Free Three Houses by Angela Thirkell Page A

them as cradles, or pirate ships, or Spanish galleons, or an Argo, or the Ark. Or they could pull one over on to its face and crouch beneath it in hiding from the world in general and Nanny in particular. Here also were deck chairs and a few rush-bottomed chairs, stained with paint, discarded from the studio, and in one corner a heap of outdoor toys; spades and buckets for the beach, a spotted wooden horse on wheels and the little wooden go-cart which our parents brought from Germany, christened by Jeanne, the French maid, ‘ le petit chariot ’. It was the kind of low four-wheeled cart that dogs draw in some parts of the Continent, or children drag about in Ludwig Richter’s pictures, and we used it to drag our baby sister and each other about the garden. There were moments when the axles bent or a wheel came off and then we had the pleasure of dragging it round by the village pond to the blacksmith and having real repairs done while we waited. The forge was at the far end of the pond, opposite the Plough Inn, just where the road calledWhiteway went up to East Hill. Rottingdean was rich in public-houses; five to a village of about a thousand inhabitants. The White Horse and Royal Oak were houses of some size and pretension, the Plough Inn was more frequented by farmers’ men and labourers who brought horses in to be shod, or wagons to have new metal tyres to their wheels, and there were still the Black Horse and the Queen Victoria – hardly more than ale houses – to supply the needs of the public.
    At the end of the cloisters nearest the house there grew a bay-tree affording easy access to the tiled roof on which we walked like cats with bare feet. This spot was technically forbidden for various reasons. Nanny forbade it on general grounds of disapproval of anything we wanted to do. My mother had visions of our mangled forms falling six feet on to the ground on our side, or ten feet into the boarding-house yard on the other. My grandmother very properly objected to a habit of using the gutter which ran along the lower edge of the cloister roof as a final foothold, for this gutter was of a peculiarly sacred nature, supplying as it did the rain water for the huge buttthat stood beside the bay-tree. But in the summer holidays these restrictions were partially removed because a barefoot child could run along the roof to where the big fig-tree hung over at the farther end and put the ripening figs into green muslin bags to protect them from birds and wasps. How the faint smell of the fig-tree comes back to me and the rough sticky feeling of the leaves as I thrust among the crooked branches, exploring for half-ripe figs to be jacketed, or picking those that were burstingly ripe and ready for the dining-room.
    There were little figs that never reached normal size though they were perfectly ripe, and they were the property of the first child who found them. How superior are our long Sussex figs to the short round foreign variety. My grandparents had three trees, two purple and one white, and while their season lasted we fed on honey-dew every day. When we were given figs in the dining-room we had to eat them in a special, and I think elegant, way. The fig was held by the stalk in the left hand and cut lengthwise with a silver knife and then lengthwise again, so that it opened like a flower with four perfect petals spreading outwards. Itwas then an easy matter to scoop out the ambrosial inside with a spoon or the human tooth.
    As one descended from the cloister roof one was apt, if in too much of a hurry, to land with one foot in the snail-pot, a large tin bowl with a wooden handle which lived permanently under the rain-water butt with a handful of salt in it for the disposal of snails. Never have I known a garden so infested with snails. Enormous grandfathers congregated together in twos and threes under the roof of the cloisters and in every angle of the wooden pergola on the other side of the lawn. Middle-sized parents lived