The beginning is Yearsly. People say that places ought not to
matter—still less houses, but I think they do. Yearsly has mattered
to me, and it did to Guy and Hugo. It stood for something very
stable, very enduring, and very sympathetic. Yearsly without
Cousin Delia might have been something quite different; it is
quite different now; but I think of them together, complementary
to each other. Cousin Delia’s personality pervaded everything
at Yearsly, and everything there seemed somehow an enhancement
and expression of her; and yet each was distinct. Yearsly had
something that it had had long before she came there, and Cousin
Delia had something, and a great deal, that she must have had
before she came, and would have had wherever she was: she has
it now.
The house at Yearsly was of grey stone; it was a long plain house
built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a door
in the middle and a row of high sash windows on either side of
the door. Above this was a second row of windows, and a kind
of Classical stone cornice overhung the upper windows. The roof
was steeper than is usual in such houses, and was also grey;
grey slates or chips of stone, with patches of green moss on
them.
Once it had been a much bigger house, with a long bedroom wing
stretching back, northwards, at the east end of the house, but
that had been burnt down in 1830, and never rebuilt, and when
I first remember it, this centre block was the entire house.
In the middle of the house was a hall, stretching from back to
front, and the two main doors, the ‘Front’ door to the north,
and the ‘Garden’ door to the south, faced each other across it.
Standing on the south side of the house, you could look right
through to the clouds at the north. The garden door stood open
almost always, except in winter.
The hall reached up to the top of the house, and the big staircase
wound up and round it, ending in a square wooden gallery from
which the bedrooms opened.
In front of the house, the Garden Front, stretched a long lawn,
with a wide gravel path down the middle; at the end of the path
six stone steps led down to a lower lawn where we played tennis,
and, at the top of the steps, one on each side, stood two lead
statues; one of Diana with a bow, and the other, a hero leaning
forward with a shield. The lead of the statues was perishing
away, and there was a great crack across Diana’s head, but they
stood out clear, and almost black, from all the south windows
of the house.
Below the tennis court was a piece of meadow sloping down to
the Mellock river, with its two lines of willows, flowing at
this point due east, and almost parallel with the front of the
house. A little further on, it turned sharply southward, wandering
away through the low-lying meadows beyond the hill.
At the east end of the house were beach trees: the nearest grew
within a few feet of the wall, and their branches threw green
lights and shadows into the end windows, and filled the rooms
on windy nights with a swishing sound like the sea.
Further from the house the trees thickened up into the ‘High
wood’ which stretched along the side of the hill, southward,
above the course of the river, for a little way.
This wood was a particular home for us: we played in the trees
like birds or squirrels, and built great nests of sticks in which
we sat.
We had special trees too—good trees and bad trees, which seemed
to us like people. There was one in particular, a very big one,
which we called the Happy Tree, and that we loved the best.
Hugo had given it the name: lying on his back one summer’s day,
his bare feet kicking on the moss:
‘On a drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity . . .
Green felicity, Green felicity, Green felicity . . .’
he kept chanting the words, beating softly on the moss with his
feet.
The pale green sunlight flickered through the world of beech
leaves on to his face; his hands were clasped behind his head,
and his dark blue jersey was open at the neck:
‘It is green felicity . . .’
Guy, half way up among the branches, said:
‘What are you saying?’
And Hugo answered:
‘Green felicity . . .’ and then:
‘On a drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree . . .
‘Oh,’ Guy said, ‘well, I suppose so . . . but I don’t see why
too happy?’
And I said:
‘But it just is . . .’
And Hugo said:
‘It just is . . .’
‘All right,’ Guy answered, ‘too happy, if you like. . .’
And afterwards we always called it the ‘Happy Tree.’
Below the trees the hillside was smooth and green. A grass path
had been cut in it, many years ago when the house was newly built.
In those days all the hillside had been kept closely mown, but
in our time the grass grew long and was made into hay. Only the
path was kept still a little shorter than the rest; we used to
race along it . . . there was room for two abreast, but it was not
wide enough for three.
The path ended in a little stone pavilion which we called the
‘Temple’—why we called it so, no one could remember . . . it
had four glass doors and steps all round; inside there was a
mosaic table and four statues in the niches between the doors.
The doors were always locked, for the roof was unsafe, and nobody
ever went inside; only Guy could remember going inside once,
with Cousin John, when an architect or expert of some sort came
to look at it.
At the other end of the house, to the west, was the walled garden,
and in the sunny corner between the end wall of the house and
the garden wall was the rose garden that Cousin Delia had made.
In that there was a sundial and some little stone ‘putti,’ and
there most often we would find her. When I think of Yearsly in
those long ago days, I think very often of her in the rose garden,
with her long gardening gloves, and shady hat, and the half smile
with which she would look up when one of us called to her, and
her quiet grey eyes in the shadow of her hat.
She was never in a hurry, and never too busy to answer questions;
if we wanted her she was always there. I used to wonder, even
then, how it was that she had so much time, for my own mother
was always busy . . . I wonder even more now.
Cousin Delia was very quiet, but she never repressed us nor made
it seem wrong to make a noise, as so many quiet people do. I think
it was partly that she was not quiet on purpose, or with an effort,
but simply from a kind of serenity. She was happy, I am sure,
and people round her were happy.
My mother once said that it surprised her that a woman of Delia’s
intelligence should be contented with such an ‘idle stagnant
life.’ I felt very angry, even then, and tried to defend her,
though I don’t think I managed to explain what I meant.
The truth was, I think, that she was never idle, only the things
she did were not the kind of things that my mother would count.
She was interested in so many things; in flowers and animals,
and little precious things in the house; little pieces of china,
or even old chairs; they seemed to have a value for her which
they had not for other people, not as objects, but almost as
friends; they lived and felt and were real for her; you could
see it from the way she touched them; and then, of course, she
had Guy and Hugo . . . and they meant so much more to her than
I ever meant to my mother.
Beyond the rose garden was the old wall; high and baked and a
little bulging in places. Big espalier apple trees were trained
across it, and pear trees too. There were two wrought-iron doors
that led into the walled garden; one led out of the rose garden,
and the other, in the centre of the wall, was called the ‘Jasmine
Gate,’ because of a great bush of white jasmine which hung round
it and over the wall.
Inside the wall there were more fruit trees; apples and pears
again and plums and cherries; there were also currant bushes
covered up in nets, and vegetables of all sorts.
And then there were flowers; a wide herbaceous border ran the
length of the north wall, and it seems to me, even now, that
the flowers in that border were brighter and bigger than any
other flowers.
One year, too, there was a big clump of sunflowers, giant sunflowers,
in a corner, away from the main border, and we made a house under
the broad leaves, at least Hugo and I did, but Guy laughed at
us . . . for he was older, and thought it silly; it was not a
real house, like our house in the wood, he said; but Guy never
laughed in a way that we could mind.
In the middle of the walled garden was a small round pond with
a fountain in the middle. The fountain hardly ever played, but
there were frogs in the pond, surprising quantities of frogs,
and we used to call it the ‘Frog Pond.’ Twice we saw a mouse
there too, on the little island of stones and weeds in the middle,
where the spout of the fountain was. The mouse was running about
among the stones, picking up something from under the weeds,
and then it met a frog sitting stolidly on a stone, and it jumped
back suddenly. We lay on our stomachs at the edge of the pond
for a long time, watching for the mouse to come back, and then
it was dinner time, and we had to go in. We only saw it once
again, though we watched for it often, but the question of how
it got there, and how it got away, occupied us a great deal,
and its existence imparted a new interest to the pond.
Inside the house there was a special smell that I have never
met anywhere else. It was a sweet, clean smell, and faint; what
it came from exactly, it would be hard to say; lavender and pot-pourri,
and old polished floors, and old brocade; sweet and faint and
slightly pungent.
Sometimes I have caught whiffs of smells in other places that
were just a little like it, and they have brought Yearsly back
to me more vividly and suddenly than anything else, as though
I had just come in by the garden door, and were standing in the
hall.
The drawing-room was on the left of the door, as you went in
from the garden. It was a very long room, with four tall windows
along the side and one at the end, and there were two fireplaces
with high chimney-pieces, white marble, with carved figures in
faint relief, and over the chimney-pieces were high mirrors that
reflected back the green of the garden from the windows facing
them. There were yellow brocade curtains, very old and faded,
and white shield back chairs upholstered in the same yellow brocade.
The room had been redecorated for our great-great-grandmother,
Mary Geraldine, when she came as a bride to Yearsly, in 1802,
and it had hardly been altered since her death, eight years later.
A portrait of her by Jackson hung between the two fireplaces,
and there was a miniature of her on a little gilt nail by the
further fireplace as well; a dark-eyed, laughing face, very charming,
very romantic. There was an atmosphere of romance all about her,
since her death in Spain when she was twenty-six. She had followed
her husband to the Peninsular War and died of fever there. Her
body had been embalmed and sent home to be buried at Yearsly,
and the story was told of how, when the coffin was opened, it
was seen that her hair had gone on growing after her death, long
black hair flowing down below her knees, wrapping her round like
a great black shawl.
Our great-grandfather had been a little boy, barely seven years
old, but this sight he remembered, naturally enough, and he had
told it to his children, Guy and Hugo’s grandfather and my grandmother.
My grandmother had told it to us. This impressed us very much
and increased the indefinable glamour surrounding our young great-great-grandmother.
Her husband had preserved everything after her death exactly
as she had left it, and so it had remained down to our time.
There were her handkerchiefs and pieces of lace, her little volumes
of Italian poetry, even chairs and tables remained where she
had put them; yet it was a happy sentimentality; there was no
sense of a dead hand in the cult of Mary Geraldine. If Cousin
Delia’s own personality was gradually, quite imperceptibly, superseding
the fainter older one, it was not deliberately nor of set purpose
at all. The two personalities, quite distinct and different in
themselves, seemed to blend and merge harmoniously, and Yearsly
was the richer for both.