7


She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely reading the
"Wesleyan Methodist Recorder," the shop at Babington, her father's
discontent, his solitary fishing and reading, his discovery of music . .
. science . . . classical music in the first Novello editions . . .
Faraday . . . speaking to Faraday after lectures. Marriage . . . the
new house . . . the red brick wall at the end of the garden where young
peach-trees were planted . . . running up and downstairs and singing . .
. both of them singing in the rooms and the garden . . . she sometimes
with her hair down and then when visitors were expected pinned in coils
under a little cap and wearing a small hoop . . . the garden and lawns
and shrubbery and the long kitchen-garden and the summer-house under the
oaks beyond and the pretty old gabled "town" on the river and the woods
all along the river valley and the hills shining up out of the mist.
The snow man they both made in the winter--the birth of Sarah and then
Eve . . . his studies and book-buying--and after five years her own
disappointing birth as the third girl, and the coming of Harriett just
over a year later . . . her mother's illness, money troubles--their two
years at the sea to retrieve . . . the disappearance of the sunlit
red-walled garden always in full summer sunshine with the sound of bees
in it or dark from windows . . . the narrowing of the house-life down to
the Marine Villa--with the sea creeping in--wading out through the green
shallows, out and out till you were more than waist deep--shrimping and
prawning hour after hour for weeks together . . . poking in the rock
pools, watching the sun and the colours in the strange afternoons . . .
then the sudden large house at Barnes with the "drive" winding to the
door. . . . He used to come home from the City and the Constitutional