Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896. E. F. Benson
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the lilac scent, of having ten minutes more to play in, rushed simultaneously over me, and at that moment some new consciousness of the world and its exquisiteness was unsealed in me. And I doubt if I have ever been so happy since, or if anything, owing to that moment, will ever smell so sweet to me as lilac.
Whatever that unsealing was, the wax was broken for ever, and from then a more vivid perception was mine. According to Wordsworth I ought, just about then, to have ceased trailing my clouds of glory, instead of which they trailed in far more radiant profusion. The arrival at Lincoln still wonderfully etched in my memory was an adventure of the finest kind, and the exploration of the new land teemed with unique discoveries. The fact that the house dated from the fourteenth century naturally mattered not at all: its joy lay in its present suitability to the diversions of children. There was a winding stone staircase, opening from a nail-studded door in the hall with pentagrams carved on the steps to keep off evil spirits: there was a day nursery made of two bedrooms thrown into one; there was a suite of amazing attics, steeped in twilight, with rafters close above the head, and loose boards underfoot. Here in dark corners lay water-cisterns which gurgled unexpectedly in the dusk with mirthless goblin chuckles; cobwebs hung in corners and mice scuttled. Here too was a bare tremendous apartment also under the roof, spread with pears and apples. Up one side of it went a buttress, which certainly contained the chimney from the kitchen, for it was warm to the touch and altogether mysterious.
Instantly, so it seems to me now, we began playing the most blood-curdling games in that floor of attics; people hid there and groaned and jumped out on you with maniacal screams. A short steep flight of steps led down from it to the nursery floor, and how often, giddy with pleasing terror, have I tumbled down those steps, because somebody (who ought to have been a sister, but might easily have become a goblin) was yelling behind me. One’s mind, the sensible part of it much in abeyance, knew quite well that it was Nellie or Maggie, but supposing one’s sensible mind was wrong for once? It was wiser to run, just in case. … From which vivid memory I perceive that though I knew about Abracadabra I was not so firmly rationalistic about the rooms with gurgling cisterns in them. In the dark, strange metamorphoses might have occurred, and when one day I found in the darkest corner of one of these attics, a figure apparently human, and certainly resembling Nellie, lying flat down and not moving (though it was for the hider to catch the seeker) the light of my sensible mind was snuffed out like a candlewick, and I shrieked out, “Oh, Nellie, don’t!” Observe the confusion of an infant mind! I knew the corpse to be Nellie, for I addressed it as Nellie, and told it not to; on the other hand, by an involuntary exercise of the imagination I conceived that this still twilight object might be something quite different.
My sisters were now of an age to sleep together in a large apartment somewhere at the top of the stone stairs, while I still slept in the night nursery, in a bed near the window. Beth occupied another bed, and in a corner was Hugh’s crib with high sides, where he—being now about two years old—was stowed away before the day was over for me. Next door to the nursery was a room smaller than any room I have ever seen, and this was officially known as “My Room.” It had a tiny window, was quite uninhabitable, for it was always shrouded in a deadly gloom and piled up with boxes, but the fact that it was my room, though I lived in the day nursery by day, and slept in the night nursery by night, gave me a sense of pomp and dignity, and I resented the fact that presently my father had the wing of the house which lay above the stone staircase connected with the night nursery by a wooden passage across the roof. This turned my room into part of the passage, and though he called this ten yards of passage “the Rialto,” I felt that I had been robbed of some ancestral domain. After all it was My Room. …
The rest of the house was not particularly interesting; it consisted of sitting-rooms and dining-room, and schoolroom and lobbies, the sort of thing that you naturally supposed would be there. But one day my father presented my sisters and me with a room at the top of the stone stairs, with which we were allowed to deal precisely as we wished. We instantly called it “The Museum,” and put in it any unusual objects that we obtained. One day Maggie found a piece of sheep’s wool stuck in a hedge, so that of course was brought home, washed white and carefully combed and put in a cardboard box with a glass lid. Then (to anticipate as regards the Museum) we spent a summer holiday at Torquay, and collected various attractive pebbles, and madrepores, and shells. These were dedicated to the Museum, and a large earthenware bread-bowl was lined with them, and filled up with water to the top, so that they gleamed deliciously through the liquid. Then there came a memorable day when my mother killed a hornet on her window; she gave us the squalid corpse, and after consultation we put it in the water of the bowl, lined with spa and madrepore, in order to preserve it. It floated about there and was supposed to be in process of preservation. An addled swan’s egg joined the collection, which, very prudently, we decided not to blow. But it began to smell so terribly even through the shell that with great reluctance we scrapped it. My father gave us a case of butterflies, collected by his father, in which, without doubt were two “large coppers.” “As rare things will” that case vanished, and I wonder what fortunate dealer eventually got the “large coppers.” … Then on a bookshelf was the great stamp-collection, and I wish I knew what had happened to that. There was all South Australia complete, and complete too was Tasmania, and complete the Cape of Good Hope, the stamps of which for the sake of variety were triangular. Heligoland was there and the Ionian Islands and New Caledonia (black and only one of it). But the stamp-collection was considered rather dull: the hornet disintegrating in the bread-bowl, and the piece of sheep’s wool were far more interesting. They had the timbre of personal acquisition, and rang with first-hand emotion. Personal and precious too were the bits of oxydised glass smouldering into rainbows which we dug up in the garden and displayed here; there too we found bowls and broken stems of tobacco-pipes which I think were Cromwellian. But Cromwell was no good to us, so we said that they were Roman tobacco-pipes. Then there was a collection of fossils, which, with the aid of geological hammers that my father gave us, we rapped out of stones in lime quarries, or from the heaps that lay by the roadside for mendings. Amateur stone-breakers indeed we were, and often bruised fingers were of the party, but they added preciousness to the trophies that we brought back to the Museum. On the door of the Museum was a paper label, on which was emblazoned in large letters tinted with water-colour, “Museum. Private.” The privacy was part of the joy of it. Occasionally we asked my mother to have tea with us there, and she came in her hat formally. This very proper behaviour was duly appreciated.
Indeed that was a good house for children with its attics and its winding-stairs, and its multitude of passages. Judging the virtue of a house by the standards of hide-and-seek, than which there is no more authentic rule, I never saw so laudable a habitation. Endless were the dark places for the concealment of hiders, endless also the various routes by which the seekers might get back uncaught to the sanctuary where Beth sat with her sewing over the fire and said, “Eh now, you’ll be falling down and hurting yourselves.” There was the route up the kitchen stairs, the route through my father’s dressing-room and study, only practicable (as on the days when the Khyber Pass is open to caravans) when he was away: there were the stairs up from the hall into the lobby; there were the winding-stairs communicating through the Rialto with the nursery passage, at the other end of which were the nursery stairs. How rare again was the cul-de-sac, that infernal invention of degraded architects and the ruin of all good hide-and-seek, which makes capture inevitable, when once you are in the trap. For magnificence of design, judging by these standards, I unhesitatingly allot the palm to the Chancery house in the Close at Lincoln.
Gardens, in like manner, must be judged by their serviceableness in the pursuit of games, and here again we were fortunate. Adjacent to the house itself was a big lawn, levelled and sown afresh, which was the arena of cricket and rounders. Behind that was an asphalted yard with a stable, a coach-house and a woodshed, erected no doubt in order that we might play fives against them: a covered passage led to the kitchen garden. There was sufficient space here for a lawn-tennis court, the lines of which were laid down with tape secured by hairpins. Occasionally the foot caught in the tape; “zp, zp, zp,” went most of the hairpins and the shape of the court changed for the moment from an oblong to a trapezium with no right-angles. By one side of this was a steep grassy bank with elder bushes growing on the top. Here you laid yourself stiffly out on the ground, and like that rolled bodily down the bank, sitting up again at the bottom to find the