Home by Julie Andrews Page A

by the house, and indeed the owl did come most nights to sit in it. At first, I would lie in bed with the covers drawn tight, feeling a little spooked by its call, but I eventually came to love it and felt comforted knowing it was there—a guardian of the night.
    The house had four bedrooms: one for Mum and Pop, one which the two boys shared, one for guests, and one for me. We had no furniture to speak of, so my stepfather turned his hand to carpentry: he built a trestle dining table with coffee table to match, some window seats with storage below, bookcases, and coat racks. My mother purchased a monk’s bench, which remains in our family to this day. We didn’t have closets or wardrobes, so Mum ran up some curtains on her old Singer sewing machine and hung them on string across the corners of the bedrooms. My stepfather added poles behind them, so that we could hang our clothes.
    All the bedrooms had sinks with the exception of mine, which was right opposite the bathroom. There was a separate toilet upstairs and one downstairs with a wash-basin, plus one outside by the garage area. Almost every room had a small fireplace, which was the only source of heating.
    The main living room was big, with a bay window—a long room, which we used mostly for parties and for housing Mum’s piano. The room we occupied most was a second, slightly smaller lounge, on the other side of the entrance hall. My stepfather built a bar there, complete with foot rail. The kitchen was large and square, with an old gas cooker, an ancient sink, and a small breakfast room next to it. Most of the windows were leaded in traditional, latticework style, and there were wood floors throughout.
    Mum and Pop freshened up the whole house with emulsion paint. They stuccoed the long, rather dark living room in white, then stippled onto it a rose maroon color, and applied a high gloss over the lot. It was probably the fashionable thing to do, but the walls looked waxy, andwith the warmth of a crowd or if the fire was lit, they would run with condensation.
    My mother found a terrific bed for me—essentially a mattress on a strong wooden box with two big doors that opened for storage underneath. My little bedroom had a window seat and a fireplace, with a mantelpiece above for all my knickknacks. Pop created a dressing table by putting up a mirror and a shelf against the wall, and Mum covered the lower half with chintz fabric and added a stool.
    They purchased a prefab bungalow for the garden, inviting Uncle Hadge and his wife, Kit, to come and live there and be our gardener/caretakers.
    Hadge said that if he was really going to develop the garden, he would need a greenhouse, so a glass lean-to was added to the wall by the back door in the courtyard. A heater was installed, and to watch Hadge’s cuttings and plants flourish in their bedding boxes and to smell that delicious, earthy smell before entering the kitchen was to be hit with sudden, sensual delight. To this day I know of no more heady perfume than the smell of warm, damp earth.
    For a few brief shining months, Hadge revealed the magic that was in his fingertips. He pared back the roses on the arbor. He weeded the overgrown tennis court, mowed it, rolled it, marked out the tennis lines, and put up a net. He pruned the trees and the orchard began to bloom. There were canes of raspberries, black currants, cherry trees, apple trees—Cox’s Orange Pippins—and a plum tree. He grew beautiful sweet peas, lines and lines of them, and runner beans. Everything about the garden began to fall into shape, and it became my joy, my realm, my fantasyland. Life suddenly seemed a lot better and we finally had a place we could truly call home.
    I found a secret hiding place, down by the small copse beyond the tennis court—a little freak of nature where the forsythia had grown into a complete natural arch. I would lie on the ground looking up into the yellow sprigs and dream the day away. I began to wonder what I would