But even without the other cellars, the Rectory was, like all houses, far bigger for the children than for the grown-ups. Children use parts of a house which are hardly even seen by their elders. There were at Wilton Rectory long secret passages in the roof, which were entered from the attic through bolted doors. Here we stepped, in semi-darkness, from beam to beam, over spaces where lay a hollow plaster floor; and now and again we came upon a complicated barricade of interlacing roof supports which had to be got through somehow. Icy draughts and narrow shafts of light broke in upon the dusty stuffiness of this exciting domain.
Then there were numbers of cupboards in the walls, in which we spent our afternoons when it was too wet to go out. In every house, an immense amount of space is lost to the grown-up people who never sit in cupboards. We had first of all the big nursery cupboard where Mildred and I played houses, each on her own shelf, for we were not sophisticated enough to call them flats. There was the vast cupboard in Mamma’s room where one could walk about on the floor, as well as clamber on the shelves among her hats. In the attic was the Bird Cupboard, called from a painting of magpies which surrounded it. It was like a long low room, and we heaped pillows at its two ends and pretended to go to sleep in it. And then there was the tiny cupboard high up in the dark wall on the back stairs. It could only be reached by someone who was very small and very agile. I was both, and so I often got into it, and remained lost for hours. When I remember Wilton Rectory, I think of it as larger by all these cupboards than it ever could have been for my parents, who only sat in the rooms.
It was the same with the garden. The kitchen-garden wall made for us a long terrace walk upon which we ran and danced. When we made the grand tour round it, we always jumped the doorways, as it was looked upon as a disgrace to come to earth in the course of the circuit. If my father saw us on the wall, he always ordered us to come down, so we lay quite flat if we heard him come out of the garden door, and hoped that he would not look up.
Of course, like other children, we had ‘houses’ in the shrubberies, under stacks of faggots, up in the mulberry tree, and in the disused duck-house on the island. We walked, bent double, in the underground channel which carried the water from the pond into the river. We sat on projecting stones in the middle of the waterfall; and on summer evenings, we ran and danced on the roof, or sat astride upon its very top, while people talked and called to each other in the street below, and our parents strolled in the garden, innocently fancying that ‘the little ones’ were safely tucked up in bed.
Because of all this, no place for me can ever compare with Wilton Rectory for spaciousness and room in which to live.
In that part of the house which we shared with those less adventurous people, the ‘grown-ups’, the hall is what I best remember. This must be because (except for Christmas Day) it is always summer in one’s childhood, and in the summer the garden door stood open, and people sat both inside and out of it, in the hall or on the steps. Here I used to hear those sounds which will always call up before my eyes the clear poignant picture of my earliest home. A church bell tolling for one of the many services: the waterfall far off beyond the lawn: the pit pat of tennis balls, and voices calling the score: footsteps on the landing upstairs: the peculiar sound made by turning the handle of the front door: and the Blobs. I am now the only person left alive who heard the whisper: ‘The Blobs are on,’ or who could guess what it meant. Yet we said it every night for about fifteen years; and because, unless I record it, no one again will ever learn that magical phrase, I must satisfy myself by writing it down. Till I was eighteen, Mildred and I (and Harold too before he went to school) always came down for dessert after dinner. As we waited in the hall, we wheedled from the parlour-maid titbits from the dishes she carried out, and then, when dinner was over, we listened to hear her put the dessert plates on to the table. A Blob for each diner. One of us always stood as sentry to hear the sounds, and then, as the others skipped about in the garden or on the stairs, there came the ominous hiss: ‘The Blobs are on.’ This meant our entrance into the dining-room and our curtseys. My father remembered that his sisters had always curtseyed to their parents, and he insisted that we should do so too. We hated it, and it made us very shy if guests were present, because no other girls of our age were expected to curtsey as we did; but now I think it must have been a pretty and graceful thing to see. And the more so, because we probably looked so embarrassed as we did it.
Throughout the summer mornings, the hall was entirely given up to ‘doing the roses’. When we were children, Mildred and I watched Mamie, my elder sister, doing this; and after she married, we took our turn. It was almost a ritual observance.
My father was a famous rose-grower, and, by the time I knew him, his garden had become his chief recreation. It was an extension of
