ten, and when you open them, you’ll be on the ground.” And so we began to do minor acrobatics, which scared my mother half to death, for he might stand on the swing and lift me up to his shoulders while we flew out over the grass. I smelled summer lavender upon him, and sometimes I smelled the sea, too, for it was just in sight. I had no other friends on the island, and my other brothers paid no attention to me.
Harvey taught me the nursery rhymes our father had taught him when he had been my age, including the swinging rhyme about Jack Hackaway. “Jack Hackaway is a little troll who takes children to the goblins when they fall,” he said, and now and then to scare me a little he might say, as we swung, “Who goes there? Jack Hackaway, is that you ?”
Sometimes I felt as if I were flying with wings on when we swung together. He always treated me as if I were the special one in the family. I loved those memories, and I cherish them even now.
By my seventh year, my father had been called to Burma by the British government, for there was a war and he was a trader in wars. So many wars came and went while I was a child that even in later years, I barely remembered what my father looked like, or how he spoke, for it was like remembering a haunting stranger seen once in a crowded train station and then never again.
My mother and my older brothers and I were packed off to my father’s ancestral home across the sea to watch over his own father, who was close to death. We moved into Belerion Hall, traveling from my beloved cottage off the Long Island Sound to the rocky cliffs of the furthest perch of Cornwall.
My first sight of the place was painful. I saw in its slate-gray curtain of rain nothing but a large prison, so unlike the delicate, wispy cottage I considered our true home, with its azalea and rhododendron bushes all around and the honeysuckle in midsummer. This new home had dead gardens that brimmed with the skeletons of briars, while moss slickened its rusty stones. Belerion Hall seemed like a millwork factory that had closed years ago, a great turgid red brick monolith to an unhappy era.
If Belerion Hall had the puritanical face of a factory, then my grandfather could best be described as the Gray Minister, which is what my brother Harvey named him immediately after our first encounter. “The Gray Minister lurks,” he’d whisper to me as I giggled. “He listens at keyholes.” Or after supper, when we played charades in the nursery, Harvey would make a signal in the air with his hands as if waving and say, “The Gray Minister comes a-tap-tapping.” This got the both of us in trouble when Spence told our grandfather of the nickname, and the elderly man came at Harvey with his gold-tipped cane, leaving my brother with bloodied trousers. Harvey had protected me, pushing me behind one of the many curtained alcoves of the corridors so that I might not be found for punishment.
Our grandfather was a tall, gaunt man of seventy, with a white wisp of beard like a goat, and a long pale face that rose up to meet the bits of peppery scrub hair left him upon his scalp.
He had eyes that always seemed red and smudged with sleeplessness, and his lips were thin and drawn back over an uneven row of teeth. He seemed perpetually smeared with a slight layer of coal dust, as if he’d been rooting around in the cellars. He rarely wore anything other than a gray coat, and beneath this, a stiff white shirt with a heavy white collar, both of which the maid had to press daily. His shoes and trousers were gray, as well, and he carried the Bible with him, though it was worn and its binding crackled and threatened to turn to dust each time he opened it.
“To spill thy seed,” he often warned Spence and Harvey, “is to invoke the wrath of God.”
To me, he would say (even when I was eleven or twelve), “Woman, thou art a temptation to Man. Clean thyself and thy thoughts. Scrub the
Harvey taught me the nursery rhymes our father had taught him when he had been my age, including the swinging rhyme about Jack Hackaway. “Jack Hackaway is a little troll who takes children to the goblins when they fall,” he said, and now and then to scare me a little he might say, as we swung, “Who goes there? Jack Hackaway, is that you ?”
Sometimes I felt as if I were flying with wings on when we swung together. He always treated me as if I were the special one in the family. I loved those memories, and I cherish them even now.
By my seventh year, my father had been called to Burma by the British government, for there was a war and he was a trader in wars. So many wars came and went while I was a child that even in later years, I barely remembered what my father looked like, or how he spoke, for it was like remembering a haunting stranger seen once in a crowded train station and then never again.
My mother and my older brothers and I were packed off to my father’s ancestral home across the sea to watch over his own father, who was close to death. We moved into Belerion Hall, traveling from my beloved cottage off the Long Island Sound to the rocky cliffs of the furthest perch of Cornwall.
My first sight of the place was painful. I saw in its slate-gray curtain of rain nothing but a large prison, so unlike the delicate, wispy cottage I considered our true home, with its azalea and rhododendron bushes all around and the honeysuckle in midsummer. This new home had dead gardens that brimmed with the skeletons of briars, while moss slickened its rusty stones. Belerion Hall seemed like a millwork factory that had closed years ago, a great turgid red brick monolith to an unhappy era.
If Belerion Hall had the puritanical face of a factory, then my grandfather could best be described as the Gray Minister, which is what my brother Harvey named him immediately after our first encounter. “The Gray Minister lurks,” he’d whisper to me as I giggled. “He listens at keyholes.” Or after supper, when we played charades in the nursery, Harvey would make a signal in the air with his hands as if waving and say, “The Gray Minister comes a-tap-tapping.” This got the both of us in trouble when Spence told our grandfather of the nickname, and the elderly man came at Harvey with his gold-tipped cane, leaving my brother with bloodied trousers. Harvey had protected me, pushing me behind one of the many curtained alcoves of the corridors so that I might not be found for punishment.
Our grandfather was a tall, gaunt man of seventy, with a white wisp of beard like a goat, and a long pale face that rose up to meet the bits of peppery scrub hair left him upon his scalp.
He had eyes that always seemed red and smudged with sleeplessness, and his lips were thin and drawn back over an uneven row of teeth. He seemed perpetually smeared with a slight layer of coal dust, as if he’d been rooting around in the cellars. He rarely wore anything other than a gray coat, and beneath this, a stiff white shirt with a heavy white collar, both of which the maid had to press daily. His shoes and trousers were gray, as well, and he carried the Bible with him, though it was worn and its binding crackled and threatened to turn to dust each time he opened it.
“To spill thy seed,” he often warned Spence and Harvey, “is to invoke the wrath of God.”
To me, he would say (even when I was eleven or twelve), “Woman, thou art a temptation to Man. Clean thyself and thy thoughts. Scrub the
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