The Country Child

by Alison Uttley

  2

  Windystone Hall

  The curving, sweeping hillsides dropped down into the narrow little valley where the noisy river, the rapid brown brook, and the white turnpike, with its jingling carts and dusty trudging wayfarers made a pretence of bustle and talk. Then up they climbed, through quiet hollows and dimpled coombes, past little woods and ridged ploughland and soft singing streams, to the heights where the great rocks lay bare and the wind lashed the torn beeches and ragged thorns.

  Little flowery fields of every shape and size, square fields, triangles, fish-shaped fields with odd corners, rhomboids, bounded by green hedgerows and black walls, linked arms and ran up hill and down dale, round the folded hills out of sight into countless valleys beyond where the sun set. Woods sprang up everywhere, little fairy woods of silver birches in the dells, bouquets of beech trees, neat and compact on the small round hills, witch woods with streaming hair on the hilltops, and hundreds of acres of great oak and beech woods which followed the curves of the land and spread up to the sky.

  Everywhere green ribbons of lanes and paths threaded the fields and woods, joining valley to valley, tying farm to farm, creeping over the high hills and loitering by the river. Many of these lanes that ran along the crests of the land were the old pack roads; some of them had been traversed by the Romans when they worked the mines which honeycombed the more distant hills, and some were older still, as the savage monoliths and green tumuli in the upland fields attested.

  As one looked across the valley, the far villages, hidden among trees in the hollows, could only be distinguished by the faint blue smoke which hung above them, a soft mist against the rolling green. Mellow lay like this, lost in the creases of the hills, until one turned a sudden corner, and found the little stone houses clustering round the duck pond, climbing up the steep rocks and sleeping huddled together about the old market square.

  Dangle, too, was sheltered in a hollow where the line of hills doubled back upon itself, miles away, in the woods, with cottages and flower gardens hiding by the stream, and farms nestling under sycamore groves. In between the two villages were a few scattered cottages and farmsteads – the hamlet of Raddle with the small post office and watermill, the long ridges of dense woods which belonged to the squire, Sir Harry Vane, and the spur on which Susan Garland lived.

  The farm with its stackyards, buildings, garden, orchard, pig-cotes, and the rambling house itself, looked like an island of fruitfulness, a small Paradise, on a shelf all to itself, with the ground falling or rising on every side. A beech wood swept round the base of the spur, protecting the house from the worst winds, with its great warm trees, and from above the wood the house rose like a fortress.

  It was an old farm, Windystone Hall, with buildings dating from Elizabethan times, and foundations older still, but it had been rebuilt, in part, and altered. In a field by the house stood a great black stone, perhaps a monument of ancient times, which, so the story went, walked down to the river to drink whenever it heard the cock crow at midnight. Joshua pointed out that a rock cannot hear, but Susan was not so sure, everything seemed to listen at Windystone.

  The gentle cows and great shaggy mares rubbed their sides against it, the sheep lay under its shadow and left wisps of wool which the chaffinches pilfered, and the cock crowed from its level summit as if it were his own barn door.

  The long gabled grey stone house was built of the rock upon which it stood, and became one with the steep crag at the back, as if it were a tower to resist invaders. Indeed, it was thought there had once been a Saxon camp there, the situation was a natural stronghold.

  All round were casement windows, diamond-paned and mullioned, peeping with little twinkling eyes at the smooth grass plot, the cobbled yard, the garden, the orchard, the paved paths, and peering down the precipitous rocky slope at the back over the tops of the beech trees to the line of hills. Each window framed a distinct and lovely landscape, with fields, hedges, wood, valley, hills and distant peaks complete.

  The massive front door, so seldom used, hid in a deep stone porch covered with honeysuckle, in the centre of the building. It led into a stone-flagged hall, which was lighted by narrow windows, through which the golden motes danced in straight lines, slanting to the floor. On one side a door led to the kitchen, the living room of the farm, and on the other sides doors led to the parlour, the south parlour and the stone chamber. The parlours were gay with old gilded wallpapers and in them were the soft tinkly piano, which only Susan played, a Sheraton bureau, a ‘what-not’ with rows of little ornaments, old sofas and chairs draped in antimacassars and stiff chintz, and great oak chests with pale panelling, with intricate wreaths of flower and leaf, and carved letters, W.M. 1644, W.G. 1796. Inside these were wedding dresses, in faded silks, falling to pieces, fichus in net and hard lace, fringes and flounces, babies’ long clothes, funeral cards, and packets of letters in strange crabbed writing, crossing and recrossing.

  The stone chamber was a store room for seeds and cow medicine, for books on farriery and breeding. An old bureau stood in one corner, with a stool in front of it. Nobody came here, the windows were curtainless, and the floor was bare. Roses pushed against the window and almost screened it, so that the room was dim.

  The kitchen was the heart of the house, a large low-ceilinged room full of doors and windows and old oak, and people going to and fro. Along two sides were oak dressers, with shining brasses and beeswaxed sides, and drawers with their own distinctive names, apron drawer, rag drawer, sewing drawer, book drawer, duster drawer and bit drawer, child’s drawer and girl’s drawer, towel drawer and writing drawer. A row of shelves, with a dinner service painted with bright trees and birds, and lustre mugs and buff jugs of satyrs and fauns, hung over one dresser, and a row of graduated dish covers over the other, each one reflecting the bright fire opposite.

  In the corner by the fireplace stood a settle with its panelled back covered and padded, and its seat a bed of blue and white check cushions. This was reserved for the farmer, and only his personal friends were invited to sit on it. Under the ceiling ran a corner shelf laden with brass and copper preserving-pans, brass saucepans, and copper tankards, of great age, but all bright and shining. The mantelpiece, too, was full of brass candlesticks, square and round, and gleaming mugs and measures.

  There was a copper warming-pan, used every night in the winter, and a row of horses’ head ornaments, moons and sun of brass, tinkling bells, and plated brushes, kept dry and clean. There were whips and guns, lanterns and a pistol, an old blunderbuss and a poleaxe.

  Everything shone, everything held a tiny red flame in its heart, but the shiniest, most important thing was the grandfather clock which ticked solemnly in its corner, where it had stood for two hundred years, joining in every conversation, interrupting with a loud whirr when it was displeased, holding its breath when the house was quiet, listening, listening to things long forgotten.

  A door from the kitchen led through a stone arched passage to the pantry and dairy with its stone benches round the walls and pans of milk set out for cream, a large, cold, airy room, with big windows at a corner round which the gales screamed in winter. Just outside the back door, a broad wall built on the rock held the milkcans, put upside down to sweeten in the wind, which sometimes caught them and threw them down the hill to the beech wood. The water troughs were near, great stone troughs sunk in the rock, fed by an ever-running spring, with a background of ferns.

  A wing started out at one side and wandered along embracing the old brewinghouse, another kitchen, a barn, and a bedchamber up a ladder and through a trapdoor, for an odd labourer. At right angles to this again, so that it enclosed a courtyard, was a line of farm buildings, rows of stone-coloured doors, steps running up the outside walls to lofts which had forgotten the reason of their existence. Once Susan, exploring, discovered a spinet, covered with dust, half hidden in some straw in one of these chambers. She played a tune and the sweet cracked notes tinkled to the rats, which stopped shuffling fo
r a moment among the worm-eaten boxes and bales of straw. In another loft she found a store of books, shut up in a chest, herbal books, bound magazines of 1840, sermons, hymns, and tracts, which she read for many a day.

  The stables, cart-sheds, and barn were in this wing, built along a side of the foundation rock, with great walls and heavy doors, to stand the wildest storm. The main cow-houses were on the open ground to the east, in a more sheltered position.

  A grass plot, with a monkey tree in the middle, stretched up to the front windows of the house, close to the walls like a green mat, for Tom Garland delighted to keep it even and clipped like the pony’s coat. It was bounded by a rounded sandstone wall, so densely covered with ferns and stonecrop, that the horses nibbled it when they were left alone for a minute in the waiting cart, and had to be driven off. Beyond the broad gravelled road which joined the cobbled yard and old buildings to the newer barns and the main gate, was a stretch of lawn with a grindstone in the middle and a wild flower garden at the edge. Daffodils, cowslips, and snowdrops made it their home. It ended abruptly in a steep drop, so that the ground was level with the tops of the trees in the orchard, and Becky had either to go round by the gates or climb down the rough steps projecting in the bounding wall. This lawn too was surrounded by a low wall, bright with ferns and gilliflowers, with clumps of white rock hanging down like snow in spring. At a corner of the house stood a group of yew trees, gloomy, black, jewelled with scarlet berries, and walled off from the horses who might eat of the leaves and die.

  Down a flagged path, past the yew trees and rosebeds, stood the pig-cotes, which were older than the house itself. Their thick stone walls were smothered in roses and honeysuckle, which covered the back in a wild tangle, unpruned and rioting. The sloping roof, with its large flat stones, was embossed with giant house-leek, great cushions of the juicy rosettes, with starry red flowers, planted in ancient days for inflammations and sores, and still used by the farmer. The cotes had a fern-covered wall a yard thick round their paved court, and beyond was a little enclosed garden – the pig-cote garden – where the pigs played sometimes. Lilacs and currants grew thick round the edge, rats from the old walls scurried in and out of the heavy grass. Over all, a benign mother, hung an enormous elder tree, dropping her delicate petals in the row of little stone troughs, decking the grass in the enclosure, and, in autumn, pouring her berries in the brown baskets of Dan and Becky, ready for the purple wine-making.

  The pigs were great friends of Susan’s, and she spent many days on the roof, playing house among the clumps of house-leek, or walking round the broad wall, talking to the grunters, listening to their answering snorts as she threw down windfalls and acorns. The sows were detestable, with their sharp cruel little eyes, but the piglets were like children, their glances soft and curious. They recognized her voice and cried shrilly when she called them and rattled the long-handled copper bowl on the stone trough outside their outer door.

  All the buildings were whitewashed, the dairy, pantry, kitchens and outhouses, the stables, barns and cow-houses. Only the old hay chambers were left, silent, listening, with their cumber of past days, worm-eaten and heavy, with a strange, curiously exciting smell, parts of spinning wheels, giant presses, cheese-stones, a broken cradle, and a medley of old boxes.

  In one of the bedrooms, the apple chamber, apples were stored for the winter; another, with a north window, had once been the cheese room. Now that the railway ran through the valley most of the milk was sent to a town, except a little which was kept for butter, and the cheese chamber was no longer stored with the great round cheeses which had left their round marks on its stone floor. There was the lad’s chamber, which had belonged to generations of servantmen, and the wench’s chamber, now renamed the girl’s room, where Becky slept. There was the old chamber with its crooked floor and heavy beams, which Joshua occupied, and the attic, where Susan looked down on the outside world from her tower in the treetops.

  Mr and Mrs Garland had a double-bedded room called the oak chamber, which contained two enormous four-posters with pink and blue diapered linen hangings which never wore out. It was the birth and death room. In that room Susan was born, and her father was born too. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had all come into the world in that same square chamber with its vision of orchard and garden, dipping valley and shining river, and black everlasting woods massed against the sky. There many old men and women had died, and young ones too, but one man had fallen asleep in the field among the mowing grass, and one had slipped from life in the saddle as he rode up the hill on his mare. When his time came, Tom Garland too would lie in a last sleep in that room.

  One little room was Susan’s in the winter when she came down from the freezing attic to a fire and curtains. It was shut away from the others, the little chamber down a little stair, and through double doors, exactly underneath her attic, but sheltered and warm.

  The best room was the parlour bedroom, and into it Susan tiptoed whenever the door was left unlocked. It was in a gable at the end of the house, and had wide windows on two sides, one framing the Dark Wood, the orchards, the river and the hills, the other looking towards the homely stackyard, the plough field, the wild steep larch wood, the beech wood, Arrow Head, and the pastures. But Susan did not come to see these, nor the rose trees which nodded and tapped at the window from spring to November. She came to peep at the treasures that were kept there.

  Inlaid workboxes and fitted dressing-boxes stood on the high chests of drawers between a pair of wig-stands, and slender pewter candlesticks. Inside them were reels of silk with tasselled ends, ivory brooches, jet bracelets, a blue leather pincushion with worn silk edges, a Valentine, a gold pencil, a pen-wiper with a black velvet dog and puppy lying on the top, a locket with a dove holding an olive branch, chains of silver with pink and grey stones inlet, scissors with gilt handles, an ivory needlecase, a mosaic cross, and clusters of little curls wrapped up in tissue paper.

  Susan never tired of looking at these things. It was the treat she chose for her birthday, her reward for picking many pounds of blackberries.

  A Queen Anne table stood at the bottom of the wide bed with its silk and velvet patchwork quilt, and on it lay a pair of fine steel candle-snuffers. A carved square stool, also covered with patchwork, stood in front of the dressing table, and Susan sat there looking at herself, staring at her black eyes and wishing they were blue, touching her short dark hair and longing for golden curls. In the dressing table she had once found a secret drawer, which gave her intense satisfaction. She wrote on a slip of paper, ‘Susan Garland wrote this. Windystone Hall Farm. Aged nine.’ She shut it up in the drawer for future ages to find, perhaps a little Susan in another hundred years, who would give a thought to the dead and gone Susan Garland, as she herself thought of the children who had once played there. But a few days later her mother opened the drawer and burnt the paper, so it wasn’t a secret drawer after all.

  She wished she could sleep once in the high oak bed, under the many-coloured quilt with its hexagons of moss-like velvet and flower-petal silk. She fingered the patterns, bits of her mother’s wedding dress, finery sent by an aunt, pieces collected for years before she was born, ‘or even thought of’, Margaret had said. She had slept in one of the drawers of the mahogany chest when she was a baby. No cradle was thought necessary, and she had lain secure on a blanket in the drawer which was placed on two chairs next to her mother’s bed in the other room. She wished she could remember it, and she opened the drawer to peep inside.

  In it lay a little white plush bonnet, her own. Was there a baby’s head inside with straight black hair, and tiny limbs kicking the wooden walls?

  Hark! Hark! Who spoke then?

  It was the room whispering urgently, trying to tell her something. She stood still, and waves of intense feeling swept across her, as if hands stroked her head and a cloak wrapped her round. Then it stopped. A rose tapped on the window, and life went on. There was no one there, except the butterflies which sat su
nning themselves on the broad white windowsill, before they hid for the winter in corners of the room. The first tortoiseshells always appeared in the parlour bedroom in the spring – they were the only guests who were allowed in, except distinguished visitors, such as the Squire, or Miss Dickory, Susan’s godmother.

  Every week Mrs Garland put the warming-pan between the sheets to keep it in airing, and every day she opened the windows to let in the sunshine. The room was her pride, a little private chapel, where she was the priest.

  Margaret Garland was a round-cheeked, apple-faced woman, with brown hair taken straight back from her low, beautiful forehead. She was very different from her pale, thin-faced little daughter. People said they did not know where Susan got her ill-looks, the child was all eyes. It certainly was not from hearty Tom Garland with his blue eyes and big open face. His cheeks were ruddy and smooth, he towered a good-looking giant over his elfish daughter, who was no use to him on the farm. Margaret Garland said Susan took after her Aunt Elizabeth who died when she was a girl. It was terrible to look like someone who was dead, thought Susan, and she whistled and climbed trees to make herself a boy.

  Margaret’s eyes were grave, but when she laughed a little light shone out of them, so that Susan thought there must be a candle somewhere behind. She had even seen it when her mother leaned with the candlestick in her hand to kiss her in bed, a little flame on a white candle, only as big as a pin’s head. There was a candle in Susan’s eyes, too, which burned ardently when she ran down the fields to search for treasure, or read Robinson Crusoe by the kitchen fire, but she seldom looked at her own face, for her looking-glass was too high up on the top of the chest of drawers, and the glass was old and spotted with mouldy stars.