Free Three Houses by Angela Thirkell

there and the room was always permeated by the stinging delicious smell of wood-smoke. Wherever I smell wood-smoke I am in the Mermaid again for a moment, watching my grandfather playing draughts on the old oak table whose deep polish reflects the candles; for in those days my grandparents had only lamps and candles at Rottingdean, lamps in the drawing-room and candles everywhere else. The Mermaid was furnished like the kitchen of some delightful Dickensish inn, with a big oak settle, a solid oak table, a few massive and extremely uncomfortable oak chairs, a large oak dresser, all of them dark with age and shining with the polish of years. The dresser was hung with gay German earthenware sent from the Fair at Mannheim by a sister of Lady Lewis, my grandparents’ devoted friend. At that time it had been almost impossible to get good common potteryin England and these enchanting pots and jugs of beautiful shape and colour could be got for a few pence in any market-place in Germany. The windows and half-glazed door were curtained with bright red Turkey twill through which the fire and candlelight shone at night with the authentic Dickens touch.
    Here my grandfather would come with his men friends to smoke and play draughts; games that seemed to go on for hours and hours, my grandfather sitting with intent face, pondering on a move for the length of time that a cigar would take to accumulate a long grey ash. The candlelight shone on the dresser and on the pewter jugs on the great oak cupboard behind the settle and glimmered back from the table; and a child, sitting on the bench which ran along the wall under the low windows, waited for the ash to be flicked away into the fire when a decision had been reached, or to fall unheeded if the game still needed consideration. I never saw cards played in my grandparents’ house, but draughts and backgammon and dominoes were often played, mostly between tea and dinner. My grandfather rarely sought any further relaxation than a change of work. When the lightwas no longer good enough to work in oils he would take up a pencil, or if he had finished with his pencil he would draw in coloured chalks or water-colour. His hand and mind were never idle and these games were a rest to him in that they were a different form of absorption.
    In summer the garden door of the Mermaid stood open and the draught players looked across the orchard and sweetbriar of the garden to the lovely line of the downs high above. To the left of the fire-place there was a recess with a little window of stained glass, a figure of a lute-player surrounded by bull’s eyes. This was an addition not approved by the nursery, because it replaced a casement window by which one could climb in and out, a far more adventurous way than using the ever-open door. In wet weather the window was also a short cut to the cloisters. Short cut is, of course, not a good description, but to us any way that was not the ordinary and easy way of getting from one place to another was known as a short cut, so I keep the name. And coming to the cloisters, we found ourselves at the starting-point for all the adventures of the garden. 

III
    Gothic House next door was a boarding-house and North End House had all the garden of both houses. A high flint wall ran right across the back of Gothic House and its little paved brick courtyard, dividing it from our garden, and against this wall was a high penthouse roof of red tiles, known as the Cloisters, supported on plain wooden pillars set in a low brick wall. The space below the roof had a wooden floor, making a pleasantly echoing place for our wet-weather playground in summer. It contained a couple of large beehive chairs made of creaking basket-work like the ‘sulkies’ in the garden at Earlham. Grown-ups could sit facing each other in them and talk, or could turnthem back to back and read or meditate, undisturbed by the sight of each other. Children could turn them over on to their backs and use