Portrait of Elmbury Read Online Free PDF

clever fellows; and clever fellows were generally shady fellows, and by no means to be trusted.
Gallery of Relations
    Beyond all these uncles and their wives, like the widening ripples round a splash in a pond extended a vast complication of distant and yet more distant relations: a network, an inescapable spider’s web of kith and kin. Most of them had enormous families; and this resulted in countless cousins.
    You might say that this regiment, this veritable Army Corps, was based upon Elmbury. Many of its members lived there; the others, who travelled farther afield, returned there from time to time to go into winter quarters; and unless the accident of death overtook them suddenly, they all came back there to die. I cannot write about Elmbury unless I mention them too; for they grew about the place as the ivy wraps itself round a tree.
    Since even the wandering ones would ultimately return, therewas a family tradition that relations must be “kept up with.” Keeping up with relations was a stern duty; you failed in that duty if you let them fall into desuetude, if they “got out of touch.” In order to prevent this, you had to write them letters at Christmas and send them diaries on their birthdays; and whenever it occurred to my mother that Aunt Nancy or Cousin Gerald was being neglected, was falling into disuse, she immediately invited the forgotten one to Tudor House in order that the dusty and rusty relationship might be polished up and oiled and put into running order again.
    If they could not come to you, it was your duty to go to them. Great-aunt Mary-Jane was bedridden, and wore a nightcap, and looked just like the wolf which frightened Red Riding Hood. We were frequently taken to visit her, in the dark Victorian house at the top of Elmbury High Street, and she gave us curious presents, such as stamps pierced through with a darning needle and strung tightly on a piece of thread, so that they formed a kind of snake, wriggly and tenuous. Alas, the snake was composed of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues; and the five hundred stamps which articulated it would be worth, to-day, about two hundred pounds if Great-aunt Mary-Jane hadn’t in every case poked her red-hot darning-needle through the young queen’s head.
    Other relations, more mobile, came to visit us; a succession of aunts and uncles, of first and second and third cousins, of cousins goodness knows how many times removed. It took about a year for the wheel to turn full-circle; and then, like the second house at the pictures, it began all over again, but one had forgotten the characters which appeared at the beginning; so that the procession of relatives seemed endless indeed.
    They did not, however, unduly oppress us. The house was big, and they troubled us children very little, intruding into our privacy only now and then, when my mother no doubt said to them: “But of course you’d like to see the children …” and they, liking nothing less, warmly agreed. So Old Nanny, warned in advance, spat on a handkerchief to rub imaginary smuts off our faces; and we were made ready in the nursery, hair brushed, toys tidied away, ready for the awful visitation—of rich AuntBlanche or poor Cousin Minnie or fashionable Aunt Doll or soldierly Cousin Farley who was in the Guards, or decrepit old Cousin Tom Holland who’d fought in the Indian Mutiny. … We shook hands, and they made the usual idiotic remarks, and soon they were gone, to be forgotten until another year brought them like migrants back again.
    They did not tarry long in our recollections; and shortly we were back in our favourite window-seat, gazing out through the blurry glass between the leads upon the rose-pink-tinted fantastic little world, and the daily pageant that passed along the town’s wide High Street.
The Colonel
    Once a year, on Boxing Day, scarlet was the colour of pageantry when the foxhounds met outside the Swan Hotel and afterwards the