The Tall Girl from Somerset 6

In a secluded part of the garden, a long way from the house, and far away from the bonfire patch, in the corner by the field, was a round lily pond.   The whole of Erewhon was perfect, but the lily pond was nirvana.  When Anne was a child, she used to go there to escape from school and exams.  As she grew up, it was protection against challenges and obligations. It was the place where she could be on her own.  The pond was surrounded by a paved walk, and around the walk was a tall yew hedge, so thick that no one could peer through, winter or summer.  By the pond was an old wooden bench, and this was the place for dreaming while the tadpoles slowly changed into frogs.

Near the house was a stone barn with a hay loft and next to that some cow houses.  These were empty of cows, for Erewhon was no longer a farm.  As a child Anne played with the old metal chains, which had once tethered the cows for milking and now hung down from the wooden stalls and were rusting through lack of use. There was a holly tree in the thorn hedge that separated the hen pen from the field.  It was a good-sized tree and every Christmas Anne’s father cut the holly there.  Every picture in the house was decorated with holly, and the holly tree never grew any bigger because of this annual pruning. 

But time has passed, as it inexorably does, like the race-winning tortoise, since Anne played in the cow stalls, and she was now 18.

I have a photo of Anne here on my desk.  It’s one of her at the end of Brean Down.  We walked there one Saturday over Christmas.  There was a biting wind, and then it came on to rain, but we managed to reach the end of the line of hills that stretched into the sea.  We reached the end and that is always important.  Then it was a quick sandwich in the shelter of a rock and after that we walked back with the wind and the rain  in our faces.     And this is her matriculation at Oxford, October 64.  Look at her smiling there!  There she is, the tall one.  The second from the right.

How we do try for the camera!  All hopes and fears are put aside, and we smile just for the necessary 1/125^th of a second. Happiness is short, isn’t it?  When that photo was taken, I have the feeling that Anne was battling away with various doubts and worries, but more of that later. There she is, and she looks very happy.

Erewhon has gone now.  Not nobly razed to the ground or magnificently burnt in a raging fire like Thornfield or Manderley, but bought by a Bristol solicitor and changed, changed out of all recognition from a rambling old farm, where the cows had filed in daily, to a prim, expensive country house for a prim, expensive city lawyer.  Do not look for the lily pond behind the old yew hedge; it is gone.  It is a paved barbecue area now.  There is a gleaming metal barbecue where the lily pond used to be. Health and safety regulations do not like lily ponds. Do not look for the cow stalls where the chains hung down, slowly rusting.  They are gone, thrown away in the first clean-up.  Inside the walls of the old barn, where there was a glorious muddle of bales of straw and the bean poles gathered from the hedges and used for the noble line of runner beans every summer, there is now separate accommodation with two en-suite bedrooms. 
The garden has gone. The mint bed, the rows of broad beans, the potatoes and the peas, the carrots and the beetroot. All are gone.  Now it has been put down to lawn.
The old farmhouse which worked with cows, hens and goats, with cabbages, plums and apples, is now retired and has nothing to fill its hours winter or summer  
‘How nice!  Yes, it’s very nice.  Oh yes, Erewhon is a very pretty house.’

Erewhon is now full of taste and empty of life.  
The old house cannot be happy.