Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle

green dye- it dates from when I was an elf in the school play--and are going to dip some old dresses. I don't intend to let myself become the kind of author who can only work in seclusion- after all, Jane Austen wrote in the sitting-room and merely covered up her work when a visitor called (though I bet she thought a thing or two) --but I am not quite Jane Austen yet and there are limits to what I can stand. And I want

to tackle the description of the castle in peace. It is extremely

cold up here, but I am wearing my coat and my wool gloves, which have gradually become mittens all but one thumb; and About, our beautiful

pale ginger cat, is keeping my stomach warm--I am leaning over him to write on the top of the cistern. His real name is Abelard, to go with Heloise (I need hardly say that Topaz christened them), but he seldom gets called by it.

He has a reasonably pleasant nature but not a gushing one; this is a

rare favor I am receiving from him this afternoon.

Today I shall start with:

How WE While Father was in jail, we lived in a London boardinghouse,

Mother not having fancied settling down again next to the fence-leaping neighbor. When they let Father out, he decided to buy a house in the

country.

I think we must have been rather well-off in those days as Jacob

Wrestling had sold wonderfully well for such an unusual book and

Father's lecturing had earned much more than the sales. And Mother had an income of her own.

Father chose Suffolk as a suitable county so we stayed at the King's

Crypt hotel and drove out house-hunting every day- we had a car then; Father and Mother at the front, Rose, Thomas and I at the back. It was all great fun because Father was in a splendid mood goodness knows he didn't seem to have any iron in his soul then. But he certainly had a prejudice against all neighbors; we saw lots of nice houses in

villages, but he wouldn't even consider them.

It was late autumn, very gentle and golden. I loved the quiet-colored fields of stubble and the hazy water meadows. Rose doesn't like the

flat country but I always did- flat country seems to give the sky such a chance. One evening when there was a lovely sunset, we got lost.

Mother had the map and kept saying the country was upside down- and

when she got it the right way up, the names on the map were upside

down. Rose and I laughed a lot about it; we liked being lost. And

Father was perfectly patient with Mother about the map.

All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn't enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few

minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very

excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was

asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with To B.rMOT'RG ND a'nz ct, sa orr, on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned

in at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back- I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so

high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards

ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to back out before we got

stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we

drove out into the open and there it was- but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.

How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse --see the sheer gray stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching

towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no

sound of any kind came to us. Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.

Father pointed out the gatehouse- it had two round towers joined

half-way up by a room with stone-mullioned windows. To the right of

the gatehouse nothing remained but crumbling ruins, but on the left a stretch of high, battlemented walls joined it to a round corner tower.

A bridge crossed the moat to the great nail-studded oak doors under the windows of the gatehouse room, and a little door cut in one of the big doors stood slightly ajar- the minute Father noticed this, he was off towards it. Mother said vague things about trespassing and tried to

stop us following him, but in the end she let us go, while she stayed behind with Thomas who woke and wept a little.

How well I remember that run through the stillness, the smell of wet

stone and wet weeds as we crossed the bridge, the moment of excitement before we stepped in at the little door! Once through, we were in the cool dimness of the gatehouse passage. That was where I first felt the castle--it is the place where one is most conscious of the great weight of stone above and around one.

I was too young to know much of history and the past, for me the

castle was one in a fairy tale; and the queer heavy coldness was so

spell-like that I clutched Rose hard. Together we ran through to the

daylight; then stopped dead.

On our left, instead of the gray walls and towers we had been

expecting, was a long house of whitewashed plaster and herring-boned

brick, veined by weather-bleached wood. It had all sorts of odd little lattice windows, bright gold from the sunset, and the attic gable

looked as if it might fall forward at any minute. This belonged to a

different kind of fairy tale--it was just my idea of a "Hansel and Gretel" house and for a second I feared a witch inside had stolen Father. Then I saw him trying to get in at the kitchen door. He came

running back through the overgrown courtyard garden, calling that there was a small window open near the front door that he could put Rose

through to let us in. I was glad he said Rose and not meI would have

been terrified to be alone in the house for a second. Rose was never

frightened of anything; she was trying to scramble up to the window

even before Father got there to lift her. Through she went and we

heard her struggling with heavy bolts.

Then she flung the door open triumphantly.

The square hall was dark and cold and had a horrid moldy smell. Every bit of woodwork was a drab ginger color, painted to imitate the

graining of wood.

"Would you believe anyone could do that to fine old paneling?" exploded Father. We followed him into a room on the left, which had a dark red wallpaper and a large black-leaded fireplace. There was a nice little window looking on to the garden, but I thought it was a hideous room.

"False ceiling," said Father, stretching up to tap it.

"Oh, lord, I suppose the Victorians did their worst to the whole place." We went back to the hall and then into the large room which is now our drawing-room; it stretches the whole depth of the house. Rose and I ran across and knelt on the wide window seat, and Father opened the heavy mullioned windows so that we could look down and see

ourselves in the moat. Then he pointed out how thick the wall was and explained about the Stuart house having been built on to the ruins of the castle.

"It must have been beautiful once- and could be again," he said, staring across to the field of stubble.

"Think of this view in summer, with a wheat field reaching right up to the edge of the moat."