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Angela Margaret Thirkell
Published by Good Press, 2021
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In the large low (but not too low) room, Grace Hoggett was ironing various garments whose smallness at once made Mrs. Grantly want to cry. From a cot in the corner of the room the fluting burbling noises continued. With an air of proud and competent ownership Heather gently pulled back the coverings and Master Pilward was manifest in all his drowsy splendour, with a fat contented face, divinely finished hands, and eminently pinchable legs.
“I thought he’d be ghastly,” said his step-grandmother, “like pictures in those books about How Babies Come to Us and all that rot. But he isn’t. He’s quite heavenly and when he’s awake he kicks like anything. And he weighs eleven pounds two ounces. He was seven pounds when he was born, so that’s jolly good,” to which life history of Master Pilward Mrs. Grantly listened with a good deal of interest. Partly because she liked and respected babies, partly because never before had Lucy been known to show the faintest interest in the young of the human race. To her nieces and nephews she had been consistently kind and they all adored Aunt Lucy, the purveyor of farm and garden pleasures, but until they could walk and talk she couldn’t, as her sister-in-law Mrs. Bill Marling far too often said, have cared less. Straws showing which way the wind blows?
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