Laughing House - Warwick Deeping (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📗

Laughing House

by Warwick Deeping

1947

THIS is the story of a House, a house which was born in more spacious days, and sat placidly for many years like a white bird in a green nest, a house that suffered one war and grievous sorrow, and survived to suffer in yet another war. Its history is human history, as a house’s history should be, if it has strength and breadth, beauty and dignity. Many such houses are doomed to die. Some will survive to live strange, new lives, for the new rhythm—like jazz music—is not of the age that created them.

To me old houses are alive; they are persons, impregnated with the memories of those who have dwelt in them, old farmhouses, old cottages, old mansions. They are not mere boxes of brick, hygienic but hideous, in which people seem to live like hens in a “Battery.” My prejudices, if they can be called prejudices, are those of an old man, and to the young the old can be boring.

I understand that to some of the young we are known as “Bumbles.” Well, this is the book of a Bumble.

Beech Hill was built by my great grandfather in the year of Waterloo, a white and spacious house, always suggesting to me that if Nash had designed country houses this might have been one of them. It stands on the lower slope of a hill, facing south-east, and looking over its high blue railings at a pool walled with local stone, a great wreath of rhododendrons, and a steep green valley rising to the splendid beeches of Beechhanger Wood. A country road from Framley Green to Roman Heath runs between the railings and the pool, a quiet road not well known to weekend motorists. All about the place the ground rises steeply, green fields and woodland, yet the house catches all the sunlight.

It stands on a gentle slope, with the great white pillars of its portico-porch set solidly and almost defiantly in massive paving. A semi-circular drive linked two fine iron gates, but they went to the war, poor dears, like the iron railings. My earliest recollections are of those two great white portico pillars, and of my father standing there after breakfast and saying good morning to the beech trees on the hill. I remember swarming up one of the pillars, and sliding down with a precipitancy that left my backside sore for a week. The broad, flat paving of the portico provided a parade-ground for my lead soldiers, horse, foot and artillery. It was about the most inconvenient spot I could have chosen so far as the rest of the household were concerned, but it pleased me to see all that coloured soldiery, red, blue, green and white embattled on the old grey stones.

Beech Hill was built in the shape of an L, with broad, low gable ends, and a slated roof with a generous over lap which gave a deep shadow-band. Attached to the rearward wing was a little orangery in the classic style. The great sash-windows showed white between green shutters. Back of the house was a base-court, and beyond it the stables and outhouses in stone and old red brick, with a little belfry and clock and wind-vane rising above the coach-house. You could stable a dozen horses here, and four carriages or gigs. Two cottages housed my chauffeur and his wife, and the Potters, my gardeners. All the doors were painted a soft blurred blue.

The garden sloped upwards in lawns and terraces to the glass-houses and walled fruit garden and orchard. The terraced borders were filled with flowering trees, roses, and herbaceous plants. Below lay a tennis court and a croquet lawn. Beyond and above the fruit and vegetable garden towered the Scotch firs and oaks and cypresses of High Wood.

From the front windows you could see the pool, glassy and black and still, with its old stone wall, lilies and bulrushes and yellow flags, and the moorhens pad dling. In the spring its great wreath of rhododendrons filled it with reflected colour. Beyond, the narrow green valley rose steeply to Beechhanger, gorgeous in autumn, with its stately trunks like the pillars of some temple. We had two other meadows South Mead and Upper Mead, which I let off for hay or for grazing. It was indeed a lovely and a peaceful spot, sheltered in winter, and living a serene life of its own with the clouds sailing over its high woods, and the sunlight playing hither and thither as it pleased.

Our association had been so intimate that I and the house felt one.

I have suffered sorrows, and the house had shared them.

My wife and I had lost both our sons in the first great war, and the house had seemed to age without them.

Sibilla died five years after the loss of her beloved boys, and I, left alone, became an old man perhaps old before my time.

Yes, it was an old man’s house, the home of a placid potterer.

I had a dog, Billy the Cairn, two excellent maids Ellen and Emily a chauffeur-valet one Grylls, and old and young Potter the gardeners. I dabbled in water-colours, scribbled in a diary, fussed over my roses, fan cied myself as a grower 1 of superfine fruit. I had a cellar which still contained port laid down by my grandfather, and I kept every bin stocked with champagne, Burgundy especially Chambertin good claret, Hock, Madeira, Sherry. Once a week I was driven up to London, and looked at pictures, and shopped, and lunched at my Club, and met other old fellows. Twice a year I went to visit semi-derelict cousins, spinsters of the Victorian tradition who were partly dependent upon me.

Yes, we Mortimers were dying out, like the world we had lived in.

I will quote one simple figure to demonstrate how utterly I was out of touch with social tendencies.

The House had twenty bedrooms!

We had shut up three-quarters of them, though twice a year they were cleaned and aired, and yet it never struck me that this was so much waste. A house with twenty bedrooms and one old man! Moreover I had at my service a dining-room,’ a large hall, a drawingroom, a study, a library, and a billiard-room, all spa cious and filled with fine old furniture. As a mere Bumble I will not bore you with a list of my antiques, pictures, china, furniture, bric-a-brac. My wife had loved all this, not out of possessiveness, but because of the beauty and harmony of her home.

I had no near neighbours, and you may not believe me when I say that I did not need much neighbourliness. I was living in the past, and the house and garden and woods were the past to me. Almost I could feel the presence of those dear people who had lived here, and especially so could I feel the nearness of Sibilla. She sat by the winter fire with me. If I went up to the high seat on the edge of High Wood and saw all the little valley spread below me, she seemed to be there with me. I felt myself talking to her.

“The valley is very lovely to-day, dear” or “The beech trees are beginning to colour.”

And I could fancy her beside me, smiling as a woman can smile at some lovely thing or at small children.

I dare say that people thought me an eccentric and selfish old codger, but my servants stayed with me. The fact was that the House was more than a house; it was a kind of sacred place permeated by a Presence, and scented with memories that conjured up pictures of the past. It was my father, and it was my mother, and the two poor lads who had died in France, but essentially it was Sibilla, and all that she had been to me.

Rumours of War. They drifted round my London “Club,” but I cannot say that I attached much importance to them. It was just club gossip, the idle chatter of old men. Moreover, I will confess that I was some what pro-German and pro-Hitler at that time, for I believed that Germany could teach this casual, lazy country of ours valuable lessons. Ours was a very amateur show, and I did know that we were utterly unpre pared for war, and that any man who had the courage to utter a warning was howled down as a war-monger by silly women, and cocksure ignorant men.

Then came Munich, and a country that had grown cowardly and soft cheered a false reprieve. I had one friend at the “Club” who knew. He assured me that Chamberlain had played for time, that ultimate war was inevitable. The Germans were too strong, and too set upon dominating Europe.

I will admit that I regarded the future seriously, so much so that I took various precautions. If this fool country was to starve, as starve it might, forethought might be valuable. We should be short of all those things which had come to us from overseas, tea, sugar, meat, petrol and what not. England’s shirt might well be hanging through its breeches, even if it had a shirt.

Wise as to the future I may have been, but I did not foresee the destruction and the mess and the upheaval that would descend upon the quiet corners of the land, or that figures in -khaki would swarm like brown lice over the places that had been loved.

So, the war came, and I a self-absorbed old man, was not greatly disturbed by the crisis. Here were we, in the wilds of Surrey, for Surrey can be wild, capable of living like some old religious house upon the food we might produce. Beech Hill could confront a war, a war that would leave it undisturbed in its green valley. The house seemed to stand firmly and defiantly upon its two white legs, daring Hell and Hitler to harm it. And in my blindness I did not foresee that the house’s enemies might be Englishmen, not Germans.

SIX months or so o mock war, and a grim winter. I must admit that I was more concerned about my flowering shrubs and my more tender plants than about what appeared to me to be pantomime. Germany had grabbed what she wanted, and we could only pull ugly faces at her, and curse Russia, though the whole fantastic business was not pantomime for Prague and Poland.

There was six inches of ice on the pool, and we had to break it daily for the moorhens and the fish. The hillsides and tree tops were white with snow or glistening with frost. We had cut dead bracken and piled it over the cistus, rosemary, and santolina. The wall flowers looked like bunches of withered herbs. Daily I fed the birds outside the porch, and my congregation was mixed and multitudinous. Even two green yaffles joined the chorus. The blackbirds and the sparrows would come right to my feet, and one robin would perch on my hand.

The old house was snug and warm, for we had central heating and plenty of fuel, coal, coke, anthracite and logs. I had laid in a reserve stock of fuel, and had piled it to the