Where we live, high on the southern moorlands of Surrey, the desolation of winter never seems to reach us; unless, indeed, upon certain days of streaming rains, or weeping mists that rush rapid and ghost-like up the valley, and blot out the world from view. But those days would be dreary anywhere and in any season.
Our funny little house, more like an Italian “Villino,” perhaps, than anything English, stands high, midway between the rolling shoulders of moor and the green-wooded dip of the valley. And the moor has always colour in it. There are some sunset days when it seems not so much to reflect as to give out rose and purple and carmine. And now in January it is a wonderful copper-brown, with the tawny of dying Bracken and the yellow of young Gorse. And opposite to us a belt of birchwood is purple against solemn green of pine. And the purple and solemn green run right down together to the bright verdure of fields and dells; then up again to moorland, where the fir trees march up once more against the sky.
There are Larches in these woods, and Oaks, so that the spring tints are almost as wonderful as the autumn. When the Furze and Broom are all guinea-gold on the moor, the young Bracken begins to creep in green patches that are pure joy. Later on the Bell-heather breaks into a deep rose which, with the sun on it, holds such a glory of colour that you could scarce find its match in an old Cathedral window. And when this splendour begins to turn to russet, then comes the tender silvery amethyst of the Ling, and spreads a mantle all over those great shoulders of wild land that is of the exact hue most beautiful to contrast with the full summer woods and the blue of an August sky; a combination so matchless for colour-loving eyes that it seems as if one’s soul were not big enough to hold the complete impression. And when our Delphiniums rear themselves against this background, we feel, looking on it all, as if we could sing for the mere rapture of it; or—having no voice—roll in the grass like Loki or like Bunny.
A LITTLE PLACE OF ONE’S OWN
For a long time we—Loki’s Grandfather and Grandmother—had said to each other that we must have a week-end cottage. We were so tired of hiring other people’s houses, summer after summer, and of the labour ‹not unattended by some pleasurable excitement on Loki’s Grandmother’s part› of pulling their furniture about, and hiding away all the family portraits and the choicest works of art, to make the alien spaces tolerable to one’s own individuality. So tired, too, of the boredom and worry of having to restore everything to its pristine ugliness and hang up the enlarged photographs and the dreadful oil paintings on the walls once more—a tedious task, albeit enlivened on one occasion by the thrilling discovery that, having consigned these treasures to an oak chest in the hall, most of them had grown fur; and that on another the oil painting of your detested landlady, in middle Victorian chignon and the hump of the period, has received a scratch on the nose which no copious application of linseed oil will disguise. We always detest our landlady ... though not as much as we loathe the tenants who may happen to hire a house of ours.
At the end of each summer, therefore, we would make elaborate calculations to prove what a great economy it would be to have a little place of our own. Finally these plans and desires crystallized into action. When Loki’s Grandfather returned from a round of inspection to the hotel where we were staying in the district we fancied, and told Loki’s Grandmother that he had visited a funny little house with a terrace upon which he “saw her”—in his own phraseology—she was extremely sceptical. And when we drove down the hill to view his discovery, and were literally dropped from the side road through a perfunctory gate into the steepest little courtyard it is possible to imagine, and she beheld green stains on the rough-cast wall of the white small house, her scepticism increased to scoffing point. She was blind to the charms of the pretty pillared porch. The narrowness of the entrance passage filled her with disdain. Though she grudgingly admitted a possibility in the drawing-room, it was not until we emerged upon the terrace that her preventions vanished.—That rise and fall of moorland in such startling proximity, and the way in which the house and its terraces seemed to cling to the hillside and be perched in space between the giant curves and the dip of the valley beyond, fairly took her breath away. An artist friend described the first impression of the view in these words: “It is so sudden!” For a long time, even after the queer, fascinating spot had become our own, this wonder of “suddenness” always seized us.
It still seems incomprehensible to us that anyone could have desired to dispossess himself of so attractive a place—an Italian “Villino” on the Surrey Highlands is not to be found every day.
But, after all, it only became a Villino after our ownership. It was just a small white house on the hillside before that. Heather and Gorse, Bramble and Bracken pressed hard upon the small area of the property which was at all cultivated, between densely growing clumps of pine and holly.