The happy tree

by Rosalind Murray

The truth was, I think, that she was never idle, only the things she did were not the kind of things that my mother would count.

She was interested in so many things; in flowers and animals, and little precious things in the house; little pieces of china, or even old chairs; they seemed to have a value for her which they had not for other people, not as objects, but almost as friends; they lived and felt and were real for her; you could see it from the way she touched them; and then, of course, she had Guy and Hugo . . . and they meant so much more to her than I ever meant to my mother.

Beyond the rose garden was the old wall; high and baked and a little bulging in places. Big espalier apple trees were trained across it, and pear trees too. There were two wrought-iron doors that led into the walled garden; one led out of the rose garden, and the other, in the centre of the wall, was called the ‘Jasmine Gate,’ because of a great bush of white jasmine which hung round it and over the wall.

Inside the wall there were more fruit trees; apples and pears again and plums and cherries; there were also currant bushes covered up in nets, and vegetables of all sorts.

And then there were flowers; a wide herbaceous border ran the length of the north wall, and it seems to me, even now, that the flowers in that border were brighter and bigger than any other flowers.

One year, too, there was a big clump of sunflowers, giant sunflowers, in a corner, away from the main border, and we made a house under the broad leaves, at least Hugo and I did, but Guy laughed at us . . . for he was older, and thought it silly; it was not a real house, like our house in the wood, he said; but Guy never laughed in a way that we could mind.

In the middle of the walled garden was a small round pond with a fountain in the middle. The fountain hardly ever played, but there were frogs in the pond, surprising quantities of frogs, and we used to call it the ‘Frog Pond.’ Twice we saw a mouse there too, on the little island of stones and weeds in the middle, where the spout of the fountain was. The mouse was running about among the stones, picking up something from under the weeds, and then it met a frog sitting stolidly on a stone, and it jumped back suddenly. We lay on our stomachs at the edge of the pond for a long time, watching for the mouse to come back, and then it was dinner time, and we had to go in. We only saw it once again, though we watched for it often, but the question of how it got there, and how it got away, occupied us a great deal, and its existence imparted a new interest to the pond.

Inside the house there was a special smell that I have never met anywhere else. It was a sweet, clean smell, and faint; what it came from exactly, it would be hard to say; lavender and pot-pourri, and old polished floors, and old brocade; sweet and faint and slightly pungent.

Sometimes I have caught whiffs of smells in other places that were just a little like it, and they have brought Yearsly back to me more vividly and suddenly than anything else, as though I had just come in by the garden door, and were standing in the hall.

The drawing-room was on the left of the door, as you went in from the garden. It was a very long room, with four tall windows along the side and one at the end, and there were two fireplaces with high chimney-pieces, white marble, with carved figures in faint relief, and over the chimney-pieces were high mirrors that reflected back the green of the garden from the windows facing them. There were yellow brocade curtains, very old and faded, and white shield back chairs upholstered in the same yellow brocade.