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Authors: L. P. Hartley
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moral
counsels.
2
TO MY MIND’S eye, my buried memories of Brandham
Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it
is only with an effort that I can see them in terms of colour.
There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and
things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind
as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there
are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like
the landscape of a dream.
The facts I owe to my diary, which I kept
religiously, beginning on the 9th, the day I arrived, and going on
until the 26th, the eve of the fateful Friday. The last few entries
are in code—how proud I was of having invented that! Not a pretence
code such as I had used to call down curses on Jenkins and Strode,
but a real one like Pepys’s—perhaps I had heard of his. I found it
difficult to “break,” partly because, from motives of prudence and
also, possibly, to display my virtuosity, I modified and
embellished it each day. There are still two or three sentences
that don’t give up their secret, though the whole affair is clearer
to me now than it was then.
Facts there are in plenty, beginning with “M. met me
on Norwich platform with the pony carriage and the Under-Coachman.
We drove 13¾ miles to Brandham Hall, which came in site after about
12½ miles and then disapeared again.”
No doubt this was so, but I have no recollection of
the drive, no visual image to make it real for me; the first part
of my visit remains in my memory as a series of unrelated
impressions, without time sequence, but each with a distinct
feeling
attaching to it. Some of the entries might just as
well refer to places I have never seen, and incidents I have never
experienced. Even the look of the house is vague to me. I
laboriously transcribed into my diary a description of it that I
found in a directory of Norfolk:
Brandham Hall, the seat of the Winlove family, is an
imposing early Georgian mansion pleasantly situated on a plot of
rising ground and standing in a park of some five hundred acres. Of
an architectural style too bare and unadorned for present tastes,
it makes an impressive if over-plain effect when seen from the S.W.
The interior contains interesting family portraits by Gainsborough
and Reynolds, also landscapes by Cuyp, Ruysdael, Hobbema, etc., and
in the smoking-room a series of tavern scenes by Teniers the
Younger (these are not shown). The first-floor apartments are
approached by a double staircase which has been much admired. The
Winlove family has the gift of the livings of Brandham,
Brandham-under-Brandham, and Brandham All Saints. At present the
mansion, park, and pleasure grounds are let to Mr. W. H. Maudsley,
of Princes Gate and Thread-needle Street, who allows the public the
same facilities to see the house that it enjoyed formerly.
Permission to view should be obtained from the agent, Brandham
Estate Offices, Brandham.
Now of this all that remains clear in my mind’s eye
is the double staircase, which certainly was admired by me. I
likened it to many things: a tilted horseshoe, a magnet, a
cataract; and both coming down and going up I made it a rule to use
alternate routes; I persuaded myself that something awful might
happen if I went the same way twice. But surprisingly enough
(considering how ready I was to be impressed), the imposing façade,
which I am sure I studied from the S.W., has faded from my mind. I
can see the front of the house now, but through the eyes of the
directory, not through my own.
Perhaps we came and went through a side-door—I think
we did, and that there was a backstairs near it convenient for our
bedroom—for I shared a bedroom, and indeed a bed, a four-poster,
with Marcus. And not only with him, but with his Aberdeen terrier,
an elderly, cross creature, whose presence soon became almost
intolerable. My memories are of the hinder
counsels.
2
TO MY MIND’S eye, my buried memories of Brandham
Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it
is only with an effort that I can see them in terms of colour.
There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and
things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind
as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there
are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like
the landscape of a dream.
The facts I owe to my diary, which I kept
religiously, beginning on the 9th, the day I arrived, and going on
until the 26th, the eve of the fateful Friday. The last few entries
are in code—how proud I was of having invented that! Not a pretence
code such as I had used to call down curses on Jenkins and Strode,
but a real one like Pepys’s—perhaps I had heard of his. I found it
difficult to “break,” partly because, from motives of prudence and
also, possibly, to display my virtuosity, I modified and
embellished it each day. There are still two or three sentences
that don’t give up their secret, though the whole affair is clearer
to me now than it was then.
Facts there are in plenty, beginning with “M. met me
on Norwich platform with the pony carriage and the Under-Coachman.
We drove 13¾ miles to Brandham Hall, which came in site after about
12½ miles and then disapeared again.”
No doubt this was so, but I have no recollection of
the drive, no visual image to make it real for me; the first part
of my visit remains in my memory as a series of unrelated
impressions, without time sequence, but each with a distinct
feeling
attaching to it. Some of the entries might just as
well refer to places I have never seen, and incidents I have never
experienced. Even the look of the house is vague to me. I
laboriously transcribed into my diary a description of it that I
found in a directory of Norfolk:
Brandham Hall, the seat of the Winlove family, is an
imposing early Georgian mansion pleasantly situated on a plot of
rising ground and standing in a park of some five hundred acres. Of
an architectural style too bare and unadorned for present tastes,
it makes an impressive if over-plain effect when seen from the S.W.
The interior contains interesting family portraits by Gainsborough
and Reynolds, also landscapes by Cuyp, Ruysdael, Hobbema, etc., and
in the smoking-room a series of tavern scenes by Teniers the
Younger (these are not shown). The first-floor apartments are
approached by a double staircase which has been much admired. The
Winlove family has the gift of the livings of Brandham,
Brandham-under-Brandham, and Brandham All Saints. At present the
mansion, park, and pleasure grounds are let to Mr. W. H. Maudsley,
of Princes Gate and Thread-needle Street, who allows the public the
same facilities to see the house that it enjoyed formerly.
Permission to view should be obtained from the agent, Brandham
Estate Offices, Brandham.
Now of this all that remains clear in my mind’s eye
is the double staircase, which certainly was admired by me. I
likened it to many things: a tilted horseshoe, a magnet, a
cataract; and both coming down and going up I made it a rule to use
alternate routes; I persuaded myself that something awful might
happen if I went the same way twice. But surprisingly enough
(considering how ready I was to be impressed), the imposing façade,
which I am sure I studied from the S.W., has faded from my mind. I
can see the front of the house now, but through the eyes of the
directory, not through my own.
Perhaps we came and went through a side-door—I think
we did, and that there was a backstairs near it convenient for our
bedroom—for I shared a bedroom, and indeed a bed, a four-poster,
with Marcus. And not only with him, but with his Aberdeen terrier,
an elderly, cross creature, whose presence soon became almost
intolerable. My memories are of the hinder
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