Read Online Henrietta Sees It Through by Joyce Dennys - Free Book Online

upstairs and change into a pair of silk ones with ladders.
    Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,
    H ENRIETTA

 
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    February 10, 1943
    M Y D EAR R OBERT
    There was a time when I preferred summer to winter. Feeling the cold as I do, the approach of January, February and March used to fill me with dread; and soon after Christmas, when the east winds began to blow, I would get what Charles calls my ‘sick monkey look’, and, wrapped in misery and shawls, remain, like the hibernating toad, in a state of suspended animation until the first really warm spring day recalled me to life.
    But all that is changed now. Since I took to gardening, winter has become my favourite season. You may well ask why, Robert, and the answer is easy to give. It is because in winter there are no weeds. Even my enemy, the bindweed, withers off at the top into thin, dead strings, and, though it is still lurking underground in all its coiling horror, a little concentrated wishful thinking easily persuades me that it is gone for ever. This excites in me a frenzy of enthusiastic tidying, and the edges of the grass are cut, the gravel paths raked and, if a dead leaf dares to lie for one instant upon the lawn, it is whisked away and plunged into a large pit dug for the purpose, where it lies rotting with its fellows, and is transformed in course of time, we hope, into rich leaf mould.
    When I persuaded Charles, who hates the garden and looks at it as seldom as possible, to inspect what I had done, he said it was so neat it reminded him of an operating theatre. Charles has often been heard to remark that it would save his money and my time if the whole thing were laid down in concrete.
    â€˜What would we do with such a great expanse of concrete?’ I said to him on one occasion, when he had made this shattering assertion.
    But Charles always has an answer. ‘We would invite our friends to roller skate on it,’ he said.
    With no weeds rearing their ugly heads, and the autumn leaves safely tucked away in their pit, I am hard put to it to find employment in the garden just now. To rest from my labours I do not dare, for muscles must be kept strong and lumbar regions supple against the Spring Offensive. Just lately I have been making a brick path. This is fascinating work, up to a point, the point being where a whole brick has to be made into a half-brick. When proper bricklayers do this it looks easy. They just take the little trowel-thing that they spread mortar with, and give the brick a tap, and it falls neatly into two pieces. I tried tapping my brick with an ordinary gardening trowel, and nothing happened at all. Then our gardener came along. Our gardener and I, like King James of the great Sir Walter, think but Rawley of each other, and never ask each other’s advice if we can possibly avoid it. The gardener, with a pitying smile, stood and watched me stagger with bricks from one end of the terrace to the other. Watching me garden is one of our gardener’s favourite pastimes. He never seems to tire of it, and spends hours out of the two days he is supposed to work for us engaged in this happy pursuit.

    The gardener, with a pitying smile, stood and watched me
    â€˜Layin’ bricks?’ he said kindly, after about ten minutes.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Yu knows as how you mustn’t never lay one whole brick ’long side ’nother whole brick, don’t ee?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Do ee know the way to split bricks?’
    â€˜Er - yes, I think so.’
    â€˜I’ll show ee!’ cried the gardener, delighted at my hesitation; and, dropping the hoe which he carries about with him as a sort of badge of office, he seized my brick, gave it a sharp tap with the trowel, and it fell in half.
    â€˜That’s how ’tis done,’ he said conceitedly.
    I was very much annoyed by this sudden display of efficiency, and as soon as he had gone, I took the trowel and gave my