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Authors: Jonathan Aycliffe
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plumes of smoke. No one passed me on the road.
At Cambo, I asked the way again. My shoes were almost worn through by now, and I wondered how much longer I could walk in them. The road was badly surfaced, and I had started to limp by the time I got to Scots’ Gap. Not far past, another road, little more than a lane, turned northward between tall, winter-struck hedges.
The wall started soon after that. It was high and thick, intended to keep people out. Grass grew right up against it and moss covered its top. Beyond it, a screen of trees prevented me from seeing any further. There was no sign of a house. On my left, tall crags cast sharp shadows against the flatness of the sky.
I must have walked two miles or more before I came to a break in that long line of stone. Tall posts flanked a high rusted gate. Behind them. I could make out a sort of lodge, its door boarded up, its windows broken.
I pushed open the gate and stepped inside.
CHAPTER 8
I am wide awak now, wide awake but dreaming of my past. A long path or drive lay in front of me, though from where I stood only a little portion of it was visible. On either side, dense evergreen shrubbery grew close to the edge, hemming in the path and blocking the view. The sky was obscured by tall, leafless trees that rose out of the bushes. They grew thicker and more tangled as they receded into the distance, until at last they became mere shadows through which I could see nothing.
It was as though, stepping through that gate, I had severed myself from all contact with the world outside, as though my universe had abruptly shrunk to the narrow dimensions of this solitary gravel path thick with weeds. I glanced behind me. The heavy gate had closed of its own accord, unheard by me, as though acting in harmony with the trees and shrubs, working in silence to enclose and contain whatever came within their reach. To enclose within, but also, I sensed, to shut out.
Strangely that thought comforted me, for was not the world from which I had come indeed something to be repelled? The walls and gate which had at first seemed so forbidding to me now took on a quite different aspect, as the outriders of a fortress within which—should all go well and against my expectations—I might at last find once more the security that my father’s death had snatched away. Behind those high walls I could forget the shabbiness and poverty of that other existence. If only it could be so. I shut my eyes tight and offered up a prayer. If only it could be so.
The path was evidently seldom attended to. Moss and weeds choked it, and I began to fear that Barras Hall might, after all, be deserted or in a state of decay. Was this why there had been no reply to my mother’s letter? The trees, a mixture of oaks, beeches, and sycamores, had been left to grow without proper care. I remembered the splendid old trees in our garden at home, and all the pruning and lopping Tom our gardener had said was essential to their health. Here, clumps of dull green moss and splotches of unsightly fungi clung dispiritedly to the trunks, pitting and ruining the bark. I noticed several that had died and one, struck by lightning, that leaned heavily on its nearest neighbor, weighing it down.
I must have walked for almost half an hour. The gravel gave way in places to patches of half-frozen mud, across which I made my way with difficulty.
Turning a sharp corner, I found myself suddenly in full view of the house. Beneath a shrunken sky, from which it could have been cut out and deposited on the ground, it stood facing me like a wall of gray stone. I felt my knees go weak as I looked at it, wondering why I had ever been so stupid as to come here, so naive as to imagine I might ever be received with cousinly pity or concern.
You have seen houses like it on your travels. The drivers with their National Trust cards and their flasks of milky coffee visit them on weekends, to walk, silentfooted, in a daze of admiration, about their
At Cambo, I asked the way again. My shoes were almost worn through by now, and I wondered how much longer I could walk in them. The road was badly surfaced, and I had started to limp by the time I got to Scots’ Gap. Not far past, another road, little more than a lane, turned northward between tall, winter-struck hedges.
The wall started soon after that. It was high and thick, intended to keep people out. Grass grew right up against it and moss covered its top. Beyond it, a screen of trees prevented me from seeing any further. There was no sign of a house. On my left, tall crags cast sharp shadows against the flatness of the sky.
I must have walked two miles or more before I came to a break in that long line of stone. Tall posts flanked a high rusted gate. Behind them. I could make out a sort of lodge, its door boarded up, its windows broken.
I pushed open the gate and stepped inside.
CHAPTER 8
I am wide awak now, wide awake but dreaming of my past. A long path or drive lay in front of me, though from where I stood only a little portion of it was visible. On either side, dense evergreen shrubbery grew close to the edge, hemming in the path and blocking the view. The sky was obscured by tall, leafless trees that rose out of the bushes. They grew thicker and more tangled as they receded into the distance, until at last they became mere shadows through which I could see nothing.
It was as though, stepping through that gate, I had severed myself from all contact with the world outside, as though my universe had abruptly shrunk to the narrow dimensions of this solitary gravel path thick with weeds. I glanced behind me. The heavy gate had closed of its own accord, unheard by me, as though acting in harmony with the trees and shrubs, working in silence to enclose and contain whatever came within their reach. To enclose within, but also, I sensed, to shut out.
Strangely that thought comforted me, for was not the world from which I had come indeed something to be repelled? The walls and gate which had at first seemed so forbidding to me now took on a quite different aspect, as the outriders of a fortress within which—should all go well and against my expectations—I might at last find once more the security that my father’s death had snatched away. Behind those high walls I could forget the shabbiness and poverty of that other existence. If only it could be so. I shut my eyes tight and offered up a prayer. If only it could be so.
The path was evidently seldom attended to. Moss and weeds choked it, and I began to fear that Barras Hall might, after all, be deserted or in a state of decay. Was this why there had been no reply to my mother’s letter? The trees, a mixture of oaks, beeches, and sycamores, had been left to grow without proper care. I remembered the splendid old trees in our garden at home, and all the pruning and lopping Tom our gardener had said was essential to their health. Here, clumps of dull green moss and splotches of unsightly fungi clung dispiritedly to the trunks, pitting and ruining the bark. I noticed several that had died and one, struck by lightning, that leaned heavily on its nearest neighbor, weighing it down.
I must have walked for almost half an hour. The gravel gave way in places to patches of half-frozen mud, across which I made my way with difficulty.
Turning a sharp corner, I found myself suddenly in full view of the house. Beneath a shrunken sky, from which it could have been cut out and deposited on the ground, it stood facing me like a wall of gray stone. I felt my knees go weak as I looked at it, wondering why I had ever been so stupid as to come here, so naive as to imagine I might ever be received with cousinly pity or concern.
You have seen houses like it on your travels. The drivers with their National Trust cards and their flasks of milky coffee visit them on weekends, to walk, silentfooted, in a daze of admiration, about their
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