Читать книгу Bricks and Flowers - Katherine Everett - Страница 7

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In spite of the stress and strain, our home life was not without its compensations during my childhood. All the servants, both indoors and outdoors, were our friends. Kind, fat Hannah, a housemaid, was always ready to tell us stories, our favourite being how she missed her chance of going to America.

“Wasn’t I the big fool,” she would say, “with me uncle over beyond sending me the fare and I going down to Cork with me shawl on me head and me bundle in me hand and come ten miles in the ass cart to the quay, that when I saw the great ship six feet from the side and the black water below I let out a screech. ‘I’ll never lep it,’ says I, ‘and what’s more I won’t try,’ and it was a stout lump of a girl I was then and not so nimble, so back home I went on the ass cart, and that’s how I come to be here and not over in America. It was the Will of God, no doubt.”

There was old Ann, the cook, angelic to us and brutal to her kitchenmaids whom she selected herself from among the daughters of lodge-keepers, gardeners, or tenants. She worked them hard and would teach them nothing, often locking herself into the larder when preparing anything special, which she would even cover with her apron while carrying it to the oven, for fear they should pick up a hint. She would make them scrub and scour and clean and peel potatoes, and would beat them over the head with a wooden spoon, but if a protesting mother came to see her, Ann would be all honey.

“Ah, then, Mrs. Sullivan, I’m glad to see you,” she would say. “Sit down while I make you a cup of tea. And is it about Bridgy you’d have a chat? The girl is raw, yes, very raw, but isn’t she the fortunate one to be getting the best of training and the good food and the warm bed.”

“Well, indeed, you’re right,” the confused mother would agree and add, “But for all she says you beat her.”

“Well, before God, that’s a great lie; if I’d give her a tap so she wouldn’t be idling the day away that’s no less than my duty to try to put a shape to her.” Then, turning the subject with a most satisfied air, Ann would enquire, “Is your tea to your liking, mam? Just say the word and I’ll make you more.”

The muddled and mollified mother would respond, “You’re too good and the tea is grand, and strong enough for a mouse to pass over it.” And she would settle down to enjoy Ann’s genial company and the warmth of the great stove.

We enjoyed it, too, for our schoolroom fare was austere, and very different would be those unauthorized titbits pressed upon us by Ann.

“Here, love, would you taste a bit of the meringue I am after making for the mistress and wait till I get the whipped cream to it, ’twill do you good,” or, “I have a nice wine jelly that I put in the little shape, along with a bit of the marzipany cake so you might fancy it.”

We always did, but if, however, we said anything about the weeping kitchenmaid, Ann would retort, “Take no notice, she’s just trash and I’ll be shut of her, forbye she’s leaving on Saturday and I have a decent girl coming.”

They were never, however, considered decent when in situ.

Sometimes I would slip into the servants’ hall at their dinner-time, which was later than ours, and would sit on the butler’s knee when I was very small, and he’d say, “Have a sup of tea, little love,” and give me some out of his saucer.

Ann never came to any meal, and when we asked why there would be smiles and evasion, and much later I realized that Ann liked her private nip of whisky, interspersed with bouts of hard drinking, in spite of which she remained with us for thirty years. Treatment was always the same, and when I was older I was often the intermediary, going down to the kitchen and taking her aside to say:

“Dear Ann, you have been very bad again and now you must see the Friar; he’s been sent for and he is coming this morning.”

Ann would be offended, tossing her head, on which she wore a large white turban, and saying, “No manner of need to trouble the Holy Brother; tell him I’m busy about my work.”

In due course the Friar would come, sandals, brown habit and cord complete, and would be alone with Ann for about half-an-hour, after which reformation was assured and lasted from three to six months; but we never knew how he dealt with her.

Outside there was plenty to interest us: the stables were full of horses, ponies, and dogs and, presiding magnificently over it all, Delany the coachman, who had ten children and, in addition to his grooms, taught relays of his little boys to attend him. I can see him standing with a small boy on either side, each holding a top boot and, as soon as he had inserted his feet in them, dropping on their knees and polishing vigorously.

We named all the babies born on the place, and Delany’s last being twins, we called them Daniel Deronda and Decimus, thinking how splendid they would sound if they became doctors and were knighted, but unfortunately Mrs. Delany added Patrick to Decimus and they degenerated into Patsy and Danny, after which we felt that future grandeur was improbable.

The coach-house and stables were new, but the dairy was in a very old, stone-built barn, divided into three parts, in one of which stood an enormous churn—a vast barrel with a handle at either end which two men would turn for hours. The old woman called Mary the Dairy would come in from time to time and call upon Heaven to know why the butter was delaying, muttering incantations and prayers in Irish, and we would beg her to tell us what she was saying.

“Just calling on God and the Devil to hasten up, for I have it all to wash and stamp for the house.”

“And a bit for yourself,” one of the men would add, for, like others on the place, Mary did her illicit trading.

Large pans of milk stood in the centre of the barn, there were no windows anywhere, the rough stone walls hung with cobwebs, and Mary would slide a dirty finger over the cream to taste how ripe it was for skimming. The butter she made was excellent. What we enjoyed most was her bedroom in the third partition, also stone-walled and cobwebby and quite dark, unless the half-door was open, when we could see all the walls, which were filled with hooks and brackets on which hung or stood stuffed hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, and guinea-fowl. She would tell us the names and cause of death of them all. She had stuffed them herself. Some were rather moulty and the shapes were odd, but to be so honoured they had to have met an abnormal end.

She slept in a wide, deep bunk fixed to the wall and apparently full of rags, but not alone, for whichever of her flock needed nursing shared it with her: sometimes it would be a turkey with the pip or a wounded duck, but more frequently a neglected new-born family.

“Don’t you sometimes kick them?” we would ask when a dozen ducklings were disclosed at the bottom of her lair.

“Why would I, and they so light and small they can slop through my toes and I not know it?”

And well they might, for Mary stood in her short ragged petticoat with bare feet and splayed-out toes in wet or cold, and we never saw her otherwise on weekdays; but on Sundays the old and dirty figure was transformed. In a large wooden chest she kept the outfit: a white goffered cap, a black cloth cloak of superfine quality, very full and reaching down to the ground, with a hood at the back, and a large, box-like pair of boots which she would sling by their laces over her arm.

MY MOTHER AND FATHER

(left) MYSELF (aged 12)

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER (Lady Katherine Stewart)

THE FAMILY OF CHARLES JOHN HERBERT OF MUCKROSS AND HIS WIFE LOUISA ANN MIDDLETON, DAUGHTER OF NATHANIEL MIDDLETON OF BRADFORD PEVERELL

(Left to right) Charles (killed by a cricket ball at Eton); Emily; Maria; Jane; Louisa, m. the Rev. Edward Stewart (my grandmother); Henry Arthur Herbert

BANTRY HOUSE

STAUNTON HAROLD

The following inscription is carved over the door of the church: “In the year 1653 When all things Sacred were throughout ye nation Either demolished or profaned Sr Robert Shirley, Barronet, Founded this church; Whose singular praise it is to have done ye best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most calamitous. The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.”

“When do you put them on?” we would ask.

“On the chapel steps, and a cruel sore hardship it is on my feet; but isn’t it well known you can’t get to Heaven but through Purgatory?”

“Do tell us what else you have in your chest,” we would beg.

“My shroud; and it’s of the very best, as it should be against the awful judgment day,” she would answer as she crossed herself, but she never showed it to us.

We often went to the walled garden which was half a mile from the house and looked through a little barred and locked gate to the lower garden, which was sheltered and full of flowers and scented with a verbena at the entrance and bounded on one side by a high rock from which tumbled white and yellow roses. I always pictured the Garden of Eden as being exactly like it. Here we would shriek and yell till Tom, the half-wit son of the gardener, would come shambling and frolicking down to let us in. He had a face like a baboon, entirely surrounded with grey whiskers, and, though of limited mind, he had his gifts, one being spinning half a plate on his thumb, which turned right back, making a large earth-stained platform for his half-plate to whirl round on.

If we went into the beehive-like cottage in the middle garden, his father, who looked the younger of the two, might be sitting over the turf fire, where an earthenware teapot always stood in the ashes. Tom, who was the housekeeper, emptied the teapot on Mondays and put in the first two teaspoons of tea, a poor brew, but by adding two teaspoons each succeeding day, by Sunday it was half full of tea-leaves and of potent strength.

We had endless jokes with Tom, and would ask him when he was going to get married. He would grin widely and say maybe next fair day he would find himself a fine fat woman to bed down with, upon which his father would order him out to work and tell us to get out too. Then we would follow him to the upper garden, where sometimes he would handle bees to amuse us. Lifting up a straw skep while we ran shrieking to a safe distance, he would throw handfuls of bees into the air, indifferent to the wide halo of angry bees around him.

Our greatest treat was to get Tom to stand on his head, but this required preparation: first he would scoop out a hollow in the earth, then fold his battered hat into it and lower his head, rolling it round and round till he was satisfied, while his straggling grey hair mingled with his whiskers. He was double-jointed, and would spread his hands on either side with an Anglo-Saxon look of angularity, and after staying in this doubled-up position for a tense moment, his thin legs, crowned with enormous boots, would shoot into the air and immediately start dancing a jig in time to melodious whistling, coming from Tom’s grey, tangled head. We would roll on the ground with ecstatic laughter as the upside-down boots kicked out and pattered with ever more complex steps and the whistling grew faster and faster. The more we laughed the more pleased he was, and when exhausted he would sit down and tell us how much they laughed at the fairs he went to, it being evident that he felt this to be the best kind of applause.

From the garden we might go on to the lake-shore to see the salmon haul—a most scriptural scene. Four fishermen went out in a heavy boat and threw out the net, and on returning walked slowly, bent forward, with the rope over their shoulders, drawing it in. Hauling was best towards evening, when the lake would be flushed with sunset colours and would send gentle ripples towards the shore, and tiny waves would break on the edge over short, tufted grass or little pockets of pebbles and sand. Gradually the net would draw closer as the fishermen, silhouetted against the shining scene, dragged its weight in, until at the last they turned to face the water, pulling the net hand over hand, watching intently in complete silence up to the last breathless moment when suddenly would come a silver flash and where all had been quiet all was excitement. Three leaping fish were on land, entangled in the net, their lovely life ended by thuds from a horrible stick ironically called “the doctor”. Laughter and betting on the weights, settled by the stillar, would follow, and one of the men would start running for the house with a salmon neatly looped by his gills and tail, and we would follow him, after a last look at the mountains and their reflections in the lake, broken by the dark figure standing in the boat and casting out the net once more.

The man with our fish would be well ahead of us and going in great haste, as my father held the theory that a salmon, to be worth eating, must be in the pot within twenty minutes of being alive in the lake. He thought a rod-caught fish inferior, the struggle before the end making the curd less fine and creamy; what he would have thought of the degenerates who can eat it out of a tin I cannot imagine.

We would walk home past the mouth of the river, the sedge-grass, reeds, and wind-bent trees aglow with evening light, and watch for the flight of duck or see high up in the darkening sky the wedge-shaped pattern of wild geese before we passed into the deep shadow of the lime avenue, at the end of which we could see our house—our rather ugly house.