Читать книгу The Insect Man - Eleanor Doorly - Страница 5
ОглавлениеThe Yew Tree Family who journeyed to
find Fabre
The children lived almost entirely under the Yew Tree. That was why everyone, who knew them, called them the Yew Tree Children. They had a house, but when they were in that there seemed always so many things to be done. There were so many rules to be observed, as, for instance, they could not speak outside their father’s doors; so many clocks to watch in order to have their hands washed before they struck one, or four, or seven; so many useful occupations that were good for them, like dusting the schoolroom or learning to make soup. But the Yew Tree, though it was in sight of the house, was far enough away to be beyond call or convenient-fetching distance, and the children were left gloriously alone.
Also they liked the Yew Tree for itself. It was very old—nine hundred years old, tradition said—and its trunk was wide, with hiding-places in it, while its branches were low and easy to climb. Moreover, the children found it amusing to watch all the strange tourists who made their way there to visit the tiny church where Jane Austen, the writer, was christened. Once someone had hidden the church key in one of the tree’s caverns, and from that time it had been the custom to keep it there. The children told the visitors that they were the sole and appointed guardians of the key, and didn’t explain that they had made the appointment themselves. But the key itself was uncommon and exciting, for it was a foot-and-a-half long, and yet difficult to find, so deep was its hiding-place.
The children were Geraldine, her brother Giles, and Margaret, who was only a friend. Their mother had been dead since Geraldine could remember, and their grown-up step-sister, Penelope, brought them up—very badly in the opinion of everybody but themselves.
Their village was different from other people’s villages, because everyone in it, including their father, was writing a life of Jane Austen. That made the children, who liked true stories of real people, want to make a collection of lives of the people who were different from Jane, in order to tease their father, who thought that there was “nobody like Jane.” Penelope did most of the collecting. The others generally listened to her and made improvements in the stories as she told them under the Yew Tree. When, by chance, she wrote them down, they granted her the special privilege of leaving out all her inverted commas for her own speeches, and that explains the absence of some of them in this story.
