Читать книгу Period Piece - Gwendolyn Raverat - Страница 14

And so it was; I can remember the smell very well, for all the sewage went into the river, till the town was at last properly drained, when I was about ten years old. There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr. Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge: 'What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?' To which, with great presence of mind, he replied: 'Those, ma'am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.' However, we lived at the upper end of the town, so it was not so very bad. That was why the bathing places were on the upper river, on Sheeps' Green and Coe Fen.

In those days both the mills were in use. I still now feel that there is an unnatural gap in the landscape, where Foster's Mill used to stand before it was pulled down; and I find it hard to believe that the boys, who now sit fishing on the parapet, have no idea that there once was a great mill behind them. We used to spend many hours watching the fat corn-sacks being hauled up by a pulley into the overhanging gable, sometimes from a barge, but more often from the great yellow four-horse wagons, which stood beneath the trapdoor. The sacks butted the trapdoors open with their own noses, and the doors fell to, with a loud clap, behind them. At night there was a watchman in the mill who used to divert himself by trying to play the flute. It was a doleful sound to hear at three in the morning, especially as he had not advanced very far in his studies. My father, always a bad sleeper, was much worried by his aimless tootlings, but felt it would be cruel to protest; however, in the end, they came to an agreement which suited them both.

My father repaired the house and altered the kitchens, making them still more vast and stony than they were before. He pulled down some of the granaries and stables; and made a tennis-court where there had been a cobbled yard. And he built two wooden bridges across branches of the river, to reach the two islands. For the river here becomes exceedingly complicated, with mill-races and weirs and millpools and various old channels and ditches, all wandering about in the Fen. He 'threw out' a bay-window to the drawing-room; this was a pity, as it spoilt the Georgian symmetry of the house. But architects did not think much of eighteenth-century architecture in those days.