What is the matter with him his And what does he do all the time his I wrote yesterday that he does nothing but read detective novels, hut
that was just a silly generalization, because Miss Marcy can seldom let him have more than two a week (although he will read the same ones
again and again after a certain lapse of time, which seems to me
amazing). Of course he reads other books, too. All our valuable ones
have been sold (and how I have missed them!) but there are a good many of the others left, including an old, incomplete Encyclopedia
Britannica;
I know he reads that and he plays some kind of a game following up
cross-references in it. And I am sure he thinks very hard. Several
times when he hasn't answered my knock on the gatehouse room door I
have gone in and found him staring into space. In the good weather he walks a lot, but he hasn't now for months. He has dropped all his
London friends.
The only friend he has ever made down here is the Vicar, who is the
nicest man imaginable; a bachelor with an elderly housekeeper. Now I
come to think of it, Father has dodged seeing even him this winter.
Father's un sociability has made it hard for any of us to get to know people here--and there aren't many to know. The village is tiny: just the church, the vicarage, the little school, the inn, one shop (which is also the post office) and a huddle of cottages; though the Vicar
gets quite a congregation from the surrounding hamlets and farms. It
is a very pretty village and has the unlikely name of Godsend, a
corruption of Godys End, after the Norman knight, Etienne de Godys, who built Belmotte Castle. Our castle--I mean the moated one, on to which our house is built- is called Godsend, too; it was built by a later de Godys.
No one really knows the origin of the name "Belmotte"-the whole mound, as well as the tower on it, is called that. At a guess one would say
the "Bel" is from the French, but the Vicar believes in a theory that it is from Bel the sun god whose worship was introduced by the
Phoenicians, and that the mound was raised so that Midsummer Eve votive fires could be lit there; he thinks the Normans simply made use of it.
Father doesn't believe in the god Bel theory and says the Phoenicians worshipped the stars, not the sun. Anyway, the mound is a very good
place to worship both sun and stars from.
I do a little worshipping there myself when I get time.
I meant to copy an essay on castles I wrote for the school History
Society into this journal, but I find it is very long and horridly
overwritten (how the school must have suffered), so I shall paraphrase it briefly:
CASTLES
In early Norman times, there seem to have been mounds with ditches and wooden stockades as de fences Inside the de fences were wooden
buildings, and sometimes there was a high earthen motte to serve as a lookout place. The later Normans began building great square stone
towers (called keeps), but it was found possible to mine the corners of these- mining was just digging then, of course, not the use of
explosives --so they took to building round towers, of which Belmotte is one. Later, the tower-keeps were surrounded with high walls, called curtain walls.
These were often built in quadrangle form with jutting towers at the
gatehouse, the corners and in the middle of each side so that the
defenders could see any besiegers who were trying to mine or scale the walls, and fight them off. But the besiegers had plenty of other good tricks, notably a weapon called a trebuchet which could sling great
rocks- or a dead horse--over your curtain walls, causing much
embarrassment.
Eventually, someone thought of putting moats round curtain walls. Of
course, the moated castles had to be on level ground; Belmotte
tower-keep, up on its mound, must have been very much of a back number when Godsend Castle was built. And then all castles gradually became
back numbers and Cromwell's Roundheads battered two-and-a-half sides of our curtain walls down.
Long before that, the de Godys name had died out and the two castles
had passed to the Cottons of Scoatney, through a daughter. The house
built on the ruins was their dower house for a time, then it became
just a farm-house. And now it isn't even that; merely the home of the ruined Mortmains.
Oh, what are we to do for money his Surely there is enough intelligence among us to earn some, or marry some-Rose, that is; for I would
approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb and I cannot feel that I should give satisfaction. But how is Rose to meet anyone his We used to go to London every year to stay with Father's aunt, who has a house in Chelsea with a lily-pool and collects artists. Father met
Topaz there--Aunt Millicent never forgave him marrying her, so now we don't get asked any more;
this is bitter because it means we meet no men at all, not even
artists. Oh, me! I am feeling low in spirits. While I have been
writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me-first the golden light of autumn, then the silver light of spring
and then the strange light, gray but exciting, in which I see the
historic past. But now I have come back to earth and rain is beating
on the attic window, an icy draught is blowing up the staircase and
About has gone downstairs and left my stomach cold.
Heavens, how it is coming down! The rain is like a diagonal veil
across Belmotte. Rain or shine, Belmotte always looks lovely. I wish
it were Midsummer Eve and I were lighting my votive fire on the
mound.
There is a bubbling noise in the cistern which means that Stephen is
pumping. Oh, joyous thought, tonight is my bath night! And if Stephen is in, it must be tea-time. I shall go down and be very kind to
everyone.
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
IV
Little did I think what the evening was to bring-something has actually happened to us! My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan
developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's
imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.
Instead of indulging in riotous hopes I shall describe the evening from the beginning, quietly gloating- for now every moment seems exciting
because of what came later.
I have sought refuge in our barn. As a result of what happened last
night, Rose and Topaz are spring-cleaning the drawing-room. They are
being wonderfully blithe--when I dwindled away from them Rose was
singing "The Isle of Capri" very high and Topaz was singing "Blow the Man Down" very low. The morning is blithe too, warmer, with the sun shining, though the countryside is still half-drowned. The barn--we
rent it to Mr. Stebbins but we owe him so much for milk and butter
that he no longer pays--is piled high with loose chaff and I have
climbed up on it and opened the square door near the roof so that I can see out. I look across stubble and ploughed fields and drenched winter wheat to the village, where the smoke from the chimneys is going
straight up in the still air. Everything is pale gold and washed
clean, and hopeful.
When I came down from the attic yesterday, I found that Rose and Topaz had dyed everything they could lay hands on, including the dishcloth
and the roller towel.
Once I had dipped my handkerchief into the big tin bath of green dye, I got fascinated too-it really makes one feel rather Godlike to turn
things a different color. I did both my nightgowns and then we all did Topaz's sheets which was such an undertaking that it exhausted our
lust. Father came down for tea and was not too pleased that Topaz had dyed his yellow cardigan--it is now the color of very old moss. And he thought our arms being green up to the elbows was revolting.
We had real butter for tea because Mr. Stebbins gave Stephen some when he went over to fix about working (he started at the farm this
morning); and Mrs.
Stebbins had sent a comb of honey. Stephen put them down in my place
so I felt like a hostess. I shouldn't think even millionaires could
eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.
I have rarely heard such rain as there was during the meal. I am never happy when the elements go to extremes; I don't think I am frightened, but I imagine the poor countryside being battered until I end by
feeling battered myself. Rose is just the opposite--it is as if she is egging the weather on, wanting louder claps of thunder and positively encouraging forked lightning. She went to the door while it was
raining and reported that the garden was completely flooded.
"The lane'll be like a river," she remarked with satisfaction, not being a girl to remember that Thomas would have to ride his bicycle
down it within an hour--he was staying late at school for a lecture.
Father said:
"Let me add to your simple pleasure in Nature's violence by reminding you that there will shortly be at least six glorious new leaks in our roof."
There was one in the kitchen already; Stephen put a bucket under it. I told him the two attic leaks had started before I came down but there were buckets under them. He went to see if they were overflowing and
returned to say that there were four more leaks. We had run out of
buckets so he collected three saucepans and the soup-tureen.