The beginning is Yearsly. People say that places ought not to matter—still less houses, but I think they do. Yearsly has mattered to me, and it did to Guy and Hugo. It stood for something very stable, very enduring, and very sympathetic. Yearsly without Cousin Delia might have been something quite different; it is quite different now; but I think of them together, complementary to each other. Cousin Delia’s personality pervaded everything at Yearsly, and everything there seemed somehow an enhancement and expression of her; and yet each was distinct. Yearsly had something that it had had long before she came there, and Cousin Delia had something, and a great deal, that she must have had before she came, and would have had wherever she was: she has it now.
The house at Yearsly was of grey stone; it was a long plain house built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a door in the middle and a row of high sash windows on either side of the door. Above this was a second row of windows, and a kind of Classical stone cornice overhung the upper windows. The roof was steeper than is usual in such houses, and was also grey; grey slates or chips of stone, with patches of green moss on them.
Once it had been a much bigger house, with a long bedroom wing stretching back, northwards, at the east end of the house, but that had been burnt down in 1830, and never rebuilt, and when I first remember it, this centre block was the entire house.
In the middle of the house was a hall, stretching from back to front, and the two main doors, the ‘Front’ door to the north, and the ‘Garden’ door to the south, faced each other across it. Standing on the south side of the house, you could look right through to the clouds at the north. The garden door stood open almost always, except in winter.
The hall reached up to the top of the house, and the big staircase wound up and round it, ending in a square wooden gallery from which the bedrooms opened.
In front of the house, the Garden Front, stretched a long lawn, with a wide gravel path down the middle; at the end of the path six stone steps led down to a lower lawn where we played tennis, and, at the top of the steps, one on each side, stood two lead statues; one of Diana with a bow, and the other, a hero leaning forward with a shield. The lead of the statues was perishing away, and there was a great crack across Diana’s head, but they stood out clear, and almost black, from all the south windows of the house.
Below the tennis court was a piece of meadow sloping down to the Mellock river, with its two lines of willows, flowing at this point due east, and almost parallel with the front of the house. A little further on, it turned sharply southward, wandering away through the low-lying meadows beyond the hill.
At the east end of the house were beach trees: the nearest grew within a few feet of the wall, and their branches threw green lights and shadows into the end windows, and filled the rooms on windy nights with a swishing sound like the sea.
Further from the house the trees thickened up into the ‘High wood’ which stretched along the side of the hill, southward, above the course of the river, for a little way.
This wood was a particular home for us: we played in the trees like birds or squirrels, and built great nests of sticks in which we sat.