I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

  The bedrooms were as spoilt as the downstairs rooms -false ceilings, horrid fireplaces, awful wallpapers. But I was very much fetched when I saw the round tower opening into the room which is now Rose’s and mine. Father tried to get the door to it open, but it was nailed up so he strode on across the landing.

  “That corner tower we saw from outside must be somewhere about here,” he said. We followed him into Thomas’s little room, hunting for it, and then into the bathroom. It had a huge bath with a wide mahogany surround, and two mahogany-seated lavatories, side by side, with one lid to cover them both. The pottery parts showed views of Windsor Castle and when you pulled the plug the bottom of Windsor Castle fell out. Just above them was a text left by the previous tenants, saying:

  “Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.” Father sat down on the side of the bath and roared with laughter.

  He would never have anything in the bathroom changed so even the text is still there.

  The corner tower was between the bath and the lavatories.

  There was no door to it and we started to climb up the circular stone stair case inside, but the steps had crumbled so much that we had to turn back. But we did get high enough to find a way out on to the top of the walls; there was quite a wide walk with a battlemented parapet on each side. From there we could see Mother in the car, nursing Thomas. “Don’t attract her attention,” said Father, “or she’ll think we’re going to break our necks.”

  The wall led us to one of the gatehouse towers; and inside it, opening on to the staircase, was the door to the gatehouse room.

  “Thank the lord this isn’t spoilt,” said Father as we went in.

  “How I could work in this room!”

  There were stone-mullioned windows looking in to the courtyard, as well as the ones at the front overlooking the lane. Father said they were Tudor;

  later in period than the gatehouse itself, but much earlier than the house.

  We went back into the tower and found the steps of the circular stone staircase good enough for us to go up higher -once we were crawling into the darkness I wished they hadn’t been; Father struck matches but there was a dreadful black moment each time one burnt out. And the cold, rough stone felt so strange to my hands and bare knees. But when at last we came out on the battlemented top of the tower it was worth it all—I had never felt so high in my life. And I was so triumphant at having been brave enough to come up. Not that I had had any choice; Rose had kept butting me from behind.

  We stood looking down on the lane and over the fields stretching far on either side; we were so high that we could see how the hedges cut them up into a patchwork pattern. There were a few little woods and, a mile or so to the left, a tiny village. We moved round the tower to look across the courtyard garden -and then we all shouted: “There it is!” at the same moment. Beyond the ruined walls on the west side of the courtyard was a small hill and on the top of it was the high tower we had driven so long in search of. It puzzles me now why we hadn’t seen it when we first came through the gatehouse passage. Perhaps the overgrown garden obstructed the view; or perhaps we were too much astonished at seeing the house to look in the opposite direction.

  Father dived for the staircase. I cried “Wait, wait!” and he turned and picked me up, letting Rose go ahead striking the matches. He guessed the bottom of the staircase must come out in the gatehouse passage, but Rose used the last match as we reached the archway on to the walls; so we went back along them to the bathroom and down the nice little front staircase of the house into the hall. Mother was just coming through the front door to look for us, dragging a cross, sleepy Thomas—he never liked to be left alone in the car. Father showed her the tower on the hill—we could see it easily once we knew where to look—and told her to come along; then dashed across the courtyard garden. She said she couldn’t manage it with Thomas. I remember feeling I ought to stay with her, but I didn’t. I raced after Father and Rose.

  We climbed over the ruined walls which bounded the garden and crossed the moat by the shaky bridge at the south-west corner; that brought us to the foot of the hill-but Father told us it was ancient earthworks and not a natural hill (ever since then we have called it the mound). The turf was short and smooth and there were no more ruins. At the top we had to scramble over some ridges which Father said must have been the outer de fences This brought us to a broad, grassy plateau. At the far end was a smaller mound, round in shape and very smooth, and rising from this was the tower, sixty feet tall, black against the last flush of sunset. The entrance was about fifteen feet up, at the top of an outside flight of stone steps. Father did his best to force the door but had no luck; so we didn’t see inside the tower that night.

  We walked all round the little mound and Father told us that it was called a motte and that the wide grassy plateau was a bailey; he said all this part was much older than the moated castle below. The sunset faded and a wind got up and everything began to look frightening, but Father went on talking most happily and excitedly. Suddenly Rose said:

  “It’s like the tower in The Lancashire Witches where Mother Demdike lived.” She had read bits of that book aloud to me until I got so frightened that Mother stopped her.

  Just then we heard Mother calling from below; her voice sounded high and strange, almost despairing. I grabbed Rose’s hand and said: “Come on, Mother’s frightened.” And I told myself I was running to help Mother; but I was really terrified of being near the tower any longer.

  Father said we had all better go. We climbed the ridges and then Rose and I took hands and ran down the smooth slope—faster and faster, so that I thought we should fall. All the time we were running I felt extremely frightened, but I enjoyed it. The whole evening was like that.

  When we got back to the house, Mother was sitting on the front door-step nursing Thomas, who had fallen asleep again. “Isn’t it wonderful??” cried Father.

  “I’ll have it if it takes my last penny.”

  Mother said: “If it’s to be my cross, I suppose God will give me the strength to bear it.”

  Father laughed at that and I felt rather shocked. I don’t in the least know if she meant to be funny-but then, I realize more and more how vague she has become for me. Even when I remember things she said, I can’t recall the sound of her voice. And though I can still see the shape of her that day huddled on the steps, her back view when we were in the car, her brown tweed suit and squashy felt hat, I can’t visualize her face at all. When I try to, I just see the photograph I have of her.

  Rose and I went back to the car with her, but Father wandered round until it was dark. I remember seeing him come out on the castle walls near the gatehouse -and marveling that I had been up there myself. Even in the dusk I could see his gold hair and splendid profile. He was spare in those days, but broad-always a large person.

  He was so excited that he started to drive back to King’s Crypt at a terrific pace -Rose, Thomas and I simply bounced about at the back of the car. Mother said it wasn’t safe with the roads so narrow and he slowed down to a snail’s pace which made Rose and me laugh a lot. Mother said: “There’s reason in everything and Thomas ought to be in bed.” Thomas suddenly sat up and said: “Dear me, yes, I ought,” which made even Mother laugh.

  The next day, after making enquiries, Father went over to Scoatney Hall. When he got back he told us that Mr. Cotton wouldn’t sell the castle, but had let him have a forty years” lease on it.

  “And I can do anything I like to the house,” he added, “because the old gentleman agrees I couldn’t possibly make it any worse.”

  Of course, he made it very much better—whitewashing it, unearthing the drawing-room paneling from beneath eight coats of wallpaper, pulling out the worst fireplaces, the false ceilings, the partitions in the kitchen. There were many more things he meant to do, particularly as regards comfort—I know Mother wanted some central heating and a machine to make electric light; but he spent so much on antique furniture even before work at the cast
le began that she persuaded him to cut things down to a minimum. There was always a vague idea that the useful things were to come later; probably when he wrote his next book.

  It was spring when we moved in. I particularly remember the afternoon we first got the drawing-room straight. Everything was so fresh-the flowered chintz curtains, the beautiful shining old furniture, the white paneling—it had had to be painted because it was in such a poor condition. I was fascinated by a great jar of young green beech leaves; I sat on the floor staring at them while Rose played her piece “To a Water Lily” on Mother’s old grand piano. Suddenly Father came in, in a very exulting mood, to tell us that there was a surprise for us outside the window. He flung the mullioned windows open wide and there on the moat were two swans, sailing sedately. We leaned out to feed them with bread and all the time the spring air blew in and stirred the beech leaves. Then I went into the garden, where the lawns had been cut and the flower-beds tidied; there were a lot of early wallflowers which smelt very sweet. Father was arranging his books up in the gatehouse room. He called down:

  “Isn’t this a lovely home for you?”

  I agreed that it was; and I still think so. But anyone who could enjoy the winter here would find the North Pole stuffy.

  How strange memory is! When I close my eyes, I see three different castles—one in the sunset light of that first evening, one all fresh and clean as in our early days here, one as it is now.

  The last picture is very sad because all our good furniture has gone-the dining-room hasn’t so much as a carpet; not that we have missed that room much—it was the first one we saw that night we explored the house and was always too far from the kitchen. The drawing-room has a few chairs still and, thank goodness, no one will ever buy the piano because it is so big and old. But the pretty chintz curtains are faded and everything has a neglected look. When the spring comes we must really try to freshen up our home a little-at least we can still have beech leaves.

  We have been poor for five years now; after Mother died, I fear we lived on the capital of the money she left. Not that I ever worried about such things at the time because I always felt sure Father would make money again sooner or later. Mother brought us up to believe that he was a genius and that geniuses mustn’t he hurried. What is the matter with him his And what does he do all the time his I wrote yesterday that he does nothing but read detective novels, hut that was just a silly generalization, because Miss Marcy can seldom let him have more than two a week (although he will read the same ones again and again after a certain lapse of time, which seems to me amazing). Of course he reads other books, too. All our valuable ones have been sold (and how I have missed them!) but there are a good many of the others left, including an old, incomplete Encyclopedia Britannica;

  I know he reads that and he plays some kind of a game following up cross-references in it. And I am sure he thinks very hard. Several times when he hasn’t answered my knock on the gatehouse room door I have gone in and found him staring into space. In the good weather he walks a lot, but he hasn’t now for months. He has dropped all his London friends.

  The only friend he has ever made down here is the Vicar, who is the nicest man imaginable; a bachelor with an elderly housekeeper. Now I come to think of it, Father has dodged seeing even him this winter.

  Father’s un sociability has made it hard for any of us to get to know people here—and there aren’t many to know. The village is tiny: just the church, the vicarage, the little school, the inn, one shop (which is also the post office) and a huddle of cottages; though the Vicar gets quite a congregation from the surrounding hamlets and farms. It is a very pretty village and has the unlikely name of Godsend, a corruption of Godys End, after the Norman knight, Etienne de Godys, who built Belmotte Castle. Our castle—I mean the moated one, on to which our house is built-is called Godsend, too; it was built by a later de Godys.

  No one really knows the origin of the name “Belmotte”-the whole mound, as well as the tower on it, is called that. At a guess one would say the “Bel” is from the French, but the Vicar believes in a theory that it is from Bel the sun god whose worship was introduced by the Phoenicians, and that the mound was raised so that Midsummer Eve votive fires could be lit there; he thinks the Normans simply made use of it. Father doesn’t believe in the god Bel theory and says the Phoenicians worshipped the stars, not the sun. Anyway, the mound is a very good place to worship both sun and stars from.

  I do a little worshipping there myself when I get time. I meant to copy an essay on castles I wrote for the school History Society into this journal, but I find it is very long and horridly overwritten (how the school must have suffered), so I shall paraphrase it briefly:

  >> CASTLES:

  In early Norman times, there seem to have been mounds with ditches and wooden stockades as de fences Inside the de fences were wooden buildings, and sometimes there was a high earthen motte to serve as a lookout place. The later Normans began building great square stone towers (called keeps), but it was found possible to mine the corners of these-mining was just digging then, of course, not the use of explosives —so they took to building round towers, of which Belmotte is one. Later, the tower-keeps were surrounded with high walls, called curtain walls.

  These were often built in quadrangle form with jutting towers at the gatehouse, the corners and in the middle of each side so that the defenders could see any besiegers who were trying to mine or scale the walls, and fight them off. But the besiegers had plenty of other good tricks, notably a weapon called a trebuchet which could sling great rocks-or a dead horse—over your curtain walls, causing much embarrassment.

  Eventually, someone thought of putting moats round curtain walls. Of course, the moated castles had to be on level ground; Belmotte tower-keep, up on its mound, must have been very much of a back number when Godsend Castle was built. And then all castles gradually became back numbers and Cromwell’s Roundheads battered two-and-a-half sides of our curtain walls down.

  Long before that, the de Godys name had died out and the two castles had passed to the Cottons of Scoatney, through a daughter. The house built on the ruins was their dower house for a time, then it became just a farm-house. And now it isn’t even that; merely the home of the ruined Mortmains.

  Oh, what are we to do for money his Surely there is enough intelligence among us to earn some, or marry some-Rose, that is; for I would approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb and I cannot feel that I should give satisfaction. But how is Rose to meet anyone his We used to go to London every year to stay with Father’s aunt, who has a house in Chelsea with a lily-pool and collects artists. Father met Topaz there—Aunt Millicent never forgave him marrying her, so now we don’t get asked any more;

  this is bitter because it means we meet no men at all, not even artists. Oh, me! I am feeling low in spirits. While I have been writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me-first the golden light of autumn, then the silver light of spring and then the strange light, gray but exciting, in which I see the historic past. But now I have come back to earth and rain is beating on the attic window, an icy draught is blowing up the staircase and About has gone downstairs and left my stomach cold.

  Heavens, how it is coming down! The rain is like a diagonal veil across Belmotte. Rain or shine, Belmotte always looks lovely. I wish it were Midsummer Eve and I were lighting my votive fire on the mound.

  There is a bubbling noise in the cistern which means that Stephen is pumping. Oh, joyous thought, tonight is my bath night! And if Stephen is in, it must be teatime. I shall go down and be very kind to everyone.

  Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

  IV

  Little did I think what the evening was to bring-something has actually happened to us! My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one’s imaginings, they never happen in one’s life, so I am curbing myself. Instead of indulging in riotous hop
es I shall describe the evening from the beginning, quietly gloating-for now every moment seems exciting because of what came later.

  I have sought refuge in our barn. As a result of what happened last night, Rose and Topaz are spring-cleaning the drawing-room. They are being wonderfully blithe—when I dwindled away from them Rose was singing “The Isle of Capri” very high and Topaz was singing “Blow the Man Down” very low. The morning is blithe too, warmer, with the sun shining, though the countryside is still half-drowned. The barn—we rent it to Mr. Stebbins but we owe him so much for milk and butter that he no longer pays—is piled high with loose chaff and I have climbed up on it and opened the square door near the roof so that I can see out. I look across stubble and ploughed fields and drenched winter wheat to the village, where the smoke from the chimneys is going straight up in the still air. Everything is pale gold and washed clean, and hopeful.

  When I came down from the attic yesterday, I found that Rose and Topaz had dyed everything they could lay hands on, including the dishcloth and the roller towel.

  Once I had dipped my handkerchief into the big tin bath of green dye, I got fascinated too-it really makes one feel rather Godlike to turn things a different color. I did both my nightgowns and then we all did Topaz’s sheets which was such an undertaking that it exhausted our lust. Father came down for tea and was not too pleased that Topaz had dyed his yellow cardigan—it is now the color of very old moss. And he thought our arms being green up to the elbows was revolting.

  We had real butter for tea because Mr. Stebbins gave Stephen some when he went over to fix about working (he started at the farm this morning); and Mrs.

  Stebbins had sent a comb of honey. Stephen put them down in my place so I felt like a hostess. I shouldn’t think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.