Three Houses Read Online Free PDF Page A

thoroughly recommend if your heartless parents send you to bed while it is still light. You lick your finger and rub it up and down on the Morris wallpaper. Presently the paper begins to come off in rolls and you can do this till you have removed so much of the pattern that your mother notices it. Then you have to stop. Another excellent way of diversifying the monotony is to cry till your mother comes. I became an adept at working up a wholly fictitious grief till I was really sobbing. If Nanny was upstairs she came banging across the landing and told me to be quiet, but I was able to judge when she had gone down to the kitchen for her supper and then my wails increased in volume till my mother came tearing up from the drawing-room below to see what the matter was. By this means I had a quarter of an hour of her agreeable company and then, much refreshed, went to sleep. Her bedroom was only divided from the Greyhound by a party wall. On Saturday nights I could hear the singing next door quite clearly. The only song I remember was of a moral nature:

    Time is money and money is time,
        And don’t you be forgetting it.
    Always get as much money as you can,
        And don’t forget the time for getting it.
    We were very lucky in having parents who could tell us stories. My father not only told us all about Greece and Rome, but he sometimes had a serial story of adventure going on at the same time. It had a medieval spaciousness and vagueness and once begun could go on for ever, or stop without in anyway affecting the plot. My mother also had a story without an end about a brother and sister. This she used to tell us after lunch while she was resting on the drawing-room sofa. Drawing-room life goes on far above the heads of people who are playing on the floor, so that when Millais came to tea and we were sent for to shake hands, I merely reported next day that I had seen the new doctor. People would come and play something very dull called Bach on my mother’s harpsichord, and when Mr Dolmetsch came to tune it and told me to sing a scale I didn’t know what a scale was; but it seemed quite an easy thing to sing.
    Before they went to The Grange, my grandparents had lived at 41 Kensington Square, and we still had friends there. At No. 40 lived my mother’s godmother Lady Simon. Every year on the third of June she used to send a huge double birthday cake for my mother and brother whose birthday was on the same day. Occasionally I was taken in state to see her. She was a rather alarming old lady with a very frank tongue, and though she was never anything but kind to me, I was, for no particular reason, afraid to go upstairs. I planted myself firmly on the doormat, saying in a tearful voice, ‘No thanky you – no thanky you,’ till my mother had to give way and take me home. Farther along was Edward Clifford who so astonishingly united a deep and active feeling of religion, a passion for duchesses, and a marvellous gift of water-colour painting. His daily work was for the Church Army to which he gave time and devotion, shrinking from nothing in the early days when roughs made organised attacks on its meetings. But at home he was surrounded by lovely pictures and china and carpets and always had his drawing-room full of flowers from some great lady’s garden. To us children he waskindness itself. It was one of our treats to visit him in his drawing-room and see his albums. He did what we should all like to do, mean to do, but somehow don’t do: kept everything that amused or interested him, whether a joke from Punch , a bit of poetry from the Westminster Gazette , a coloured reproduction from a publisher’s advertisement, an engraving of a bird or landscape, and pasted them all into huge albums. Among the miscellaneous cuttings were the most exquisite water-colour drawings done by him at one or other of the country houses where he stayed. My first art purchase was one of those drawings with which I fell madly in love