Читать книгу Period Piece - Gwendolyn Raverat - Страница 16

At the end of the tennis-court stood the one big empty granary, which had not been pulled down. My mother being nothing if not ingenious, used this granary in a number of experimental ways. Sometimes she planned to grow mushrooms on the upper floors; sometimes the first floor was a drying-room for the washing, and the washing was done on the ground floor, with water which the maids had to pump up from the river. (They did not like this at all.) Sometimes the first floor was a hen-house. The granary was built over a kind of cellar, which was always liable to flooding; so the hens lived on the first floor, and a small door-hole was knocked through the wall for them, from which a sort of ladder ran down to the ground. The poor hens were supposed to go down this ladder across the stable-yard, out through another hole in the great carriage-door, and across the road to pasture on Queens' Green.

I don't know whether this journey was too complicated for their well-known lack of intelligence, or whether they found the ladder too difficult to climb, or whether they were run over by the fiery hansom-cabs and butchers' carts of those days, but anyhow, the plan did not succeed; and the hens were soon moved to a salubrious period residence on the Big Island, where my mother designed for them a little bridge of their own, across the ditch to the Lammas-land meadow. It was rather like the Bridge of Sighs, made in wire-netting; and with a little instruction they learnt to negotiate it.

But the hens' hole in the granary wall remained, and one of our favourite pastimes was to swarm up a drainpipe and wriggle through the hole into the loft; and my worst nightmares still have to do with the time when I got stuck in the hens' door-hole, because I was too fat, and had the greatest difficulty in getting out alive.

When I was about nine the granary became so dilapidated that something had to be done about it; so my mother had the idea of turning it into a flat, or upstairs house, and letting it. Then for a long time, we had glorious fun with scaffolding rising up out of the river, and ladders, and mortar, and workmen, and mess. Underneath the house, the ground floor was made into a coach-house and stable for the horse my mother always intended to keep some day, and never did. I still often feel as if the present garage is haunted by the wistful ghost of a horse, who never was there at all. The house is most ingeniously full of my mother's beloved gadgets: tricks for opening the front door without going downstairs, and for drawing up the bread in a basket; though, of course, the architect insisted on following the well-known Victorian principles of making the dining-room as far as possible from the kitchen, and the bathroom as far as possible from the hot-water boiler. This particular architect was quite explicit about it: he wrote a book on house design, in which he said: 'The coal store should he placed as far as possible from the kitchen, in order to induce economy in the use of fuel.' This house was named the Granary.

Beyond the Granary, there was another strip of garden running along the river bank, and from the very end of it I can remember seeing, in the twilight of a June evening, the procession of boats, which used to end the May races. The eights were dressed up with flowers and flags, and came up into the Millpool to turn there, before going down again. It must have been in 1892, the last time the procession took place.

The Grange was, of course, modernized inside, for my mother was always on the side of progress. She had an enormous coal-bin built beside the nursery door, to which the coalmen carried their sacks up the narrow back stairs and along the wriggling roundabout passages, making a terrible mess as they went. This was to save the maids' labour, but they did not like the plan at all, more because it was unusual than because of the coal dust. There was now a bathroom, too, with the bath, all decently encased in mahogany, so that you could not see its legs. She had installed a system of speaking tubes from the nursery to the hall; but these were never used at all, because shouting up the short back stairs was so much simpler, if less refined.

Anyhow our house never was the sort of place where you rang the bell for the maid to put coal on the fire. My mother always sent a child to ask for what was wanted, if the child could not itself do what was necessary. I don't say she never rang the bell herself when the supply of children ran short; but it was far more likely that she would call out to someone passing by the door to come and do what she wanted. For like a true American, she always left the doors ajar; no doubt she felt it dull if they were shut. One of the four big rooms downstairs was called the smoking-room, for smoking was not yet quite respectable, though of course my father really smoked everywhere. It was later on the schoolroom.

There was gaslight in the nurseries and passages and bedrooms; hissing, unshaded gas-burners as a rule; where the brown middle of the flower-like flame always fascinated me. There was a Colza oil lamp in the drawing-room, and tall candles in the dining-room. But as soon as it was possible we had the new electric light put in, though it was considered very expensive and much too extravagant for the kitchens and the attics; and such passage lights as there were must never be left on. We had the telephone, too, so early that we were Number 10 on the list. In the kitchen, near the vast iron range happily roaring the coal away, stood the clockwork roasting-jack, behind its shiny screen; though the screen was now chiefly used to shelter the troughs of dough, when the bread was put down before the fire to rise; for our bread was all made at home of stone-milled flour from Grantchester Mill.

Here at the Grange I was born in the summer of 1885, and here I and my brothers and sister spent all our youth.

From the big night nursery window we could look right down on to the slow green river beneath us; and if a boat went by it was reflected upside down, as a patch of light moving across the ceiling; and the ripples always purled in a dancing rhythm there, when the sun shone. Across the Little Island we could see up to the weir and the footpath along the Upper River, where I always thought the Lord walked when he led his flock to lie down in green pastures. Here we were never out of hearing of the faint sound of the water running over the weir; and on windy winter nights, when we were in bed, we could hear, a long way off, the trucks being shunted at the station and the whistling of the engines on the line. That was when you couldn't sleep because you had a 'feverish attack' and, wonderfully, there was a fire in the night nursery, throwing up the flickering criss-cross of the high fender on the ceiling; and you were glad to be safe in bed, because of the lonely dreadfulness of the night outside. And in the dark early morning we could sometimes hear from the Big Island the crowing of the cocks, which disturbed my father so much.