Read Online Three Houses by Angela Thirkell - Free Book Online Page B

one door to another. If, for instance, one was in the Bower and urgently required a toy which had been left in the drawing-room, therewere the following routes to be considered. You might go up the brown staircase, through the nursery, and down the blue staircase, but if Nanny happened to be bathing our baby sister at the time it was almost impossible to get past without an accusation of making a draught by leaving one door open and being called back in an awful voice which could not be disobeyed because you shut the other door so loudly, not to speak of the terrible prospect of being caught by Nanny and kept there for good on some pretext or another. It was better to avoid the nursery at bath time. Then there was the quickest route through Uncle Phil’s bedroom, down the steps into the studio, out at the other door, and so down the blue staircase. But the dangers of using Uncle Phil’s room as a passage have already been pointed out and if one intruded upon the studio uninvited, though my grandfather was always glad to see me, Nanny was sure to get to know of it somehow and there would be a scolding in store. A third route was to go down the brown staircase, turn to the left through the dining-room, down the steps into the hall, up the steps again into the blue-staircase house and so to the drawing-room.But if the grown-ups happened to be having a meal they had a curious prejudice against a child banging in at the door, careering through the room and hurling itself down the steps, leaving the heavy curtain that hung over the arched doorway half drawn. So that on the whole the simplest plan was to make a dash across the garden from door to door, leaving a print of wet muddy feet in the hall of the blue house and then return by the same way, leaving this time wet muddy footprints in the hall of the brown house.
    Luckily for us the pantry – provided that Nanny was safely in the nursery – was always glad to see us. It possessed two objects of rare interest, namely a filter and a stuffed animal in a case. The filter was merely a conventional sign, a sacrifice as it were to some forgotten god of Victorian hygiene and was certainly never used by us. Mysterious and interesting though it was, no one who rushed in from the garden to get a drink of water was going to waste precious minutes in holding a glass under the filter’s slow drip. Our more direct method was to seize a tumbler with cut glass stars on it from the shelf, hold it under the tap of the pantry sink,turn the tap violently so that water splashed up into the air and over one’s frock, gulp the water and rush out again. But all the same the filter, both at Rottingdean and in London, gave, one felt, immense prestige and respectability to the house. As for the stuffed animal I can’t even remember what it was – a gull I vaguely think – but in any case the most incongruous ornament possible in a house none of whose members knew anything about bird or beast life, or had ever handled rod or gun.
    After exhausting the charms of the pantry we could lift the latch of the narrow door in the opposite wall and fall down two steps into the smoking-room. It was the old kitchen of the brown-staircase house and was always known as the Mermaid. My grandfather had hung over the open fire-place a painted bas-relief of a mermaid with flying hair playing with fishes in a billowy sea, so the room was called by her name. The floor was brick and so was the fire-place which was re-coloured with ruddle – the red whitewash, if one may so describe it, common in some of the southern counties – whenever it got dirty with smoke. Most of the fire-places in both houses wereruddled on occasion, and it was great fun to watch the housemaid of the moment with a little pail of the luscious compound painting it on to the bricks, an occupation in which we should have loved, but were never allowed, to participate. The fire-place in the Mermaid was not ruddled very often, for only wood was burnt