Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one half looked like a crescent moon; and I said to my mother, “We shan’t be able to break biscuits like that any more.”
CHAPTER III
MEMBLAND
To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge.
On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove.
When you went through the front hall you came into a large billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper—but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there was a large double writing-table.
Later, under the staircase, there was an organ, and the pipes of the great organ were on the wall.
There was a drawing-room full of chintz chairs, books, potpourri, a grand pianoforte, and two writing-tables; a dining-room looking south; a floor of guests’ rooms; a bachelors’ passage in the wing; a schoolroom on the ground floor looking north, with a little dark room full of rubbish next to it, which was called the Cabinet Noir, and where we were sent when we were naughty; and a nursery floor over the guests’ rooms.
From the northern side of the house you could see the hills of Dartmoor. In the west there was a mass of tall trees, Scotch firs, stone-pines, and ashes.