shuffling footsteps descending the creaking stairs.
There were many cats which frequented my aunt’s colourless garden at night. You could sometimes see them sneaking along the walls in the moonlight, or observe them, crouched down, watching each other with endless patience.
Their calls would wake me up, and the eerie sound would cause me to think of ghosts. I would lie awake, staring into the darkness, listening for the shuffling feet of the old recluse.
Each time the cats screamed and I lay listening, heart beating faster, I thought of what Prosset would have said, and the way he would have looked at me; he would have been genuinely astonished that anybody could be even momentarily frightened by a cat in a garden at night, or that I should listen for the sound of an elderly gentleman’s ghostly steps. I suppose he would have been quite right, too, but Prosset was an exceptional character. He never knew any fear, and I doubt if he knew any in those last moments in the cottage at Ockleton; he would have looked on death with surprise, maybe, but that is about all. I was never in a position to test his nerve in the presence of anything supernatural, but I don’t think it would have failed. He would have reacted as usual, magnificently, chin up, his eyes calculating and cool, facing the direction whence the threat would come.
I wasn’t made like that. I wished I had had a loaded gun by my bed, but my little single-barrel hammer gun was down in Somerset in Aunt Nell’s gunroom. I wished I had had some means of defence; even if it were only a cudgel, and even though I realized you could hardly defend yourself against a spirit with a charge of gunshot or a club.
I remember that those holidays I went off for my week’s stay with my Aunt Nell, as always, in high spirits. Aunt Nell was as different from gentle Aunt Edith as anybody could be.
She was the wife of my father’s uncle, a sort of great-aunt by marriage. She, too, had lost her husband and she lived alone in a large Georgian mansion with about eight hundred acres of farmland and woodland. She was a remarkable old girl, beak-nosed, imperious and short-tempered, and in her youth she had been a great rider to hounds. Now she bred polo ponies, and knew as much about farming as any man in the neighbourhood. She did not make the place show a profit, but she at least made it pay its way. When I stayed with her, I saw comparatively little of her.
I would be out with my gun all day. At mealtimes we sat at opposite ends of a vast mahogany table, waited on by a butler and footman in livery. In the evenings she attended to her correspondence and I read a book. I was not much interested in her, and I had the impression that she was not much interested in me, at any rate while I was very young; and that she had me to stay because I was one of the family, and she thought I ought to be brought up with some vague idea of how the English gentry lived on their estates. But, in view of later events, I think I did her an injustice, and that in her rough way she tried to put some backbone into me.
Apart from being in the country, I enjoyed the luxury of the great house, the choice of food, and having my clothes laid out for me at the beginning of each day by the footman, while I still lay in bed, drowsy and warm. It was so different from the house in Earl’s Court, with its smell of mice, the dank garden, the horrid little leaded windows on the landings, each with a design in red and blue glass.
I have been down there recently. Aunt Nell is long since dead. Death duties made havoc of the property, so that her nephew, who inherited it, was unable to keep it up. It was occupied for a time during the war, but now it is empty. Nobody wants it. It is too big, too isolated. The long drive is covered with weeds, and where the cars used to sweep proudly round with a swish of tyres to deposit their passengers by the great porch there is now a sea of dandelions.
On the south side, velvety
There were many cats which frequented my aunt’s colourless garden at night. You could sometimes see them sneaking along the walls in the moonlight, or observe them, crouched down, watching each other with endless patience.
Their calls would wake me up, and the eerie sound would cause me to think of ghosts. I would lie awake, staring into the darkness, listening for the shuffling feet of the old recluse.
Each time the cats screamed and I lay listening, heart beating faster, I thought of what Prosset would have said, and the way he would have looked at me; he would have been genuinely astonished that anybody could be even momentarily frightened by a cat in a garden at night, or that I should listen for the sound of an elderly gentleman’s ghostly steps. I suppose he would have been quite right, too, but Prosset was an exceptional character. He never knew any fear, and I doubt if he knew any in those last moments in the cottage at Ockleton; he would have looked on death with surprise, maybe, but that is about all. I was never in a position to test his nerve in the presence of anything supernatural, but I don’t think it would have failed. He would have reacted as usual, magnificently, chin up, his eyes calculating and cool, facing the direction whence the threat would come.
I wasn’t made like that. I wished I had had a loaded gun by my bed, but my little single-barrel hammer gun was down in Somerset in Aunt Nell’s gunroom. I wished I had had some means of defence; even if it were only a cudgel, and even though I realized you could hardly defend yourself against a spirit with a charge of gunshot or a club.
I remember that those holidays I went off for my week’s stay with my Aunt Nell, as always, in high spirits. Aunt Nell was as different from gentle Aunt Edith as anybody could be.
She was the wife of my father’s uncle, a sort of great-aunt by marriage. She, too, had lost her husband and she lived alone in a large Georgian mansion with about eight hundred acres of farmland and woodland. She was a remarkable old girl, beak-nosed, imperious and short-tempered, and in her youth she had been a great rider to hounds. Now she bred polo ponies, and knew as much about farming as any man in the neighbourhood. She did not make the place show a profit, but she at least made it pay its way. When I stayed with her, I saw comparatively little of her.
I would be out with my gun all day. At mealtimes we sat at opposite ends of a vast mahogany table, waited on by a butler and footman in livery. In the evenings she attended to her correspondence and I read a book. I was not much interested in her, and I had the impression that she was not much interested in me, at any rate while I was very young; and that she had me to stay because I was one of the family, and she thought I ought to be brought up with some vague idea of how the English gentry lived on their estates. But, in view of later events, I think I did her an injustice, and that in her rough way she tried to put some backbone into me.
Apart from being in the country, I enjoyed the luxury of the great house, the choice of food, and having my clothes laid out for me at the beginning of each day by the footman, while I still lay in bed, drowsy and warm. It was so different from the house in Earl’s Court, with its smell of mice, the dank garden, the horrid little leaded windows on the landings, each with a design in red and blue glass.
I have been down there recently. Aunt Nell is long since dead. Death duties made havoc of the property, so that her nephew, who inherited it, was unable to keep it up. It was occupied for a time during the war, but now it is empty. Nobody wants it. It is too big, too isolated. The long drive is covered with weeds, and where the cars used to sweep proudly round with a swish of tyres to deposit their passengers by the great porch there is now a sea of dandelions.
On the south side, velvety
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