Free The Cardboard Crown by Martin Boyd Page B

sea queen and felt his watery pink eyes fixed on her, she would toss her head(Arthur here inserted a piece of pure embroidery) :
    ‘Papa used to say—“I wish to goodness Hetty would stop tossing her head, she’s not a pony.” Then just before the end of the voyage she did stop. She turned and snatched up her piece of protoplasm. She went round telling everyone that Mr Dell was so refined, such a gentleman, though for the past two months she had been saying that he couldn’t possibly be a gentleman as his family neither owned land nor was distinguished in the church. Actually he was a solicitor, the son of a solicitor, very respectable people in Dorking or somewhere. He had a little money and had gone out to Melbourne thinking the climate would suit him, but he found the life too rough.’
    The events of the following year were much talked about in the family. I have always been acquainted with them and the diaries have freshened up my memory. They all disembarked at Plymouth. A Reverend Frederick Mayhew, an uncle of Hetty’s, met them at the ship, to conduct her to his house at Datchet, where she was to stay. The four Langtons were to rest at Waterpark for a few days, before going on to London. They parted from Hetty and Mr Mayhew at Frome. Mr Dell also was in the train.
    Waterpark, where the Langtons lived for many centuries, is four miles from Frome. Our Australian relatives who have never been there are apt to speak of it as if it were one of the great houses of England, but it is only a modest manor, though a very pleasant one. I may think this because I spent the happiest years of my life there, probably happier than my childhood here at Westhill, where I felt the countryside to be large and frightening with so much dead timber, with snakesand scorpions, with magpies which snapped their beaks like a pistol shot close to one’s ear when they were hatching their young. Sometimes in the summer to go out of doors was like entering a vast scorching oven, and I felt my head would burst. The doctor said we all had thin skulls, particularly my eldest brother Bobby.
    Waterpark on the other hand is, or was, embowered in elms and horse chestnuts. No scorching winds came near its lawns. It was deep-meadowed and happy. It did not display its dignity to the world but only to its own garden. One drove there through steep-banked Somerset lanes, and the first sign of it was a simple white gate, with a notice: ‘Wheels to Waterpark House only’ meaning there was a right-of-way for pedestrians. Beyond the gate was a short avenue, in summer a green tunnel under the chestnuts, and at the end on the left was a door in a high wall. Above this carved in stone, was a shield, chipped and stained and covered with lichen. One could hardly see that it was
party per pale.
By the door was an iron bell-pull, but when it was rung and answered, one came, not into the house, but only onto a stone path which led to the front door. The lawn stretched across to a stream, and beside it were three oak trees. Across the stream were meadows full of buttercups, which shed their golden dust into the seams of one’s shoes. Phrases from Tennyson crowd in my mind when I think of Waterpark. It was the land where it was always afternoon. How far away they seem, those summer holidays, when we played tennis with the Tunstall boys, and had tea under the tree by the stream. How irrecoverable, not because I was young then and cannot be young again. One would not mind that if there were otheryoung people, Julian or his children, playing on those lawns. But the life is gone. This was finally brought home to me on the morning after my arrival here a year ago. There our old kind butler and the fresh-cheeked footman brought out the silver trays. Here the cook I had before Mrs Briar, wearing an old dressing gown and with a row of black glossy ringlets round her forehead, which recalled one of King Charles II’s mistresses, handed me a cup of tea slopped over into the