are sisters of a child's mother or father, kindly at times but too wrapped up in themselves and their careers to be aunts. An Edwardian aunt was by definition selfless and unattached; or sufficiently loosely attached to get free from what she was doing when wanted. When a crisis blew up, a real tragedy or a minor difficulty, an unmarried aunt was almost at once upon the doorstep. As I remember them they were competent as well as selfless. They came aboard a distressed household like a pilot and brought the ship safe to port. When my father became Principal of the Theological College and moved across the road to the Principal's House his friend Arthur Hollis, afterwards Bishop of Taunton, became Vice-Principal and I think three of his distinguished sons were born at Tower House. Mrs Hollis was not only lovely to look at but she had a serenity surprising in the mother of a family of small boys, and a good reader aloud should always have serenity; it casts a spell. I have two memories of her that especially shine out, just as certain paradisial dreams do, clear and bright against the darkness of much forgetfulness. The first is of her reading aloud to a group of children in the panelled drawing room at Tower House, a small beautiful room half-way up the stairs. The sun was warm on the panelling, for it was summer, and there were flowers in the room and a sweet smell. Perhaps they were Mrs Simpkins pinks, or syringa or Dolly Perkins roses. The children sat on the floor and Mrs Hollis sat on a low chair, her wide skirts spread about her. She had a beautiful voice and I think the sweetest face of any woman I have ever seen. I had hard work to admit to myself that she was lovelier than my mother but I had to in the end. She was. She lacked my mother's vivacity but she was more serene and serenity, I believe, is the first essential for lasting beauty as well as for reading aloud. The book she was reading was called The Cocky Oily Bird. I do not know if I have spelt this bird's name correctly, and I do not know certainly who wrote the book, and I have never been able to find it. I do not remember anything definite about The Cocky Oily Bird yet he is with me today, and is I think the original of a bird who seems to fly in and out of my mind whenever I am writing, and was especially with me when I was writing The Bird in the Tree. Perhaps I could find a copy of The Cocky Oily Bird in the world if I looked a bit harder, but I think I am rather afraid, if I found it, of finding him perhaps not so wonderful after all. The book might have owed the whole of its magic to the charm of the woman who read it aloud.

My second memory of her was when I was taken by her two older sons to visit the third on the day when he was one week old. It was an occasion of great solemnity and I can remember how my heart beat as the three small children approached the door in procession and the eldest knocked. I had not seen the baby yet, indeed I do not think that I had ever seen any very small baby at close quarters before, and the whole thing was fraught with magic and mystery. We were bidden to enter, and went in, and facing us was a nurse seated in a chair with the baby enthroned on her lap. And babies were indeed enthroned in those days. Their lace-trimmed long robes flowed almost to the ground and their royalty was awe-inspiring. The sight of that baby was for me one of those moments of dumbfounded astonishment that a child never forgets. He was so small and yet he was so royal. He had not been with us a short while ago and now here he was. What could anyone be expected to make of such an astonishing occurrence. The younger of the little boys pointed out the baby's excellent points but I hardly listened, and then suddenly I remembered that a person I loved was in some way very much concerned in this and I looked round for Mrs Hollis. She was also enthroned, in a billowy-white bed only a few feet from me, watching the children at the window. Our eyes met, she smiled at me and I was in heaven. And there the memory abruptly vanishes. There would be sadness in such memories but for the remembrance that being true they are eternal.

For practical purposes the event had repercussions when I returned to my own home across the road. Every morning I ran to my mother's room hoping and expecting that she had a small brother for me. He was intensely real to me and I was convinced he would come. I did not ask for him, merely looked around, leaving my poor mother completely mystified as to what I wanted. He did not come and having been told that if you can't have the best you should make do with the second best I demanded a baby doll, and was told I must wait. I was angry and frustrated.

At Christmas I got the baby, a wax one in a long robe that cascaded over a variety of undergarments, and over all a long cloak with bonnet and cape attached. He was such a feminine doll, that I decided to change his sex and called her Ida after my mother. I loved that doll with all the passion of which I was capable and she was with me until I was approaching middle age, when I felt it my duty to part with her to a child whose need seemed greater than mine. I read somewhere that the deeds of our life which we regret most deeply are the good deeds. The cynical remark is perfectly true. I wish I had Ida still. I wish she was still lying in my drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, and that I could take her out and look once more at her homely and scratched, yet angelic, pink wax face. She was such a cuddly doll, and her face was soft to kiss.

The doll I still possess, Madame d'Anvers, is too distinguished to be homely. I do not remember cuddling Madame. The cold reserve of her aristocratic countenance forbade the liberty. But if I love her less than I loved the baby doll I can never part from her because she was the first gift of my Guernsey grandfather. He was in Paris when he heard the news of the birth of his first grandchild and he went straight out and bought Madame for me. And so she is as old as I am; but she has worn much better and before leaving her for my grandfather I will describe her, simply for the sake of my own pleasure in her. Her face is white china, delicately tinted, and there is not a wrinkle in it. Her hair, lying in curls on her shoulders, is as golden as ever it was and is surmounted by a tall headdress of stiffened lace ornamented with a large pink bow. Her dress, one of those wonderful striped eighteenth century dresses so often seen in pictures of the period, is tightly laced over her bosom, fits close to her slender waist and then billows stiffly out like an umbrella. From gold chains at her waist hang two little watches painted with flowers, and she used to have pearl rings in her ears and a tiny golden cross on a bit of black velvet round her neck, but these have mysteriously disappeared and I cannot find them anywhere. The loss is tragic. She has a purple silk apron with two large pockets. If anyone should have sufficient temerity to lift her skirt lace-trimmed undergarments are revealed, white stockings on her shapely legs and wooden clogs on her feet. Her body and her hands are made of white kid and she is over one foot tall. Knowing my grandfather I am quite sure he chose for me the most beautiful doll in the whole of Paris. I am also sure that he could not afford !t for he never had any money. But to write of my grandfather I must leave Wells and go to the Island.

feted by the clean cold wind was great joy. And then came the excitement as the coast of Guernsey came into view and slipped slowly by to starboard. I have a little map of Guernsey drawn by my grandmother Marie-Louise Ozanne in the year 1865, a few years before she married. It is exquisitely drawn in Indian ink on a bit of handmade paper measuring only four and a half by three and a half inches, but with the tip of her fine pen she has portrayed trees and windmills, and it would seem every road and lane in the beloved little island, all clear and tiny as a map made in Lilliput.

I am looking now at the little map because I could not remember which came first along the coast; Vale Castle, St Sampson's Harbour or Mont Crevell. They were passed in that order. And then Soux Point was rounded and the little town of St Peter Port was in sight, the houses crowding up the hillside one behind the other, looking out to sea over each other's shoulders to watch the ships sailing in. One could see the spire of the town church, and the pier and Castle Cornet on its rock, and there at last was the harbour wall and the waiting people. As the boat drew slowly in to its mooring-place I would try to pick out my grandfather, and perhaps an aunt or even two aunts, who would probably be with him. The moment when I saw him and the moment when he saw me and lifted his hat in greeting were perfect moments. Then the perfection began to unwind itself, just as my mother's stories did, and became a thread of joy through the long business of the docking, making it not only bearable but beautiful.

The shouts of sailors and porters, the shrill whistles, the bangs and thuds of cargo being unloaded, the sound of the gangways being run out, the scream of the gulls overhead, the sound of the wind and the slap of the sea all made up a symphony of sound, the music of arrival in a happy haven.

I was in my grandfather's arms at last and then standing beside him holding his hand, speechless with the sudden shyness that would come upon me because I had not seen him for a year. Family news was shouted above the babel of noise and the special porter, who always attended our family arrivals and departures with as much interest as though the family were his own, collected the luggage and we pushed our way to where the cabs waited.

There was always a great deal of excitement when the steamer from England arrived, for it was the island's one link with the great world. It brought the mails, and sons and daughters and grandchildren returning perhaps from the other side of the world. The time of its arrival was always uncertain for it could be delayed for hours on end by bad weather, and upon one occasion, still remembered when I was a child, it did not arrive at all for a storm had driven it on the rocks and nearly all the passengers were drowned. "The boat's in!" was a cry that would echo through any Guernsey house that had a view of the harbour, and it was always a cry of relief. I can remember seeing the road that ran between the town church and the harbour empty and deserted, but when the boat came in it appeared to be the hub of the universe.

The vehicles that waited for travellers beyond the pier were a varied assortment; private carriages, cabs, brakes, and the enchanting little conveyances that were a specialty of the island. They were a cross between a bath-chair and a hansom cab, but low to the ground, with the driver sitting in front and not behind. But they held only two people, and such luggage as they could pile on their knees and feet, and were far too small to accommodate my grandfather, three aunts, myself and the luggage. And if it was Aunt Emily who had brought me from England there was a good deal of luggage; for she was not only pretty, she was dressy, and favoured very large hats trimmed with roses. We had to have a cab and just as there was a special porter who looked after the Collenette family there was a special cabby who drove us. I wish I could remember the names of these two kindly men, I can remember the face of the porter, but not of the cabby; though I remember the smell of horses and straw which pervaded his cab and which I thought a lovely smell. They were both, I think, bilingual. They knew enough English to make themselves understood by travellers and for the rest they spoke the French of the island patois that might not have been understood in the streets of Paris.

Those were still the good days when the island was orientated more towards France than England, but the change was coming. My grandparents grew up speaking French but by the time I knew them they had changed to English, which they spoke with a French intonation. 1 thought the change all wrong, for the Channel Islands have never belonged to England, but England to them. They originally formed part of the Duchy of Normandy and when their duke conquered England they naturally conquered it too. The situation has not been altered. Jersey and Guernsey have for years now tolerated an English Lieutenant-Governor on each island. But they keep him in his place. I once attended a meeting of the Guernsey Parliament. Before proceedings started the Lieutenant-Governor entered arrayed in full-dress military uniform with a sword by his side, and bowed to the assembly with a wonderful combination of dignity and humility. They acknowledged his existence with politeness and he seated himself on a throne-like chair. He was there as a representative of the King of England, but throughout the long proceedings he spoke not a word. He was not allowed to.

The Channel Islanders are a proud people and my mother's family were no exeption to the rule. One of my aunts once said to me, "We think a lot of ourselves," and indeed they did. The founder of their family was William the Conqueror's cupbearer who fought at the Battle of Hastings and was of royal blood. (At least so my mother's family have always maintained but I am myself agnostic about this. If in a future life I am proved wrong none of my maternal ancestors will speak to me.) Although my mother was never able to go back to Guernsey after my birth she remained a staunch Channel Islander. She was a woman of strong feelings, wonderfully controlled. Only once do I remember an outburst of passion. It was at the beginning of the last war, when England was forced to abandon the islands to German occupation. My mother burst into a storm of grief and fury which shocked me speechless. "I will hate England till I die," she said. And she did.

And so for English people arrival at the island was like landing on a foreign shore. It must be some particular arrival that I remember when I think of clearing skies after rain and wind, and of wet cobbles shining in pale yellow sunlight as the cab rattled us away from the harbour. The tall houses of St Peter Port are built in the French fashion and the streets are steep and narrow. The streets of Wells slope gently so that St Peter Port seemed to me strangely exciting, more like a grey stone mountain rent with deep narrow chasms than a town. Here and there the chasms were so steep that instead of streets there were long flights of steps between the houses. In the lower part of the town were the exciting shops, dark and foreign, some of them fronting narrow cobbled lanes where only pedestrians could pass up and down. The big covered market was here, and the small stone houses where the poorer people lived. Then, as one climbed, came the bigger houses of the elite of the island. They had steps leading to elegant front doors flanked by tubs of blue hydrangeas or agapanthus, and behind them were gardens where palm trees grew in the mild climate, Guernsey lilies, fuchsias and escalonia. In England we know escalonia as a hedge, or a bush ornamented with rather small sparse sticky flowers, but in Guernsey it grows to a tree and the scent of the many pink blossoms after rain comes in great gusts of perfume. My grandparents, after their children had grown up, had had a house in St Peter Port and from the high steep garden one could see the harbour, but I remember it only dimly, for they could not long afford it, and the house I remember so clearly and visited so often was a modern one, beyond and above St Peter Port. We reached it finally after a last slow drag up the hill and were out in the country, on the flat fields of the hilltop, in sunlight and sparkling air. I believe that hilltop is now completely urban but at the time the row of Victorian villas was lonely and stood out starkly as a sore thumb. But I did not think them ugly. I thought my grandparents' house perfect. The walls were of strong grey granite, and they needed to be for the wind up there could be terrific, and there was nothing but the flat fields between the houses and the cliff edge, and beyond was the sea; and beyond that on clear days one could see a blue smudge against the horizon that was the coast of France. There was a small square of flower garden in front with a bed of mignonette beneath the bay window of the drawing room. Above was a balcony and a passion flower climbed over it and covered the front of the house. It grew as luxuriantly as the mignonette below and the smell of all those flowers in hot sunshine would drift in through the open windows. There was a larger bit of garden behind the house but this was given over to a green lawn where stood the imposing array of instruments used by my grandfather, who among many other things was a meteorological expert, for measuring in and foretelling the weather. The cab stopped at the front gate and my grand-other came out to welcome us. Her face glowed 1th love but she moved with her usual unimpaired dignity. Nothing ever upset my grandmother's dig-nity. If her house had started to fall upon her in an earthquake she would have moved out from it in a serene and dignified manner. Had her dignity cost her her life she would have considered death preferable to unbecoming hurry. Like my mother she was a brave woman; I do not think that either of them knew what fear was. She was tall and beautiful, with fine dark eyes, and she never lost her slim figure and upright carriage. In my childhood her abundant hair was iron-grey but I have a photo of her when she was very young, showing a mass of dark hair piled in a high crown of plaits on top of her head. She had great charm, and again like my mother no trouble at all in getting her own way. She did not even have to try. She dressed in long full-skirted graceful black dresses, with a black cloak and bonnet for out of doors. She always carried an umbrella when she left the house. She had three, one for wet weather, one for doubtful weather, and the third for use on the days when her husband could assure her that it would not rain.

If it was Emily who had brought me over she was the first to be greeted, for she suffered cruelly at sea and must immediately be comforted. That done my grandmother and I greeted each other affectionately. We loved each other but not I think to any remarkable extent. I admired my grandmother but I found her a little intimidating. Though my mother had inherited her mother's strong character, in looks she was like her gentle father, and the velvet glove she wore disguised the iron determination better than my grandmother's height and dignity. I suspect that my grandmother thought me a shockingly spoilt child; in which opinion she was perfectly correct. And in nothing did I take after the Collenettes. I was entirely and distressingly English. When years later my grandmother had another granddaughter, the child of her younger son William, she had a grandchild after her own heart, a little creature dark-eyed and vivacious and strongminded as herself, and as brimful of charm.

My memories of that arrival stop with my grandmother's greeting. I recall only being in bed and marvelling at the extraordinary phenomenon of a bed that plunged and rose with the motion of a ship in a rough sea, even though it stood perfectly still on a flat floor.

The morning brought reunion with my grandfather in his study on the first floor above the front room. I made a point of standing at his elbow when he was working and if I drove him distracted his serene selflessness let no signs of irritation appear. In memory his little study is full of sunshine, with the scent of the passion flowers rioting over the balcony outside coming in through the open window. It would not even have occurred to me to stand at my father's elbow while he worked; I doubt if he would have tolerated me there. The difference between the two men was that my father did not love children as children, though he did his duty by them when related to him with admirable patience, while my grandfather loved all children, clean or dirty, good or bad, with equal devotion. He was an indulgent father and the kind of husband tall, strong-minded women so often marry. He was half a head shorter than his wife, gentle and yielding. Yet possibly he yielded to my grandmother in the same way that my father yielded to my mother; for love's sake and desiring peace; for I do not think he was a weak man. No weak man could have been so undefeated in adversity as he always was.

Following the family tradition he had chosen medicine for his profession but after only a short period of work he became ill with diabetes. There was no insulin then but with determination and a strict diet he struggled on and lived to be over eighty. But his sight was affected and though he did not go completely blind until he was old, and with strong glasses could continue to read and write, he could

not be a doctor. But he wanted to put his medical knowledge to good use and so he opened a chemist's shop. In those days a chemist was almost a doctor; his shop was not flooded with cosmetics and cameras and was almost entirely used in serving those with minor ailments and injuries who could not afford the doctor. My grandfather was expert in help but as he was just as dedicated to those who could not pay as to those who could his business did not thrive financially. He could never succeed in any sort of business. He was too conscientious and too compassionate. In the early days of their marriage my grandmother had to help him by starting a little dame's school in their home and teaching the neighbours' small children with her own.

They lived at that time in an old house called Le Hechet, that belonged to my grandmother's family. It had a yard with a pump in the centre, a good garden, and was surrounded by fields, and close to it, joy of joys for children, was a windmill. The house still exists though the fields have vanished. When I wrote Island Magic I did not keep the family at Le Hechet but moved them to a farmhouse which fascinated me. And that too still exists. The family were deeply united and loving, all the more so because life was not easy. The elder son Arnold died in childhood and neither of his parents ever quite recovered from the grief and shock of losing their firstborn. That was the only deep sorrow but there was an acerbation in the person of Aunt Marguerite.

In those days maiden ladies whose parents had died and who had not sufficient means to keep up an establishment on their own had to be supported by their brothers or nephews. The bliss of independence could not be theirs since it was not genteel for a gentlewoman to earn her own living. Lovers of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice will remember the anxiety among the males of her family when Charlotte did not marry. Which of them would have to have her? Mr Collins solved the problem. But there was no Mr Collins to solve the problem for Aunt Marguerite's brothers when her parents died. And then their nephew Adolphus, my grandfather, announced his impending marriage to Marie-Louise Ozanne. Magnificent! They should have Aunt Marguerite, and upon their return from their honeymoon they immediately had her. She lived to a great old age and her thwarted instincts found satisfaction in gadvising her niece by marriage in her domestic and Imaternal duties. Poor Marie-Louise. But also poor i* Aunt Marguerite, for what else had she to do?

When they had outgrown their mother's teaching the children were sent to a day school, the girls to Guernsey Ladies' College, William first to the Gentlemen's College and afterwards to a school in France, |and the four girls suffered deeply under the stigma Jof having a father in trade. They were an old Island ifamily, descended, they thought, from William the iConqueror's cupbearer, but their father was a chemist land they were made to suffer for it. Life in the Vic-Itorian era was less violent and corrupt than ours but lat least in this age the distinction between a doctor land a chemist causes no actual suffering, and the I Aunt Marguerites of that generation are in this one headmistresses and members of Parliament.

But apart from Aunt Marguerite and the chemist's ishop the children had an ideally happy childhood. IThey did not have enough to eat and that left its jmark upon them, fpr they were none of them physically strong in later life, but since bread with a smear

of jam upon it is filling enough without butter they were not aware of their deprivation and they were given an unusual amount of freedom. They had the cliffs and bays for their playground, the water lanes, the fields and the windmill. Their parents loved them and I think it can be said of my grandfather that he lived for them and the wife he worshipped.

But he was a man of many interests. One was promoting the teetotal cause. I do not know at what stage of his life he became a purveyor of soft drinks, nor whether they were an adjunct of the chemist's shop or superseded it, but I do know that a large cart full of crates and rattling bottles, drawn by a couple of horses and with A. Collenette inscribed upon it, was a matter of pride to me since I had no sense of shame in having a grandfather in trade; I did not at that time go to school and no one jeered at me for it. It was also a matter of pride to stand outside the library at St Peter Port and read the weather forecast that hung on its wall framed in a glass case, printed in large clear letters and signed A. Collenette. And if a little group of people had gathered and were attentively reading my grandfather's forecast I was in bliss. Weather matters on an island. Those attentive people were wondering if a crossing to Alderney in a small boat across a strip of water famed for its choppiness would be possible today. Others were anxious about a business trip to Le Havre, and yet others who wanted to go sailing or fishing, or were planning a picnic tomorrow, were bothered about the wind. Would it rain? They stood in front of the library asking my grandfather and their complete faith in him made my proud heart beat almost to bursting point.

My grandfather was above all a man of science.

It was his first love, enthroned in his heart long before the age of sixteen when he first proposed marriage to Marie-Louise Ozanne. It was a tragedy that, failing medicine he was not able to make it his profession. He was not a good man of business but as a scientist he would have been happy. He read every scientific book he could get hold of and the amount of knowledge he amassed in a lifetime was very great. Yet if science was his first love it was science that brought him one of the great griefs of his life, for while he was still young he completely lost the religious faith that had meant so much to him. The scientific conclusions of his day made it impossible for him to accept the book of Genesis as literal truth. And if Genesis was not true then the Bible, every word of which he had believed to be directly inspired by God, could no longer be the basis for his faith. After an agonising struggle the ground went from under his feet and he fell into the darkness of unbelief, a darkness that shadowed his whole life.

When I stood beside him in his study my grandfather was writing scientific articles and pamphlets. When he became aware of me he would patiently put down his pen and smile. He had golden brown eyes like my mother's. In appearance he was very French, with a pointed grey beard and thick grey hair worn en brosse. He was the kindest man I have ever known. I cannot believe that he ever had an unkind thought or spoke an unkind word in his life and his inner sadness was well hidden. He was a great tease and again like my mother he had a gift for merry repartee. He was driving the family out for a picnic one day and my mother, who had just become engaged, was sitting beside him on the box discoursing vivaciously on the marvels of this man she was to marry. Even in those days tourists had penetrated to the island, and native inhabitants able to provide them with the glories of an island tea would put a notice to that effect in the window, adding hopefully, Ici on parle anglais. As they passed such a notice, with my mother in full spate, my grandfather turned round to the rest of the family with twinkling eyes and ejaculated, "Ici on parle fiance."

I think of the music of Mozart when I think of my grandfather. The great composers seem to represent different types of spiritual greatness in men. The Word speaks perhaps more clearly through music than through any other medium known to men, even the beauty of the world itself, but in different tones. Beethoven is a rock of strength and certainty; but there are times when you feel he speaks of something that could fall upon you and crush you to powder. Bach is less frightening. Beyond the dancing of his heavenly spirits, who whirl and spin and never put a foot wrong, are depths beyond depths of the unknowable, but when he writes of these he is happy about it. He believes with George Macdonald that "there is a secret too great to be told", and neither he nor Beethoven allow us to be afraid for long; in the midst of the thunders or the dancing they pause and let the mercy of God speak through them. Mozart too has his dancers moving in measure; but the dancers are sometimes ourselves, not always the heavenly spirits. He is so often gay and tender in those first movements of symphonies and concertos, as though delighting in us, and in the second movements, while we rest, he sings to us. It is often of himself he sings, and then delight is only on the surface; below is heartbreaking sadness. But he does not wish to break our hearts and the dancing comes again, but faster, as though urgent to cover up what was not intended should be revealed. I am reminded of my grandfather.

Driving picnics were still a feature of island life when I was a child. Those who did not possess a brake of their own hired one. If the father of the family could himself drive, he did so, if not a driver was hired with the brake, and the islanders being merry people he enjoyed the outing as much as anyone. Guernsey is a small island and the inhabitants of those days knew it like the palm of their hand. Yet to visit a favourite bay or clifftop six miles away for the fiftieth time brought no sense of stalemate. It was a visit to a well-loved friend and always there was something new to see. And the scenery is varied. The flat sands of 1'Ancresse might be in a different country to the rocks of Le Gouffre, and there is no comparing the town church at St Peter Port with the little church at Le Foret, where on one of the gateposts was an ancient stone figure of a heathen goddess. And Fermain Bay and Saints Bay have a totally different atmosphere. Fermain was the one the aunts and I visited most often because it was the nearest, but Saints Bay was the one I loved best.

A steep narrow road led down to a few of the bays but others could only be reached by leaving the brake on the clifftop above and climbing down one of the water lanes. I do not know if any of these remain now, and if they do they have probably been tamed and civilised. In my childhood they were steep stony paths, green tunnels arched over by trees, with a stream running down the side under a canopy of ferns. It was wonderful for a child to come out at the bottom and see the stream running across the sand, and run with it to the edge of the sea. Sometimes the picnic would be for both lunch and tea and then mountains of food would be brought and bathing things for everybody, and down in the rocky bay the family would take possession of a cave for the whole day. This sounds a selfish action but there were so few people then, and so many caves, that it was not selfish.

The cave was primarily for the bathers and getting undressed in a cave struck me, aged six, as a stupendous experience. It was also a dignified, leisurely and lengthy one. Edwardian undressing could never be done in a hurry, with dresses fastened up the back with many hooks, petticoats with buttons and tapes to be undone and laced corsets to be removed. And a bathing dress was not put on in a moment. It was an elaborate garment with frilled trousers to below the knee and a short full overskirt. There would be a monumental bathing cap, also frilled, and the whole outfit was frequently scarlet trimmed with white braid. It was a pity it had to get wet. If the mouth of the cave was rather large an elderly female relative who had accompanied the picnic sat at the entrance with a parasol up. Needless to say no gentleman, not even a brother, was allowed to set foot in the cave. They were sent off behind the rocks.

The caves were washed each day by the incoming tide and they had firm floors of silver sand. Frequently they had rockpools in which there were deep crimson anemones, delicate waving pale green seaweed and minute scurrying crabs. The seaweed, or vraic, that clothed the rocks in the bay and was washed up along the shore was lovely too. There was one special vraic called carrageen that was collected at certain seasons and made into jellies and moulds, and another kind used both as a fertiliser and as fuel. Collecting seaweed was called vraicking. A child could be endlessly happy in these enchanted bays, for when one had finished bathing and collecting seaweed and shells there was rock climbing. I was by nature a climber, having a good head for heights, but I liked to climb alone, having served my apprenticeship climbing the cedar tree in the garden at Wells where I was nearly always alone.

I am ashamed now when I think of my furious rages when my aunts interfered with rock climbing. Aunt Emily was easy to shake off for she was no more than a gripper of the ankle. Always so beautifully dressed, she was herself not partial to climbing. With a quick wrench and a quick scramble upwards one could get rid of her. But Aunt Marie, a spare agile person who could climb better than I could, was another matter. If she caught me starting to climb she did not grip my ankle but simply came after me to take care of me. She was the dearest of the aunts but I hated her, and said so, when she shared my rocks. The third aunt, Irene, was seldom in Guernsey for she spent her working life as nanny in royal families abroad. But I know quite well what her methods would have been with disobedient rock-climbing children. She could not have climbed, for she was lame as the result of a broken thigh in her childhood, so she would have been an ankle-gripper, but being the most determined woman I have ever known in my whole life she could not have been shaken off. With her free hand twisted in the infant's jersey she would have got that child off that rock, and if there had been any incidents in the process she would have delivered a good spanking. These were her methods with her small royalties, for royal children, she would say, though always lovable and loving, have warm tempers to match. For this reason she liked working in continental palaces for they frequently had tiled floors, and it is easier to empty a jug of cold water over the head of a small boy in a rage than to spank him. He quiets instantly. But you need tiled floors.

My grandmother had yet another method with climbing children. She trusted in God. In early days she once took her young family for a picnic to one of the bays. They were old enought to be left to their own devices, she thought, and being very tired she sat down with a book and began to read. She was disturbed by a total stranger roughly shaking her shoulder. Outraged, she looked up. He was rather white about the gills and pointing with his finger to the cliff. "Are those your children?" he demanded. "If so, take proper care of them." They were climbing high up on the rock face, and they looked very small and were in considerable danger, but they were near-ing the top and to shout at them at that juncture would have been the worst thing possible. My grandmother's serenity was inwardly slightly dented but this rude and total stranger must not know it. "I trust my children to God," she said, and returned to her book.

In her old age my grandmother found picnics tiring, but I remember one when she was present and it was illumined for me by the fact that we picked camomile daisies together on the clifftop for the camomile tea she loved. The Guernsey cliffs were always a paradise of wild flowers. In the spring they were fragrant with bluebells and primroses and in the summer came the honeysuckle and the foxgloves.

A friend with a clifftop garden grew madonna lilies there and I remember how mysterious they looked just at twilight, tall and motionless, appearing and disappearing through the mist that was drifting in from the sea. It was from the same clifftop that I saw one of the most unearthly sights of my life. It was high summer and the sun was setting. The mother-of-pearl sea was calm and still, arched by a blue sky scattered all over with small pink clouds like feathers. Slowly, as the sun set, the sea changed colour and became a deep amethyst. I understood then the phrase, 'the wine-dark sea'. I stood where I was, unable to move, until with the sun down the colours slowly faded into the glimmering dimness of twilight. I have seen, but only once upon the coast of Pembrokeshire, the green flash that conies when in a cloudless sky in a dead calm without a breath of mist, the sun dips below the horizon. That was unearthly too but the wine-dark sea was even lovelier.

But a dead calm can be frightening when a brewing storm is piling its thunderheads of cloud on the horizon. Heavy and menacing, they climb from the sea so slowly that they seem not to move, and out there the sea itself seems not to move, yet below it is sucking over the rocks and booming in and out of the caves as though a wind were blowing. Yet there is not a breath of wind. A tremor of fear seems to be running all along the coast, through the earth beneath one's feet as well as through one's body.

I had other happy times with my grandmother besides the picking of camomile daisies. When we were alone she often sang to me. She had a clear and pretty voice even in old age and she knew the ballads of the day by heart. The one I loved best was 'Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar as he came hastening home from the war'. There was another about a lady called Clementine whose feet were so large that herring boxes were the only footwear she could get on. But this one worried me, I was so sorry for her, and I would ask to go back to the troubadour.

The only time my grandfather was really annoyed with me was over my grandmother's singing. It was Sunday evening, the aunts had gone to church, I was in bed and he was enjoying a peaceful and precious evening alone with Marie-Louise. But I had measles, was covered with spots and fractious, and from the top of the stairs I called to my grandmother to come and sing 'Gaily the Troubadour'. She obediently came rustling upstairs in her Sunday silk but would have nothing to do with the troubadour because it was the sabbath. However she found a hymnbook and sitting in the armchair in Emily's room, where I also slept, she sang hymns to me. I was enchanted for she had never sung hymns before. In matters of religion she stood midway between her husband's agnosticism and her daughters' faith. I think she was nearer to him than to them, but she did sometimes go to the town church and she did not think it right to sing ballads on Sunday; and she did always just hope that she and Adolphus would not be parted at death. I think I was wrong to describe my grandfather as an agnostic, for even at the end of his life he was still convinced that beyond death there was nothing but darkness and the end of it all. He was perhaps an atheist and my grandmother an agnostic. But atheism is an ugly word, with a finality about it that no scientist should tolerate, and I prefer agnostic to describe them both. Only to my mother and my youngest aunt, who of all her children were the only ones to inherit the

strong streak of extra-sensory perception that ran in her family, was my grandmother able to communicate after her death her discovery of the fact that 'it is all true'. To my mother especially she was able to convey her joy with overwhelming conviction. And so, uncertain as she was in life, she had forgotten the words of the hymns of her childhood, though she remembered the tunes, and had to find a hymn-book that evening when she sang to me.

My grandfather down below was displeased. Not only were hymns reverberating over his agnostic head but he had lost his quiet time with Marie-Louise. Once or twice he came to the bottom of the stairs and called out, "Marie-Louise, come down." But she was not accustomed to being ordered about by Adolphus and replied sweetly but firmly, "Dolph, I must sing this child to sleep. I will join you presently."

I do not know how long it took her to sing me to sleep but I remember my dismay that my grandfather of all people should not have been on my side. Spoilt little brat that I was I thought everyone should always be on my side. Especially with measles upon me.

My grandparents, their four daughters and their son, were all fascinating individuals, but the family charm gave them a likeness to each other. It had a sparkle like light on water. In one daughter only was it lacking. Emily had been bom soon after the death of the elder son Arnold and her parents' grief had affected her with a pre-natal sadness. She was the only one to have blue eyes and was considered the prettiest of the daughters, but she was never happy and she died in middle age. Her mother yearned over her with painful love, as though in apology, and loved her the best of her daughters. My grandfather's favourite was Marie. My father and I thought his partiality correct for we too thought Marie a wonderful person; I because she adored children and spoilt me even more shockingly than my mother did, and he because of her goodness and her intellect. My father excelled in the in-law relationship and his house and his purse were always ungrudgingly at the service of his wife's family, who were too charming and unworldly ever to keep firm hold of a penny. He loved them in a truly Christian way but when it came to Marie he forgot about being a Christian and just loved her. I do not think that my mother was jealous for Marie had none of the feminine graces with which my mother brimmed over. She was vivacious and talkative but her talk was a man's talk since, my father maintained, she had 'a man's mind'. It was her father's mind, but her consuming passion was mathematics. Yet she understood enough science to be able to talk as an equal with her father, just as she could talk theology with my father. All the aunts could perform the duty known as 'doing the Obs.', but to her it was not only a duty but a joy.

'Obs.' was an abbreviation of the words meteorological observations. Twice daily the instruments in the garden had to be consulted. Among other matters the velocity of the wind had to be noted, the rainfall measured, and the hours of sunshine. To measure the sun one left the garden for the cliff and climbed a slender wooden tower to a small platform, and consulted a miraculous instrument where the sun had actually burned a path on a curved piece of cardboard. My grandfather did the rounds himself whenever possible, but there were occasions when someone else had to do them for him. My grandmother had, at the very beginning of Obs., declared herself incapable of doing them; she said she was not sufficiently intelligent; so if a daughter was not handy a neighbour had to do them. This remark of hers was an absolute lie and everyone knew it. 'Doing the Obs.' was perfectly easy, and my grandmother had great intelligence, but she knew better than to land herself with an incubus of this kind for the rest of her life, and the mere suggestion that she should 'just this once do the Obs.' made her feel very unwell. By the age of eight I could have done the Obs. myself if only they would have trusted me. I adored Obs. and would tag after anyone who was doing them in what must have seemed an intolerable manner. 'To measure the sun.' It sounded like a fairy tale. If only they would have let me climb alone to the platform of the sun and measure his footpath by myself. But they wouldn't.

Marie was so clever as a child that every available penny was saved and she was sent to the Cheltenham Ladies' College, to study under the revered Miss Buss and Miss Beale. It was a fellow student, and not Marie, who wrote the famous verse,

Miss Buss and Miss Beale Cupid's darts do not feel, How different from us Are Miss Beale and Miss Buss

but she could have written it for she was a very witty person. Men delighted in her friendship but I never heard of any dart wounds. She dressed deplorably, and could not see to do her hair properly because her looking-glass had the letters of the Greek alphabet stuck round it and on it (she taught herself Greek as she dressed) but she was not unfeminine in appearance for she was small and slender. I think she was just not interested in Cupid. Combined with a strong will and occasional explosions of a fiery temper she had the greatest power of selfless loving of any person I have ever known, and since she spent her whole life teaching mathematics to children she needed the lot. It was Miss Buss and Miss Beale who taught her the deep and enduring religious faith that she afterwards handed on to her sisters.

I cannot leave this enchanting family without recording a small incident which lights up in my mind a picture so vivid that I feel I am there, looking on in the old disused stable at Le Hechet where the children used to play. It concerned the facts of life, which were not taught to little girls at that date. They either found out for themselves, or not, as the case might be. These little girls could not find out, and as they were very intelligent it worried them. Or at least it worried the three youngest. I cannot believe that it worried Marie, indifferent as I think she was to anything even remotely connected with Cupid. It was the youngest who found out. She was not intellectual like Marie but she had a needle-sharp mind. They had I suppose been told by someone, not their father, to apply to the Bible when in need of guidance. So she went through it with eyes as sharp as her mind, noting down everything relevant to the subject, until the day came when she could say to her three elder sisters, "I've got it! Come to the stable." So carrying the Bible they trooped to the stable, four little girls wearing frilly white pinafores over dark dresses, and quiet and undisturbed in the cobwebby shadows and slanting sunshine all was (more or less) revealed.

I must leave the island where I entered it, at St Peter Port. There were frequent shopping expeditions to what was grandly known as Town (with a capital T as though the little rocky place were London) but before anyone left the island there was a final expedition to buy gifts to take back to England. Early in the morning the aunts and I set out laden with baskets. We caught what we called the bus at the end of the road. It was not a bus at all but a large open brake drawn by two bony horses. I was sorry for the horses, perpetually travelling up and down that steep hill with the added bitterness that going down the shopping baskets of the passengers were empty while coming up they were full of heavy parcels, with live shell-fish down at the bottom. This was the custom and no one seemed to realise its cruelty. The crabs and lobsters were still alive when taken from their beds of seaweed in the market and were imprisoned for fear they should get out of the basket and walk up and down the bus.

The moment when I first discovered that crabs and lobsters are boiled alive was what in modern parlance is called a moment of truth. My grandmother had sent one of the aunts and myself to Town one day to call at the library and to buy a lobster for tomorrow's lunch. This we did and the lobster was placed beneath the library books in the basket. It must have been a very quiescent one for I thought it was dead. After we got home I went to the kitchen to talk to Sophie, my grandmother's maid who did the cooking. I opened the door and saw the lobster frantically trying to climb out of the pan of boiling water. Sophie pushed it down and put the lid on top. I shut the door and ran away. I do not remember where I hid myself and after the fashion of children I kept what I had seen to myself. I did not seek for comfort, not even from my mother when I got back to Wells. I have never been able to eat shell-fish from that day to this.

Yet if one could turn one's mind from the fate of shell-fish the market was a wonderful place, almost a cathedral of a place, with stone aisles and a high echoing roof. The countrywomen in their black shawls and bonnets came from all over the island with their produce, eggs and yellow butter, curds, vegetables, fruit and flowers. Oh the flowers! They were piled up in great banks of colour and their perfume scented the whole place. The fish on the other hand had no smell. For one thing they were too fresh and for another the beds of seaweed on which their bodies lay sent a breath of the sea to mingle with the scent of the flowers. The aunts bought butter and eggs and always without fail a canful of curds. A bowl of Guernsey curds is delectable food. Yogurt cannot hold a candle to it. The making of curds is a very complicated matter and is best done by those with hereditary skill in a cool farmhouse dairy. They were eaten with sugar and grated nutmeg in the same religious silence that used to attend the eating of shell-fish at a Guernsey high tea. Such a silence was remarkable for whether they talk patois or English true Channel Islanders are equally voluble. My aunts talked so constantly and so rapidly that English heads went round.

We did not buy goche in the market but in a bakery in one of the narrow, paved shopping lanes. There is no cake in the world like the Guernsey goche. It is a lard cake packed full of fruit and delicately spiced, and crisp and crackly on top. A wonderful cake, but digestible, for my uncle in his youth could eat a pound at a sitting with no ill effects. It is still made but I have heard to my sorrow that it is not now what it was, and that Guernsey biscuits have disappeared altogether. This is a tragedy. They were not biscuits, they were like circular rolls to look at but they were not rolls. They cannot be described. Whenever my mother was more ill than usual, and nothing the doctor could do seemed to help her, we would send for Guernsey biscuits. When presented with one she was immediately very much better. A last shopping expedition had to include Guernsey biscuits, and boiled sweets from a little shop in a narrow alley. And then we would visit the verbena shop.

I think this was in the same alley as the sweet shop and was even smaller and more mysterious. One was served by a dark, gentle man who had some unearthly quality about him. He might have been a fairy man in disguise and perhaps he was. It was he who manufactured the Guernsey verbena scent and it was a magic perfume. The monks of Caldey Island now make something which very nearly reaches the same perfection, but not quite. Verbena likes to grow facing the sun, with its back against an old stone wall and its roots where it can feel old stones below the earth. The fairy man must have had a walled garden such as the monks have, and I should guess that verbena likes to have sea-air as well as sun on its face. It will grow without sea air provided it has old stones to its feet and its back, and sun on its face, but it will not smell so sweet. And nor does mignonette, nor passion flower. At least the mignonette and passion flower in my Oxfordshire garden do not have the scent they had in my grandparents' garden. The Guernsey lilies on the other hand, which have no scent, stand along the wall that faces the sunrise as gaily and triumphantly as though they thought they were in Guernsey.

If there was time between the buying of the verbena scent and the catching of the home-going bus I might be allowed what to me was a great treat, and that was a visit to Victor Hugo's house. It had been kept just as he had left it as a memorial to him, and was open to the public at certain hours and very reverently visited, for the islanders were proud that he had found refuge with them when he was exiled from France. As a child I knew very little about him but I was awed by the fact that the house had once belonged to my great-grandfather Doctor Ozanne. He had sold it to Victor Hugo and my grandmother had taken the great man round the house on her eighteenth birthday. Children are dreadful little snobs and the fact that my grandmother had talked with Victor Hugo, and of all the houses in Guernsey hers had been the one he had chosen for his home, seemed to me to shed a very bright lustre indeed over our family. When I went there I marched through the rooms that Victor Hugo had made so magnificent with tapestries, carvings, ornate marble clocks, inlaid tables, chandeliers, velvet draperies and much more, and had hard work not to call out to the other sightseers, "My family lived here. My grandmother talked to Victor Hugo. This is my house." I thought it beautiful. Now, how much I wish I had seen it in its original simplicity. But at the top of the house was a little room that Victor Hugo built out from the roof and this was comparatively simple. Here he would sit and work, and on a clear day when he looked up he could look out over the steeply sloping garden and see the coast of France.

The last evening came, trunks were packed, the Obs. and my grandfather anxiously consulted as to tomorrow's weather. The morning came and we said good-bye to my grandmother and I think we all cried a little. The aunts had to survive another term of teaching in English boarding schools before they would see the island again, and I was returning to Wells where there was no bathing; you might not bathe in the moat. My grandfather came with us in the cab to see us off but though I remember the arrivals at the island so clearly I cannot remember any of the departures. Perhaps my grandfather standing alone waving to us as the ship drew away, and then the slow disappearance of St Peter Port and the ships at anchor and the circling gulls, and then the heading out into the open sea away from it all was too poignant to be remembered. For I would not be back for another year, and a year to a child can seem an eternity.

CHAPTER IV

Edwardians

BACK IN WELLS THE ISLAND AND ITS ENCHANTMENT receded from me as the busyness of home grew round me once more. It was another sort of enchantment, remembered as a hum almost like the busyness of bees. Deprived of (or not yet burdened with) our modern labour-saving inventions there was a great deal to do even in a modest home like ours. It was a world in itself, self-contained to an extent it is hard to realise today. Households were larger then than they are now for as well as children they almost always contained grandparents or an old retired governess or nanny as a permanent member. People with adequate homes and families did not take up room in the little hospitals, called in a small town like Wells cottage hospitals, but were ill in their own homes, and if the illness was serious that made work. There was no old person living in our home for my father's parents had died in his youth and my mother's, hating to leave the Island, visited us at rare intervals and could never have borne to live in England, but the aunts always came to our home to be ill.

And then there was the cooking, a tremendous business. The very size of the blackleaded kitchen range, taking up the whole of one wall, the highly polished pots and pans and rows of china plates on the dresser, the stir and bustle, the comings and goings of tradesmen and servants and children and dogs and cats, cried aloud of the enormous importance of cooking to an age that had never set eyes on a tin opener.

Without it there were hams to be boiled, marmalade and pickles and chutney to be made, plum puddings to be stirred in large earthenware crocks, quantities of food to be bottled and preserved and stowed away, fruit that included such things as mulberries, medlars, apricots, nectarines, bullaces, the old-fashioned fruit that grew in the walled gardens which most houses seemed to possess in country towns; passing along a street, if the front door was wide open, you could sometimes look through the dark polished depths of an old house and see through the open garden door the rich glow of an autumn garden. These walled gardens trapped the sunlight and distilled it into golden wine, and the wine got into the fruit.

The comfortably-off ate far too much but with that kitchen range glowing like an altar at the centre of the house, and the garden packed with food that must not on any account be wasted, it was perhaps not surprising. Yet after a breakfast of porridge and bacon, followed by an adequate lunch and afternoon tea with homemade cakes, however did the adults of those days manage a three-course meal in the evening? Yet many did and though I remember very portly persons I remember too lovely ladies with willowy figures and tiny waists. Emily, for instance,and cousins who came to stay. I would look through the baize door that shut the nurseries off from the rest of the house and see them floating down to dinner in their long dresses; and one evening I remember they had each fastened an aster into their dress.

Asters were a favourite flower and so were sweet-scented geraniums, and the peonies I especially loved because their petals and leaves were always so wonderfully cool; but they were less useful than geraniums whose petals could be rubbed on cheeks that needed a little colour. Make-up was not considered proper for virtuous young ladies, only the other sort, but no one knew what you were doing with geranium petals.

That past age had many evils that were peculiarly its own and one of the worst was disregard of the misery existing outside the self-centred home, beyond the quiet village or the sleepy country town. "We lived in our own world," a friend of my own age said to me not long ago. We did just that and paid little attention to what went on in the world outside. At least so it seems to me, looking back. The solidly based home, the small communities with their songs and tales and dances, were good things, but upon the other side of the coin was this indifference. When told of conditions in the London slums, or in the industrial North where the infernal machines were spitting out their venom over blackened homes and lives, we were very sorry but we had no means of picturing it to ourselves, it all seemed very far away.

My parents were more aware of the suffering of the world beyond the charmed circle than were many of their friends, my father because he had been born in London and as a young priest had worked in a factory town, and my mother because she was deeply compassionate and had made it her business to know. People went in to meals in our house past two large collecting boxes which my mother kept on the hall table. One was labelled S.P.G. and the other Waifs and Strays, and the latter had a picture on it of two ragged children. I do not know if anyone looked at them as they went in to dinner but I do know that people who came to stay in the house did not leave it until they had done their duty by one box or the other. I do not know how my mother contrived this but she was a clever woman and could contrive most things. If the Waifs and Strays got more than the S.P.G., which I think they did, that would have been because my mother cared more for waifs and strays than she did for the heathen. They were less remote. It is said that parents always try to give their children what they have lacked themselves and so my mother, remembering the austerity of her own childhood, allowed me too many pretty clothes, too many toys, too much spoiling, and ended by having a very nasty little spoilt brat on her hands. But upon one piece of discipline she did insist. Every Christmas I was forced to choose from my multitude of toys a basketful that must be given away. No matter what the display of tears and temper the basket must be filled. Nanny then took me by the hand and led me to St Thomas's street, where lived children poorer than myself, and I had to go from house to house giving away my toys until the basket was empty. I suffered agonies of embarrassment but there was no escape for Nanny was with me and prodded from behind. I can remember only one of the many homes. The kitchen was dark and there seemed nothing in it except too many children. They sat still as statues as they suffered the indignity forced upon them, moving only to put out a hand and take the proffered cast-off toy from the rich little girl who wore a velvet bonnet. That scene of poverty must have burnt itself into my mind for I can see it vividly now, though at the time I think I felt more embarrassed than ashamed.

The affair was not without its effect upon me, though hardly the one that my mother intended, for I decided to give away the whole of the contents of our apple store, laid out upon slotted shelves in the garden room. It only took me about an hour, filling my basket with apples and running backwards and forwards from the apple room to the garden railings through which I pushed the apples to the delighted children outside. Just as the birds know by some mysterious instinct that you have put out crumbs for them, so did the children of St Thomas's street know about those apples. They gathered in flocks and there was no sullen indifference this time. They knew I was defying authority and there was ecstatic delight on both sides of the railings. I am happy to remember that the last apple had left the apple room before I was caught. I could not understand the ensuing row.

"But you told me we must give away our things," I said to my mother.

"Your things, I told you," retorted my mother. "Not my things and your father's. Now we shall have no more apples until next autumn."

The thought of no apple dumplings was sobering and I wept. It was my first depressing realisation that an act of true self-sacrifice is not intended by God to leave you just as comfortable and well off as you were before. My mother was mollified and said we would plant an apple tree in my own little patch of garden, which was situated in the midst of the vegetable garden and commanded a splendid view of Tor Hill, and every apple on it would be my own to do what I liked with. This was done but the devil saw to it that that tree never bore a single apple.

I come back once more to the hive of industry that was an Edwardian home and marvel that it cost so little to keep going. My father had an income of five hundred pounds a year and this supported a medium-size house and garden, three maids (though the little one aged about fourteen only earned ten pounds a year) and Nanny and a gardener. There were always many mouths to feed and even when making allowances for what inflation has done to the currency how was it managed? As I think about it I realise that we spent practically nothing outside our home. We seldom went to a theatre and holidays, if taken at all, were a visit to relatives or a fortnight in lodgings at the nearest seaside resort, for only rich people went abroad. Light was cheap, consisting of oil lamps and candles. Coal was also cheap but was never used in bedrooms unless you were seriously ill. The houses were dark and cold but I think we hardly noticed the cold because we wore so many clothes, and these were cheap because mostly made at home and made to last practically for ever.

A great deal of time was expended on our clothes. They were lovely in our home and owed much of their beauty to the lady with no head who stood

like a saint upon a pedestal in the day nursery. Her name was Dummy and she was much revered. She was red in colour and had a well-formed bosom and a tiny waist. Below the waist she expanded considerably but ended abruptly at the hips. Her only garment was Nanny's tape measure which when not in use was draped round her neck. Upon her serene and docile form Nanny and Emily, who often stayed with us and was clever with her needle, created Emily's and my mother's dresses and my mother's tea-gowns; though there is something of a mystery here because my mother and Emily were so slim and Dummy had such a well-developed bosom. I can only suppose that by the standards of the time Dummy had the correct measurements and my mother and Emily filled up the empty spaces with some sort of in-filling. Created is the right word for these garments were works of art. Yards of material formed their flowing lines and they were ornamented with lace insertions, tucks, ruffles and ribbon. Tea-gowns were a veritable froth of this and that and looked like the foam of the sea. They were never worn at tea time so far as I can remember but were put on when you felt poorly; something midway between a dressing-gown and a dress and indicating that though you were up you were only just up.

Female clothes were designed very much as an outward symbol of the passing years. As soon as ageing gentlewomen began to show their age rather badly they cashed in on it, wearing soft dresses of lavender and grey, a shawl or lace scarf round the shoulders and a lace cap to hide the place on the top of the head where hair tends to get thin. Having dressed for the part they sat down. On chilly days they sat by the drawing-room fire, on really warm

days a basket chair was carried into the garden and they sat there and watched the grandchildren at play. i That is all they really did about the grandchildren; watch them and occasionally sing them to sleep. What they would have thought about the overworked grandmothers of today I do not know. But whether or not they had grandchildren very little was expected of these ageing ladies. They had done their work, were revered for it and might now sit down. j I suppose it is on balance a happy thing that old people are put on the shelf less early now; but I do have days when I hanker for a lace cap.

I also hanker after the hat-trimming box, for it was great fun. Edwardian hats were so elaborate that only the wealthy could afford a new one every season, the less wealthy bought what were called shapes, felt for winter, straw for summer, and these shapes went on year after year, retrimmed in spring and summer from the hat-trimming box. The placing of this large box upon the nursery table on the appropriate half-yearly date was almost a religious ritual. Everyone gathered round, the lid was lifted and the contents ceremoniously emptied out. There was practically nothing that could not be placed on an Edwardian hat; fur, flowers, cherries, jewelled buckles, velvet bows, ribbon rosettes, ostrich feathers, swans-down, cocks' feathers. And worst of all, wings of birds, big white wings that looked like wings of gulls and ducks' wings in all their lovely variety. A woman could look at times as though she wore a whole dead bird on her hat. The thought of it revolts me now but then I longed for wings or a swirl of ostrich feathers instead of just a swansdown edging to my bonnet. But if the winter headgear was sometimes an outrage the shady straw summer hats could be lovely with their wreaths of poppies and corn, cowslips, rosebuds or forget-me-nots. And sometimes a wreath of real flowers was worn with a matching posy tucked in at the waist, but this was not a good idea because they died so soon. A better notion was that adopted by the men at a garden party or wedding. A small silver or glass container with water in it was fastened under the lapel, how I cannot imagine, and a rose or carnation with appropriate greenery was stuck in the drink and remained fresh throughout the afternoon.

There was a lot of gladness in the clothes of that period. They swished and rustled and floated and swept, and chains and bracelets tinkled. My mother had few jewels but she tinkled because on the days when she was well enough to abandon her tea-gown and put on a dress she wore her chatelaine. It was fastened to her belt by a silver hook and from it depended on slender silver chains a pair of scissors in a silver sheath, a little purse of silver rnesh to hold her thimble and a tiny notebook with silver covers and a pencil in a silver case.

Mothers get dressed so quickly in these days that their offspring cannot get much fun out of helping them do it. A zip-fastener, if it does not stick, is switched up the back in a moment but hooking your mother up the back when heaven alone knew how many hooks and eyes you had to manipulate was a work of art, and required much practice and heavy breathing on the part of the child and much patience on the part of the mother. Hair had to be brushed with a hundred strokes a day. When it was up it was coiled on top of the head like a crown, and when down it was a matter for pride if a child could boast that its mother could sit on her hair. My mother could

and it was a joke between us that she could have emulated Lady Go diva. Her hair was brown with golden lights and so full of electricity that on frosty days it sprang about her head like snakes when it was brushed.

Washing long hair at home was quite an undertaking and so was washing bodies without the aid of bathrooms. There were large marble-topped wash-stands in each bedroom with patterned jugs and basins. Our nursery jug was ornamented with chilly storks standing in a pool, depressed bulrushes growing beside them, and in cold weather the water in the jug would be frozen hard by morning. Our home possessed bath tubs of two sorts, some round, some shaped like armchairs, and these were placed in the bedrooms at night, each with an early Christian beside it. These early Christians were a fascination to a child. I do not remember how they got their name. It was not a name known to the trade I am sure. Probably my mother invented it because they were supposed to encourage early rising. They were small brown wicker hampers, tubular shaped, lined with cotton wool and twill of a vivid shade of scarlet. At bedtime metal containers filled with hot water were put inside and they were carried upstairs one by one and placed in each bedroom beside the tub. I imagine you did what you liked with it, using the hot water then and there or keeping it till the morning when it would still be hot and could be used for shaving as well as washing. I say I imagine because I have no certain knowledge of these mysteries. Children and servants were the lucky ones. Children bathed in a tub before the day-nursery fire and the servants bathed beside the blessed warmth of the kitchen range.

Just before we left the Principal's House my mother, whose active mind was always well ahead of the times, lost patience and startled Wells by installing a bathroom. It was a nine days' wonder. I do not think it worked very well, and the only thing I really remember about it is that when the first wave of zero weather struck the bathroom all the pipes froze, and later burst, and the resultant display of icicles was so glorious that a professional photographer asked if he might come to take photographs.

I hope that bathroom eased the lot of our servants, for they were wonderful. In those days servants never left you except to get married or die. In a middle-class household they were members of the family, dearly loved and loving. Mostly the people they worked for were unworthy of them, it was very seldom that they were unworthy of their people. When their breed disappeared something extraordinarily sound and sweet went out of life. Sarah reigned in the kitchen all through the years of my childhood and Mary and Lilian, two beautiful sisters, were in turn our parlour-maid. But Mary was so incomparably beautiful that she did not last long and I had the honour to be her bridesmaid at her wedding at St Cuthbert's Church. Her sister Lilian was like a lily, with a perfect skin and smooth pale gold hair. The housemaid Araminta came to us as a small girl hardly more than a child. She was not a beauty, for she had a sallow skin and prominent teeth, but she was most attractive all the same. She had a trim little figure, curly black hair and sparkling black eyes. She also had one of those stout hearts that so often go with a very small body, and a loyalty to match her heart. When we left Somerset for Ely and the Cambridgeshire fens Sarah was too old to contemplate taking her roots out of Somerset, and she went to live in an almshouse, but those two brave girls Lilian and Araminta, because of the great love they bore my mother, said they must come too. They came but alas we did not keep them very long. Their soft West-country voices and their charming ways made havoc of the tough hearts of the Fen men and they both got married.

I think Nanny would never have got married however many men had asked her. From the time she came to us, when I was a month old, her life was centred on my mother. She was like a planet revolving round the sun. My mother possessed what I think is best described as a healing personality. She had slightly the charismatic gift in her hands and more strongly the telepathic knowledge of the spiritual needs of others. Nanny came to her a plain shy girl, very slow in all she did and with no self-confidence. Yet when my mother's sisters blamed her for choosing such a dull girl as Nanny she replied, "She is the one. She is kind." And how right she was. Shut behind the green baize door of the nursery wing the children of that period were entirely in the care of their nurse and at her mercy. Nanny was all mercy. But my mother saw in her more than kindness. She arranged for her to have sketching lessons and to her amazed joy Nanny found that she was a painter. Later she found that she was also an excellent photographer. To find herself an artist transformed her and she blossomed into a happy girl. My mother had her reward for in all her illnesses she never needed a nurse. Nanny did everything for her. The love of the two women for each other and their reliance upon each other was extraordinary. When in the last war Nanny was killed in an air-raid something broke in my mother. She was not defeated but she carried on for the rest of the way without gaiety.

Nanny's parents lived at Bath and if there was an aunt handy to be with my mother Nanny would sometimes take me to stay with them for a short while. It was almost as good as going to the Island. They were the opposite of my grandparents for it was the old man who was tall and imposing while his wife was tiny, gentle and obedient. But Nanny-Daddy (surely I could have thought up a less obvious name for him) did not alarm me because he was grey-bearded like my grandfather. His considerable girth was contained in front by a large gold watch chain stretched across it. Picture to yourself King Edward the Seventh with the face of an exceptionally good and kind man and that was Nanny-Daddy. He was hospitable and liked to see the large dining-room table entirely surrounded, the guests doing justice to the superb cooking of his eldest daughter Mary. He did justice to it himself but he always kept a selfless eye on the progress of his guests and did not forget the children. I was never scolded for greediness in his house, as was sometimes the case at home, instead his voice would boom above the hum of conversation with the information that "Elizabeth's plate is empty." No wonder I loved him.

Nanny-Mummy did not sit round the table with the rest of us for she was frail. Dressed in black with a gold locket round her neck she sat by the fire and warmed her thin hands and said very little, but when she did speak it was lovingly in a soft musical voice,

with a gentle nodding of her head that was somehow like a caress. I cannot remember that she ever embraced anyone but she called us all 'my dear', with a long lingering inflection of the last word that made one feel strangely protected. She must in her life have wept much for only three of her large family of children had survived and her eyes were pale and faded.

I do not know what Nanny-Daddy's life work had been, though I have the feeling it was the Great Western Railway, but I think he must have come from country stock for he had chosen for his retirement an old house that had once been a farmhouse, with a large rambling garden where he spent his days growing superb vegetables and rearing chickens. Once it had been right out in the country, and when I knew it there was still country on three sides, but on the fourth side it was attached to the City of Bath by streets of small Victorian houses. The old house looked as though attached to the stretch of grey streets as a ship is moored to a long grey harbour wall.

On arrival, having got out of the cab and paid the cabby, the traveller faced the high stone wall that surrounded the house and garden, but looking up one could see beyond the house green hills that rolled up to the sky. They were a sea of green waves that rolled for ever, never breaking and making no sound at all.

There was a strong door in the wall, an iron chain with a ring on it hanging to one side. This one pulled and a bell sounded far away in the depths of the house. Then came the extraordinary, amazing, magic moment. The door opened, one went through and there was nobody on the other side. It had opened by itself onto a short stone-paved path arched over by a curved iron roof green with age, supported by iron posts on each side. Then Mary, Nanny's older sister, appeared in the wide darkness at the open front door, smiling a welcome. Someone, probably Nanny-Daddy, with knowledge learned from the G.W.R., had contrived a mechanism which both rang the bell and opened the outer door without human help. It was a great marvel.

The hall was stone-floored, large and dark as a cave. Worn stone steps led up to the kitchen upon one side and upon the other was the large dining room where everyone lived as well as ate. Meals were presided over by a very large framed engraving of the Last Judgment. The companion picture in the hall showed Christians being thrown to the lions; but it was mercifully so dark in the hall that you could not see it very clearly. Beyond the dining room was an exquisite little parlour which was only used on Sundays. This contained a tinkling upright piano and lots of fascinating china ornaments and antimacassars. The whole house smelt of furniture polish and shone and sparkled with cleanliness. It was a tall house and there were exciting empty storerooms and attics that both scared and fascinated me.

But best of all were the cock and the hens. His hen houses occupied the same position of importance in Nanny-Daddy's garden and heart as the Obs. did in my grandfather's. The daily ritual of collecting the eggs, at which I assisted, had the same sort of religious importance as the ritual of 'doing the Obs.', and my wonder the first time my grandfather showed me the path of the sun on a crescent curve of burnt cardboard was equalled on the day Nanny-Daddy first put a fluffy chicken into my hands. How did these things come to be? How could a bit of cardboard measure the sun? How did the egg get under the hen and the chicken out of the egg? Where did the sun come from when it came up out of the sea looking like a painted Easter egg? In Wells we always had painted eggs for breakfast on Easter day. Why? Nanny was no good at answering questions and quick to say with a weary sigh, "Well, that's enough. How many more times am I to tell you that I don't know." Why did people not know? What was this mystery at the heart of things? To wake up in the dawn and hear the cock crowing in the garden filled me with ecstasy. Cocks and hens were not kept in the precincts of Wells and I heard the thrilling sound for the first time in Nanny's home. From visit to visit I looked forward to hearing it again and I shall never hear it without a thrill. When first I made acquaintance with Hamlet the phrase The cock that is the trumpet to the morn' went right through me. That was what the triumphant cry was, a trumpet that celebrated the return of light. The answers to our clamorous questions are hidden in a light too blinding to be approached, but the cock agrees with George Mac-donald that there is a secret too great to be told.

The short visit would end and Nanny and I would return to Wells. I was never homesick either on the Island or at Bath. I had begun visiting the Island before the beginning of memory, it was an extension of home, and in Bath I had Nanny. I was with her far more than I was with my mother, and it was she who satisfied the needs every child has for a trustworthy experience of security and love. In my earlier years I think I loved her more than I loved my mother, and I was afraid of my father. He was the very reverse of a harsh man but he was the one who was called upon to administer discipline when my behaviour passed all bounds. Discipline was my chief point of contact with him when I was small and his marvellous tenderness was something I discovered only in later years.

Though I remember my first foretaste of it. My mother became desperately ill with terrible pains in her head and so paralysed by some form of poisoning that she could hardly drag herself from her bed to her sofa. Our doctor had not the faintest idea what was the matter and was anxious that she should leave home and live in Bath for the winter, in the care of a doctor there who was reputed to be very clever, and of course Nanny had to go too to look after her. I was left in the care of Nanny's sister Mary, but even so to have both my mother and Nanny disappear at the same moment was for me a very traumatic experience. Spoilt little horror that I was I found comfort in resenting Mary and being as naughty as possible.

And then quite suddenly my father became for those few months the central figure in my world. He had as it were turned back upon that pathway where he was always in the distance. There would be many of these brief meetings before that final turning back, and this was the first of them. His days were an austere fixed routine of work and prayer, beginning at six in the morning and finishing at midnight, but somehow he found time to play with me as my mother had done before she became too ill. The playtimes with him were not sessions for he was not anchored to a sofa or a rocker as my mother and Sarah were. There were big wicker armchairs in the study, for the use of his students when they came to talk to him, and in these marvel-

lous playtimes they were turned upside down and turned into caves inside which my father and I growled and prowled as lions and tigers. Or they became little huts in which such characters as Bruce and Alfred watched spiders and burned cakes.

But on Sundays there were no games. For one thing my father had had a very stern, almost Calvinistic upbringing, with no storybooks or games allowed on Sundays for the children (except Noah's Ark because it came out of the Bible) and though for the rest of his life his mind became steadily broader and more tolerant he was at this time still a little shackled by it. And for another thing my Sunday scripture lesson, always given me by my mother, was now his task.

I think he had not the slightest idea how to set about instructing a small child. My mother had given me carefully prepared instructions which went in at one ear and out at the other. My father took me on his lap, with a cushion placed between his exceptionally bony knees and his child's tender posterior, and turned the pages of a New Testament picture book, commenting briefly on the pictures as we con-sidered them one by one. At the pictures of the pas-sion of Christ I refused to look. I had caught a glimpse of one and that was enough. My father was under-standing about this and we turned them over in a lump, leaping straight from Palm Sunday to Easter day and ignoring the crux of the matter altogether. Yet now I think that turning the pages of that picture book with my father was the most important thing that ever happened to me, important because for the first time in my life the man in the picture book came out of it and was alive. It is probably simply my fancy that his arrival had been heralded by the crowing of the cock, but fancy or not the cock-thrill went through me all over again when I discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and found how often the thought of Christ would be linked with a bird symbol; there is 'The Windhover' dedicated to Christ our Lord, but the best of all to me is the ending of the sonnet on 'Patience'.

And where is he who more and more distils Delicious kindness? He is patient. Patience fills His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we

know.

The theophanies of children could be the subject of a book in themselves. I am sure most children have an awareness of God in very early childhood, though it can come so early and be so simple that later they forget it; or if they remember they do not wish to speak of it for fear of being laughed at. I am speaking of it now only because I am trying to tell the truth and believe that it was a valid experience and that I am lucky in remembering it so clearly. I owe the clearness perhaps partly to the loneliness of my childhood and to the beauty of my home. (How can a child in a slum experience God? Can it have a theophany with nothing to look at but dustbins and brick walls and never a moment of silence and loneliness? Yet sometimes perhaps in the mercy of God it comes.) And also without doubt to the fact that my father had in some way communicated his own conviction to me. He had made the Christ in the picture book a living person.

The winter passed and my mother came home, making a gallant pretence that the doctor at Bath had helped her, and even though my father receded from me again the spring world was full of joy. It was in a world of sunshine and birdsong that I had my first conviction of sin. So baldly stated it sounds a comic occurrence but I did not think so at the time. It overwhelmed me. I know the exact spot on a field path where I first knew the vileness of sin in myself; and can recapture the misery I felt because it has been repeated so many times since. What caused this first conviction? Was it because Christ had come alive? Or because I had come to know and love my father better and perhaps subconsciously compared myself to him? Partly perhaps the shock of joy caused by my mother's homecoming, because it was to her I ran when I got home and to her that I poured out the tale of my wickedness; and I hope that the way I had treated Nanny's sister, and also frequently treated my poor daily governess, came first on my list rather than stealing sugar from the nursery cupboard. The shock of realising what went on behind the green baize door of the nursery wing must have been a cruel one to my mother but I remember that she stood up to it well and was able to assure me of God's forgiveness.

A little later I was alone in the garden, at a spot where hyacinths and deep red wallflowers were in bloom against a grey stone wall, and God revealed himself in a shining world. Every flower flamed with the glory and every bird sang of it. It would be foolish to try and describe the experience; who can? Only the poets and mystics can capture something of the light, Traherne perhaps even more perfectly than Wordsworth.

All things were spotless and pure and glorious; and infinitely mine and joyful and precious . . . I was entertained like an angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory; I saw all in the peace of Eden; heaven and earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not make more melody to Adam than to me. ... Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

I think of Laurie Lee at the age of three.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger skins of sunlight. 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. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.

He felt fear as well as awe and he was right. In our weakness it can seem a terrible as well as a beautiful world, but I do not remember fear, only awed amazement. I picked some of the deep red wallflowers and a small hyacinth, and Nanny let me keep them in a pot of water beside my bed in the night nursery. The scent of wallflowers and hyacinths is now for me irretrievably mixed up with the reading of the Gospels. My godmother had given me a little copy of the New Testament and in the ungrateful way of spoilt children I had not bothered with it and had lost it. But now, I don't remember how, it came to light again and lived under my pillow. I woke up with the birds and read it every morning, not ceasing to read it until I had reached the end of the fourth gospel. I cannot have understood much of what I read but all through that reading time I continued in the amazement of peace and love. And that experience too has been described over and over again. "He looked us through the lattice of our flesh and he spoke us fair." Then the whole heavenly thing slipped away never to return.

Almost for a moment this child sounds a nice little girl but though these visitations of mercy may give direction to a life, may even store up some strength in us of which we are not aware until much later, they do not alter fundamental character. I have met many delightful untarnished only children but I was too spoilt to be one of them. I do not see how the spoiling could have been avoided. In my early years no one expected that my mother would live long. She herself was quite sure she would not, and like so many sensitive extroverts her own suffering caused her not only to be acutely aware of illness in others but even to imagine it was there when it was not. She considered me a delicate child who might not live long either. Whichever way she looked at it fear of being parted from this adored child, whom she had nearly died to bring into the world, was always a shadow upon her. And so she, who if she had been a well woman would have been a wise mother of many children, was in illness the reverse. Whenever I sneezed she sent for the doctor. Or if she did not Nanny did, for Nanny well or ill was a congenital spoiler. And so that child was and is a neurotic selfish little beast. I say is for she is with me still. All my life I have been waging war with her. I have a dim hope that I may get rid of her before I die, but it is very dim. If I do not, and beyond death find that she is with me still, the starting of the battle with her all over again will be my purgatory.

bookshelves on each side and placed at right angles to the door. My father had his chair and writing table upon the other side of it and with books at his back and books to right and left sat in a protected nook, unseen by anyone entering the room. This excellent piece of furniture accompanied him from study to study wherever he lived. Its value was greater than may appear at first sight. As a priest my father had to be at any time cheerfully available to anyone who wanted him, but as a writer he hated to be disturbed. At the sound of a knock at the study door exasperation would rise within him, and was sometimes apparent in the tone of his 'come in', but the time it took the visitor to get round to the other side of the bookcase gave him time to compose his features, and take a firmer grip of his Christianity. There was nothing to be seen on his face when the intruder reached him but an expression of angelic patience, and the warmest of welcomes was always apparent in his smile and voice. I know, for I had to intrude myself so many times. But the bookcase had yet another value. To knock at the door, to hear that 'come in' and then have to walk around that bookcase, was intimidating. One did not intrude upon my father on merely trivial matters.

At Oxford he was one of a group of brilliant young men, one of whom, Clavel Parmiter, afterwards became his brother-in-law. Another friend, in later years Professor de Burgh, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, wrote for me after my father's death a description of the young man he remembered.

What made the strongest impression on myself and on others, both at the time and afterwards, was his winning, radiant personality. Its influence spread around him without conscious effort on his part and largely without conscious appreciation on ours. It was not merely or mainly the brightness and vitality of youth, it was something less transient and more firmly rooted in his nature, something that sprang from constant communion with the supernatural spring of joy and hope, that reflected the light that was its source. He was so entirely free from any form of egoism, whether self-indulgence or self-assertion or self-righteousness. . . I never saw him show contempt for anyone or anything; though he could when occasion required express strong disapproval and even indignation. With his real modesty and simplicity of heart went a personal dignity that no one would lightly venture to offend. . . Above all he was keenly interested in persons of all sorts and conditions and was ever ready to share wholeheartedly in their interests and activities. The easiness and optimism of his nature was never dimmed by his realisation of the evil and suffering of the world, for they sprang not from ignorance of the stern facts but from knowledge; from the visioii that he had already seen in his youth of a city that hath foundations, of an abiding reality above and beyond the changes and chances of this earthly life.

This extract goes deeper than anything I could say and yet it is astonishing because even this close friend did not put his finger upon what was the keynote of my father's character, and that was his courage. Because he was not an optimist. While my mother was always quite sure that everything would turn out all right he was privately very much afraid that it would not; yet he was able nevertheless to place disaster in God's hands and leave it there; a condition of mind that he described as being 'an optimistic pessimist'. His courage lay in the fact that he could present this gay face to the world whatever his private grief and despair. For he knew grief even in his Oxford days, for both his parents died while he was there and the death of his mother especially hit him hard. He knew about despair. After a period of strain or overwork darkness could fall upon him suddenly out of the blue and last for weeks. My mother and I knew when this happened, for you cannot live in the same house with a soul in darkness and not know it, but not from anything he said or any alteration in his loving manner towards us. I doubt if anyone else knew. His attitude to this lifelong anguish could be perfectly expressed in the words of Leslie Weatherhead's prayer.

Help me, O Lord, so to strive and so to act, that those things which cloud my own way may not darken the path which others have to tread. Give me unselfish courage so that I am ready always to share my bread and wine yet to hide my hunger and my thirst.

Yet it is true that he could be wonderfully happy for he possessed the three most necessary ingredients for happiness; the power of delighting to the utmost in any sight or sound of beauty, a keen sense of humour and a humble love for God and man. Every human being had his profound reverence and he criticised no one.

The happy Oxford days must have passed all too quickly. He read Honour Mods and Greats and went down in a blaze of glory with a Double First; due he said to a diet of Bath Oliver biscuits and Cooper's Oxford marmalade. In the last frantic weeks of revision there was no time to dine in Hall. Dr Oliver and Mr Cooper alone sustained him.

He was ordained Deacon and Priest and for four years worked in a big working-class parish in Leicester. Then he turned to the work of teaching that was his vocation. For a year he was Chaplain at Salisbury Theological College and then he moved to Wells, to find my mother and the West-country and the sixteen years of work that were the happiest of his life. All his life long his pupils had a great affection for him but I think the devotion of his Wells men was greater than any. I can remember how vital he was in those days. His early physical delicacy had been left behind, he played games hard, he tramped for miles over the Mendip hills and he bicycled with incredible speed; generally holding forth enthusiastically upon some favourite topic while his companions, faint but pursuing, tried to keep near enough to him to hear what he was saying.

One of his Wells pupils has told me how sometimes the unregenerate, when reading their papers to him, would expound heresies in the hope of shocking him. But no one could get a rise out of my father. Very seriously, with a twinkle in the eye, he would wax very enthusiastic over the heresy in question, point out everything that could be said for it and only then knock it to bits.

He hated slackness. Mentally and spiritually as well as physically he was always taut and vigorous and controlled. He had a temper but he seldom lost it. Looking back over the years I can only remember two occasions when he really blazed out; and then over somebody's intolerable slackness. He could at times seem hard on his men. The first Office of the day was said in the College Chapel at some extremely early hour, and those who dared to creep in late on a cold winter's morning were in danger of being awakened the next day by the Principal wrenching the bedclothes off them. And the same sort of cold douche could be applied to a badly prepared sermon; for those unfortunate men had to read their sermons aloud to the Principal before they were allowed to preach them in the little mission churches in the Mendip hills where they tried themselves out on Sun-

days. "Will it do?" asked a poor young man one day when the reading of his composition was received in stony silence. "Do what?" asked my father. And yet they loved him.

I did not feel the loss of paternal grandparents because their place was taken by Uncle James and Aunt Emma, who became father and mother to my father and his sister when their own parents died, and grandparents to their children. They might have walked out of one of Galsworthy's novels; indeed my father's delight in the early part of the Forsyte Saga was partly due to the fact that the Forsyte uncles and aunts were so like his own. I remember them perhaps too vividly for truth because for me they were figures so august that they took on something of a fairy-tale quality, and as soon as the golden glow of a fairy tale starts to gild the facts the latter tend to lose something of their validity. But golden is a correct adjective to apply to Uncle James and Aunt Emma for they had both kinds of gold. They were goldenly good and they were also wealthy. They possessed a town house in Portland Place and a country house in Sussex. When Uncle James, who was a doctor, drove out to visit his patients it was in a smart brougham with his hat poised at an elegant angle. Aunt Emma, who was delicate, mostly sat at home. A violet-coloured velvet bow adorned the lace cap she wore on her smooth white hair and she had jewels in her ears, and on the rare occasions when she accompanied her husband in the brougham she wore her sables. I am certain about the sables since the remnants of them, incorporated with humbler
remnants from the small sable tie of my Guernsey grandmother, are now a source of moral support to me at the rare times when I screw my courage to the agonising point of a social occasion, but I am not certain about the earrings. I may have invented them to match the sables and the soft flowing dresses, and the gentle beauty and sad dignity of Aunt Emma.

Her sadness, I believe, was caused in part by the heartbreaking severity of her religion, and in part by her husband's wealth. She did not like it. When she had married him he had been a perfectly ordinary young G.P. in the suburbs, with his way to make. My father was responsible for the marriage for as a small boy he had been very ill with pneumonia, and his young Aunt Emma had immediately gone to the help of her sister Bessie, as unmarried aunts always did in those days, and James Goodhart, his father's nephew, was also hurried to the rescue and in the opinion of the family saved my father's life with Emma's assistance. Naturally they fell in love, their marriage yet another of the happy unions that shone around my childhood like warm beacons. This particular happy marriage, when my father's aunt upon one side married his first cousin on the other, meant an extraordinary interweaving of double relationships throughout the family. As far as I know only one member of the family ever tried to work it out, but upon coming to the conclusion that he was his own uncle he gave up in despair.

Having saved my father's life Uncle James went on from there to save the lives of many other children, for it was with children that he was as a doctor so specially gifted, and in what must have seemed to Aunt Emma no time at all they were living in Portland Place, and some years later her husband was a baronet. What she felt about being Lady Goodhart and wearing sables was, I think, expressed by what she did every Saturday night. She tipped the contents of her purse, from the sovereigns to the farthings, into her washhand basin and she scrubbed every single coin clean. Her religion had taught her that money is the root of all evil and I am sure that whether she knew it or not she was trying to scrub the evil off hers before Sunday. At least the coins she put in the plate should be clean.

I don't think Uncle James had any guilty qualms about his income. He had worked hard for it, he worked hard till the end, he was generous with it and he would have enjoyed it if Aunt Emma had let him. Indeed I think that in spite of her he did enjoy it a little for I remember him as a cheery man of great charm, with a dark silky beard streaked with white and a lock of hair falling artistically over his forehead, beautifully dressed in dark clothes with a big black tie. Indeed he looked far more like a fashionable portrait-painter than a doctor. He was a wonderful host and loved entertaining but I doubt if Aunt Emma did, though for love of him she could be a charming hostess too. Yet the effort it cost her was always apparent and when Uncle James stopped laughing his face had a shadow of sadness over it.

I have said her religion was severe, the statement based not only on the fact that the same religion clouded my father's childhood but also on something my mother told me. As a young bride she stayed with Uncle James and Aunt Emma that she might watch the pageantry of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. It was a glorious occasion and London nearly went mad with excitement and jubilation. The aged queen symbolised for her people England's greatness at that time, and the glory of the Empire, and perhaps it was more themselves than the old lady whom they were glorifying. England considered herself the greatest country in the world. Kings and princes had assembled to pay homage to her queen, and no doubt every rftan, woman and urchin in the streets felt more than human and rejoiced accordingly. Uncle James rejoiced and insisted that Aunt Emma should come with him in the brougham, just the two of them together, that they might drive round London and look at the decorations and see the happy people. It would do her good, he insisted. It would cheer her up. To please him she went and my mother ran eagerly downstairs when she heard the brougham's return to welcome them home. To her dismay they came in silently with unsmiling faces.

"Didn't you enjoy it, Auntie?" she asked.

Aunt Emma shook her head sadly. "How could I enjoy it, dear? All those thousands of people. It was for me a sight to break my heart."

"But why?" pursued my puzzled mother.

"They looked so unrepentant, dear. I could only ask myself how many of them were lost souls. To think of them in hell, I could hardly bear it."

My mother looked at Uncle James, saddened and distressed at the total failure of his attempt to cheer up Aunt Emma, and what she could hardly bear was his bitter disappointment. Dearly though she loved her my mother did not forgive Aunt Emma for that. Whatever her private conviction as to the final destination of the Jubilee crowds Aunt Emma should, for her husband's sake, at least have looked and laughed and smiled as though she thought it was heaven for all. My mother forgot that Aunt Emma was not the excellent actress that she was herself. Though she had a sharply truthful tongue my mother could send any expression she chose rippling over her animated face. My father, who enjoyed reading aloud, read aloud to her indefatigably for forty-two years, not only novels, plays and poetry for her supposed entertainment but also all his lectures and sermons and books, for she was an excellent and unbiased critic and she appeared to enjoy it as much as he did. I could hardly believe my ears when years later she told me that if there was one thing she hated it was being read aloud to. But Aunt Emma had no French blood in her and was incapable of deception.

We did not stay with Aunt Emma and Uncle James very often; only I think when my father brought my mother to London in search of some relief from her suffering. Uncle James could do nothing to help her himself but was only too anxious that she should see other doctors, though without X-rays to help them they could diagnose neither her dislocated coccyx nor the fact that she was suffering from arthritis caused by acute poisoning from sinusitis.

I cannot imagine why my parents took me with them on these visits, unless it was because Aunt Emma so enjoyed brushing my hair ("so exactly like my Bessie's hair. The likeness of this child to my darling Bessie is something extraordinary"), for my neurotic hatred of all large towns made me nothing but an exasperating incubus. From my babyhood all noise reduced me to an extremity of terror. I was taken protesting to children's parties and sat through the festive teas cold and shaking in dread of the banging of the crackers. School sports with the pop of pistols terrified me, and so did fireworks, thunderstorms and the noise of London. I think my mind has not often reached such a pitch of terror as was produced by a drive down Regent Street in an open victoria, sitting on the small seat with my back to the horses. It would have given delight to any sensible, normal child but the rush of noise coming from behind me, and the claustrophobia produced by crowds and pressure, were sheer hell. The ridiculous terror had no connection with physical danger; what I was afraid of I did not know. And yet driving in a hansom cab brought a sort of trembling bliss; even such a little fool as I was could not help rejoicing in such a magic equipage. And I could bear the top of a horse bus. Perhaps both conveyances gave me a sense of height and of removal from noise, and I have always loved heights; especially if it is quiet up there on top. To make matters even more annoying for my exasperated relatives I was always physically ill in London. Uncle James, appealed to, could find nothing whatever the matter with the maddening child, and must I think have indicated that it would be preferable to all concerned if I visited himself and Aunt Emma in the country only.

Their lovely country home was a very different kettle of fish. It was bliss. They had a large garden that in my memory basks always in hot sunshine. I have only to think of it to have in my nose the scent of the giant sweetpeas that grew there, and the smell of the azaleas and rhododendrons that separated the garden from the open country. By crawling through the bushes I could reach a certain secret place I knew of. There no one could see me from the house and I could sit cross-legged in a bower of apricot and golden azaleas, and see the world stretching away from me in mile after mile of blue shining heat mist. This hidden place was almost as wonderful to me as the cloisters at Wells, or Saints Bay in Guernsey; and at night in the deep stillness

of the Sussex countryside the nightingales sang.

There was another garden where I was happy. My father's only sister was now living at Uppingham, where her husband Clavel Parmiter was a housemaster and Nanny and I sometimes visited them. There were four children and they had a large sunny nursery in a big house and a Nanny who, like mine, had been trained at the Norland Institute in the arduous business of coping with 'the modern child' of that age. I suppose children always have been and always will be naughty, the rare moments when they trail clouds of glory being for those who look after them mere fitful gleams of sunshine in a long stormy day, but I think we behaved better then than the little demons do now, for I remember the two Nannies reigning very serenely over the five children in that nursery. And I remember these children dressed in their Sunday best, one small boy in a sailor suit and four little girls in white muslin dresses with coloured sashes, sitting good as gold and still as mice in the drawing room after tea while my uncle read aloud to us from (I think) The Child's Book of Saints. Like my father he read aloud extremely well, trained to it as part of his parental duty, but even so the picture of even temporarily good and quiet children listening to a Sunday story with hands folded in muslin laps is distinctly a period piece.

I admired my cousins because they were so clever; they could catch a ball without dropping it and play card games well, and they never shamed their father by the clumsiness and speechlessness of desperate shyness as I shamed mine, and they made fairy houses beautifully.

It was the fairy houses that made me love their garden so much. I may be wrong about the garden but as I remember it the lawn sloped down to a hollow where narrow paths wound among flowerbeds and under the shade of bushes and low trees. It seemed a secret, mysterious place to me, just the place to build houses for the fairies. Somehow, though of course I believed absolutely in fairies, I had never thought of building houses for them in the Wells garden. As an only child I had been more aware of the need for human than for fairy companionship and had found for myself a boy of my own age called Charlie. I do not know if that was his real name because I do not know what sort of boy he was, whether he was the creation of my imagination or whether he really had some mysterious, inexplicable life of his own. He was, in either case, completely real to me, and we played happily together for hours. Also he was useful. When I did not want to go to one of the hated parties I said Charlie was coming to tea with me. If I did not want to do my lessons I said Charlie was coming to play with me. The boy became a perfect nuisance to everyone except myself, and finally my mother lost patience and spoke terrible words. "Once for all, child, there is no Charlie." It was a death sentence and the boy left me. I cried bitterly but he never came back.

But my cousins, having each other, thought fairies in the garden would be preferable to more children and taught me how to build houses for them. The roofs and walls of these mansions were constructed of twigs and leaves, and inside were beds for the little creatures made of flower petals and on the floors were carpets made of more flower petals arranged in patterns. We would see who could make the prettiest house but we never knew if they gave pleasure because we never managed to see a fairy inside. We were so sheltered in our nurseries that children then did not grow up so quickly as they do now, yet to reach the age of ten years gave us a grown-up feeling. One's age now had two figures instead of one. Ten candles on a cake went all the way round it. At ten years old I decided that I no longer wanted to be called Beth. I told my family it was a babyish name. I was ten years old and must now be called Elizabeth. Having delivered my ultimatum I banged the door shut on my childhood and thought it gone. But my father opened the door again. He obstinately refused to call me anything but Beth.

I find it impossible to think of the family of the silk merchant without thinking of what they believed, for their faith was so much a part of themselves that they cannot be separated from it. It has been said of Victorians and Edwardians that they were frequently hypocritical in their religion, and I think this is probably true, for even in my childhood to be an agnostic, like my Guernsey grandfather, was to be slightly suspect. A doctor or lawyer who did not go to church would not have so many patients or clients, as one who did. Therefore nearly everyone did go to church and Sunday was a day set apart, entirely different from other days, with a different flavour to it.

In town and city alike one awoke to a sense of serenity and quietness, unbroken until the bell-ringers got going in every tower and steeple in the land. But it was not noise they made, it was music.

In the country the wind carried the sound of the bells over the fields from one village to the other, and in the towns there seemed to be bell-song at every street's end. Sunday was a dedicated day, sacred to the bells, to top hats, rustling silk dresses, kid gloves, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; and God. To what extent God himself mattered to each one only that one could have told you. Or perhaps he could not have told you, since sincerity finds it hard to find the right words and hypocrisy, being so often a form of self-deception, finds it only too easy. But for the many I do believe that faith in God was deep and strong, and so his law as they conceived it was important, and sin mattered, and the discipline of their moral code was as binding as their faith and gave strength to the nation.

I do not think there were any hypocrites in my father's family; they did not have Huguenot blood in them for nothing; and I think of them with great respect. If they were too stern, too obsessed with thoughts of sin and death and judgment, I believe they had paradoxically a basic happiness that we have largely lost today because we no longer have their discipline.

Certainly they were much too tied up in the minutiae of sin. When I had to go through my father's books after his death I found a little book of devotions that he must have used in his very early days. It made my heart ache, for the lists of sins for which the penitent must search his conscience made it seem that one could hardly breathe without sin, and if my father was using this little book in the early days of his marriage I can understand the exasperated cry which sometimes broke from my mother, "Why can't people realise that God has common sense?" Yet in the practice of a strict discipline of penance there is joy. There are few joys so great as the joy of a sense of forgiveness and without a sense of sin one cannot know it.

But I will say for us today that we get ourselves dead, and our bodies disposed of, with less fuss and bother than our ancestors did. The funeral elaborations of those days were tremendous, and yet I think our ancestors were not so afraid of death as many people are today. I think it had a kinder face. Since those days two great wars have scored their wounds across the body of our shared humanity, and in our individual lives we see daily on the TV pictures of death by violence, torture or famine, and road accidents are always with us. This face of death is too hideous to be seen without fear and horror but it is the one we see most often, for normal deaths from illness or old age take place almost always in hospital. Very often even the nearest relatives do not see them; or if they do it is in the atmosphere of a hospital ward, fraught with an accumulation of pain and distress. And so how can people not be afraid?

But in those pre-war days people mostly died in their own homes and a death in the house was as normal as a birth. Even the children knew all about it. You came into the world and you went out again, the children were told. You took off your body as though it were an old coat and went through the door of death into another world. Both birth and death could be painful, and death was hard to bear for the people left behind, but there are other things in life which are hard to bear, we were told; life is not a bed of roses and heartbreak is to be expected.

"You must expect that," was the constant and lugubrious remark of an old servant of ours. She said it of every disaster, from death to smashing the best teapot, and the invariable remark could rouse hidden laughter in her hearers if the disaster was not too bad, but it represented a serenity of acceptance that took away the dread of death. I think we children grew up with little fear of it. Frightened person though I am I do not know yet what people mean when they say they fear death. Injury, disease, pain, these things that meet us on the way to death and test our courage to the utmost, yes, but not death itself. Yet I believe that the fear of death must come at some moment to every soul, and that it is right that it should. A sense of immunity is a bad thing, a separating thing. At the end of it all, perhaps at the end of many lives, there should be no human experience that we have not, all of us, shared with each other. How can we hope for union with God until we have come to regard unity with each other as the greatest treasure that we have as we journey to him?

But paradoxically what a fuss was made about this normal thing, death. The elaborate funeral procession with the black horses and the carriages following filled with mourners in inky garments, and afterwards all the letters of condolence that must be answered on black-bordered notepaper, and then the weekly Sunday visits to the grave with floral offerings, and to the dressmaker for new clothes, as black dresses were discarded for purple, and then purple for grey and heliotrope, and then finally (though with trembling and temerity) the thought of a pink dress could once more be entertained.

One is thankful so much fuss has passed into oblivion, but yet, had it a good side? The relief of tears was not only allowed but expected, and it relieved tension. Having so many things to do occupied the mind and provided death with pageantry and ritual, things that have always seemed to be two of the human hungers. And ritual is basically religious. Bereavement was easier to bear when faith upheld it, for in spite of their black garments everyone said, and most people believed, that departed members of their family had gone to heaven. And yet they believed in hell too, and not all departed members of a family are equally virtuous; but of course for the black sheep of one's own family there were always extenuating circumstances. Dear Aunt Emma mourned over the probable destination of the crowds in the streets, but I don't think that she imagined for a moment that anyone related to her could share their fate. Human thinking always seems to get especially muddled when it has to do with religion and the old lady who said, "The Hand of God has been heavy upon me but there's One Above will see me righted," was quite representative. The basic thought at the bottom of each selfish mind is, "It can't happen to me," and that 'me' includes the relatives who seem a part of us. We felt that way in the last war and would confess it to each other. We might be racked with anxiety for husbands and lovers fighting overseas, our bodies would tremble and our mouths would go dry when bombs were falling close to us, yet down at the bottom was that strange sense of immunity. When it did happen to us I think the first reaction was one of stunned astonishment.

CHAPTER VI

Ely

RELIEF FOR MY MOTHER CAME AT LAST FOR UNCLE James sent her to a London surgeon who knew what was the matter. Her sinusitis was so bad that it had caused an abscess pressing on the brain. He was getting old and he told my father that he himself had not the courage to operate, but he sent her to a brilliant young Bristol surgeon whose name if I remember correctly was Watson Williams. I expect that the operation he performed then, and the others which followed later, are now normal and commonplace, but they were not at that time for surgeons came from France and Germany to watch this first operation, while my father spent the time praying in the chapel of the nursing home. My mother was delivered from the worst of her pain, though still no one knew that she had a dislocated coccyx, and after a long time away from Wells she came home relieved but anxious. For even before the sinusitis and arthritis attacked her the relaxing climate of Wells in its hollow in the hills, combined with the

on its little hill. Our predecessors in the house had fought the cold by installing in the hall a peculiar monster resembling those seen in pictures of prehistoric beasts. He was called the Tortoise Stove and had a tortoise sculptured somewhere on his iron mail. He also had a huge metal chimney that reared up like a proboscis and disappeared in a hole in the wall to go I know not where. In the winter a fire was lit in his belly and on calm days he shone with a soft glow and gurgled gently in his sleep, but on windy days he became red-hot all over and roared and bellowed. His temper was then considered to be dangerous, and we would approach him carrying bowls of cold water that we placed as propitiatory offerings at his feet and upon his scaly back. But he must have been a good monster at heart for he never exploded, never did us any harm at all, and served us faithfully through all the years we lived at Ely.

For me personally his chief use was not for warmth for I spent many happy hours making toffee on him. The accomplished cook who took the place of Sarah was too efficient a person to want children under foot in the kitchen, and the hours I had been used to spend toasting myself in front of the kitchen range at Wells I now spent making toffee with Tortoise. I loved him dearly. He had a distinct personality, hot-tempered but good-natured with it, a friendly sort of dragon, though friendlier when not red-hot. I was with him when I had to say good-bye to Nanny.

This good-bye was the one shadow on the move to Ely. I was to have a daily governess to prepare me for boarding school, my mother was now well enough to manage without a nurse and my father made a terrible decision. A man in debt to Queen Anne was not justified in keeping a Nanny permanently in his household for no reason except that she was beloved, and so Nanny must go. I was told about it but children do not understand the meaning of a grief that they have not as yet experienced, and I received the news with total incomprehension. How can a child understand that someone who has been the foundation of life from the beginning is not going to be there next week? It is the same as being told that the earth itself will not be there on Wednesday. The situation cannot be understood. It was not until she said good-bye to me in the hall, and for the first time in my life I saw her weeping, that I realised what was happening to us. I clung to her, but it was no good, she pulled herself away and blind with tears went out to the cab that was waiting at the door, got in and was driven away.

Then I knew. She was not just going away for a holiday, she was going for good. She might visit us but she would never live with us again. She was going to live with another mother and another child. She would love another mother and child, not us any more. Nanny had gone. I doubt if any of the partings of my life have plunged me into quite such total desolation as this one did. I stayed for a while in the hall with Tortoise and then went back mechanically to the unfortunate new governess from whom I was careful never to learn one single thing. Not only was my mind closed against her, it was closed in the face of learning for many years to come.

If my desolation was so great what could my mother's have been? Nanny had been with her when the flood of illness and pain had overwhelmed her youth, and it had perhaps been Nanny rather than her husband who had comforted her most as she struggled to find her feet and conquer her despair. My father was always a great strength to her, I know, but her instinct was always to spare him... I do not think anyone ever tried to spare Nanny. . . I wish I could say that my mother and I comforted each other but I cannot remember that we did. My mother was a very proud as well as a very brave woman and in the whole of our life together I never once saw her cry. When she wept she did it alone and no one would have dared intrude upon her. She faced the world in the manner laid down by King Alfred. "If thou hast a woe tell it not to the weakling, tell it to thy saddle-bow and ride singing forth." Any emotional display, any voicing of sentiment that was not entirely sincere, roused her anger. She would cheerfully deceive people for their good, as she did when she let my father think she enjoyed hearing him read aloud, but in the things of the human spirit she demanded truth.

The top floor of the tall rambling house was extraordinary. There were six rooms, the schoolroom and five bedrooms with steps leading up and down between them and a huge skylight in the roof above the landing. One felt as though on board ship, there was so much light and air up there, and when the wind blew from the fen such a turbulence of sound. Other small girls joined me daily in resistance to education. I do not think our poor governess enjoyed herself, but we did. The schoolroom was over the drawing room, a big room taking the curve of the roof. I had been allowed to choose the colour scheme and so the walls were white and the door, window

and exposed beams were painted the bright cornflower blue which at that period was my favourite colour. There was the usual big schoolroom table, uncomfortable chairs, a wooden cupboard, bookcases and an upright piano. There were two windows facing south and east and I remember the room as perpetually filled with sunshine. But then I have no memories of wet days in my childhood, I remember only the spectacular thunderstorms, great gales and the whiteness of snow, never dull drizzling rain. Yet I also remember the umbrella stands with metal trays to take the drips, and the enormous goloshes. So it must have rained.

The south window looked over the front garden and had a view of the old walnut tree surrounded in spring with hundreds of aconites growing in the grass. But the glory of the room was the east window. The tall house was at the summit of the little Isle of Ely and from the east window one looked out as from a tower over the vast stretch of the fen reaching to the distant line of the horizon. The colours of the fen, especially in the days of harvest, were lovely. They changed with every passing cloud and when the floods were out in winter they mirrored the sky. When later I went to boarding school and the schoolroom became my bedroom I had my bed by the east window, and could watch the sun come up over the horizon and paint a huge skyscape of clouds lilac and saffron and crimson and rose. I developed a love for Ruskin in those days, partly because he could paint a skyscape in words as it seemed to me that no one else could do.

If I had closed my mind to learning in the academic sense I had not closed it to books, for I did not consider that books were education, and if I learned

a thing? Why had he not been allowed to go free? The shell theory, when I finally reached it, was comforting. He had gone free. What the three of us had felt or seen in that bungalow was only the cast-off shell of his misery.

Yet sometimes I think the apparitions we see are not shells but real spirits; but they are the happy ones and we should rejoice to see them. Children, I think, see them most often. The story of a little boy whose encounter with a monastic ghost was happier than mine was told me by his mother. It was during the last war and she had accompanied her soldier husband to the training camp where he had been posted as commandant. They rented as a temporary home a very old house which, they were told, had once been a monastery. They themselves found it unpleasantly haunted but their small son was not aware of anything frightening; on the contrary he said the old man who wore a sort of dressing-gown with a rope round his waist, and sat on his bed and talked to him before he went to sleep, was a nice old man and he loved him. "He is teaching me a prayer," he told his mother. Presently he said to her, "I know the prayer now. I can say it." She asked him if he could say it out loud to her and he said yes, and carefully recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin, without hesitation or mistake. She was astonished. He had not yet been to any school and she could think of no living person who could possibly have taught it to him.

Into this category might come the playmates, unseen by the grown-ups, who come to play with

lonely children; that is if these playmates are not merely projections of the children's own longing; and also the friendly but inquisitive spirits who keep an eye upon the welfare of a much-loved home. Something of this kind was experienced by Jessie, the friend with whom I live, myself and our dog, when twenty years ago we came to live in our 300-year-old Oxfordshire cottage. Our immediate predecessors had been here only for a short while. They had found the empty cottage, repaired and modernised it with great skill and then, finding it too lonely, they sold it to me. Its owner before them was a gallant old lady who is still remembered as the village washerwoman. She inherited the cottage from her father, the Rector's coachman, and lived in it for fifty years. We had been here only a short while when we became aware of her presence; or we thought we were, for there is always that 'if. We humans saw no one, but Tiki the dog most certainly did. In the evenings, when Jessie was out at some meeting or concert and I was alone in the living room writing, Tiki would be lying on the floor beside me. Our long raftered room was once two rooms, kitchen and parlour, but my predecessors made one room of it. Tiki and I would be at the parlour end facing what had once been the kitchen. All would be quiet and peaceful and then suddenly Tiki would leap to her feet and facing the corner of the room, where perhaps there had once been a rocking-chair beside the kitchen fire, would bark furiously at someone whom she could see but I could not see. Finally, though the person felt friendly, I am ashamed to say that I grew frightened and on lonely evenings took to writing upstairs with Tiki lying on my bed. But this ruse was not always successful for Tiki would occasionly behave in almost the same manner. She did not bark but she would sit up, lift her head high and growl at someone who apparently came into the room, and then her head would move round slowly as her dark eyes watched that someone wander round the room and go out again. Then Tiki would curl up and settle down once more. Our little spare room, once the old washhouse, opens out of the sitting room at the parlour end. We said nothing of our haunting when a friend, a practical Yorkshire woman of whom one would expect no odd fancies, came to stay with us. She was aware of something. "I'm not at all afraid," she said, "but I cannot go into my room at night without turning round and facing the far end of the sitting room. I don't see anything but I have to face it, and then I am all right. I can go into my room and shut the door."

Then, as we settled down in our new home and began to love it dearly, Tiki ceased to bark and growl and no longer even glanced at what I now call the rocking-chair corner. We concluded that the old lady was satisfied and was no longer visiting us. And yet only two years ago a friend came to stay the night. He arrived in the morning very tired and after lunch went to his bed for a rest. He emerged at tea-time enquiring, "Who's the old lady I've just seen in my room?"

I believe hopefully in sight-seeing ghosts, though to my knowledge I have never seen one, and if they exist I hope that after I die I may be allowed days off from purgatory to be one myself. We die with so many places that we long to see still unvisited. I have been luckier than most for many places that I longed to see I have seen, but there are many others that I know I shall not see in this life. But as a ghost, perhaps? I hope so. And better that way for one would travel so light, and miss the turmoil at the airports and not get tired. And there would be the extraordinary blessed loneliness of no one seeing you, though you are there.

I experienced this once in an unforgettable dream. I was a ghost in my dream, not of the sight-seeing sort but of the re-visiting old haunts variety. I was not visiting an old house but Peppard Church, whose spire I can see from my bedroom window and whose bell sounds across the fields to tell us the time. I confess with shame that I have never enjoyed church , services; unless taking place in Ely Cathedral, and then it was the Cathedral that worked its alchemy upon the services and not the other way round. But there is an exception, a completely simple early-morning Communion service at any village church. At such a service one is not so much a complicated human being coming to a ritual that can be almost as complicated as oneself, one is that simple creature, the hart, coming to the water springs. And the place where they spring can become as beloved as one's home, and those who are with you there are no longer the congregation but the family. I was one with them in my dream, loving them, and yet because they could not see me I experienced at the same time that happiness which reprehensible solitaries like myself feel when they can slip into an empty church and be alone there. When they went up to the altar I went with them and knelt at the far end of the line, the last of them. But I woke up just before the priest reached me and so I cannot tell you what a priest does when confronted with a ghost at the altar rail.

did not see them I could feel how magic ran in the earth and branched through one's veins when one sat down. The stories that some of my Dartmoor friends told me would be laughed at by most people, but they were sensible persons and they did not laugh. I think that probably the one among my friends who experienced most was the one who said least about it, Adelaide Phillpotts, Eden Phillpotts' daughter. She lived for years upon the moor and she loved it so deeply that she was not afraid to spend whole nights alone on the tors; but she is a mystic and mystics seem always unafraid. Her book The Lodestar is full of the wild spirit of the moor.

The friend who saw fairies, when she first went to live in her cottage on the moor, was visited early in the morning by a little old woman, wearing a bonnet, who walked quietly into the kitchen where she was preparing breakfast. Friendly and smiling the old woman refused breakfast but sat down to chat. She wanted to know exactly what my friend intended to do in the garden. What flowers would she have? What vegetables? She had very bright eyes and nodded her head in approval as they talked. She seemed a happy old woman, very much at home in the kitchen, but when my friend turned away for a moment she found on looking round again that her visitor had left her. She was never seen again and when the neighbours were questioned they denied ever having seen such an old woman in the village.

Another friend was driving back to her home on the moor one summer evening when she found herself in the most beautiful wood. She had no sense of strangeness but drove through it entranced by the loveliness of the evening light shining through the

trees. Coming out of the wood she found herself at her home, put the car away and went about the normal business of the evening, and only gradually did she remember that her road home lay through an open stretch of moorland. There was no wood there; not now. The next day she went to see an old man who had lived all his life upon the moor and told him what had happened. He nodded his head. "I know the wood, ma'am," he told her. "I've been in it myself. But only once. You'll not see it again. It's only once in a lifetime."

This experience of a long-vanished wood is the same sort of experience as that of Edith Olivier at Avebury, and that of Miss Wordsworth and Miss Jour-dain at Versailles. We can hardly ever have what we think is a unique experience without discovering it has been shared by many others. Only the details differ, not the experience. Two more examples are the moor terror and the singing in the lonely places, but these did not come to me on Dartmoor. Nothing surprising happened to me on Dartmoor; at least nothing more surprising than the sense of being lifted up into another world, enclosed in its own mystery and belonging to itself alone, and that happens to all of us when we climb up to the mountains or the moors. The keen air is like wine and we are not our valley selves as we watch the cloud shadows passing along the flanks of the hills, and listen to the sound of falling streams and the crying of the curlews. The whisper of wind stirring the grasses has a distinct voice, insistent at the door of our hearing, and behind it all the vast silence and stillness of this world of the heights seems like the stillness and silence of eternity itself.

Yet this surprise of entering another world is always new and fresh however often it comes. Spring is always new, and the first blue flower opening on the stringy tangle of a plant of morning glory is always a profound shock however much you were expecting it. Expectation, shock, wonder and worship. And terror too; not in the heart of the morning glory but in the heart of the silence and stillness. It seems to be of God, indeed almost to be God, but the moors and the mountains have their dark mysteries as well as their holy ones, and terror can leap out of the heart of what felt like a holy day just as suddenly as out of a dark and frightening storm.

It was in Skye that I had my only (I hope) experience of the moor terror. It was years ago when Skye was wilder than it is now. I was on a walking holiday with a friend, but she was tired that day and I climbed up alone to the great stretch of moorland behind the little hotel where we were staying. It was a long pull and it was good to sit and rest. There was not a sign of a human habitation or of another human being. I felt alone in this magic world and gloried in the loneliness. For once it was not raining in Skye, it was a blue, still, warm day. I could see the Cuillins in the misty distance and the blue line of the sea was not far away. The bees hummed in the wild thyme but there was no other sound. I sat without moving for I do not know how long, sinking deeper and deeper into happiness and peace, and then suddenly there was a loud, shattering, double-rap behind me. It was like two mighty blows of a door-knocker in quick succession, but much louder. I have sometimes been wakened from sleep at night into a state of momentary fear by this same double rap but this was infinitely more terrifying and it came from exactly behind me. I jumped to my feet and turned round but there was nothing to be seen; only the

empty miles of moorland quivering a little in the heat-haze. But the terror remained. I was not brave enough to stay, and left the lovely place more precipitately than I have ever left anywhere. I did not actually run but the pace was good and steady and did not slacken until I reached the homely little hotel beside the harbour down below. It was years before I spoke to anyone about this terrifying experience and then I was told casually, "That's the moor terror. Everyone has it at some time or other."

And many people too have heard the singing, though I had not heard anyone speak of it until I heard it myself. If I did hear it. . . For again there must always be that 'if. The subconscious mind can play queer tricks upon one, projecting scents and sounds and images that appear to us completely objective, but nevertheless their origin is within ourselves. Or there may be a perfectly ordinary explanation for what seems a very un-ordinary phenomenon; only we do not happen to know what the explanation is. Or, as is pointed out in that wonderful book by Renee Haynes, The Hidden Springs, an experience may be both objective and subjective. Some good or evil influence may be present in some particular place, at some particular time, an objective presence outside ourselves, and spiritually we are aware of it; but, if we see or hear anything, this may be merely the response and projection of our own subconscious mind. When we think of the phenomenon we call 'seeing a ghost' this can be an alternative to the shell theory. Well, whatever the explanation of the singing I heard I shall remember it until I die. It happened, of course, in Devon, where these unexplainable things are commonplace.

My mother and I had a cottage in an apple orchard at the edge»of a village. Behind our cottage, between the orchard and the village, was a steep hill. To the right Dartmoor was visible, but otherwise the place was a little valley in the hills that had a magic of its own. There were a few other small dwellings besides ours, an old house behind a high wall, a farm and some cottages, and so strictly speaking the place was not a lonely one, and yet, because of its particular magic, it was. Especially in the early morning, and especially after a snow-fall. There is something very lonely about a deep snow-fall and Devon snow, because the average rainfall is high, is almost always deep. One is walled in and cut off. The world seems very far away and the heart rejoices.

In spring, in Devon, there is often a sudden late snow-fall taking one entirely by surprise. I remember once seeing irises and tulips with their bright heads lifted above a deep counterpane of snow, and boughs of apple blossom sprinkled with sparkling silver. But the snow-fall that seemed to bring the singing was earlier in the year. There were only the low-growing flowers in bloom in the garden and they were all buried out of sight. There had been no wind in the night, no suggestion that the last snow of the year was falling, and when I drew the curtains early in the morning I was astonished to see the white world. And what a world! I had never seen a snow-fall so beautiful and I was out in the garden at the first possible moment. The snowclouds had dropped their whole treasure in the night and were gone. The huge empty sky was deep blue, the air sparkling and clear. The sun was rising and the tree shadows lay blue across the sparkle of whiteness. The whole world was pure blue and white and it seemed that the sun had lit every crystal to a point of fire. There was a silence so absolute that it seemed a living presence. And then came the singing.

It was a solo voice, ringing out joy and praise. One would have said it was a woman's voice, only could any woman sing like that, with such simplicity and beauty? It lasted for some minutes, and then ceased, and the deep silence came back once more. I stayed where I was, as rooted in the snow as the trees, but there was no return of the singing and so I went back to the cottage and mechanically began the first task of the day, raking out the ashes of the dead fire and lighting a new one. The light of the flames helped me to think. None of us, in the little group of dwellings in the valley, had a voice much above a sparrow's chirp. No one in the village that I knew of had a voice like that. It was war-time and visitors from the outside world seldom came. Even if by some extraordinary chance some great singer had descended upon us, what would she be doing struggling down the steep lane from the village in deep snow at this hour of a cold morning? And wouldn't I have seen her? I could see both lanes from the little terrace outside the cottage and had seen no one. There were only two explanations. Either I was mad or I had heard a seraph singing. Later when I took my mother her breakfast I told her of the singing. She looked at me and, as usual, made no comment whatever.

And so, for some years, I inclined to the former view and I told no one else about the singing. And then, one day after the war had ended, a very sensitive and sympathetic cousin came to visit us and told me about a holiday he had had in the wilds of Argyll. He had always wanted, he said, to talk to someone who had heard the singing and at last he had come

one on each side of the fire, and I heard the whole story of Socrates. "There," he said when he had finished, "now you know how Helene felt."

Our Guernsey grandfather would have loved Helene as much as my father did but he never saw her after her first visit to Guernsey when she was a baby. During the First World War, though there was not the tragedy of enemy occupation as in the second war, no one might visit the Channel Islands unless they had an urgent reason to do so. Marie and Emily could go but I could not, and so I was separated from my grandfather for some years. At the end of the war my grandmother died, leaving her husband totally broken by his loss. Emily gave up her work to be with him and they both came to stay with us at Ely for a while. My grandfather was now over eighty and almost blind. He faced the journey to see my mother again, but Helene was not then with us. Emily took him up to London to see a famous eye-surgeon, hoping something could be done to save the remnants of his sight. Nothing could be done and despair took hold of him.

I could hardly reconcile this old, broken man sunk in darkness with the laughing grandfather I had known. With Marie-Louise dead there was no one who could comfort him, not even my mother. Without faith he could not pray and believed that Marie-Louise had passed into oblivion. He was not musical and could find no joy in listening to music. The only thing that anyone could do to help him was to read aloud, for his mind was still active and for the period of the reading he would emerge a little from his darkness and a shadow of his old alert expression would come back to his face. I. was usually exempt from the duty of reading aloud to him for when immersed

in the first torture of boarding school I had developed a shocking stammer, which I did not conquer until late middle life, and the experience of listening to my reading aloud was another sort of torture for the unfortunate hearer. However, if no one else was available, my grandfather considered my reading aloud better than none, and a little real interest flickered up in him as he tried to help me with my speech troubles. For he still loved us all. If despair had killed all hope he still had love.

But one grey dismal afternoon when we were sitting together neither the book I was trying to read to him nor the peculiarities of my stammer could interest him. A wretched silence fell between us. My mother was lying down and my father and Emily were out. There was no one I could fetch to comfort him and I did not know how to do it myself. Then he began to speak, not fumbling for words, voicing his despair quite clearly. "I must die soon," he said, "and go into nothingness. What I have cared for all my life has been knowledge, scientific knowledge. I have read and studied in every free moment I have had. I have now great knowledge and could be useful, yet I must die and all that I know will die with me. All that I have and am must die. It is all totally wasted."

He sank back into silence and I sat frozen with dismay. I could not speak. But why did I not do as I would have done as a small child, run to him and hug him? Why did I not do something? I cannot remember how it ended. I only hope that my father or Emily came back quickly. The visit ended, my grandfather and Emily went back to Guernsey and she wisely moved them from the house where Marie-Louise had died to a little flat at St Peter Port, looking down on the harbour. Here my grandfather sat at the window all day long. He could see little or nothing of the busy life of the harbour but he could hear it; the varying voices of the ships, men shouting to each other, the gulls crying and the sound of the sea when the wind blew, and Emily thought it comforted him. But he did not survive the move for long and quietly died.

I totally failed my grandfather but he did not fail me, though it was years before I realised what it was he had done for me in rooting my faith, that I believe grew up out of his despair. Children lucky enough to grow up in a Christian home are given a good start, since small children are copycats and believe what their parents believe and do as their parents do, and later they sail out from a harbour that has a lighthouse on the rocks and however far they travel it is difficult to forget the harbour with the green fields of childhood behind it, and the light always haunts them; it is a finger of light feeling for them.

But neither a copycat religion nor a haunting is faith. Somewhere, if one is lucky enough to have faith, however wobbly and constantly tested it may be, there must have been a moment of conviction that fell like a seed to the earth and struck root. When my grandfather said that all that he was, all that he knew, was going into nothingness I felt at first furious, and then incredulous. What he said was a lie. It was impossible. His knowledge was a closed book to me but I knew what he was in himself, what sort of a man his chosen life of selfless love and struggle had made him. Among living creatures man alone, it appears, is capable of making this deliberate choice, and my grandfather was only one among a great multitude of selfless lovers and seekers. If all

this love and struggle and knowledge was to go to waste then not only must God be so crazy that he could not exist but the universe also was crazy and pointless. Yet it did not seem to be. It seemed to bear witness to a marvellous provenance and order. It seemed to bear witness to a God who is not crazy. This is what I worked out later. At the time I simply knew the thing was impossible, and I think faith roots more easily in these sudden convictions, coming like blinks of light from the lighthouse, than by any muddled reasoning of a thing as limited as the normal human mind.

After the war ended my father faced and carried through the difficult task of re-starting the Theological College. When it had been fully restored his vice-principal took his place as principal and he went to King's College, London, to teach theology under Dr Matthews, who later became Dean of St Paul's. He loved and admired Dr Matthews and his short time there was one of his happiest. He kept his canonry at Ely Cathedral and we still lived there; indeed I think we hardly contemplated having our home anywhere else. My father lived in his rooms at King's College during the week and came home to Ely at the weekends. He loved London and he loved Ely and the swing between them was something he enjoyed.

Someone who lived at Ely at the time wrote to me not long ago and told me one of her memories of my father in those days. She was walking along the Gallery, the street that led from the Porta to the

Cathedral green, when she saw my father coming slowly towards her. He was a fast, light walker but he had slowed his steps to match those of the old tramp walking beside him. They were deep in conversation and my father was carrying the tramp's bundle. They were on their way to our house so that my father might get the old man a meal.

The little incident is typical of the many things of this kind that he was constantly doing. That was an Ely incident, remarked because he was so well known in Ely, but what did he do in London on those walks he took on his free afternoons, exploring the city's nooks and crannies? What strange characters did he meet in the places to which he penetrated? What did he say to them? What did they do? What would I not give now to know more about those London adventures, of which he spoke once with a light on his face, but he was a reticent man and with the awful self-centredness of youth (at least my youth) I never asked a single question, for my own affairs at this period were too absorbing.

I was in love for the first time and for a while the world shone with the same sort of beauty that had lighted the garden at Wells in my childhood. It ended in tears, of course. Does not every first love end in tears? That is if it does end, but sometimes I think that first love is one of the hidden beauties that are a part of us forever. In my case how glad I am that that particular magic was a part of Ely as well as of myself.

What to do with me when I left school was a problem for my poor parents, once they had grasped the fact that their daughter knew next to nothing. That girls as well as men could now go to an Oxford or Cambridge college was still like a dream come true,

but very few of us who went to that old-fashioned happy school achieved it, and they only the brightest after a long period of intensive coaching. Academically speaking there was no hope for me. Many of my school friends had wealthy parents but whatever my father earned it always seemed drained away by the upkeep of some large ecclesiastical house; his lazy ignorant daughter would have to earn her own living.

Parents of that era realised that unless their daughters had exceptional beauty and charm they would not marry. The First World War left few young men alive. The phrase used at that time, 'the lost generation', sounds poetical but it was the truth. The few who came home when it was all over were so exhausted that they succumbed easily to the influenza that devastated Europe as soon as the fighting ceased. At least it was called influenza for politeness' sake. It was more like some form of plague; so many thousands of dead men and horses all over Europe were not buried deep enough. There was hardly a household that did not have its dead through this illness. I remember the winter as being one of still, dark cold like a pall over the land. No sun, no rain, just a heavy mantle of grey . . . But probably memory is playing tricks with me and I have spread a few grey days over the whole period. And so at that time there were millions more women than men in England.

But for the unmarried women their fate was mitigated, if not transmuted altogether, by the wonderful fact that they were needed as a labour force. They had proved their worth in the war and now they had the vote and a large and varied field of work was open to them. Women today consider themselves not yet sufficiently free but old women of my age cannot get over the conviction that we were liberated fifty years ago. I am one of many who have found great joy in work and in building up a career. I have even lived to 'thank God fasting' for the single state. Though you have to be fairly old before you can recognise and deeply prize the blessings of a single life, for up to that point the deprivation of childlessness is hard to bear. Yet for the childless woman there is no lack of children in the world to love, even if they are not her own, and nothing to prevent a single woman experiencing the richness of falling in love now and again all her life. And indeed it is richness, for to every human being the pain of perhaps not having love returned is less important than the blessed fact of loving.

But at our prehistoric school we were unaware of all the opportunities that would soon open before us and still considered that a girl who must earn her own living had only two choices, to be an actress or a nurse according to temperament, and so I went through a stage-struck period and had I not been a stammerer I might have opted for that, and if by some miracle I had got there and my father had not liked it, that would have been his own fault.

The magic thing happened one winter's day when I was going home for the Christmas holidays, towards the end of my time at school. It was a cold dreary day, the war was going badly and school had been shadowed by Miss Lumby's death, but I was in high spirits as the train pounded towards Waterloo be-

cause my father would meet me there. He always had to meet me on every return from school, and convey me across London to Liverpool Street and the train to Ely, because not only was it not de rigueur then for girls to travel alone but my mother was perpetually haunted by a thing called The White Slave Traffic; a menace which I never fully understood but to which I was favourably disposed because it was largely responsible for my father meeting me in his top hat. He hated his top hat but I insisted that he should wear it when meeting me. I was immensely proud of him (no other girl at school had a father as good-looking as mine) and I considered that his charm was increased by his top hat. Looking back now I think I was wrong about this for he was not a top hat man. He looked his best in the cassock with a leather belt that for warmth's sake he always wore at home in our cold house, for that expressed something of what he was in himself.

No one could have suspected that the scrubby schoolgirl falling joyously from the railway carriage was this good-looking man's daughter. Our school uniform must have been designed to discourage vanity in even the prettiest girl, and I had no beauty except the long hair hidden from sight in a tight pigtail. In summer and winter alike we wore dark blue serge coats and skirts, the skirt was long for it had to 'cover the fat part of the leg', which was as well, for our thick black woollen stockings were not things of beauty. Tucked into the waist of the skirt was a high-necked white shirt blouse and somehow this always parted company with the skirt at the back, hanging down like a white tail, so the two were generally tethered together by a large black safety-pin. The school tie was thick and cumbersome

Our immediate predecessors, Dr and Mrs Headlam, had not loved it either, but I believe the Regius Professor before Dr Headlem, Canon Scott Holland, had loved it. But then he was a saint and as saints glow with the love of God no doubt their surroundings reflect their own warmth back to them. I have a photo of him sitting in the walled garden, that we were told was a dreary place before he came and saw what could be done with it, and he looks happy and serene as he surveys what he accomplished. It was difficult to make flowers grow in the garden because the soil was so poor and stony and the house cut off the south sun, but Canon Scott Holland planted roses in beds filled with imported earth, and as irises like stony soil he made a long bed filled with all the different species of iris that he could find. But to my mother it was a draughty, stuffy town garden and she could love only its one supreme glory, a wonderful acacia tree in the north-east corner. Its perfect shape and white flowers against a blue summer sky was one of the sights of Oxford. Over the garden wall, just beyond the archway that leads from Tom Quad to Peckwater, one would often find a painter sitting sketching the tree, for it towered up like an archangel and all the light in the sky seemed to flow towards it.

There is more light and warmth in that house now for after we left it was thoroughly renovated. Windows were enlarged and central heating was installed. Perhaps now it feels like a home and the acacia tree rejoices.

Phyllis, Muriel and Florence had been seized with a despair almost equal to my mother's when they saw the house, but as the chaos of removal began to give way to some sort of order we began to revive. The lift we had installed for my mother at Ely, a

comic thing like a large wardrobe worked by a mechanism of ropes and weights, had come with us and it enabled her to go from just outside her bedroom door to the garden door in a matter of minutes. She left her bed and sat in her wheelchair in the garden and tried to concentrate upon the acacia tree, but the air that came to her was the air of a city and she said she could not breathe. And I, when I tried to make a workroom out of a dark north room near the kitchen, found when I had set up my loom that there was scarcely enough light to work by, and who, in a city like Oxford with a fine art school, would even wish to be taught handicrafts by a nobody like myself in a room like this? My father was back in Oxford, his adored city where he had once been so happy and neither of his females appreciated it... I remember that we did have the grace to be ashamed of ourselves.

Driven by my shame, I began to discover Oxford's glories. I was not, like my mother, a sick woman. I was young and I had a strong pair of legs. Anyone who loves Oxford knows what I discovered, sometimes with my father, sometimes alone. Kingfishers in Christ Church Meadows and bluebells in Bagley Wood. The Library at Merton and the great fan-roofed stone staircase that ascended to the hall at Christ Church, and which echoed at the end of every summer term to the music of Byrd when the Cathedral choir stood there singing in the evening. New College garden and the cloisters at Magdalen.

Those cloisters were for me the heart of Oxford; why, I cannot explain. For me it just was so. Through all the years at Oxford, however unhappy I was, however restless and distracted, as soon as I had opened the door in the wall, gone in and shut it behind me, I was at peace. And nearly always alone. It seemed

almost as though I was the only person who knew about the door in the wall. Or if there was anyone else there, sitting or strolling quietly, and if one met their eyes, there was the ghost of a smile there, as though they recognised another of a fraternity. . . . Here is our peace. . . . The noise of the city could not, in those days, be heard in that enclosed place and there was one of those living trees there; a still, dark tree.

All trees are alive, I know, as miraculously alive as any other living creature, but some trees seem to have an added depth in their living, just as saints have. I have loved and remembered many such trees. The cedar tree at Wells into whose arms I climbed so often. The ilex tree at Damerosehay. The acacia tree. The wild cherry in the garden here in Oxfordshire, nearly as tall as a church steeple and, in a good spring, snow white, from top to toe, and so many more. Perhaps their added quality is that they have been very much loved. With the saints it is the other way round; they love very much. In both cases what Tolstoy said is true, "Where love is, God is." Which makes me suddenly remember the limerick Ronald Knox wrote about a tree in a college quad.

There was a young man who said 'God

Must think it remarkably odd,

To find that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad.'

'Dear sir, your astonishment's odd,

I am always about in the Quad,

And that's why the tree

Continues to be

While observed by, yours faithfully, God.'

OXFORD 2

The tall, thin, black figure of Monsignor Ronald Knox strolling round Oxford, his rather wide clerical hat unusually bent about the brim, his head bent a little forward, a half-smile on his face and a distant look in his eyes, apparently as blissfully indifferent to traffic as though his long loping legs carried him over the empty spaces of the moors instead of along busy streets, was a heart-warming sight. Even before I knew who he was I was fascinated by the sight of him, linking him in my mind with my father. Was he also a theologian? My father did not lope and stroll, he walked rapidly through the Oxford streets, wasting no time, his hands behind his back, but he often had that same half-smile on his face, and the distant look in the eyes. Since they were unaware of obstacles in their way it appeared as though the obstacles melted away, for they were not halted upon the path as were lesser men. I tried a trick on my father to see if he could be halted. Frequently, I leaving home and he returning to it, he would hurry past me without a sign of recognition. One day I side-stepped and confronted him. He stopped but there was quite a pause before his eyes could focus upon me or his mind remember that he had a daughter. Then he smiled. It was a moment of triumph for me. Yes, these men could be halted. Great though their intellectual power was it could not actually reduce material objects to vapour.

How remarkable they were, those Oxford Characters. They were themselves to such a degree that they had a sort of validity that made them unforgettable. Though today it may seem to us in our black moments that human beings are becoming automatons, that

proliferated. My father's books proliferated too but he had a plan by which when he bought six new books he sold six old ones, thus keeping the tide down and slightly salving his conscience over the expense of the new books. But Dr Jenkins could not have parted with a book to save his life. A multitude flowed into his house but none flowed out. When every bookcase in the study was full they stood in piles of varying heights all over the floor so that the room looked like a wood where the trees had all been cut down. "And when I go to see him," said the Bishop of Oxford, "there is a cup of tea he has forgotten to drink on the top of each tree stump." When the books had overflowed the library Dr Jenkins began piling them up on each side of the staircase, and there was barely room for his slender figure to go up and down between them. It was said that he only possessed two suits of clothes and that the best suit mysteriously disappeared and was found eventually well-pressed beneath the books on the stairs.

In the course of time his two maids either left or died of heartbreak, I do not remember which, and for a while Dr Jenkins managed with a daily helper who came in. Then he decided that a woman in the house, any woman, was intolerable. Outside the blessed harbour of his home they must be courteously endured, but inside, why bother with them? He was perfectly capable of looking after himself by himself. During his last years we were no longer living in Oxford and so we did not see him with his clothes growing green with age and his gown becoming more and more tattered, but always courteously refusing female assistance. Just once, I was told, his courtesy failed him. Christ Church is a royal foundation and

royalty was to pay one of its periodic visits. One of the don's wives pleaded with Dr Jenkins that she might be allowed to mend his torn gown. He courteously refused the kind offer. In despair she actually stole the gown from him and accomplished the necessary repairs. It was an insult to his independence, an unsufferable liberty, and just that once he was angry.

He was amazingly kind to me after my father died. The widows of clergy, living in official houses, are given only a short while to pack up and go. This cannot be helped, for a successor must come as quickly as possible to carry on the work of the man who has died. But a clergy-widow's pension is small and unless she has private means she must move into a house as small as her pension. In those days clerical houses were almost always on the too-large-white-elephant scale and so the problem was how to deal with the surplus possessions when you were moving from a house containing thirteen rooms to one containing four. It can seem an insuperable problem; especially if the books have proliferated. Dr Jenkins said he was going to help me sort my father's books, since I had to know which were valuable and which were not, to whom they could be given or where they would be sold, and we set aside a whole morning for the task. He arrived very early in cap and torn gown and we went into the study, and I can see now how his eyes lit up and his face kindled as the book-lined walls enfolded him. He had been in the study many times before of course, but only talking to my father, not let loose among the books.

He took a quick happy trot around the walls and gave a sudden cry of delight. He had found a particular treasure. He took it out, caressed it and opened it, then holding it in his left hand he raised his right to command my attention and began a loving, and long, dissertation upon it. He replaced it tenderly, went a little further and cried out again. Another treasure. He took it from the shelf and the process was repeated. It went on like that all the morning. I remember that I got tired and sat down. The lunch-hour struck in one boom from Tom Tower and we still had not sorted the books. But Dr Jenkins thought we had. He put the book he was holding back in its place, came to me and took my hand and held it. He spoke no word of sympathy, he knew better, merely filled the room with it for a moment or two. I never saw him again. He was a wonderful Character and so great was his individuality that I think he came near to being a saint.

Dr Spooner, Warden of New College, was another small white-haired gentleman of great charm and learning. Spoonerisms have now disappeared from the social scene but they were a great delight to the Oxford, and indeed to the England, of those days. Actually Dr Spooner said (or it was said that he said, for legends tend to grow about a genuine Character and the truth is hard to come by) that he only perpetrated one and that afterwards Oxford delighted in making them up for him. His one, he said, was when he gave out the first lines of a hymn. "We will now sing hymn number 175,

'Kinquering kongs their titles take From the foes they captive make.' "

But this is not strictly speaking a Spoonerism. It is a nonsense. A true Spoonerism, though dotty, must

make sense of a sort. A good example is the criticism Dr Spooner is said to have addressed to one of his laziest pupils when saying good-bye at the end of term. "Sir, you have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted the whole worm."

Dr Spooner had a sense of humour and he did sometimes deliberately make up a Spoonerism for himself. Travelling up to London in the train with other members of the University for an important luncheon he was unusually silent. He seemed wrapped in meditation and they forbore to disturb him. Later, at the luncheon, he made a speech including the most exquisite Latin Spoonerism.

I said that I thought Dr Jenkins, the prince of Characters, came near to being a saint. I think many Characters do, even if they don't actually arrive, but there is no doubt that all saints are Characters. It is hard to say what a saint is. I think that the nearest one can come to a definition is to say that a saint is a man or woman who has attained to the highest degree of selflessness that is possible in this world. This is a very limiting definition, making a saint a very rare bird indeed. He is individual to a degree, and so a Character. Someone asked me not long ago, out of the blue, "Have you known any saints?" And I heard myself answering, "Bishop Gore, and Mrs Rogers our Oxford charwoman." Only two? Sometimes I think my father was a saint but then my father could at rare intervals, to use a modern phrase, 'blow his top', and I remember that Jacapone da Todi and Father Damian were never 'raised to the altars' by their church because of their shocking tempers. So that leaves only two in a long life.

Bishop Gore was a friend of my father's, and what my father felt about him was so compounded of reverence and love that the very thought of him filled me with awe even before I saw him for the first time in my college days. He came to preach at St Giles, Reading, and I went to hear him. His reputation had filled the large church and his sermon on the great crowd of witnesses made them practically visible. The children of the clergy are not generally fond of sermons, for they have had to sit through too many, but this was a sermon to rank with the great discourses that John Donne used to preach at St Paul's and I listened as though it was the first sermon I had ever heard. Then, when we moved to Oxford, Bishop Gore came to stay with us for a few days. I expected to be terrified but even though he resembled the Isaiah of my youthful imaginings I was not afraid; and I had always thought Isaiah would have been as terrifying to meet as Beethoven. "Truly great men and women are never terrifying," someone told me lately. "Their humility puts you at your ease. If a very important person frightens you he is not great; he only thinks he is."

Nor can one dog-lover easily be frightened by another and Bishop Gore was a dog-lover; or at least upon this visit he lost his heart to our dog. We had at the time a very great dog. It has been said that the dog is the saint among the animals, so great are his powers of love and forgiveness, and if that is so then Brownie was a pre-eminent saint among very many. He was a large dog, possessed of quietness and dignity, and I will say no more of him at the moment, returning to him with what I fear may be great length later. Suffice it to say here that he and Bishop Gore greeted each other with what appeared to be a kind of recognition. It was very odd. There was only one person who ever willingly sat in our

dismal dining room under the eyes of those humourless men in the portraits, and that person was Brownie. He liked the place. Stretched out on the wide comfortable sofa he could feel himself separated from the ceaseless comings and goings of a busy house. He liked to meditate and here he could do so in peace. One day during his visit to us Bishop Gore could not be found. He was discovered with Brownie in the dining room, sharing the sofa, caressing the big dog's wise domed forehead and long silky ears and murmuring over and over again, "I like you, Brownie. Brownie, I like you."

Mrs Rogers our charwoman had given her heart to cats rather than dogs. At one time she had fifteen cats in the dark little house off St Aldates where she lived with her sister. When I went to see her there I thought it was a wretched house but I doubt if she did. I don't think she ever envied the good fortune of others because I think she never realised that her own life was a hard one. When she compared herself with other people it was always with compassion for them. She said to me one day, with absolute sincerity and much love, "I'm so sorry for ladies. Poor dears, they're so helpless." How ashamed I was! At this period of my life I hardly knew how to peel a potato.

Thinking of her, and of the greatness of her example, I think one of the saintly qualities is this unconscious refusal to envy the lot of others. For the unselfish, envy is an impossible exercise anyway since it is destructive; a symptom of a hidden urge to smash and destroy, while love is bound up with the urge to create and give; even if there is nothing to give except compassion. She was a small, bent woman, worn with hard work. She looked old but

CHAPTER XII

The Ark

IN THE SPRING OF 1939 MY FATHER DIED AT BARTON. He had a bad fall, a fortnight of pain and bewilderment, and then he became unconscious and died in his sleep. The nurses at the nursing home where he died told me I was wasting my time, sitting so many hours by the bed of a dying man who would never regain consciousness. But he did. He appeared to come back from some great distance and said slowly and distinctly, "Dear one, it is loving that matters," and then drifted away again upon the great, peaceful journey. So that is the end of it for these great men. All their accumulated knowledge, all the argument and controversy, seem of little importance. Only love remains important and is immortal. Baron von Hugel was much like my father in his dying for his last words to his niece were, "It is caring that matters. It is caring."

I had come very near to my father at the end of his life for he had been so marvellously good to me in my miseries and problems. For most of my life it had been between us as in my first memory of him, he had always been far on ahead of me, disap-

pearing into countries of the mind and spirit where I could not follow him. But in the last year of his life it was as though he turned back upon his path to find and be with me on mine. We were close to each other as never before, and part of my sorrow when he died was that our closeness was given no time to mature and grow greater. But between my father and my mother the closeness had been lifelong. They had been almost one person. What the parting meant to her she allowed no one to know. Her eyes lost all their brightness but no one saw her cry.

All times of devastation, whether they are the normal personal losses that visit every life, or the devastation of great wars, famines and earthquakes, leave the survivors with a feeling of amazement. Is it possible that such weak creatures as we know ourselves to be have coped with this? Done what had to be done, borne what had to be borne, picked up the pieces and become ready to begin again and go on living. It took more than a year, moves to three different houses, and the outbreak of a war to bring my mother and myself to this condition of amazement, followed by humble gratitude.

For no one supposes that this competence and survival has much to do with their everyday selves. Christians acknowledge the power and grace of God and marvel at it. Non-believers marvel at the discovery of a toughness within them that they did not know they had, a source of strength that seems not available in everyday living and opens up only when disaster strikes. The believer acknowledges this too but gives the name of God to the well of power within him, and believes also that he has a prepared path under his feet and moves along it step by step to a prepared end. Much later, looking back, he realises
how many stars there were showing the way at the cross-roads, stars which can be called either coincidence or Providence according to personal belief.
My mother and I called the cottage in Devon in which we finally began again Providence Cottage.
It was of course considered a sentimental name by a number of friends ("What have you called the place? Tranquillity Lodge? Serenity Mansion? Peace Villa?") but our feelings were not hurt for we knew what we knew. Above all we knew that my father still lived and still loved us. So great was his spiritual power that he was able to make that unmistakably clear to both of us after his death, and so we came to believe that human love at its best is so great a thing that only a God of love could possibly have created it..

Once she had mastered her first shock and grief my mother behaved like a phoenix, drove herself back into life and then flamed up into activity and optimism, even into a spurious state of health and strength that amazed Nanny and myself. For Nanny of course had now come to us. Her own parents had died, she was living with her sisters and was free to help us until we had settled into a new home. Helene was no longer living with us as her parents had come back to England for good and she was with them, and so my mother now only had Nanny and me to galvanise into activity.

We packed up the family treasures to go into store, sold the rest of the contents of the big Oxford house to help pay the large sum that was owing to the Inland Revenue (that detested bogey) when my father

died, and our first move was back to Barton, where Innisfree was now home. And we knew how lucky we were. Not many clergy widows, turning out in a hurry, have anywhere to go and we had our bungalow already furnished with the little we needed. Indeed we were lucky for unless I could manage to work much harder and write much better than I was doing at the moment we were going to be very badly off. That the position and the frailty of the bungalow would make it desperately cold for my mother in the stormy Barton winters was at the back of our minds, but we firmly kept it there. The turmoil of leaving Oxford over, exhausted by it and with nothing more to do we sank into black misery until my mother was suddenly aware of the first star, the first pointer. "We need a holiday," she said. "We are going to Devon for a month."

Devon? Why Devon? Nanny and I were dumbfounded. She and I had never been there and my mother only for a short while when she and my father were on their honeymoon. We knew no one there and where could we stay? But my mother had seen an advertisement in the paper. A small wooden bungalow could be cheaply rented for a summer holiday at a village called Marldon, four miles from Paignton, and she was quite certain that that was where we must go. So Nanny and I dragged ourselves out of the ooze of our exhaustion and we set off, driven by a Barton friend who had a large comfortable car and said he knew the way. More or less he did and very late in the afternoon we found the wooden bungalow and inside it our unknown landlady, who kept a guest-house next door, had lit a glowing fire.

For it was what those who do not love Devon call 'a typical Devon day'; that is to say it was raining, that steady relentless rain that lifted the Ark above

out altogether. What, if anything, were we thinking? A bomb falling on a little house like ours would have totally destroyed everything in it. Perhaps, like the Egyptians of old, we subconsciously thought that what was close to our bodies in death would accompany our spirits as they entered a new life.

I do not remember what we thought, but eventually Plymouth was left in ruins and peace, Marldon was once more a safe place for children and joy raised its golden head, for Helene came to live with us for a while with her small son.

At the outbreak of war Helene, with "the sea in her blood, became a Wren; but only for as long as it took her to decide which man of them all in the navy she wished to marry. Sometimes a very attractive girl gets so confused by sheer scope that she falls in love less wisely than a less attractive girl will do. But Helene never suffered from confusions. Her marriage was so happy that she could say at the end of her life, "It has been idyllic." I said earlier in this book that only happy marriages were about me in childhood, but I have just realised that on both sides of my family the tradition has been carried on into the younger, and now the youngest, generation. There has never been one broken marriage and I wonder—why? Is it their religion, which compels them to hold on through the stormy periods, and endure and pass through, because that is what they promised before God that they would do? I think so. To love God subtly alters a human being. If the simile is not too homely the lover of God has glue in his veins and tends to be more adherent than other men. The more he loves God the more, for God's sake, he sticks to his woman, his job or his faith. Christians should be judged, I think, by their stick-

ableness, since by that alone can God get anything done in this world; that appears to be disintegrating now before our horrified eyes from sheer lack of glue.

Helene had at this time one over-riding purpose; to keep her son safe for a father who had been sent to fight on the other side of the world only a short while before the birth of his son and so had never seen him. As soon as the war threatened the safety of one place she snatched up the baby and fled to another; for herself she was fearless as my mother but for her son she was terrified.

The American army, that was later to turn much of Devon into a training ground, had not yet appeared and Westerland was as peaceful as it was beautiful. My mother and Helene, who so greatly loved each other, were overjoyed to be together again, and Helene's two-year-old son laughed all day and sang for much of the night; and if his gift of song was less appreciated than his gift of laughter it was none the less joyous. My mother's outings in her bathchair, with Bob Patey's tall figure looming above the cavalcade, looked funnier than ever when Helene pushed her small son in his minute conveyance alongside the swaying ship. We laughed a great deal, but I am afraid I laughed less than the others because I was caught in the terrible coils of the most marvellous piece of material good fortune. Overnight I had become a best-seller.

For years, in between the many other things that had to be done, I had been writing Green Dolphin Street, a book about a Guernsey great-uncle, my grandfather's brother. It was a story I had always wanted to tell because it was so extraordinary, and the writing of it took my mind off the war. Though much of the book is imaginary the basic facts are true. My great-uncle went into the British navy but while he was still only a midshipman he fell into trouble. On shore leave at an eastern port he got into a scrape, did not return to his ship at the appointed time and found it had sailed without him. He was now a deserter and was afraid to face the music. He found a ship bound for Australia (in my book I made it New Zealand because my ignorance of Australia was even more total than my ignorance of New Zealand) and sailed in her to try his luck in a new world. His early struggles over he did well, but he longed for the Island to which he could not now return without being court-martialled. But he had a living link with the Island. He had been in love with a Guernsey girl and he wrote to her father and asked if she would brave the long voyage in a sailing ship and come out and marry him.

But, poor William, he suffered from the family impediment of never being able to remember names correctly. My mother suffered from the same thing and good hostess though she was she could scarcely ever introduce her guests to each other by their right names, frequently unconsciously using the name of the place from which they came; she would introduce Colonel Birmingham to Mrs Winchester. William, writing his letter to his future father-in-law, confused the name of the girl he loved with that of her elder sister, who was less attractive and considerably older than himself. The reply was in the affirmative; yes, she would come. Palpitating with joyous excitement

he was at the harbour to meet the ship; but it was the wrong girl. He never told her. How could he? She had come quite alone on the long, stormy voyage, a woman who had never left her safe island home before, and he was a compassionate man. He married her and he made her happy. But he wrote to my grandfather and told him what an agony it was to meet the unwanted bride with a smiling face. I wrote a note at the beginning of the book to say that this mistaking of the names was true, but as no one ever reads a writer's notes I was reprimanded by several reviewers for cooking up such a fantastic story.

As so often happens to a book when it is written over a long period of time, put aside and then picked up again, Green Dolphin Street grew longer and longer. In the end finishing it nearly killed me and when my literary agent warned me that under wartime conditions with paper so short, it was more than likely it could not be published I tried to forget about my poor old Dolphin. I thought he might have to sink without trace. And then came a cable from America telling me that my American publisher had sent the book in as a candidate for a Metro Goldwyn Mayer film prize of £ 30,000, and the old Dolphin had won it.

It was hilarious news for everyone. I was not the type of woman to have this sort of thing happen to me and my unsuitability for the role struck everyone as extremely funny. For the village it was a happy nine-days'-wonder in the midst of a horrible war. I remember the laughing faces and the kindness of people who were themselves badly off and yet could rejoice whole-heartedly at the success of someone else. And then came a damper in the person of a Jewish gentleman who with his family had taken refuge in the village from air-raids. He had considerable knowledge of finance, and travelling in the bus from Paignton, our shopping town, in the company of half the village, he told the bus that he doubted if taxation would leave much out of the £ 30,000. A second financier in the village agreed with him. According to his calculations the American aliens tax, English super tax, agency fees, lawyers' fees and the share in the prize that would go to the publishers of the book, would leave me £ 3000.1 was so relieved that it was like waking up from a nightmare. £ 3000 was a large sum but I felt I could cope with that; the load of £ 30,000 was enough to crush any poor woman to death. In the end our village financiers were wrong; it was £ 4000.

Nevertheless, I now became a successful writer, because a book that without the publicity of the film prize might not have been published for some years, and would perhaps have failed when it did appear, eventually sold all over the world. And the good fortune worked backwards as well as forwards because a successful book re-animates past books as well as casting a rosy glow over future ones. They are read and in the course of time one becomes a habit with one's readers. I had to learn to cope. I did not want to be a rich woman, and hoped I would succeed in never living as one. But the resolve meant that I had to learn how to administer what came to me and the mistakes I made in learning were at times catastrophic . . . and to think that I had at one time, at our leanest period, actually prayed for money! Desiring, of course, only a modest competence.

"The prayer I must pray for you," a great friend told me, when she had finished laughing at my complaints over my good fortune, "is the collect for the twelfth Sunday after Trinity—'Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy. . .' "

Apart from my understanding mother they all laughed, and Helene laughed more than anyone when she arrived at the tail end of the tempest of publicity. "I wouldn't have missed this for anything," she chuckled, as she dumped her son in his miniature conveyance and hurried out after my mother and Bob Patey, and the swaying bathchair; all of them heartlessly escaping and leaving me to cope unaided with yet another invasion. It was the reporters who invaded, and those who came to plead for financial help. Also the postman, who arrived daily with an avalanche of letters.

Reporters and interviewers, mortal men and women who are persecutors only because they must earn a living like the rest of us, appeared to me at that time in the guise of vultures. On one desperate day I cast myself on my bed and vowed that anyone attacking the front-door bell that afternoon should go unanswered. But reporters are enterprising people, especially if female; that particular girl, that afternoon, came in through the window.

Of the letters, the begging letters were the worst because the machinations of lawyers in both countries delayed the arrival of the filthy lucre for a long time, there was little in the bank and therefore little I could do immediately to help. One night, trying to cope with the letters of every sort and kind, I reached despair, picked up the whole bundle and dumped it in the fire. That is something that will

of awe. Here was the great quietness but what was happening over there? It was the invasion of Europe, so long planned, hoped for, expected and yet never coming. It was here at last If it succeeded the end would be in sight; the end of the concentration camps, the end of all the agony and horror. But what if it failed? The queer, unaccustomed, lasting silence made it easier to pray, but individual prayer seemed a feeble, fleeting thing in the face of what was happening over there.

There was still much more to come, the doodlebugs and the shattering horror of the dropping of the atomic bombs. People have grown used to the thought of atomic warfare now, the present generation have grown up with the bomb, and so it is hard for them to realise how appalled we were then. And the dropping of the bombs seemed to tarnish victory. When it came at last most of us felt almost more shame than joy.

CHAPTER XIV

To Make an End Is to Make a Beginning

there must have been a little space between the ending of the war and the beginning of my mother's last illness but I do not remember it. The one thing seems to merge into the other in my memory. Through all my life until then, among many doubts there had always been one thing that I had been quite sure of, and that was that because my mother had suffered so much in her life she would be spared a long and painful illness at the end of it. The very reverse was the case. The last illness was long and hard and through the last year there was the humiliation of mental illness added to the physical suffering. When I started this book I told myself that in writing it I wanted to think only of the happy memories; unless a dark period should lead out into some new and happy knowledge. This one did and so I can write of it.

Anyone who has looked after someone they love through mental illness knows the particular misery of it. If a patient remains mentally himself however bad the physical distress may be the person you know is still there with you, but in mental illness the beloved personality seems lost and you appear to be living with a stranger; at times a frightening stranger, talking (and perhaps with truth) of the nearness of the powers of darkness. Death seems in some way to have already taken place for you feel you have lost the person you love. Physical suffering can ennoble and purify but mental confusion seems pointless and useless, and it is this which causes the particular misery of it.

But this illness taught me that it is only a case of 'seems'. The truth may be otherwise. A few days before her death my mother returned, weak and dying but entirely herself. And much more than herself. It was not my imagination but the truth. She came back peaceful and spiritualised. I do not know how else to describe it because there are no words for these things. She had wanted, before she died, to become fit to be with her husband again, and all through the years that she had had to live without him she had been growing. In some hidden way that literally only God knows about, the mental illness had been the last stage of the purification. On the morning of the day she died (and our doctor had told me that her death was not imminent, and so I was not expecting it) she said she must put on her prettiest nightdress and have the best counterpane on the bed, "because They are coming today". Irene, who was with us that day, was aware of the scent of flowers drifting about the rooms, though there were no flowers in the cottage and the garden was held in a dead grey spring cold. In the evening the mysterious They', of whom the dying so often

speak, came, and my mother drifted away into as peaceful a death as it is possible to have.

I only write this because of the possibility that it may a little comfort someone who is experiencing the same sense of useless, pointless suffering when someone they care for is mentally ill. It may not be useless. My experience is not unique. I had a friend who for years had been nursing a war-injured husband. When he became mentally ill, and was finally taken away from her, she was in despair. Believing it would be so I told her, "At the end he will come back to you." After he had died she said, "It happened as you had thought it would. He came back at the end entirely and peacefully himself."

My friend had her husband taken from her but my mother and I were never parted, and I owe that to the goodness of a nurse who lived in the village. Our doctor had said it was too difficult a case to nurse at home but she pleaded with him. She promised him she would help me through and would never let me down. Nor did she, though she had a husband and small son to look after at home, and was often making her way through storm and snow between one home and the other. And those in the village who loved my mother would take turns in giving extra help by day or night when it was needed. This is typical West-country kindness. Such goodness exists all over the world, I know, but the West-country brand of goodness has a particular gentleness and warmth. I was so buoyed up by it, so exalted by the loveliness of my mother's passing, that I could hardly feel any grief at all. With Irene weeping I was ashamed of my dry-eyed calm and happy state. But perhaps that is the way we ought to feel when a soul goes free, and we should hold to our joy for

the short time that it is with us. For sinners, it cannot last, and the remorse that follows it as we remember all the failures of inadequate love, all the selfish things done and the sharp words said, all the unthinking cruelties of children (some children) to their parents is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, things that we must endure in this life.

But we have to learn to forgive ourselves. After the cross, I think that what most convinces us of the love of God is the forgiveness of the greatest of his sons and daughters. I do not think that love and forgiveness can be separated, since real love by its very nature must forgive. To know oneself forgiven by God and by those we love, is a most humbling and lovely experience and teaches us the necessity for forgiveness. The power to receive some hurt done to you, great or small, with the forgiveness that lets it come to an end in you, puts an end to retaliation, that horrible eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth business that can keep some impulse of cruelty circling round the world for ever. Forgiving others should not be difficult, knowing as we do how great is our own need of it, but forgiving oneself is another matter. There is no one harder to forgive than oneself; it can take years. Nevertheless we know inside ourselves that it must be done, for remorse is a sin that rots away the very vitals of the soul. And we know well the price of a soul to God. If God and his saints in their divine foolishness put such a price upon our soul we should not let it rot.

I went to Damerosehay. It was a lovely summer and the old house and the garden, the sea and the marshes were shining in the sun and there was healing in the air of the place. One day, I remember, I was sitting under one of the trees in the garden and the wind from the sea was blowing through the leaves. A moment of joy seized me, so sudden and so startling that I could hardly believe it. Yet it was true. Into the middle of my wretchedness at this time dropped this sudden joy. Joy is what life is about, I believed at that moment. It lies, somehow, at the root of every pain.

There was a shadow of sadness over Damrosehay and I was aware of it. The house had, I think, been used for refugees during the war but Mrs Adams had brought it back to its former use as a quiet hotel for her friends and their friends. But she looked very tired and she was finding it hard to get the staff she needed. The house was shabby and the garden overgrown. It made no difference to the peace of the place but there was sadness now as well as peace, an intuition of what was to come. We who were staying there had no idea at all that in a few years time Damerosehay would have vanished as though it had never been.

For that was what happened. Mrs Adams had eventually to give up the struggle to keep going and leave the house where she had lived for so many years. She took her treasures with her to her new home, the Dresden china figures, the books and pictures, and the house was sold and became an ordinary hotel. But it did not flourish. Perhaps the spirit of it died when Mrs Adams left and it was stripped of its treasures; and of the nine cats, clothed in the furriness of each individual personality, who had been an integral part of its being. For whatever reason, the shell of Damerosehay failed to attract holiday-makers and the hotel failed. For a while the house stood empty, fading into pitiful ruin, while the garden turned back to wilderness. Then bungalows and caravans began to eat their way over the beauty of the marshes and it was decided that the old house must go.

The village postmistress at Keyhaven told me what happened. The house was so filled with old wood that the destroyers thought that burning would get rid of it more quickly than any other method. But even though its spirit had departed the body of the house still had a will to live. It refused to burn down. The wooden bones would not ignite and the flames could not take hold. The destroyers gave up in despair and fetched the bulldozers. The house and garden of Damerosehay could not stand up against those and now I believe (I will never go to see) that no one can find the place where they once had their life. Well, they had it, and one of the things in my working life about which I am most thankful is that someone or something prompted me to write three books about an imaginary family living at Damerosehay, and that those three seem to be my readers' favourites. As long as the three books are read Damerosehay has not quite vanished from the world and I have not lived in vain.

I came back to Providence Cottage to find it an empty shell. It had been repainted and looked fresh and pretty. People came in and out, talking and laughing, but their voices echoed as voices do in a house that is unfurnished and deserted. Without my mother's vivid presence the place was dead. But I had to stay there since she had made me promise not to leave in a hurry but to stick it out for a year. She was quite right. Few things hold one up better than familiar surroundings and the routine of a life that goes with them. Both the surroundings and the routine may have gone dead on you, but at least they are there, like a pair of crutches. You may hate them but they keep you upright. With their help I could get back to work again, and tried to recapture the peace of Damerosehay by starting the third and last book about the Eliot family, The Heart of the Family. There is something of my mother in Lucilla Eliot and the company of Lucilla was comforting. But the book was such a struggle that I wondered if my writing days were perhaps ended.

That there is nothing so therapeutic as work I have proved over and over again but for many years I had another reason for always fighting to get back to work. I had a perhaps laughable conviction that I had a visiting demon (I saw him once and he was horrible) who brought darkness and was determined that I should not write books. So when I had once more disentangled myself from him and the sun showed signs of coming out again I would write as hard as I could, determined that I would write books and that they should be happy ones. And I think they were, for a dark background to one's life tends to make the happier times happier still. I had been living in my present home for some years when standing in the garden one day, looking across the fields to the woods in the distance and thinking of nothing except their beauty, I had a sudden conviction that my demon had left me for good; torn off me finally by my father. I left the garden and went back into the house full of grateful thanks to my father. All

sheer fantasy, probably. The mind is capable of playing any number of tricks upon one; especially a horri-fically imaginative mind. Fantasy or not, from that day my demon seemed to retreat.

The weeks dragged by in Devon and kind friends came to visit me, but I lived in a dusty desert. Everything, I felt, had come to a dead end. There seemed no way out or through. Then the autumn came bringing with it what I suppose is the greatest miracle of every human life, the miracle of renewal. It taught me that no apparently dead end is ever a dead end, but a new beginning. Also that perhaps no true new beginning is possible until you seem to be standing with a shut door facing you. Also that when you have passed through the door you cannot expect to be quite yet out of the shadows. New beginnings grow slowly.

I had intended to live alone that first winter without my mother. Having had no experience of living alone I had not yet discovered that that is a thing I cannot do. At the time I thought it was what I needed. My wisest, closest friend at Marldon disagreed with me so heartily that she gave me the name and address of a friend of her own who she thought would spend at least that winter with me. When I showed signs of resistance she answered, "Go home and write to Jessie Monroe tonight." I went home and turned the idea over in my mind with growing alarm, but felt compelled to make a start on a letter. That evening my friend rang up and asked, "Have you written?" I said I had partly written the letter. "Finish it," she said, and immediately put the receiver down.

And so I wrote to a total stranger at the address given and at first received no answer. My spirits rose. Then I had an answer from Jessie on holiday in Italy.

I felt that my own doubt and dismay were echoed in her letter, and in that at least we were united, but she went so far as to say that when she was back in England again she would come, and would see me through the winter. Thankful that she was not contemplating anything longer I wrote a welcoming letter and awaited her arrival with growing alarm. The appointed day brought her, but not the appointed hour, and my old friend and bogey, anxiety, reared its ugly head. It is one of the silliest of mental impediments to think that those you love (had I already begun to love Jessie?) are perfectly safe if you are with them but beset with danger on every side if your powerful protection is absent. Yet I believe the majority of people do suffer from this silly thing. Possibly common sense is not the hall-mark of the majority. At last I heard the sound of a car door being slammed with great determination, went out into the garden and heard a very clear voice saying the words that are now so delightfully familiar. "I'm sorry I'm late." We looked at each other. I saw an upright, capable-looking young woman with a head of hair like a horse-chestnut on fire, and the white magnolia skin that goes with such hair. Her eyes were very direct. She looked young enough to be my daughter and I doubted if she would stand me for long, yet when I went to bed that night to my astonishment I found myself flooded with happiness, and slept deeply.

Jessie has stood me for twenty-one years and has been the most wonderful event that ever happened to me. Not that the first months were easy for either of us, for we had to search for points of contact. I was a firmly embedded member of the Church of England, she was a fiery Celtic Presbyterian. Her passion was gardening and I am no gardener, mine was books, and "I've not read any of your books," she warned me. Well, I thanked God for that. No friendships do I value more than those not founded on my books. To be loved as the faulty person you actually are, rather than as the pleasing personality that people think you are, is an unspeakable relief. Our religious differences were not so easy. "Anyone would think you had been brought up onFoxe's Book of Martyrs," I said at the end of a heated argument. "I was," she replied briefly.

We have both mellowed since then and learned that friends who are at one in the basic beliefs of their lives have the one unity that really matters, but at that time our first real point of contact was dogs . . . We got one ... A Dandie-Dinmont puppy, the first of the Hobbits, the never-to-be-forgotten Tiki, who was with us when we moved from Devon to Oxfordshire.

I would never have believed that I could have got myself out of Devon. I thought I was there for the rest of my life. For Jessie it was otherwise. Many passionate gardeners have little affection for places where the rainfall is above average, and so she was glad to have her gum-boots pulled out of the wet, heavy Devon earth and transplanted to a soil possessing potentialities which she had not yet experienced, and moreover to a part of that soil where the rainfall was well below average. I say "pulled out" for that is how it felt to us, since so many things combined to show us what we had to do. It seemed we had to go, and the obvious place was Oxfordshire within

easy reach of old friends and relatives who had been urging me to move nearer to them ever since my mother had died. We packed up. Jessie was to stay with her mother for a while and I was to be with a nobly hospitable cousin near Henley who had asked me to stay with her until I could find a new home; the dearest of the cousins with whom I had lived in Reading. It should have been a happy prospect but I will never forget my misery as the train pulled out of the station and I watched Devon slipping away. It was only then that the full force of my mother's loss came over me. She had loved Devon and had seemed a part of it. Now, as it passed away from me I felt her totally lost.

It seemed an interminable journey but I had Tiki on my lap, a solid young dog by this time, honey-coloured, furry and warm, and at the end was my cousin waiting for me at Reading Station, that I knew so well from my college days. Life was becoming repetitive, turning around towards the last half-circle that brings us back to our beginnings.

Once more it was difficult to find the right home, and again I took shelter in the Ark while I searched. But my cousin's house was a different sort of Ark from the wooden cabin perched on the hill-top at Marldon; it was the warmest, most sheltered, comfortable house imaginable, and my cousin's love was as sheltering as her house. We went together on house-hunting expeditions and I was as difficult to please as my mother had been, not liking what I could afford and losing my heart to what I could not afford. I had reached despair one morning when I opened the paper at random and found myself looking not at the leading article but at an advertisement of a seventeenth-century cottage for sale not far from us, and my whole dark mind was suddenly full of light. . . This was no coincidence . . . This was it, I believed, and out at the other end of all the legal and financial and structural and human difficulties that surround the buying of a house, it was. Jessie was alerted and travelled down to us at once, arriving late one evening. "I'm sorry I'm late," she said, and all the lights went up in Tiki's world and mine and we were ourselves again.

In those days Peppard Common could still be said to be in the country. A few houses were grouped around it and to the north the road that crossed the common disappeared towards Henley between tall elm trees, the village pond to the left and the seventeenth-century inn, The Dog, to the right. The entrance to Dog Lane could hardly be seen where it left the road beside the inn, and the two cottages in the lane hiding behind the inn could hardly be seen either. Dog Lane is very ancient, it was a Pack and Prime lane, and is still called that when it reaches Henley. The men with their pack-horses primed their pistols when they rode up from the river to the wild common lands above. The two cottages are called Primrose Cottage and Rose Cottage and have been called by those names for perhaps three hundred years, and so it was no good for me to complain that there are too many Rose Cottages scattered over the countryside and that letters would go astray—which they do—for Rose Cottage it had to be. Dog Lane, of course, was perfect as an address. It seemed to promise, and has had, a constant supply of dogs in both cottages and at the Dog inn.

The village wheelwright had lived at Primrose Cottage, and the Rectory coachman had been succeeded at Rose Cottage by his daughter, whose friendly ghost seemed so close to us when we moved in. It had

remained empty after she died and then my predecessors had found it and restored it skilfully, but they lived here for only a short time and had been able to do little more than dig up the wilderness of the old garden, lay down two small lawns and plant sweetbriar hedges. The old fruit trees had been there already, apples and plums, and prizing privacy beyond rubies Jessie added cherry trees, oak trees and innumerable tall flowering shrubs, so that the place is now very green, shady and bird-haunted, with climbing roses and clematis trained to grow

up the old trees.

Gardening in an old garden can be exciting. In the wilderness at the bottom of the garden Jessie found remnants of very old roses, Apothecary and Rosamundi, Maiden's-Blush and Moss rose. Transplanted they have flourished. They bloom only once a year, but they are worth all the modern roses put together, they are so lovely and their scent is so exquisite. Sports of the old primroses have appeared, jack-in-the-green, hose-in-hose and gal-ligaskin, but though we bought plants of the old species and tried to grow them again we failed. Jessie tried to bring back to the garden plants it might have held originally, collecting all the herbs she could and planting rosemary and lavender. And we kept carefully the strange bits and pieces that were dug up in the garden, bits of old crockery and china, ancient buttons, and parts of implements whose original use it was hard to identify.

It is the perfect garden for dogs, room in it for racing with balls, yet with shady paths and hidden corners where bones can be hoarded, and a dog can lie up in the heat or hide wrapped in invisibility when wanted for a bath or some other uncongenial purpose. There have been three Dandie-Dinmonts in this garden, all three mustard dogs. Dandies come in two colours, pepper (black and grey dogs) and mustard (honey-coloured). The latter have the advantage that they are easier to see at night or when they have hidden themselves from justice or the bath.

Tiki lived out the average ten-year span of a Dandie's life, a span that is cruelly short, and perhaps that is one reason why they are not a popular breed; heartbreak every ten years is hard to face when the years go by so quickly. Tiki, so-called because I was reading The Kon-Tiki Expedition when she came to us, was not beautiful. She must have had a rough time of it in kennels before she came to us at seven months old because she had an injured leg that could not be put right. She was something of a ragamuffin, a gamin, but she had guts and spirit, was a digger and hunter in spite of her lame leg and could run at a fair pace after rabbits or hares. But despite her gamin quality she had great perception. It was she who appeared to be aware of some ghostly presence in the cottage and she who always knew when Jessie was coming home. The exact hour of Jessie's return from a holiday or a shopping expedition is always unpredictable, but when the car was half an hour away Tiki always knew it. She would walk to the door and lie there patiently, a dog carved out of wood. I would time it by my watch. After half an hour I would hear the car turn in and the honking of the horn, and Tiki would erupt into a maelstrom of joy.

She was succeeded by Randa, our beautiful filmstar dog. Randa (short for Miranda, since on a dark winter's night we drove through a tempest of wind and rain to see her for the first time) had had a comfortable start in life and was no gamin but a fine lady who liked to pose on silken cushions. 'The Sybarite', Irene called her. Her hair was long and silky and she had melting, sad dark eyes. She disliked getting her feet wet and unlike Tiki was an indoor rather than an outdoor dog. She was also a hospitable dog. She had learned how to smile and would welcome people to the house (if she liked them) with the broadest of smiles. If she did not like them she remained courteous, but unsmilingly so. She was very vocal. She would talk at length (alas that we could not always know what she was saying) and when Jessie and I had to go out without her she would welcome us home both with smile and song. From the very beginning she was always a good dog, larger than the other two as well as more beautiful both physically and morally. She never knew beforehand when Jessie was coming home but after her death at ten years old her spirit seemed very much with us in the house and I would hear her barking her, "Here I am, and am I not beautiful?" bark and would answer her. She had of course been an indoor dog. The spirit of Tiki the outdoor dog never seemed to return to us. Set free from her hampering body with its lame leg she must have been too happy running like the wind in the spirit body to want to come back.

Froda, happily, is only three years old and so I have every hope that she will outlive me. She is an outdoor dog and more like Tiki than Randa, but she too had a happy beginning to her life and is not a gamin, but a fairy creature who darts lightly about her kingdom of the garden, appearing and disappearing like a gleam of sunshine, aloof and mysterious in her fantasy world. Almost the first thing she did when she came to us was to make a bower for herself inside a thick clump of honeysuckle. (Hobbits, Professor Tolkien tells us, like to live 'in tunnels and holes'.) Inside her bower all was darkness but through the round open front door her baby face could be seen faintly gleaming. The fairy quality in her is fitting for she was named after Fro do the hobbit in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; only as Frodo is a boy and she is a girl the O had to be changed to A. Hobbits, as the vast company of Tolkien's lovers all know, are described by him as having 'the art of disappearing swiftly and silently'. This is true of Dandies also, and like the Hobbits they have large furry feet.

Dandies were originally Scottish badger dogs, trained to dig out badgers, and even foxes, for in former days a couple of Dandies were attached to every pack of hounds. They did not run with the hounds, being too small, but were royally carried on horseback. The dogs got their name from the farmer Dandie Dinmont in Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannering, a man not unlike a real-life farmer called James Davidson who owned a pack of terriers who were all called either Pepper or Mustard, according to their colour, a man whom Walter Scott called "the proprietor of all the Pepper and Mustard family, in other words, the genuine Dandie Dinmont." Walter Scott once owned a pack of twelve Dandies. He loved them dearly and when one little bitch, to whom he was especially attached, got lost in a wood he nearly went out of his mind during the harrowing hours of search.

Queen Victoria had a Dandie, but I think only one,

and she was wise, for one digger at a time in the family is enough. They dig everything, not only the garden but the carpets and the beds (if they are allowed on the beds) and the sofa cushions and even bare boards. They are also a bit obstinate and difficult to train. In fact they are more likely to train you than you them. Perhaps this untrainable quality, as well as the shortness of their lives, has helped to send them out of fashion. But they will surely come back into favour, for there are no more lovable companions in the world. They are true Hobbits.

Solid old tree trunks, heavy and hard as stone, hold the cottage together, with lesser beams that seem to be ships' timbers, since they have bolt holes in them. Old ships used to be brought up the Thames to just below Henley and broken up there, and ships' timbers are to be found in houses and cottages within easy reach of Henley. On a very hot day an aromatic scent comes from the beams. Spices? Were these beams once part of a spice ship? Soon after our arrival Jessie called my bedroom 'the captain's cabin' merely from the look and shape of it, and great was my joy when the same friend who had brought Jessie into my life gave me a copy of a poem she had seen framed and hanging on the wall of an old house in Devon. She had copied it out then and there because it evoked memories of Rose Cottage, where at night the open country beyond us seems to hold such a great depth of darkness; and where an old white horse, put out to grass in the fields below our windows, was one of the joys of our early years.

Adams, Mrs., 227, 285

Alan of Walsingham, 127-28

Anne, Queen, 125, 130-31

Ashcroft, Peggy, 228

Austen, Jane, 59, 134, 177, 178

Avebury, 154, 165

Bartlett, Miss, 178, 192

Barton, 219-33, 248 ff.

Bath, Island of, 93, 94, 96

Beale, Miss, 71-72

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 62

Bennet, Elizabeth. See Goudge, Elizabeth, grandmother (maternal)

Blackheath Proprietary School, 104

Blake, William, 32, 36, 43, 163

Bronte sisters, 134

Brooke, Rupert, 177

Browning, Robert, 105

Burney, Fanny, 236

Buss, Miss, 71-72

Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 42 Casquet Rocks, 49 Chamberlain Street, 18 Channel Islands, 39, 49 ff. Cheltenham Ladies' College, 71 Christ Church, 198, 208 Christ Church Meadow, 105 Church, Lily, 43 Clare, Mr., 257-61, 266

Damerosehay, 180, 181, 182,

284 ff.

Damian, Father, 211, 244 Dartmoor, 163-65, 168 Da Todi, Jacapone, 211 Davidson, James, 296 De Burgh, Professor, 106-7, 194 Devon, 23, 155, 162, 167-70, 251

ff., 265 ff., 288 ff. Devonshire, 32 Dickens, Charles, 134 Donne, John, 136, 212

Duckworth, Gerald, 229-30

Eliot, T. S., 300

Ely, 124 ff., 126 ff., 132 ff., 137 ff.,

144-47, 182 ff., 187 ff., 191,

197, 198, 199, 254 ff. Ely Cathedral, 124 ff., 127 ff.,

161 Evans, Edith, 228

Fermain Bay, 63

Froniga, 32

Fry, Elizabeth, 244

Galsworthy,. John, 228 Gibsons, Stella, 230 Glazebrook, Canon and Mrs., 152-

Goodhart, James, 111 ff. Gooueds, William, 101. See also

Goudge, Elizabeth, grandfather (paternal)

Gore, Bishop, 211-13 Goudge, Elizabeth

aunt Emily, 49 ff., 65, 68, 69, 79-80, 84, 184-86

aunt Emma, 103, 110 ff., 122

aunt Irene, 65

aunt Marguerite, 58 ff.

aunt Marie, 65, 70, 71-72

cousin Helene, 182 ff., 219, 231-33, 255, 272-73, 277, 278

father, 15 ff., 24 ff., 37 ff., 70, 78, 80-81, 83, 93 ff., 100 ff., 104 ff., 110 ff., 114, 118, 119, 123 ff., 141 ff., 144 ff., 149 ff., 174, 183, 187-88, 190 ff., 194, 198-99, 200, 203 ff., 214 ff., 232, 234 ff., 248 ff., 287

grandfather (maternal), 47, 48 ff., 57 ff., 63 ff., 68 ff., 77, 118, 184-87

grandfather (paternal), 101 ff.

grandmother (maternal), 55-56,

66 ff., 73 ff., 184, 185 grandmother (paternal), 102 ff. mother, 17 ff., 24 ff., 38 ff., 43 ff., 48, 53, 78, 80-81, 82, 84, 86-87, 89, 93 ff., 108, 112, 113, 123 ff., 132, 144, 148 ff., 155-57, 167, 183, 194, 198-99, 202 ff., 215 ff., 219 ff., 228 ff., 234 ff., 249 ff., 265 ff., 280 ff., 291 uncle Arnold, 58, 69 uncle James, 110 ff., 122 Greece, 232-33 Grenfell, Joyce, 33 Grey, of Fallodon, Lord, 177 Grey, Mary, 193 Guernsey, 48 ff., 63 ff., 74 ff. Guernsey Ladies' College, 59

Harewood House, 181 "*-t-

Haynes, Renee, 167

Headlam, Dr. and Mrs., 202

Here ward the Wake, 144

Higham, David, 230

Hilary, Richard, 178

Holland, Scott, 202

Hollis, Arthur, 45

Hollis, Margaret, 27, 43, 44-45

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 96,

104, 243, 311 Hugo, Victor, 76 Hurley, William, 128

Ibsen, Henrik, 228 Innisfree, 221 ff.

Jenkins, Dr. Clive, 206, 207-11 Jersey, 49, 52 Johnson, Samuel, 236 Jonson, Ben, 13 Jourdain, Miss, 154, 165

Kennion, Mrs., 23-24, 26-27, 41 Keyhaven, 147, 180, 181, 182, 227, 252, 261

Kings College, 187 Knox, Ronald, 204, 205

L'Ancresse, 63 Lang, Andrew, 134 Lee, Laurie, 98 Le Gouffre, 63 Le Hechet, 58, 72 Lewis, C. S., 223 Lawrence, D. H., 140 London, 100-1 Lumby, Miss, 178, 190 Lymington, 180

Macdonald, George, 62, 93 Magdalen Meadows, 141 Malleson, Miles, 193 Marldon, 251, 263, 267 ff. Mendip, 142 Mendip Hills, 29, 109 Moberley, Mr., 179 Monroe, Jessie, 288-90, 290 ff.,

301 ff. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 62

New Forest, 147 New Milton, 219, 221

Dates, Lawrence Edward Grace,

237

O'Brien, Kate, 230 Oliver, Edith, 154, 165 Ouse River, 138 Owen, Wilfred, 177 Oxford, 22, 37, 198-99, 200-18,

219, 221, 222, 250 Oxfordshire, 31, 159 Ozanne, Marie-Louise, 50. See also Goudge, Elizabeth, grandmother (maternal)

Palmer, Samuel, 222 Parmiter, Clavel, 106, 116 Patey, Bob, 266, 267-69, 273 Patey, Mrs., 268-69 Pearn, Nancy, 230

Index

319

Peckwater, 202, 216 Pembrokeshire, 67, 305-6 Peppard Church, 161 Peppard Common, 292 Phillpots, Adelaide, 164 Phillpots, Eden, 164 Poole, 180 Portland Place, 110, 111

Reading College Art School,

194 ff.

Regent Street, 114 Rogers, Mrs., 211, 213-14 Ruskin, John, 133

St. Francis, 244, 311

St. John the Divine, 311

St. John the Baptist, 311

St. Paul, 243

St. Peter Port, 50, 53-54, 60, 63,

73, 77

Saints Bay, 63, 115 St. Thomas Street, 18, 82 Salisbury Theological College,

108

Schweitzer, Albert, 244 Scott, Walter, 296 Seaby, Professor, 196-97 Shakespeare, William, 178, 192 Shaw, George Bernard, 228 Sidney, Philip, 14 Skye, 166

Smart, Christopher, 308 Solent, 180 Somerset, 142, 143 Spooner, William Archibald,

210-11

Sussex, 110, 116 Swann, Donald, 300

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre,

239, 240

Temple, Archbishop, 235 Terry, Ellen, 42 Thackeray, William Makepeace,

134

Tolkien, J. R. R., 21, 240, 296 Tom Quad, 200 ff., 216 Tor Hill, 83 Tor woods, 139 Tower House, 19-20 Traherne, Thomas, 97 Trollope, Anthony, 134

University College, Oxford, 104 ff. Victoria, Queen, 112, 296

Walter, Lucy, 305 Weatherhead, Leslie, 108 Wells, 18 ff., 77, 78, 93, 108 ff.,

115, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128,

134, 148, 192, 221 William the Conqueror, 53, 59 Williams, Charles, 244 Williams, Watson, 123 Wolfe, Humbert, 254 Wolsey, Cardinal, 214 Wookey Hole, 18 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 154, 165 Wordsworth, William, 32, 97

Yeats, William Butler, 221