Rosamond Lehmann: The Gipsy's Baby

Rosamond Lehmann The Gipsy’s Baby 1 At the bottom of the lane that ran between our garden wall and the old row of brick cottages lived the Wyatt family. Their dwelling stood by itself, with a decayed vegetable patch in front of it, and no grass, and not a flower; and behind it a sinister shed with broken palings, and some old tyres, kettles and tin basins, and a rusty bicycle frame, and a wooden box on wheels; and potato peelings, bones, fish heads, rags and other fragments strewn about. The impression one got as one passed was of mud and yellowing cabbage stalks, and pools of water that never drained away. After a particularly heavy rainfall there was water all round the door and even inside, on the floor of the kitchen. Cursing but undaunted, wearing a battered cloth cap on her head, Mrs. Wyatt drove it out again and again, year after year, with a mop. It was an insanitary cottage with no damp course, mean little windows in rotting frames and discoloured patches on the walls. Mr. Wyatt was shepherd to Mr. Wilson the farmer, who was, I suppose, a shocking landlord; but this idea only strikes me now. It merely seemed, then, that the wretched cottage with all its litter and pieces of shored-up life suitably enclosed the Wyatt brood, and that one was inseparable from the other. Mrs. Wyatt accepted her circumstances in a favourable spirit, and gave birth each year to another baby Wyatt. She was a small crooked-hipped exhausted slattern with a protruding belly and black rotten stumps of teeth. Her beautiful wild eyes were of a fanatical blue, and when she fixed them on you they seemed to pierce beyond the back of your skull. Her face was worn away to bone and stretched skin, and in the middle of each hollow cheek was a stain of rose, like one live petal left on a dead flower. Maudie, Horace, Norman, Chrissie Wyatt—these names I remember, and can differentiate the owners clearly. Then came three more who reappear to me only as a composite blur, and their names escape me, except that one must have been Alfie, and I still believe the baby’s name was Chudleigh. All but one, they took after Mr. Wyatt, and had flat broad shallow skulls, sparse mousish hair—foetus hair—coming over their foreheads in a nibbled fringe, pale faces with Mongolian cheekbones and all the features laid on thin, wide and flat. Their eyes were wary, dull, yet with a surface glitter. They were very undersized, and they wore strange clothes. Maudie owned an antique brown sealskin jacket with a fitted waist and flaring skirts to it. Horace had a man’s sporting jacket of ginger tweed that flapped around his boots. The younger ones could not be said to be dressed, in the accepted sense. They were done up in bits of cloth, baize or blanket; and once I saw the baby in a pink flannel hot-water bottle cover. There was something sharp, gnawing, rodent about them; a scuttling quietness in their movements. Their voices too were extremely quiet, delicate, light; entirely without the choking coarseness of the local drawl. Chrissie was the different one. She had a mop of curly brown hair with auburn stripes in it, a dark, brilliant skin, hollow cheeks, and large rolling eyes like her mother’s, only dark. Her brow was knobby, over-developed, disquieting with its suggestion of precocity, of a fatal excess. She frowned perpetually in a fierce worried way, and her prominent mouth would not shut properly. It made a sharp rather vicious looking circle of red round her tiny white teeth. Some charitable person had given her a frock of black and scarlet plaid that fitted tightly to her miniature form and gave her the enhanced reality, or the unreality, of a portrait of a child. I don’t think I ever saw her, except once, in any other garment in the whole space of time—how long was it?—during which our orbit touched the orbit of the Wyatt family. The frock did get more and more exiguous; but Chrissie did not grow much, or fill out at all. Against the dun background of her sister and brothers she was isolated and set off: as if her mother’s degenerating flesh and bone had combined with the nondescript clay of her father to produce the rest; but Chrissie had been conceived from that bright splash of living blood in her mother’s cheek. Whereas the others all looked, curiously enough, clean in a superficial way, she was always excessively dirty, and this increased her look of a travel-stained child from a foreign country: a little refugee, we would think now. If one met her in the field path and said: ‘Hallo, Chrissie,’ one said it with apprehension: might she not spit, screech like a monkey, blaze out a stream of swear-words? She never did, though. She bent rapidly down and started to tear up handfuls of turf. When one passed on, she followed, at a little distance, her eyes rolling fiercely, like a colt’s, not focusing. She was often alone, but the others seemed always in a cluster, moving up and down the lane, or hanging over their broken fence. When we went by we always said ‘Hallo,’ kindly, and they breathed the word back to us in a soft wheezing chorus. They always had colds on their chests. Then, after a brief distance had been established between us, they were apt to direct a piercing whistle after our dog Jannie, a Dandie Dinmont whose long low trotting form riveted them always into a pin of concentrated attention. Patiently bouncing along, as only Dandie Dinmonts do, his shaggy topknot over his eyes, his heavy pantomime head as if barely supported between invisible shafts, he seemed altogether to ignore this magnetising influence. Seemed, I say: we knew he had another life; that nostalgie de la boue drove him at dawn and dusk, himself all grey, a shade, to explore the lowest districts and there regale himself with nauseous garbage. We suspected that the Wyatts’ back door furnished him a toothsome hunting ground. Another trait which we could not ignore, but kept firmly on the outskirts of our relationship with him, was his habit of killing cats. He was death on cats. It was curious, for he was a total failure with rabbits, and if he blundered on one in the course of one of his Walt Disney gallops over the fields, he winced if anything and seemed upset. A great many cats visited our garden up till—not after—the time when Jannie, shaking off puppyhood, was beginning to know his own nature; and once he killed three in a week. He left a specimen corpse in the broccoli bed and our gardener came upon it unexpectedly. It was his own cat, a tortoiseshell. The sight turned him up, he said; he hadn’t been able to fancy his dinner. We grew to be nervous of exploring the shrubbery, just in case. My father got bored after paying up several high death claims, and gave orders to the outdoor staff to bury at sight and say nothing. At the same time, to our despair, he steeled himself to purchase a muzzle for Jannie. Tearful and crimson, Jess adjusted it, muttering in his ear that it hurt her more than him. But Jannie went out into the paved garden, and beat with his muzzle on the ground like a thrush cracking a snail shell, and within the hour he had got the better of it and came in again wearing it as it might be some kind of Central European military helmet, rakishly, over one eye. Attempting to conceal from him our laughter, we rolled about on the ground and squealed and bit our fingers. We muzzled him a few more times in a spirit of pure frivolity, to await the intoxicating result; but when that delight lost its freshness, the device was altogether discarded; and he ranged once more in all his wild dignity and freedom. Now we entered upon a halcyon period. No cat, living or dead, haunted the garden any longer. Innocently Jannie’s smoke-blue form wove in and out of the berberis and laurel. We told ourselves it was an adolescent phase outgrown. One evening the back door bell rang. Shortly afterwards a note was carried through and presented: a grimy note of poorest quality. It seems strange in retrospect how many of the dramas of our lives opened with the loud ping of the back door bell, and were passed along up to the front through a number of doors and voices of announcement. ‘A person at the back door, ’M, wishes to speak to you.’ ‘What kind of a person, Mossop?’ ‘I reelly couldn’t say, ’M. Mrs. Almond give me the message.’ Ladies and gentlemen to the front door, persons to the back. The former could scarcely engage one’s imagination: they and the nature of their visits were easily calculable. But a person at the back door emerged, portentous in anonymity, from that other world that ever beckoned, threatened, grimaced, teeming with shouts and animal yells and whipping tops and hopscotch, with tradesmen’s horses and carts, and the bell of the muffin man and words chalked up on palings, just beyond our garden wall. Now and then someone came through the wall and appeared before us, and occasionally it was by the pressure of some extreme urgency—a fatality, a case for the hospital post haste—so that the sight of one or other of my parents walking from the room in answer to such a summons always caused in us a stirring of the bowels. It was my father who received this note: my mother was out. He scanned it in silence, then said: ‘Is someone waiting for an answer, Mossop?’ ‘Yes, sir. I understand a young lad. I couldn’t say who it would be.’ ‘Tell him I’ll come along presently and see his mother.’ Then he handed the note to Jess. It said that Mrs. Wyatt presented her compliments and our dog had taken and killed their dear little black cat they’d had for a pet three years. It was a bald statement of fact translated with a world of labour into demented arabesques of scrawl and blot, and signed simply: Mrs. Wyatt. We looked at Jannie sweetly sleeping in his basket by the hearth, and looked away again, seeing a loved face suddenly estranged; angel’s face, fiend’s face, unaware of crime. ‘It’s his nature,’ muttered Jess; but the pang rooted in the acceptance of such a truth has rarely come home to me more profoundly. This was the first time I knew the inescapable snare of loving a creature with no sense of decency. He was a criminal. We could not change him. We had to love him, go on patching up his betrayals of us, still kiss his tender cruel fur cheeks. My father sat and smoked a cigarette, and we sat, our books discarded, and waited for him to finish it. He was aware of our feelings and we trusted him. He was never one to blame or to pass a moral sentence. The principle of his life was a humorous benevolence combined with a philosophical scepticism about humanity; and no doubt that perfect generosity of temperament which led him, all his life, to give away his money to anybody who asked him for it, had enabled him frequently to reflect without bitterness: ‘It’s his nature.’ I think the letters in every kind of handwriting, classy, uneducated, youthfully unformed, shaky with age, baring secrets—some trivial, a few tragic—of folly, ill luck, confidence misplaced, with accompanying expressions of everlasting gratitude and pledges of prompt repayment, laid away without comment in a drawer of his desk and found after his death—I think they would fill a volume. The numerous ones beginning: ‘Dear Old Man,’ were the ones most conducive to cynical reflection. Not that he would have thought so. He never expected to be paid back, and he never was; and in his will he directed that all debts owing to him were cancelled. We waited in silence, silence, and finally he got up and said: ‘Come along, you two, Jess and Rebecca. Down the lane with us.’ Jannie, seeing what looked like the prospect of a walk, stretched himself and skipped forth from his wicker ark and began to prance. ‘Don’t let him out,’ said my father; and in silence we shut the door on his shining, then anxious, then stricken face. Seeing the light fade totally out of him made us feel that the punishment horribly fitted the crime; but far stronger was the sense of wantonly smiting his innocence. The shame, the blame were ours. We went down the garden, through the bottom gate. It was a hot June evening, and the lane smelt of privet, of dust and nettles. We walked past the end of the row of stumpy prosperous cottages, each with its tended flowery front plot, and came to where the Wyatts’ cottage squatted by itself upon its patch of cracked earth and vegetable refuse. There was a decrepit barren old plum tree just beyond their gate, and beneath it were several little Wyatts, perfectly still: waiting for us. Maudie, the eldest, sat with the bald baby on her knee; another, at the staggering stage and with a faint hatching of down on its skull, was stuffed into a wooden grocery box on wheels. Horace, next in age to Maudie, had this vehicle by one handle, and sat there negligently pushing it back and forth. Chrissie was not there. As we came through the gate, it was as though a wire running through them tautened and vibrated. They watched us advance towards them. My father said benevolently: ‘Is your mother in?’ ‘In the ’ouse,’ said Maudie, with a jerk of her head. We were about to pass on when Horace croaked suddenly: ‘Your grey dog got our Fluff.’ My father replied regretfully: ‘Ah, dear, yes. We’ve come to say how very sorry we are.’ ‘We don’t like ’im no more.’ ‘I can understand that,’ said my father. ‘He’s a very bad dog about cats, yet in other ways he’s most gentle and loving. It’s strange, isn’t it?’ Horace nodded. ‘We buried poor Fluff,’ he said without emotion. We went on, and their heads swivelled round after us, watching. My father rapped at the door. The lace curtains covering the front room window twitched sharply. After a pause the door was opened by Mr. Wyatt, in his shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe. ‘Good-evening, sir!’ His tone was bluff and hearty, and his sly little eyes twinkled up at my father in a normal way. I don’t quite know what I had expected—that he would burst into tears perhaps, or pronounce a curse upon us—but a grateful relief softened the pinched edges of my heart, and affection for Mr. Wyatt came over me in a flood. ‘Good-evening, Wyatt. My little girls are dreadfully upset about this business,’ said my father, in a serious man-to-man way. ‘I’ve brought them along because they wanted to tell your Missis and the youngsters how they felt about it. Was poor Pussy a great pet? Are they much cut up about her?’ And what should Mr. Wyatt do but give a shout of laughter. ‘Oh that dog, sir! ’E does give me a laugh—always ’as done. Never seen such a dog—’e’s a proper caution. Never think from the build of ’im ’e’d be so nippy, would you? Jiggered if I know ’ow ’e copped that blessed cat. Thought she could look after ’erself. ’E’s given ’er many a chase up the tree when ’e’s been around. Caught ’er napping—that’s what it was.’ He chuckled and pulled at his pipe. ‘There she was, laid out stiff round by the shed. Not a mark on ’er. ’E done the job double quick—neat, too. Our Chrissie saw ’im at it. She was a bit upset. Fact is,’ he added confidentially, ‘they was all a bit upset. It’s only natural. They thought a lot of that there cat.’ A figure now suddenly materialised behind his shoulder, and it was Mrs. Wyatt, straightening her dark blue apron, tucking in wisps of hair, sending out emanations of wild welcome. She seemed completely overcome by the sight of us on her doorstep and kept uttering whimpers of delight, her ruined gap-tooth mouth opening and closing at us, her great eyes shedding over us streams of radiant blue light. ‘Won’t you come in, sir? Arthur, why don’t you ask the gentleman in, and the young ladies, bless their hearts. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t feeling quite the thing, and I slipped upstairs to have a bit of a lay-down.’ Her voice, piercing, resonant, with an occasional wailing note in it, pinioned us where we stood while continuing to urge us within. It occurred to me suddenly that Mrs. Wyatt looked very ill. Her lips were a queer colour—violet—and her cheeks beneath the carnation cheek bones were yellow, cadaverously sunken. She looked mad, driven, loving, exhausted. I stared at her until I felt hypnotised; and to this day her face with that something prophetic stamped upon it which I discerned but did not recognise comes before me in all its waste and triumph. My father excused us from coming in on the score of its getting on for my bed time; and this threw her into a further paroxysm of enthusiasm. She seemed to dote on me for my early bed time: it was a tribute to our superior way of life. ‘To be sure! It would be! Bless ’er! Well! It’s ever so good of you, sir, I’m sure to trouble to come down. I said to myself: “Now shall I mention it, or shan’t I?” Giving you all such a shock and upset—it didn’t seem right. But the children did take on so, I didn’t hardly know what to do. I thought: “Mrs. Ellison will understand I did it for the best.” How is she? Oh she does so much! I’m sure every one in the village worships her. Oh that dog of yours!—artful!—it isn’t the word. I said to my husband I’d never have believed it. Always round at our back door always welcome, the bones and that he’s buried, and then to take and kill poor Fluff like that. It seems so cold-blooded if you understand. Many’s the plate of scraps he’s had off her. I used to pass the remark to my husband, what an appetite!—and then gazing up at you so melting out of his big eyes. Ooh, Chrissie did create!—didn’t you lovey? Where’s she got to now? She’s been tight round my legs ever since.’ She turned and yelled over shoulder: ‘Chrissie! Chris! Come to Mammie, duck! Dad’s buried poor old Fluffie. You won’t see her no more.’ These (to us) crude and tactless encouragements seemed to fall upon deaf ears. No Chrissie appeared. My father engaged Mr. Wyatt in low-voiced conversation. I saw some silver slip from his hand into the knobby brown-grained hand of the shepherd; and the latter thanked him with a brisk nod and a brief word. All at once Chrissie darted from the obscurity of the cottage towards her mother. I caught a glimpse of her grimy burning face before she buried it passionately in Mrs. Wyatt’s skirts. Another thing I noticed was that a spasm contracted Mrs. Wyatt’s lips and forehead, as if the impact made her wince with pain. She put an arm round Chrissie’s head and clasped it to her side. ‘There’s a silly for you!’ she cried with rough love. ‘Whatever will these young ladies think? She’s shy, that’s what it is. Ooh, she did create! Never mind, duckie, it’s all over now. Mammie’ll get you another kitty. Look now, these lovely little ladies have come to see you.’ ‘To say we’re sorry,’ muttered Jess heroically. ‘Oh dear, and we know they wouldn’t have had it happen for the world.’ But Chrissie remained mute, tense, annihilating herself; all of her repudiating us. My father touched us on the shoulder, and it was all over, and we could go. I had been nervously fingering the wood of the rickety porch, and had my hand raised, picking at the paint blisters. Suddenly I felt it seized and snatched to Mrs. Wyatt’s lips. I heard her cry wildly: ‘Look at her little white hand!’ Tingling from head to foot with blushes, I was unable to join in the mutual expressions of cordiality and farewell. We went away down the cinder path and when we came to the group beneath the tree my father stopped. ‘You know, we’re dreadfully sad,’ he said. ‘We love cats as much as you do.’ They stared at us, their eyes pin-pointing from a great distance. But Maudie said politely: ‘Oh well, it can’t be helped. It don’t matter.’ ‘Dad says ’e’ll beg a puppy for us when Jet at the farm ’as pups,’ said Horace. ‘Good,’ said my father. ‘Remember puppies like a nice bowl of water—clean water—handy for whenever they want to wet their whistle. And I’ll tell you a thing they don’t like. They don’t like to be tied up all day. In the end it makes them so cross they feel like biting people. Just as I’d feel. Wouldn’t you?’ They looked extremely wary now, their faces blank with suspicion and alarm. Not a word came out of them. My father walked round behind them to the back of the tree and examined in a meditative way a hole freshly dug in the ground. ‘That’s a fine hole somebody’s dug.’ ‘We done it for Fluff,’ said Maudie. ‘’Orace done it. But our Dad took ’er away and put ’er somewhere else. ’E said Alfie and them would go digging ’er up all day.’ My father stirred the earth with his toe: ‘I fancied I saw something shine,’ he said. ‘What can it possibly have been? Come and look, one of you.’

Cautiously Horace got to his feet and came and stood beside him. ‘Just here,’ said my father. Something gleamed in the loose dry soil at the bottom of the hole. Suddenly Horace crouched and started scrabbling; then he whisked upright again, his face drawn, mottled a dull pink. On his palm lay some earth and a half-crown piece. He was trembling all over. ‘Well, I’ll be blessed!’ said my father. ‘What an extraordinary piece of luck that you should have dug just there.’ Maudie picked up the baby and came and stood beside her brother. The one in the box clambered out and joined them. Finally Horace said in a toneless whisper: ‘’Oo do it belong to?’ ‘Why, to the lot of you,’ said my father. ‘Finding’s keeping, you know, when it’s buried treasure.’ We went out of the gate, and when I looked back I saw Horace scuttling towards the cottage, his head down, and the little one scuttling after him. Only Maudie remained under the plum tree, her stomach stuck out to support the weight of the child in her arms, staring after us. ‘You did drop it in, didn’t you, Daddy?’ said Jess, who liked to have everything shipshape, with no excuse for mystification. ‘I saw you,’ I said; and I had; and was in consequence brooding beneath the cloud of too much light. For it had come home to me in a flash, as the coin left his pocket for the earth, that my reading of The Treasure Seekers* had been at fault, and that my father and Albert Next Door’s Uncle had practised an identical deception. This was an absolutely new idea to me, and caused me a shock of disillusionment. My father sighed and smiled. Surreptitiously, for fear of Jess’s eye, I squinted sideways at my little white hand. 2 That was the first act in our relationship with the Wyatts: unpropitious, fraught with omens. It was my younger sister Sylvia who subsequently insinuated them, first into the garden, then into the house; and so forever into memory and imagination. Sylvia had long ago swept away any class barriers which she considered irksome, and for preference selected comrades from among the back lane children. In the self-created rôle of Lone Scout, wearing a personally designed uniform girt with a stiff leather belt and stuck with knives, ropes, whistles, assuming a gruff husky voice and a sort of backwoodsman’s accent, she roamed the lane and mingled in the seasonal hopscotch and top-whipping. She knew every single one of the children, name, age, details of private life and all. Her experiences must have been interesting—much more so, factually speaking, than my own. I feared the caterwauling noises that floated up in the evenings to the nursery window; I shrank from the drawings and inscriptions upon the pillars of the railway arch. They printed themselves with scorching precision upon the cavern walls behind my eyes, but I passed them furtively, hoping they would—wouldn’t—would be rubbed out; as they sometimes were—only to reappear again—by some anonymous purifier working secretly with an indiarubber in the night. I never thought of the back lane kids as children like myself: they were another species of creature, and, yes, a lower. I imagined their bodily functions must in some nameless way differ from my own. But for Sylvia they were objects of whole-hearted fascination, beings to be emulated and admired. Such posted announcements as: Rosie Gann goes with Reggie Hiscock, with accompanying symbols, were transcripts of mysteries into which she had initiated herself without dismay or shame. There never was a little girl less likely to see something nasty in the wood shed. What she did see she accepted with an unwavering speculative eye—an eye that from birth had met the shocks of life impenetrably with one cold answer: ‘Just as I expected.’ I was fluid, alternately floored and ecstatic; but she was what I believe theosophists call an old soul, and the parents, nurses, governesses, schoolmistresses of the world impressed on her nothing except a tacit determination to resist their precepts. Jess cried out fiercely: ‘Unfair! Unjust!’; and I wept, and hastened to be accommodating, because of a wish to be loved by everybody; but Sylvia gave away no clue that might have provided an opportunity for character-moulding. She learned a number of interesting words and rhymes in the back lane; and sometimes she came in from play with a faintly stupefied expression, as if there had been a good deal to take in. She used to conduct parties into the garden by the bottom gate, and lurk with them among the shrubbery. My parents were democratic in their ideas, but I doubt if they would have encouraged their visitors, had they been aware of their presence. So far as I know, they never were precisely aware of it. The shrubbery was profuse, in the late Victorian style, containing many a secret chamber and named vantage point. The game was to see unseen. Generally all was silence, but now and then owl hoots, unseasonable cuckoo calls issued from the depths of the foliage: ritual cries, maybe, or merely a leg-pull for the gardeners. But gardeners are, I think, particularly unsusceptible to leg-pulls based on natural phenomena; or perhaps it is that custom has dulled their response to the calls of birds: anyway they gave no outward sign of attention or perplexity. There were also occasional raids on the cherry, plum and apple orchards during the ripe seasons—triumphs of strategy one and all; differently organised indeed from the wretched affair of the ungentlemanly Barstow boys and the peaches, to which I lent myself: but that is another story. These were the days when each portion of the garden, every shrub-girdled bay of grass and rose bushes, every dark sour-smelling haunt of fern and creeping ivy beneath the laurel-planted walks had its particular myth, its genius or indwelling spirit. Now, when I go back home, I am confused sometimes by double vision. A veil clouds my eyes, and at the same time a veil is stripped off; for a moment time’s boomerang splits me clean in two, and presences evanescent and clinging as webs, or the breath of flowers on the wind, drift in the familiar places, exhaling as they pass a last tingling echo of primeval rapture. Almost I remember what, besides myself, hid in the forests of asparagus; what whispered in the bamboos round the pond, and had power over the goldfish and the water lilies; what complex phantom rose up from the aromatic deeps of lavender when I brushed white butterflies in flocks off the mauve bushes. Sylvia’s myths, intense as mine, were different in their nature, and we never exchanged or shared them. Mine leaned to prettiness and fairies; hers, I feel sure, were bonier, more unromantic, masculine. We ranged ourselves roughly as it were—Little Folks against the B.O.P. Jess took in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, and she cleaned out the rabbit hutches and nursed the puppies through distemper, and knitted scarves and mittens—proper, wearable ones—for my father and my brother, while daemonically we roamed in thesacred wood with bloomers torn, and black powder off branches in our matted hair. Sylvia’s customary visitors never came near the house, let alone into it; but the Wyatts did come. They worked away noiselessly, like termites, and in the end our foundations collapsed, and they were in the nursery. It was the summer my mother went back to New England to see her people, and took Jess with her. Our infant brother was sent to the seaside with Nurse, our unpopular Belgian governess returned to her native country for a lovely long holiday, and Sylvia and I remained at home to keep our father company, with only Isabel the nursemaid to supervise us. It was a beautiful time. All over the household a slackening of moral fibre took place. Mrs. Almond our cook had friends in most afternoons, and we showed off to them and made them clap their hands over their mouths to gasp and giggle and exclaim that we were cough-drops, cures or cautions. Mossop imported a fascinating curly-haired nephew called Charlie, a professional soldier, who played the concertina and encouraged us to sit on his lap. I stayed up to dinner every night. The Wyatts advanced their operations. One day Sylvia said in an off-hand way: ‘Isabel, the Wyatts are in the garden. They want to come to see our toys.’ Another time Isabel might have replied that want must be their master, or: ‘And so does the sweep’s grandmother, I dare say. The very idea! What next?’—but she was in particularly mellow spirits that afternoon and she answered: ‘Well, I can’t see the harm in that. A cat may look at a king, so I’ve heard tell;’ and she went on pinning together the cut-out front portions of a new blue sateen blouse over her opulent bosom, and humming snatches of After the ball was over. She was a strapping girl with red cheeks and a full blue marble eye. She sang loudly, in operatic style, with maniac tremolos, as she went about her work. She had a bottom drawer, and a bone in her leg, and saw handsome strangers in the tea-leaves, and bade us leave a little for Miss Manners, and threatened to give us what Paddy gave the drum; and was apt to answer our questions obliquely with a tag or a saw. She was without tenderness. Her mind was not on us. A set-back in her private life on her day out, or a telling-off from Nurse occasionally made her sulky, and then she was apt to give us sharp pushes and be rough with the comb; but she had a fund of easy animal good nature, and we liked her very much, and admired her looks as much as she did herself. Sylvia went away, and came back with three Wyatts behind her: Maudie, Horace, Chrissie. They stood in a block at the nursery door. I said would they like to look in the toy cupboard; but they made no answer. ‘There’s the rocking-horse,’ said Sylvia; but their eyes darted up and down, over the walls, along the floor, not focusing. A deep flush came up and began to burn in Sylvia’s cheeks. Nothing more happened. Then in came Isabel, swinging her hips, looking particularly pleased with herself—I suppose the blouse was turning out a nice fit—and crying amiably: ‘Well, here’s a lot of smiling faces, and no mistake!’ We giggled, abashed, and the Wyatts looked at her in a stunned way. Then a minute ventriloquist’s voice came out of Maudie, remarking politely: ‘Hope it’s no trouble.’ ‘Trouble? I’ve got trouble enough without troubling about you. All my ironing to do. Mind the wind doesn’t change on those doleful dials of yours, that’s all, or we’ll all have something extra to mope about. We don’t eat children in this nursery, you know.’ She picked Chrissie up in her arms and gave her a little shake; and Chrissie strained back, her wreath of hair slipping forward and hiding her face as she bowed it low, low on to her chest, out of Isabel’s sight. ‘Curlylocks! Oo, aren’t you a thin mite! We’d never get a square meal off you, would we?’ A tiny doll’s titter issued from the other two, and at that encouraging symptom Sylvia and I broke out in hearty laughs of relief. A section of Chrissie’s eye was visible, frantically rolling. Suddenly she pitched forward in Isabel’s grasp, flung both arms round Isabel’s neck and hung there convulsively, buried and silent. ‘Lor’ love a duck!’ said Isabel after a second’s pause, her voice taking on a startled gentler note. ‘You cling on like a little monkey, don’t you? Just like a little monkey on a stick.’ She carried Chrissie over to the musical box, wound it up and put on a disc. Out tinkled After the ball was over in liquid midget notes. She gave Chrissie a kiss and set her down, saying: ‘Be a good girl now, there’s a love. You’re all right.’ Then she gave a nod to Maudie and tweaked Horace’s ear and went out. It was all right then: the paralysis was dissolved. Horace mounted the rocking-horse, dubiously at first, clutching its mane and letting out a sharp panicky ‘Hey!’ whenever it moved; gradually with increasing bravado. Maudie walked softly about, looking at the rugs, the fireguard, the screen we had plastered with cut-out pictures from magazines and seedsmen’s catalogues. She looked at the doll’s house, and the doll’s cot, but she never so much as put out a finger to touch anything. Playing seemed a concept unknown to her. She threw off polite remarks, such as: ‘Ain’t it a big room?’ and: ‘Is that your picture book?’ She stood with her sagging, broken-down working woman’s stance, and looked long at the coloured print of Madame Vigée Lebrun* and her daughter above the mantelpiece. I explained that they were mother and child, and that the lady in the picture had executed the work herself. She said: ‘Is it hand-painted, then?’ I said dubiously I thought it was a copy but that the original was indeed hand-painted. She said however did she manage then, when she’d got both arms round the kid? I was stumped. After that she said: ‘Where d’you keep your clothes and that, then?’ and I conducted her to my bedroom, and opened the cupboard. Our wardrobe was far from extensive, but I felt a mounting possessive complacence as I displayed my frocks. She still seemed apathetic, but at the back of her eyes I could now see a fixed point of glittering light. I was overcome by the desire to present her with a pink cotton frock which I disliked. Though I was nine and she rising thirteen I was fully as tall as she. This wish strove with fear of being scolded should the transaction be discovered, and the resulting conflict held me powerless. She said: ‘Which is your best, then?’ and for a climax I took down my dancing-class frock of crimson accordion-pleated silk. She put out her hand to touch it, but did not do so. ‘We’ve got bridesmaids’ frocks too, from our cousin’s wedding,’ I said. ‘Apricot satin with pearls embroidered on the belt.’ ‘Where are they, then?’ she said. ‘Oh, they’re put away,’ I said. ‘We’re not allowed to take them out of their tissue paper.’ Feeling suddenly a peculiar revulsion from clothes, I led her back to the nursery, where Horace was still on the rocking-horse, and Chrissie still crouched by the musical box, with Sylvia putting on Robin Adair, The Bluebells of Scotland and After the Ball for her in unbroken succession. A noticeable thing was their apprehensiveness about any spontaneous moves. We were accustomed to the uninhibited pounces and rushes of our social equals when they came to tea; but the springs of these children were crushed back and could not leap out. There came a battering and a whimpering at the door, and who should tear in but Jannie, fresh from some round of local visits. We were embarrassed; but they looked at him without ill-will while he gave himself up to the raptures of reunion. Horace even bent to stroke him, remarking: ‘You copped our Fluff, you did.’ ‘’E still comes round our back door,’ said Maudie. ‘Our Mum says she can’t like hold any think against a dumb animal when it’s their nature.’ We could think of no suitable reply. Then Isabel came carolling back, and swung Chrissie up again and set her on her lap, saying cheerfully: ‘Well now, let’s have a look at you. Found your tongue yet? Eh?’ Chrissie nestled against her shoulder, half-hiding, but relaxed, coy. The others came and stood close beside Isabel, trustful, smiling faintly. ‘You’re all right, Chris,’ said Horace. ‘Our Mum says she’s a funny girl,’ said Maudie. ‘She says she don’t know where she come from. She’s not like the others, she says.’ ‘She can’t ’arf bite when she gets ’er temper up,’ said Horace. ‘Yes, I bites,’ whispered Chrissie, beaming. I think it was the only thing I ever heard her say. Isabel burst out laughing. ‘Oo, you little sinner!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you know what happens to little girls who bite? They get turned into nasty little dogs, they do. Don’t you ever do such a shocking thing ever again.’ She tilted Chrissie’s chin up and looked at her indulgently. It was plain that the beauty of the creature had caught her fancy. ‘Two-pennyworth of bad ha’pence, that’s what you are,’ she said; and then, goodnaturedly, she swept us all out to the garden and told the Wyatts to mind and run along home at once now. So we accompanied them to the bottom gate, and bade them good-bye. The visit had been a success. Yet for the rest of the day I felt depressed. I wished never to have known the Wyatts. _________________________________ A few days afterwards, Sylvia told me that the Wyatts wished to come to tea. Do you?’

‘Did you ask them?’ I said.

‘No—they asked themselves.’ ‘I don’t really want them much. Do you?’ ‘I don’t mind. Anyway I’ve told them they can come.’ ‘I think Isabel might be cross.’ ‘I shall ask Dad. If he says yes, she’ll have to.’ A stubborn sense of obligation was driving her, I could see. Her feelings about the Wyatts were undoubtedly purer, warmer than mine; but in her too, I think, they were beginning to get muddied. Uneasiness was creeping over both of us. We had got what the Wyatts wanted; sense of guilt deprived us of any concentration of forces such as theirs to oppose to them; Jannie had killed their Fluff. We were at their mercy. That evening Sylvia said: ‘Dad, can I have some children to tea?’—and of course he said: ‘Yes, my pet,’ and inquired no further. So when next morning at breakfast Sylvia announced: ‘Dad says we can have the Wyatts to tea,’ some flouncing movements were the only outward signs of revolt that Isabel could permit herself. ‘Oh, indeed, by all means, have the whole lot in,’ she said sweetly. She rattled the crockery on to the tray, and added what I had been waiting for: ‘And the crossingsweeper’s family, do, by all means.’ This relieved her feelings, and she added with only normal tartness: ‘I suppose you’ve got round your father again to allow it.’ She went out with the tray, and no doubt told them downstairs that next time she’d speak her mind. She was having a bit of an off-day, unfortunately; but also I suspect that the previous visit had been condemned in the servants’ hall. The Wyatts had a very low local reputation. That afternoon Maudie, Horace, Chrissie came to tea. Their hands and faces showed signs of scrubbing, and they were dressed for the occasion. Maudie wore a strange box-pleated dress of violet alpaca, made originally for a far larger and fuller frame. It lent a saffron tinge to her sallow complexion. Chrissie, in a discoloured scrap of pallid Jap silk, had almost lost her personality. I had expected them to fall on their food and stuff it down with both fists, after the manner of the ravenous in fiction, but they seemed uninterested in tea. I wondered—so full of surprises are people’s home lives—if possibly they were accustomed to daily feasts of cream buns and iced cake, and were utterly disgusted by our simple fare. They chewed without appetite at a slice of bread and butter each, and refused ginger-bread, and clearly gave Isabel the pip by their unnatural abstraction from the board. I could hear the caustic comments she was not expressing. Nothing is so likely to produce hatred and contempt in a hostess as distaste manifested at table by her visitors; and when the latter are a trio of despicable, scrubby, under-nourished little brats, the feeling must be deeply intensified. I suppose one factor was that they were so unaccustomed to the ordinary diet of childhood or indeed to regular meals of any sort that they had become more or less indifferent to food. I have often noticed how much less greedy children of the proletariat are than others. One would imagine that they would be more absorbed in the problem of stoking up than the pampered young of the middle and upper classes; but it is not so. They are spare and delicate of appetite, extremely cautious of experimenting, and seem not to wish to stuff themselves even when there is a real opportunity for a blowout. But when I look back, I see that as regards this particular tea-party it was excess of emotion that deprived the Wyatts of all appetite. At last they had compassed their objective: they had come to tea. Everybody was quite silent. This time Isabel did not help. It was a relief when the meal was over. Chrissie scuttled to the musical box, Horace to the rocking-horse. Maudie lingered about, looking apathetically at various objects. As soon as Isabel had gone out with the tray, she said to me in her dull voice: ‘Where does your mother keep her dresses and that, then?’ My heart sank. ‘Oh, some in her room, some in the cupboard in the passage.’ ‘Let’s have a look at them, then.’ Feeling dishonoured and sensing doom, I led the way to my mother’s bedroom. I came to the door which since her departure I had not found courage to open; and desolation swamped me as I turned the handle. There was the shrine, empty, its fresh chintzes as if frozen beneath a film of thin green ice, the bed shrouded, the gleaming furniture, the cut-glass bottles, the photographs, the pastel drawing of three little girls in white frocks and blue sashes—ourselves—speaking at me with cold, mourning, minatory voices. All her possessions had become taboo. This was desecration. I loathed Maudie. ‘Ain’t she got any velvets, then?’ said the relentless voice. ‘She’s taken all her best frocks to America,’ I said. ‘I think everything’s locked, anyway. We’d better go back to the nursery.’ ‘Go on. Try.’ Fearing she was about to lay hands upon the cupboard, I sprang towards it, and at my touch the carved olive wood door yawned open with a soft complaint, and revealed the long attenuated draperies of various garments hanging down. ‘That’s her black velvet tea gown,’ I said, touching it hurriedly. ‘What’s that?’ said Maudie, pointing. ‘That’s an evening dress. It’s got silver water lilies on.’ ‘Let’s see it, then.’ I took down the green and silver brocade on its hanger, and laid it out on the couch. ‘Ain’t that ’er best, then?’ ‘It’s one of her best, but she didn’t take it because sea journeys tarnish silvery things.’ For a few moments, pride of showmanship overcame my nausea. If I had to go through with it, at least I could tell myself I had done Maudie proud. The dress flowed along the couch, a glittering delight. It was my particular favourite, appearing in my imagination as a sort of transformation scene—a magic pool, a fairy ring in an enchanted wood. I glanced at Maudie, and saw in her eye the same gloating point heightened now to an inexpressible degree. It was the look of someone in a trancelike state of obsession. It was at this moment that Isabel swept in upon us. The rest is lost in horror and humiliation. We were driven back to the nursery, and the Wyatts were told it was high time to get along home. Off they bundled, noiseless, wary, unresisting. Through a mist, I saw Chrissie in the doorway break from formation, dart back to the musical box, make as if to pick it up, snatch her hands off it, dart back, dumb, to Maudie’s side again. Afterwards I was enveloped in a whirlwind of scolding. Explanation was fruitless; I did not attempt it. That night in bed I wept myself to a pulp and knew that my mother would die in America and that it would be entirely my fault; and nobody came magically to comfort me. _________________________________ Isabel was particularly nice to us after that episode. I suppose she felt some responsibility with us for the catastrophe; I heard her say to the kitchen maid that those dratted Wyatt kids were on her mind. ‘And another any day now,’ said Alice; and then they whispered together. She gave us little treats, and encouraged us to have a picnic party of friends of our own class, and helped to make it go with a bang. Then, perhaps to demonstrate the difference between riff-raff like the Wyatts and well brought up inferiors, she asked little Ivy Tulloch to tea with us. Ivy was the only child of the head gardener at Lady Bigham-Onslow’s, impressive neighbour, and Mrs. Tulloch and Isabel were dearest friends. Isabel had tried before to offer us little Ivy, but we had always vigorously rejected her. This time we felt our position shaky, and dared not protest. She was a fat bland child with bulbous cheeks and forehead, and we despised her prim smug booted legs and her pigtails bound with glossy bows. She had far more and smarter frocks than we, and insertion and lace frills to the legs of all her knickers; whereas we had only one ornamental pair apiece, for parties. She was kept carefully from low companions, never played in the lane, and was made ever such a fuss of by Her Ladyship. The arrangement made without consulting us was that she should trot along about four o’clock for a nice game with us, and that her Mummy should pop in after tea to have a chat with Isabel before taking her home. Four o’clock came and went: no Ivy. We began to feel hopeful: she had forgotten the day, perhaps, or been struck down by measles. At five we ate the doughnuts bought to tempt her dainty appetite. By five-thirty we had totally erased her distasteful image from our minds, and were agreeably immersed in our own pastimes. Then we heard the back door bell ring sharply: and Isabel, exclaiming: ‘There!’ went rustling down at top speed. Shortly afterwards, two pairs of footsteps returned, two voices sounded in the passage, engaged in emphatic thrust and counterthrust. We recognised the refined and breathy tones of Mrs. Tulloch, and the punctuating gasps and exclamations of Isabel. They went into the night nursery, hissed together for a little longer, then flung open the dividing door and descended upon us. A flaming spot stood in either cheek of Mrs. Tulloch, and there was a look about her, we saw it at a glance, of the mother fowl defending its young. She kept saying: ‘Don’t give it another thought, Isabel, I beg. I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble, not when it’s children’; and Isabel kept repeating that she never would have credited it, never, the wickedness. Chaotically, the facts emerged. Stunned, we pieced them together. They were these. Little Ivy, dressed in her best and feeling a wee bit shy, bless her, but innocently trusting to be met as arranged by Isabel at the back door, had come tripping across the fields at the appointed time. But at the turn of the lane, who should be lurking in wait, pressed up against a small wooden side door in our garden wall—who but Chrissie? And then what happened? Chrissie Wyatt had had the downright demon wickedness to declare to Ivy she wasn’t wanted inside, that she, Chrissie, had been specially posted there by us to tell her so; that it was horrible, awful in there anyway, a kind of torture chamber: nobody was allowed to talk, not even to smile at the tea-table; and Ivy had best run along home quick before anybody appeared to beckon her within. So what was left for Ivy but to hurry back home to her Mummy, frightened out of her little wits, sobbing her little heart out? ‘Wait till I catch her!’ muttered Isabel. ‘I’ll give her not even smile at tea. When I think! … Cuddling up to me so loving and … The spitefulness! It only shows … And I hope it’ll be a lesson. If I hadn’t got your word for it, Doll, I’d never have credited it, never. Who’d ever fancy a ’uman child could have the artfulness, the wicked artfulness—a scrap of a thing like her. The downright impudence! Makes you think she can’t be right in her head …’ ‘The devil’s in her, if you ask me,’ said Mrs. Tulloch; adding sweetly: ‘You said they came to tea last week, did you, dear?’ ‘It wasn’t my doing,’ said Isabel. ‘They got round their father, as per usual.’ ‘Ah well! We all know a certain gentleman’s kind heart. But as I always say, it’s all very well. Right’s right, when all’s said and done.’ ‘Ah, and it’s easy to be soft when it’s others have the trouble. That’s where it is.’ ‘And some will always take advantage, that’s one thing certain.’ Together they went on intoning judgment and sentence on Chrissie. ‘Makes you wonder where she’ll finish up.’ ‘Mark my words, if she goes on like this, she’ll come to a bad end.’ ‘It’s the bringing-up—you can’t wonder really.’ ‘Bringing-up it may be, but I always say when a nature’s bad, bad it is. You can’t alter it. Be your station high or low. Many’s the time I’ve passed the remark to Tulloch.’ Meanwhile we were dumb, aghast. Had we been told that Chrissie had laid a charge of dynamite at our gate and blown up Ivy, the shock could not have been greater. We had to agree, it only showed, we must let it be a lesson. Yet we could not regret the catastrophe to Ivy, or feel drawn towards the injured parent, in whose strokes at the Wyatts we apprehended a back-hander at ourselves; and whom in any case we were debarred from liking owing to her squint and her manner—genteel, patronising, obsequious. ‘Now take my advice, dear, and put your foot down another time. If you’ll excuse me mentioning it, right’s right, and it’s best to start as you mean to go on. I dare say it’s not my place, but they hadn’t ever ought to have set foot, dear, and you know it—though far be it from me to blame you. Still—they’re not exactly a clean lot, are they? You wouldn’t want yours to pick up anything, would you?—not with their mother away.’ With that she rose and I hope,’ said Isabel, with a stony glance at us, ‘you’ll find it in you to let her come another day instead. I’m sure the girls are as upset as me to think it should have occurred.’ ‘Thanks, dear,’ said Mrs. Tulloch, with a sort of repudiating graciousness. ‘Perhaps later on when she’s over the shock. She’s such a sensitive wee soul—you never know what a shock like that will do to a sensitive child. Bless her, she’d got herself quite worked up. “Oo, Mummy,” she said to me when I was changing her, “will they have rosebuds on their frocks like me?” The things children think of! “Shall I take my new dolly?” she said. “Will they have some big dollies there?—bigger than mine?”’ She uttered a tender deprecating laugh, and cast a glance round our doll-less nursery. ‘Well, ta ta, dear. Now don’t brood about it, I do beg.’ ‘I’ve a good mind,’ said Isabel, ‘to go down this very minute and speak my mind to her mother.’ ‘Now, dear, take my advice and don’t do no such thing. You never know what sort of answer you’ll get from that sort of person. She might turn reelly rude, and then you’d regret you ever gave her the opening.’ ‘You may be right,’ said Isabel. ‘Still—’ Still—later on that evening, after we were in bed, Isabel stood by our bedroom window, fingering the curtain, looking out over the garden, arrested in an unfamiliar pose, a quietness that suggested brooding, almost dejection. From this window, the chimney of the Wyatts’ cottage was just visible between the poplars. Flat on our pillows, we watched her. Suddenly we heard her say quietly: ‘It was jealousy.’ She was speaking to herself. Then: ‘Poor little beggar.’ She heaved a deep sigh, shook her head. ‘Ah well, what you can’t cure, you’d best let alone.’ She bade us good-night with customary briskness, and went away. _________________________________ Next morning, I wanted to go to the creek to hunt for some particular water plant for my collection of pressed wild flowers. Short of making a long and dreary detour through the village, it meant passing the Wyatts’ cottage; and the idea of running into a group of them was painfully embarrassing. But Sylvia lent me moral courage, and, declaring that since we obviously could not avoid the lane for the rest of our lives it was best to bare our bosoms at once for the encounter, offered to accompany me. We went together down the lane, and the way was clear. The cottage looked deserted. But when we came back about lunch time they were all there, every one of them, in a huddle by their gate. The next to youngest sat in his soap box, the baby lolled its head on Maudie’s shoulder. There was no movement among them except the slight turn of their heads as they watched us approach. ‘Hallo,’ we said sheepishly, not looking at any particular one of them. ‘’Allow.’ As we passed, Horace croaked suddenly: ‘Our mum’s gorn to the ’ospital. She’s bad. The amb’lance come for her.’ ‘Last night,’ said Norman, ‘our dad ’ad to go for the doctor. Then the amb’lance come.’ ‘’Er ’ead was bad,’ said Alfie. One of the younger ones piped: ‘Make it better at the ’ospital. Then she come back.’ ‘Our dad’s gone on ’is bike to see ’er,’ said Horace. We said we hoped she would be better soon. We could feel the after-quivers of catastrophe reverberating through the group, but we could not think of anything else to say. Maudie had not spoken a word. Awkward, wishing to make a friendly gesture, I approached her. I had a weakness for holding babies, and though I could not feel drawn to this one, still it was a baby; and I asked her timidly if she thought it would come to me. ‘’E’s all right,’ she said indifferently, scarcely glancing at me. Impossible to believe that this was the same Maudie whose stoat-like concentration had so weighed upon me. Then I heard her mutter, in the voice of a sleep-walker: ‘We got enough babies, anyway.’ Then, as if accosting a stranger to ask the way, she looked at me with a faint contraction between the eyes and said ungraciously: ‘Where is the ’ospital, then?’ I did not know. ‘It’s a good way off,’ she said. ‘That I do know.’ She shifted the baby a bit and relapsed into indifference. Chrissie was hiding behind her, and involuntarily I caught a glimpse of her face. It was pinched, sallow, drab, and she was almost indistinguishable from the others. We hurried home to tell Isabel, and found that news of the calamity had already reached her. She shut us up when we attempted to question her, but asked us rather sharply if they’d said whether they’d had their dinners. We had not thought of this. For us, meals were things that appeared on the table at punctual intervals, were eaten, removed again. She appeared absent all through lunch, bit her finger, and after she had cleared away, came to us and said: ‘Now be good girls and sit down with your books a bit, like your mother wished you to do. I’m just going to pop down and see if those young Wyatts are all right.’ Feeling a warm rush of affection for Isabel, we obeyed her. She came back not long after, still laconic, and merely said they were all right, various neighbours had taken them in and given them their dinners. They were playing now in the lane, along with some others, and seemed quite bright. The kitchen maid ran upstairs with a belated post-prandial cup of tea for her, and they retired together to the nursery pantry while she drank it. Terrific whispers came forth, and my ears, ever agog, caught such words as ‘raving’ and ‘water on the brain’ as I lingered past them on my way to the bathroom. I told my father that evening when he got back from London, where he went four days a week to edit a literary journal; and immediately he took his hat and walking-stick and went down the garden to see Mr. Wyatt. He was away some time, and when he came back, his face looked sorry. He told us that poor Mr. Wyatt was very worried. Mrs. Wyatt was dreadfully ill. After all his long bicycle ride, they had not allowed him to see her: she was too ill. She had had a baby, and the baby had died. I knew, and did not know, and could not ask about the unmentionable connection between this and her mortal sickness. Then he rang the bell and told Mossop to telephone to the hospital first thing in the morning, and inquire for Mrs. Wyatt, and get the message sent down to Mr. Wyatt. Then he went over to the garage and told Gresham, our chauffeur, to hold himself ready to drive Mr. Wyatt to the hospital at any moment of the day or night. We felt comforted, almost elated. Our father had the situation in hand, and everything would probably be all right. _________________________________ It was the next night after supper. Sylvia had gone to bed, and I had been allowed an extra half-hour for David Copperfield. My father and I sat reading in the library. It must have been nearly nine o’clock. There had been a heavy thunderstorm earlier in the evening, and the sky, instead of clearing in the west with sunset, had remained dun, murky, overcast; and we had drawn the curtains to shut out the lugubrious dusk. All of a sudden came a sound of running on the gravel path outside. Then a frantic drumming on the French windows. My father went white as paper, as he always did at any sudden shock. Again. Again. Paralysed with terror, I watched him walk across the room, draw back the curtains, press down the handle. The doors fell back and there on the step stood Mr. Wyatt, hatless, haggard, wild. ‘Wyatt, my dear chap, come in, come in,’ said my father, all haste and gentleness, taking his arm and drawing him across the threshold. They stood together in the bay of the window, silent, their heads bowed down; one so tall, dignified, white-haired, the other so small, brown, and gnarled, his poor coat hanging off him, his hair plastered in dark dishevelled strips over his bald head. He drew great labouring breaths as if he had been running for miles, and I saw that his clothes were soaked with rain and sweat. His throat and lips kept moving and contracting, but no sound came. My father stole an arm around his shoulders. At that he cried out suddenly in a terrible threatening voice, like an Old Testament prophet: ‘She’s gone, sir!’ My father nodded. I heard him murmur: ‘Rebecca, run along,’ but I was too petrified to make a quick move, and next moment the storm was loosed. Mr. Wyatt began to walk up and down, up and down. The appalling dry sobs torn out of his chest seemed to fling him about the room. He passed my chair with glaring eyes fastened upon me, and took no notice of me. An overpowering smell emanated from him—his clothes, his body, his agony—and his terrible voice went on racking him, bursting and crying out. ‘She’s gone, sir! They never let me see ’er—not once since they took ’er away. Not till the end. Better not, they said, she won’t know you, Mr. Wyatt—she was raving, that was it. They sent word down at dinner-time—come at once. Thanks to your kindness, sir, I got there quick. ’E was good, your shuvver—’e give me a packet of fags and ’e never stopped for nothink. She’s going, they said … It’s all for the best, Mr. Wyatt … It was ’er brain went—brain fever or that—some word or other—I never did understand sickness. Why should a thing like that fly all over ’er like, in a couple o’ days? She was always strong and ’ealthy, wasn’t she? She never complained—only to say she was fagged like these last few months—and a bit of a backache. I thought that ’ud right itself when ’er time come. I thought—I never thought … She never … She ’ad the best of attention, didn’t she, sir? Do you think they give ’er proper attention there?’ ‘My poor Wyatt, I feel convinced they did,’ said my father. ‘I never saw no doctor. They don’t always trouble so much about poor people and that’s a fact, sir. She’s going, Mr. Wyatt, the nurse said … She was a pleasant spoken woman. She won’t know you, she said. They’d got ’er in a room separate … She died private anyway—not in a ward along of … She didn’t fancy the thoughts of that … She never wanted to go to the ’ospital. “Don’t let them take me, Jim,” she says that night—just before she come on so queer. “I’ll never come out alive.” “Don’t talk so foolish, girl,” I says. “You’ll be back along of us all next week.” What could I do, sir? I ’ad to let ’er go, didn’t I? I ’ad to abide by what the doctor said?’ ‘Of course, of course. It was It was the only thing to do, Wyatt. It was a hundred to one chance, you know. We knew that.’ ‘A ’undred to one chance—Ah! … She was peaceful when they took me in. She died peaceful anyway. She ’ad ’er ’ands laid out on the sheet—’er eyes shut… “Now, my girl,” I says… Oh, but ’adn’t she fallen away in the short time! It would ’ave ’urt you to see ’er. It ’urt me crool. “Now my girl,” I says. “We want you back ’ome, don’t we? The little ’uns is fretting for you.” I thought that might rouse ’er… She never stirred nor took no notice… I sits there beside ’er, on and on. Then I leans over to ’ave another look at ’er. All on a sudden ’er eyes flies open as wide as … She stares right up at me… She knew me at the last, that I do know. That nurse comes in again then… “She’s gone,” she says. “Poor dear,”… and covers ’er face over… Sir, do you know what they says to me? She didn’t never ought to ’ave ’ad another, they says. It was ’er time of life. She was too wore out, they says. She’d ’ad too many. I… ’ He struck his forehead with his clenched fist. ‘God knows we ’ad enough mouths to feed.’ His voice broke, trailed off; hopelessly he shook his head. Then he cried out: ‘I loved my wife, sir! They can say what they like—nobody can say different. We was happy… A happy family… She thought the world of them—the ’ole blessed lot. “I wouldn’t be without one o’ them,” she’d say…’ He fell silent, but went on walking up and down. My father took the opportunity to come over to me and whisper that I was to go to bed—he would come presently and see me. He gave me a kiss. Doubtful whether or not it would be correct to say goodnight to Mr. Wyatt, I hazarded it finally in a tiny voice, scarcely expecting any response. But he answered with dignity: ‘Good-night, missy, God bless you. I must ask your pardon, sir, for coming like this upsetting you and little missy here. I ’ad ought to ’ave thought. I thank you for all your kindness. You’ve been a friend, sir. Yes, a friend. I must get along ’ome to the young ’uns. Got to think of them now, haven’t I? Got to break it to them. Maudie, she’s a good girl, but …’ He shook his head with the same hopeless perplexity, and adding: ‘Good-night, sir, God bless you,’ made for the window. ‘Wyatt, my poor fellow, don’t dream of going like that,’ said my father tenderly. ‘Sit down and rest yourself and take a drop of brandy with me. You’re thoroughly exhausted. Here.’ He pulled forward an armchair and Mr. Wyatt sank immediately into it without another word, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The decanters were on the table and my father was pouring out brandy in liberal measure as I slipped out of the room. I told Isabel what had happened, and she was kind to me and brought me hot milk to stop my shivering after she had helped me to bed. Great tears dripped down her face, and she blew her nose loudly and muttered if only there was something she could do. A little later I heard voices in the garden and crept to my window to look out. The moon was up now, softly breaking the clouds, and I saw Mr. Wyatt and my father walking together across the misty lawn towards the lower gate. Their voices rose and fell. Mr. Wyatt was quiet now. The prophetic howl had gone out of his throat, and his guttural voice, his voice that seemed almost choked with soil, twined with thick roots, with tubers, sounded much as usual; and my father’s voice, which was both light and rich, answered him musically. Still later on, he came up and sat on my bed and told me how very sorry he was I had had to witness so painful a scene. He explained and comforted as best he could, and made me feel better. I could bear to accept the fact that that was how human beings behaved in the first anguish and indignation of bereavement. What I could not bear, then, was to see him wipe away the tears that kept rolling down his face. I lay awake and imagined all the children huddled crying and wailing in the cottage. I saw Maudie’s face; I tried to imagine Chrissie’s; and I saw Mrs. Wyatt stretched dead, her hands folded, in the hospital bed, taking absolutely no notice of them all. I thought the two stains of colour must still lie in her snow cheeks, like roses in December. _________________________________ After that, the sinister pattern broke. We went away to join our infant brother and nurse at the seaside; and plunged in the happy trance of waves, rocks, sand, we let slip the Wyatts from our minds. My father joined us for a week, brought us all home, and then went to Liverpool to meet my mother and Jess. We painted WELCOME HOME in white letters on a strip of scarlet bunting, and were busy attaching it to the gateposts of the drive, when we saw Horace, Norman, Alfie and the soapbox one standing under the wall, watching us. ‘Hallo,’ we said. ‘’Allow.’ We looked at them furtively and they seemed much as usual except that the three younger ones had new suits on. They watched us with their usual mixed look, incurious yet attentive, as we sat each astride a brick post and lashed rope round the stone ball on the top to hold our banner in position. I felt suddenly that we were doing something silly; and directly I had said: ‘Our mother’s coming back from America this evening,’ I blushed deeply, realising the tactlessness of mentioning the return of a mother. ‘It’s nice,’ stated Norman, in a flat way. We called directions to each other, and they went on watching, and by and by we got down and surveyed our work. It was a bit crooked but it flared out with loud brilliance upon the shining blue September air. In another hour our parents and Jess would drive in under it. We could not help wondering if Jess would whole-heartedly approve of such a blatant display of feeling. Horace said: ‘They’re going away to-morrow—the three of ’em.’ ‘Where are they going?’ ‘To the Institution.’

Silence. We did not know what he meant. ‘Our dad said for us all to stay together and we’d manage, but that lady said it was too much for Maudie, she hadn’t ought to do it. She come and see ’er. She said Maudie couldn’t give ’em what they needed, so she spoke to our dad.’ ‘Our dad cried,’ said Alfie. ‘So she said they’d be better off in the Institution. She wanted for the baby to go too, but Maudie wouldn’t let ’im go.’ ‘Maudie cried,’ said Alfie. ‘The lady said it was ever so nice there. They was ever so kind to children. They ’ave a Christmas tree and all. So our dad said to ’em to be good boys and learn their lessons and ’e’d ’ave ’em out soon. ’E’s going to get a better job and then we’ll ’ave a reel ’ousekeeper and it won’t come so ’ard on Maudie. ’E bought ’em new suits.’ ‘And we got sixpence each to buy sweets,’ said Norman. ‘And a horange,’ said Alfie. ‘What about Chrissie?’ I said. ‘Chrissie’s going to stop at ’ome. She went and ’id ’erself when the lady come. One of our aunties wrote a letter. She said she’d take Chrissie and bring ’er up just like ’er own. But Chrissie created so our dad said for ’er to stop at ’ome.’ ‘So there’ll only be the four of us at ’ome now,’ said Norman. ‘Maudie and ’Orace and Chrissie and baby,’ said Alfie. Their voices were important, not pathetic. The family had obviously been the object lately of many a local charitable scheme, both private and official; and this had set them all up in their own estimation. I felt vaguely that a number of well-disposed people were interested, many benefits were being conferred, and everything was turning out as well as could be expected. It was time to go and tie a festal bow on to Jannie’s collar, so we said good-bye, and went away. But when I asked Isabel what the Institution was and she replied the workhouse, I knew enough about society to know that disgrace had come upon the Wyatts; and though I was sorry and disturbed, I felt once again what a very low family they were, and how they and their house and their misfortunes emanated a kind of miasma which the neighbourhood could neither purify nor disregard: as if a nest of vermin had got lodged under the boards, rampant, strong-smelling, not to be obliterated. Now and then I saw Chrissie passing to and from school or playing in the lane among a group of contemporaries. She looked as usual, in her plaid frock. She never smiled, or took any notice of me. Mr. Wyatt continued to be seen about the sheep folds, smoking his pipe. My mother went to see him, and then went again and took Maudie some clothes. Maudie told her she was managing nicely. Dad helped her in the evenings when he got home from work. Sometimes he undressed the baby all himself and gave him a wash and put him to bed: he’d never taken so much notice of any of them as he did of this baby. Yes, the baby had a cold on his chest, but she’d rubbed him, and he was ever so bright and eating well. There was a neighbour, Mrs. Smith the washerwoman, who was kind. Once I ran down with a message from Nurse to ask her to wash the nursery sofa cover in a hurry and Maudie was there, sitting slumped in a kitchen chair, drinking a cup of tea, silent, grimy, greasy, her hair screwed and scraped up into a bun with huge hairpins. She had put it up, I suppose, to mark the fact that she was now a woman: one of a thousand thousand anonymous ones who bear their sex, not at the unconscious, fluid, fructifying centre, as women who are loved bear it and are upborne by it; but as it were extraneously, like a deformity, a hump on their backs, weighing them down, down, towards the sterile stones of the earth. _________________________________

In October, the gipsies came back. They came twice a year, in spring and autumn, streaming through the village in ragged procession, with two yellow and red caravans; men in cloth caps, with handkerchiefs knotted round their throats, women in black with cross-over shawls and voluminous skirts, some scarecrow children, and several thin-ribbed dogs of the whippet race running on leads tied, much to Jess’s disquiet, under the shafts of the caravans. They were a raffish, mongrel lot, with bitter, cunning, wizened faces and no glint of the flash and dash that one is conditioned to expect. But there was one noble beauty, a middle-aged woman, short, ample of figure, with gold earrings and a plumed black hat, who came regularly to the back door with a basket of clothes’ pegs to sell. The eyes in her darkly rich, broad face glowed with a veiled and mystic fire, and her voice came out of her throat with an indescribable croon on one low note. Isabel always went flying down to buy some pegs—it brought bad luck to turn the gipsies from the door—and once I went with her to watch the transaction. Superstition made Isabel excessively polite, not to say conciliatory, quite unlike her usual style of bridling badinage and repartee with the tradespeople. I smiled at the woman, and at once her face seemed both to melt and to sharpen, and she caught my hand in hers and began to mutter. I felt the hardness and dryness of her strong hand. My eyes sought hers and were immediately lost in the fathomless gaze she bent upon me. I could not look away, and my panicking senses began to swoon beneath the torrent of unintelligible words poured over me. Something in my face, she said—my fate, my future, a long, long journey … something I could not bear to hear. Then suddenly it stopped; and she asked in quite a different, whining voice if there were any old clothes to-day—any shoes—a pair or two of the little lady’s cast-off shoes now for the children—a coat, now—an old jacket for her man. I heard her drilling away at the resisting Isabel as I made off upstairs, my heart still thumping loud with terror. After that I was convinced that the gipsies designed to steal me, and ventured to tell Isabel so; and though Isabel told me not to be so soft, all old gipsy women went on like that, I would never, after this incident, go through the gravel pit field where they always camped so long as the caravans were there. The gravel pit itself was a romantic spot, overgrown with grasses, clover, brambles, wild rose bushes and bryony. In spring it harboured the most exciting birds’ nests—once I found a goldfinch’s—but in autumn it was particularly enchanting, when one could rove from one slope to another picking blackberries, hips, and branches of the dogwood that flushed the air so rosily on grey days and blue. Also there were fossilised sea-urchins, petrified fragments of shells lurking among the stones and sand of the old quarry-workings. I spent hours of my childhood there, wandering in a voluptuous, collector’s daydream, or lying hidden in one of the many secretive hollows. It was October. From the nursery window I looked out over the familiar view of shrubbery, lawn and apple orchard, and saw between the thinning boughs of the poplars that bordered it a glimpse, a mile or so away, up the hill, of two red and yellow caravans nestling in a corner of the gravel pit field. The beech woods rose up directly behind them, clasping them as in the curve of a tender shoulder. I saw blue smoke rising, figures sitting on the steps, children tumbling in the grass. I could also see a group of local children hanging over a gate, watching them, a little distance away: the scarlet frock of Chrissie was among the group. I remember thinking then what a fascination the bright roving caravans must have for her; how congruous a part she would seem of the life of fairs and gipsies. I felt faintly anxious and depressed, wondering if the woman had yet been to the back door, hoping that next day the corner of the field would be empty of its load of alien humanity. All the reasons I had for melancholy came down to weigh upon me: Jess, who had not been very well, absent for the winter, gone to share bracing air, riding and education with some cousins near Brighton; our unpopular governess back from Belgium in a day or so, and myself left to bear the brunt of her without Jess. Then I remembered Mrs. Wyatt whom I sought to forget, and how she also had seized my hand; and felt I was singled out in a disquieting if gratifying way by this coincidence: wild forces both, and I, so passive, their inexplicable point of explosion. What happened next is hard to put down in any exact way, because so much was concealed from us, we had so much to conceal, that sometimes I think I dreamed it all. Suddenly one day out broke the melodrama; but at once we were hurried away from it, and its development reached us only as it were in snatches, in disjointed echoes from the wings or by the furtive peeps we contrived through the lowered curtain. Horror toppled above the village for a short while, then sank back and vanished; and everybody drew a great breath and burst out in chattering, exclaiming, head-shaking; and all the children who had been snapped indoors after school by wrought-up parents were let out to play again; and everything was as before, except for the usual scatter of flotsam left by the retreating tide; and except for one small figure carried away on it, vivid but dwindling. The gipsies went away. Two or three days later, a peculiar vibration began in the village. It was confined at first to the children. In the afternoon, we were messing about in the laurels by the garden gate, when two of Sylvia’s associates, sisters called Cissie and May Perkins, came past and beckoned portentously to us. They said: ‘Can you keep a secret?’ We said yes. They said: ‘There’s a little dead biby in the gravel pit. We ain’t allowed to tell ’ow we know, but we do know. Cross your hearts and swear by the Bible you won’t tell no one.’ We did so. They said: ‘We know because Chrissie told us. She found it. It’s under some bramble-bushes. It’s got no clothes on. It’s a biby boy. She says the gipsies left it there.’ ‘Do you mean they killed it?’ we said. ‘Dunno.’ We were silent, beholding the monstrous image of a dead naked baby boy under the bramble bushes. We said: ‘Oughtn’t somebody to be told?’ ‘She says on our solemn oath we’re not to. We’re not to tell our mums nor no one. She says after three days the gipsies may come back and take it away. She’s going up to-morrow to see.’ ‘Why does she think they’ll come back for it?’ ‘Dunno. She says that’s what they do. She says if the gipsies knew she’d found it they’d do something downright awful to her.’ ‘What would they do?’ ‘Murder ’er and bury ’er.’ They added: ‘Be down by the gate to-morrer afternoon when we come out of school. We’ll tell you if it’s still there.’ Next day at the appointed hour they said: ‘She’s been up to look, and it’s still there.’ We were to wait another day, and cross our hearts we’d tell no one. But that evening some overwrought child broke down and unloaded the news to its parents. All the village began to hum. We were made aware of this by the gathering and whispering of Nurse, Isabel and the others in the servants’ hall; and by the fact that our mother called us to her and said with some severity: ‘Now girls, I want you to promise—especially you, Sylvia—not to talk to any children in the lane just at present. If they see you in the garden and call out to you just wave politely and go away. There may be a case of measles in the village and I don’t want you to run any risk of contact. I don’t say it is measles, we must wait a few days to make sure. But you needn’t give any reason. Do you understand? Promise now.’ We promised. That night while Isabel was brushing my hair, she remarked to Nurse. ‘Not mentioning any names, someone told me they’re under suspicion, that lot, for the same line of thing before; only they never could fasten it on them like. Nice, isn’t it?’ Nurse shook her head and uttered a series of sharp tongue clickings. She said: ‘Ah, there’s more in it than meets the eye.’ ‘Mark my words,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s that man. You know the one—the older one with the nasty expression of face. I always did think he looked the part.’ ‘If you ask me,’ said Nurse, ‘they’re all in it. The shock for that little mite!—I can’t get her off my mind.’ After a pause she said: ‘Have they got back, did you hear by any chance?’ ‘Mm,’ said Isabel. Nurse queried with her eyebrows. ‘No,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s inky black out. Jim and old Gutteridge had lanterns, but I don’t think they fancied the job in the dark, if you ask me.’ She giggled. ‘I don’t blame them neether.’ Nurse told her rather sharply to get on with our hairs, do, and not chatter so. We understood that an expedition of householders had visited the pit with lanterns, and returned empty-handed. Next day as I came back at noon from my hour of German with Miss La Touche (cultured spinster and traveller), I saw a sight that froze my blood. It was the local constable emerging from the school-yard, grasping Chrissie by the hand. Her face was down on her chest, her hair over it. With every step she struggled to fling herself back. The constable seemed to be attempting genial encouragement, but he was not built or endowed for soothing. He was the very type of rustic policeman—burly, beefy, flaxen, slow of wits and speech. He was plainly embarrassed by his task and wore a sheepish grin. There was not another child in sight: all kept in. Together, slowly but surely, they turned up the hill towards the gravel pit. Later on, in in the afternoon, another kind of hum began to develop. The silence that had hung over the lane gave place to the customary commotion. The sounds that came out of the servants’ hall seemed to contain gasps of staggered somewhat ghoulish incredulity. There seemed also a note of disappointment or disgust—as if there had been a let-down after a promised sensation. I heard Nurse say to Isabel that’s what came of letting your nasty imagination run away with you. ‘Whose nasty imagination?’ said Isabel, going red down her neck. ‘Yours,’ said Nurse simply. ‘And a lot of other silly gossips I could mention. I never did believe it from the start.’ ‘Oh, didn’t you indeed! I’m surprised,’ said Isabel, with impertinent emphasis. Nurse actually let this pass, and hurried on to say in a different, confidential tone: ‘But talk of nasty imaginations! … ’ and they went murmuring and hissing down the passage together. Shortly after, Nurse said in a crisp yet off-hand way: ‘Look here, you two—especially you, Sylvia—if you happen to speak to any of those children that hang around by the gate and they go telling you any nasty nonsense they’ve picked up, don’t you take any notice. They may have got hold of some silly story or other that’s been going about. I’m sure I don’t know what they don’t pick up, those children—nobody cares, more’s the pity, and if I had my way—’ She broke off, then added: ‘Well now, you’ve heard what I say. If they repeat it, you just tell them there’s nothing in it and never was and say I said so.’ ‘All right,’ we said. My mother went out about tea-time. As soon as the car had driven away with her, we made our way to the bottom of the garden, where Cissie and May were awaiting us. They said: ‘The biby wasn’t there.’ ‘Had the gipsies taken it away?’ ‘No. There wasn’t no biby. She mide it all up.’ ‘! ! !’ ‘The p’liceman come to school this morning. ’E said for Chrissie to come along with ’im to show ’im the plice. Teacher was ever so upset. Chrissie didn’t want to go. She fought ’im. She bit ’is ’and. But ’e took ’er along. When they got up to the pit, she took ’im to a plice and she says there, that’s where it was. Well, it’s not there no more, ’e says. It’s gorn, she says. So ’e said for ’er to come along at once to the p’lice station. So she begun to take on and said she didn’t want to go. Then she said there ’adn’t ever been no biby. She’d mide it all up. So ’e brought ’er back and ’e told teacher she was a bad wicked little liar, wasting ’is time. So teacher mide ’er stand up in front of the ’ole class and tell us she’d mide it up. Teacher asked ’er what she wanted to tell such ’orrible wicked lies for. She never said nothink. She was shivering and shaking all over. So teacher took ’er into ’er own room and put ’er to sit down in a big chair with a rug round ’er, and she said she’d speak to ’er later. She’s still there. Teacher’s going to keep ’er there till ’er dad comes from work, and then take ’er back ’ome. Our mum says she’s a bad bad girl and we’re not to ’ave anythink to do with ’er. She says she ’ad ought to be sent to a re-formary.’ _________________________________ We never saw Chrissie again. The problems of her disgrace, her punishment, her future—all were kept from us; and even the know-alls of the lane were more or less in the dark about her destination when she vanished from the village. We knew that our mother, ever combining prompt with humanitarian action, had taken charge of Chrissie’s case. We did venture to ask Isabel whether it was true that Chrissie had been sent to a reformatory, but she said sharply, stuff and nonsense: Chrissie had gone right away to live with some kind people who loved her, and who would give her a mother’s care and perhaps adopt her if she mended her ways and tried to be a good girl. She added: ‘And if she grows up a decent ordinary being after all instead of a wild wicked demon, she’ll have your mother’s trouble and your father’s generousness to thank for it.’ So we knew that something impressive had been accomplished, and that our parents were paying for it. This was before the days of child guidance clinics. _________________________________ I remember only one or two more things about the Wyatts. Later on in October I plucked up courage to go past their cottage by myself: an act I had been unable to face since the death of Mrs. Wyatt. The lane was strewn with the drenched, honey drifts of poplar and chestnut leaves, and their sweet and pungent smell of death made my heart turn over. High over the fences of the little gardens, sunflowers flopped their harsh tawny faces. I came to the Wyatts’ cottage, and Maudie was there, standing by the gate. One of her hands was bandaged and in a dirty sling; with the other she supported the baby who sat astride her crooked hip. ‘Hallo,’ I said timidly. ‘’Allo,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘What a lot he’s grown,’ I said. She looked down at him and said in her indifferent way: ‘Yes. ’E’s getting on all right. ’E goes all over the place now.’ ‘Isn’t he heavy for you to carry?’ ‘I don’t mind. ’E likes a ride.’ Suddenly she put her cheek down against his and cried: ‘Don’t you, ducks?’ He peeped out at me with a coy grin; then hid his face in her shoulder. A faint smile went over her face, maternal, indulgently mocking. He was bald, rickety, exactly like his brothers, but the hiding gesture reminded me of Chrissie; and what with that, and Mrs. Wyatt vanished for ever, and the desolate look of the cottage with Maudie standing alone there with the baby, and only two more to come home out of all the nine, I felt most terribly miserable and feared to disgrace myself by tears. I said: ‘What have you done to your hand?’ ‘Got a poisoned thumb.’ ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘It throbs painful at nights. I ’ad it lanced but it goes on. The nurse comes to see to it. She says it got bad because it wasn’t done up sooner. Still, I got to use it a bit—you can’t do all your work with one ’and.’ I said I hoped it would soon be better, and then there was nothing more to say, and I said good-bye and went on. When I reached the corner I glanced over my shoulder, but she was not looking after me. Maudie had given up wanting anything I had got. _________________________________ That winter they all went away. Mr. Wyatt got another job, over the other side of the country. I don’t know if it was a better job. He came to say good-bye to my parents. I was not present during this interview, but later on, looking over the stairs, saw my father showing him out of the front door. ‘Good-bye, Wyatt, my dear chap,’ said my father warmly. ‘The best of luck to you and yours.’ Mr. Wyatt went on wringing his hand, speechless, for a long time, then said brokenly: ‘God bless you, sir,’ and went away. They left the cottage in such a state that it had to be fumigated and washed down with lysol from ground floor to attic. It stayed empty for a bit; then the landlord did a few repairs and put a coat of paint on, and another family came to live there. They planted vegetables and sowed a little plot of front lawn and cut out some little flower beds and made a little tile-bordered path to run exactly through the middle; and after a while it looked quite like the other cottages.