SARAH MORRIS REMEMBERS
D. E. Stevenson
© D. E. Stevenson 1967
D. E. Stevenson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1967 by Collins.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
For M.C. with love
Table of Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Three
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Part Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Part One
Chapter One
A small child lives in the present and takes everything for granted but to most children there comes a moment of awareness; the child wakens from its trance and becomes conscious of itself and its surroundings. This moment came to me on a Christmas morning many years ago when I discovered myself to be a little girl in a warm cashmere dress with a gold bracelet on my arm.
The dress and the bracelet were new; they were Christmas presents from father and mother. I liked the colour of the dress – a soft pinkish red – and I liked the feeling of it on my bare arms.
The boys had presents too: Lewis a big wooden sled and Willy a silver watch. We had other presents: a doll for me and books and building blocks and puzzles from the grandparents; stockings packed with sweets and crackers and fruit and queer little wooden toys from Santa Claus. The nursery floor was untidy with paper wrappings.
The boys and I were sitting on the window-seat looking out at the snow-covered garden. I didn’t remember having seen snow before and I thought it was pretty. It had come in the night while we were asleep, but now it had stopped snowing; the sun was shining and the long shadows of the trees fell across the glistening white lawn.
The little bracelet felt heavy on my wrist, there were charms on it which jingled when I moved my hand. I looked at my hand, opening and closing it.
“Why are you looking at your hand like that?” asked Lewis.
“I’ve never seen it before.”
He laughed. “Silly little Sally!”
“I know what she means,” said Willy. “She’s beginning to find out about herself; just like I had to find out about my train—how to fit the rails together and wind up the engine.”
Lewis wasn’t listening; he said, “I’m glad there’s snow, but it’s a nuisance being Christmas Day. I won’t be able to go out with my sled till after lunch.”
“You wouldn’t have got it if it hadn’t been Christmas Day,” Willy pointed out. He added, “There they are!”
There they were: father and mother coming back from church through the little green gate which led from the churchyard into the Vicarage garden. They had been to church early – and we would all go together at eleven – but mother had wanted to fill up the flower-vases so she had gone over directly after breakfast and father had gone with her to help. There they were, coming down the garden path: mother in front, holding up the skirts of her green dress and walking carefully on the snowy path; father shutting the gate and following her.
He looked up at the nursery window and waved to us. The sun shone on his thin face and smooth dark hair.
I was like father – everyone said so. Lewis was like mother, with fair wavy hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Willy wasn’t like anyone in particular; he had brown hair (which was always untidy, no matter how often he brushed it) and thin knobbly knees. Lottie was the youngest of the family; she was very pretty with big blue eyes and flaxen curls as soft as silk. Everyone admired Lottie but at that time I wasn’t interested in her, I liked being with the boys. Sometimes they were a bit rough but I didn’t mind – I didn’t mind what they did if I could tag along after them and share in their games.
The Fenimore Cooper period was terribly exciting and, now that I think of it, somewhat dangerous. We crept about in the woods and shot at each other with home-made bows and arrows. One day I shot Willy in the arm, it was just a graze but it bled freely. Willy didn’t mind but I sat down and wept.
“You mustn’t tell,” said Willy, when Lewis had tied a dirty handkerchief round the wound. “If you tell we’ll never be allowed to play Indians again.”
“She must swear an oath,” declared Lewis.
I swore a dreadful oath that I wouldn’t tell – and I didn’t. Of course mother saw that I had been crying and wanted to know what was the matter but I remained dumb.
“You shouldn’t play with the boys,” said mother. “They’re too rough, Sarah. Why don’t you play dolls with Lottie?”
“They aren’t rough,” I said. “It wasn’t that, at all. It was something quite different.”
Mother looked at me – and sighed – and said no more.
I can remember other little incidents which happened when I was a child. There was the day when Lewis was pushing me in the swing and I fell off and broke my arm. Father was in his study, writing his sermon, and came running out and carried me into the house . . . and he held me tightly while Dr. Weatherstone set the bone and bound it up with splints. I remember the day when Willy’s white rabbit escaped from his hutch. Mr. Blake, the sexton, was our gardener and he had told Willy that he didn’t hold with rabbits except in a pie so we were terrified that he might catch Peter. We hunted madly all over the garden and at last I found Peter amongst the cabbages; I seized him by his long white ears and screamed for Willy. Peter kicked and struggled and tried to bite me but I held on like grim death until Willy came to the rescue.
St. Mary’s Vicarage was a fine old house with a lovely big garden and we lived there very comfortably for in addition to his stipend father had a small private income. The church and the Vicarage were on the side of a hill. On the top of the hill were the woods, where we played Indians, and at the bottom of the hill was the village of Fairfield. It was quite a big village with good shops so we got all our provisions there; if we wanted clothes we went to Larchester in the bus.
We knew all the people in the village and we liked them – all except the baker’s boy who brought our bread. He was a sturdy individual, with a red face and ginger hair, and very cheeky. One day Lewis found him stealing eggs from a robin’s nest outside the kitchen door. We knew the robins, we had watched them building their nest, and had seen the eggs in it, so when Lewis caught the baker’s boy with his hand in the nest he was furious.
“Thief!” cried Lewis.
“Thief, yourself!” shouted the
baker’s boy. “I’m collecting birds’ eggs——”
“You’re not to take those——”
“Who’s going to stop me?”
“I am!” cried Lewis. advancing in a threatening manner.
The baker’s boy laughed. He threw the eggs on the ground and stamped on them; then he rolled up his sleeves.
“Run, Lewis!” I shouted . . . but, instead of running, Lewis went for him and hit him. The next moment they were fighting like mad dogs.
The baker’s boy was much bigger than Lewis and I was so frightened that for a few moments I was too petrified to move. Then, when I saw that Lewis was getting the worst of it, I seized a stick from the herbaceous border and hit the boy on the back of his head. I was so mad with rage and fright that I hit him as hard as I could . . . he fell down on the path and lay still.
“Sarah, what have you done?” exclaimed Lewis in alarm.
“I had to,” I said breathlessly.
“You’ve killed him, Sarah!”
“I had to,” I repeated. “He was killing you – he’s twice your size – it’s his own fault if he’s dead.”
Fortunately, the baker’s boy wasn’t dead, he was just stunned, and after a few moments he sat up and looked about him with a surprised expression on his fat red face. Then he rose, took up his basket, and walked away.
We stood in silence and watched him go.
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” said Lewis at last.
“I had to – he’s twice your size, Lewis!”
Lewis began to laugh. “He doesn’t know what happened to him,” declared Lewis. “I bet he thinks I knocked him out! Gosh, what a joke! We shan’t have any more cheek from the baker’s boy.”
We decided not to tell anyone about the fight – not even Willy – but Minnie came into the scullery when Lewis was bathing his bruised face so we had to tell her the whole story. It didn’t matter telling Minnie because she hated the baker’s boy as much as we did.
Minnie Dell was our cook. She was very small but wonderfully strong for her size. She explained to us that she had had “the fever” when she was eight years old so she had never grown any bigger after that. “But three of the others died,” she added cheerfully.
There had been seven little Dells. Minnie used to say the poem, “We Are Seven,” and she always cried when she said it, but she wasn’t really sad. She was as gay as a lark and full of fun. She came from Ryddelton, mother’s old home in Scotland; sometimes she talked to us in her home tongue to make us laugh, but she could speak good English when she liked.
“You’ve got to mimic them, that’s all,” said Minnie. “You’ve got to listen – really listen – and watch their lips. That’s how to learn a language; mind that, Sarah, when you’re learning French at school.”
Minnie was a wonderful needlewoman; she made her own dresses and sometimes altered things for mother. She was fond of reading and borrowed books from the library in Larchester, where she went for her afternoons off. Travel books were her favourites; she read them carefully and often came out with queer bits of information about what she had read.
“Think of this!” she would exclaim. “In Africa the blacks file their teeth into points to make themsel’s look fierce!”
I can’t remember a time when Minnie wasn’t there, in the kitchen, cooking our meals or sitting by the fire. She was part of our lives and we loved her dearly.
Lewis, who was five years older than I was, remembered a big fat cook who had boxed his ears for taking a bun off a baking-tray which had just come out of the oven. Soon after that mother went into the kitchen and found the big fat cook lying unconscious on the floor. Mother thought she was ill and sent for the doctor . . . but Dr. Weatherstone laughed and said she was drunk and a big pile of empty bottles was discovered in the coal-cellar.
All this was a secret in the family; it was a sort of legend. Father and mother never spoke of it so I have no idea how Lewis knew.
When the big fat cook had gone Grandmama Maitland sent Minnie Dell from Ryddelton “to be a comfort” and Minnie had been with us ever since.
When I was six years old I went to a little private school in Fairfield which was run by Mrs. Powell. She had no degrees or diplomas but she was an excellent teacher and made our lessons interesting. In addition to all the usual subjects she taught us to make little clay models and straw mats and kettle-holders in cross-stitch . . . and when we were older she gave us each a large exercise-book with hard covers and showed us how to keep diaries. We wrote about the birds and animals that we saw in the woods and about what we did in the holidays. Mrs. Powell gave us prizes for neatness and originality.
I began keeping a diary when I was ten years old and it became a habit which has remained with me all my life. The diaries are all written in big exercise-books with hard covers (like the first one, which was given to me by Mrs. Powell); some days consist of two or three closely written pages . . . and there are gaps when nothing interesting happened or when I was too busy or too unhappy to write.
When I started this story of my life I unpacked the diaries which I had kept in a large tin box and, as I turned over the pages, all sorts of things came back to me – things I had forgotten – and I realised I had plenty of material for a family chronicle. I had intended to write the story to amuse the family but I hadn’t got very far before I saw that I was faced with a difficult choice: either I could write a story about the family, suitable for the family to read, or else I could write a true story about everything that had happened to us all. The choice was so difficult that I put away the pages I had written until I could make up my mind about it.
Several months passed – I had almost forgotten my “story” – then one day when I was looking for something else I came across the pages and read them and felt the urge to continue . . . and now I saw quite clearly that the story would be no good unless it was true in every detail. I would write it for myself, for my own satisfaction; no eye but mine should ever see it and perhaps when I had finished it I should be able to see some sort of pattern in my life.
As I sat down at my desk to write I realised how much I owed to Mrs. Powell. I hadn’t seen her for years but I remembered her so well that when I shut my eyes I could see her round pink face and the brown fringe across her forehead and I could hear her voice saying cheerfully, “Now we’ll have reading. Find your places, children.”
Lewis and Willy never went to Mrs. Powell’s; they went to Bells Hill, a boarding school near Larchester. On Saturdays they rode home on their bicycles and often stayed the night. When the boys were away the house was very quiet but when the boys came home the house woke up and was full of stir. Sometimes we had friends to tea and played hide-and-seek in the garden but I liked it better when we were alone and went into the drawing-room after tea for music.
On Sunday evenings we had hymns but on week-days father sang old songs – songs which had been old when he was young – such as “A Fox Jumped up in a Hungry Plight” and “The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” and “Ring the Bell, Watchman.”
Unlike the songs of modern times they all had good rousing tunes.
I remember those evenings so well! I remember the comfortable lamp-lit room; father at the grand piano, playing and singing in his mellow baritone; mother sitting by the fire with her mending-basket, humming and beating time . . . and all of us standing round and joining in the choruses. Every now and then father would put his fingers in his ears and exclaim, “Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey!”
None of us knew where the quotation came from but we all knew what father meant.
We took it in turns to choose the songs. Willy’s favourite was “The Fox” and mine was an old ditty with several verses. I can’t remember them now but only the chorus which came at the end of each verse:
“Dashing away with a smoothing iron,
Dashing away with a smoothing iron
She stole my heart away.”
We all sang quite nicely – when we di
dn’t shout – but Lewis’s voice was beautiful; it was a boy’s treble, clear as a bell. In the holidays Lewis sang in the choir. One Sunday morning he stood up and sang, “O, for the Wings of a Dove.” He looked so angelic and his voice was so pure and unearthly that I was quite frightened. I was even more frightened when Mrs. Quail, who sat in the pew behind us, whispered to her sister that he was “too good for this world” . . . but fortunately I remembered that only yesterday Lewis had put a small lump of mud in father’s ink-pot.
Mr. Shepherd was the organist of St. Mary’s so it was his duty to train the choir, but he was old and impatient and he offended people so mother used to have the choir to practice on Tuesday evenings. She said it was better for them to be “half-cooked” before Mr. Shepherd took them.
Chapter Two
Just beyond the garden wall, on the opposite side from the the church, there was a small field. We called it “our field” but it really belonged to Farmer Rickaby; he was churchwarden and he had told father that we could play there if we were careful. We were country-bred children so we knew what that meant: not to spoil the crop by walking across it when it was growing, and never to leave the gate open. We were not likely to leave the gate open for we never opened it, but climbed over the low wall at the top of the garden. Here, there was a very old oak-tree surrounded by some enormous stones and on fine summer days we often took a picnic basket and had tea beneath its branches.
Lewis liked cricket, so quite often he didn’t come home on Saturday afternoons, but Willy came home whenever he could. We used to pretend we were Dan and Una – in Puck of Pook’s Hill. It was a good place to pretend magic for the tree was so old and gnarled and twisted that there was something very queer about it . . . and the hedge was thorn. One day we found a tiny ash-tree in the woods; it was only eight inches high, but we dug it up and planted it between two of the stones.
Our tree was magic in winter too. When the branches were bare we could see how twisted they were. Anyone might have thought the tree was dead, but every spring the buds opened and the tree was covered with fresh green leaves. It was like a miracle.
Sarah Morris Remembers Page 1