Three Houses by Angela Thirkell Read Free Book Online Page B

long rise a clear expanse of country was open before us. Roedean School was still in its cradle in Sussex Square and there was nothing to break the long lovely lines of the downs. Brighton lay behind us, the gasometers were passed, and the only signs of man’s handiwork that we could see ahead were the black windmill and, between usand the sea, the tall chimney that was a ventilation shaft for Brighton’s main sewer, a gaunt ugly piece of utilitarianism, very different from the shaft at the other side of Rottingdean which was disguised as an enchanting little cottage, white with green shutters. Only on some days did a wind blowing from its direction across the downs betray what the house was meant to hide. All the rest of the way the old road ran green and deserted between us and the cliffs. In places it was quite broken away, but much of it was untouched, with a little strip of grass still left between the further bank and the sea. Only if you went near the edge you could see ominous cracks, and the beach below was strewn with huge fragments of chalk that had crashed down in the winter when alternate frost and thaw were doing their destructive work. Here and there a few houses stood roofless and derelict, abandoned as the cliff crumbled and fell, used as a resting-place by tramps. Presently a long valley opened on our left and we stopped to set down a passenger for Ovingdean which lay half a mile or so away among trees at the end of a white road. Here my mother would takeadvantage of this stop to turn us out and make us walk up the last hill. This time we felt less resentful, for Nanny was safely inside the bus with our baby sister and with her eye removed we could scramble up the steep bank of the chalk cutting, clutching at scabious and yellow horned poppy as we climbed, and walk along the top of the ridge looking down on to the bus. Now we came to Greenways, the only house facing the old Dover Road that was still inhabited. Behind it were pigsties and we could hang over the wall watching and smelling those agreeable animals till the bus caught us up.
    Then the drag was put on, leaving those shiny smooth marks on the surface of the road, and we skidded down hill into the village while Charlie the conductor blew his long coaching horn. Charlie was one of the village wits, a tremendous favourite with all the maids. When he stood at the back of the bus, swaying to its motion as it turned down to the right to the White Horse, the archangel Gabriel would have compared poorly with him in our eyes. The White Horse was the official terminus of the omnibus, but after delivering some parcelsit would go round the village putting passengers down at their doors. The White Horse was a real seaside inn then, facing the sea across a strip of grass known, from the name of its proprietor, as ‘Welfare’s Green’. The older inhabitants of the village remembered when the Dover Coach Road ran between Welfare’s Green and the sea, but in our time it had all crumbled away and only a fragment of the inner bank was left, which would fall in the next frosts. West of the green was a large ugly house, vaguely Gothic in style, what my grandfather used to call ‘battlemented, castellated, Blue-beard Bosh’. Its garden wall was perilously on the edge of the cliffs and summer after summer we would see how more of the garden had slipped into the sea till at last the house itself began to fall piecemeal and its remains were carted away. In the far corner of the green was a little summer-house of trellis, ‘erected’, in the words of Dickens, ‘by humane men for the accommodation of spiders’, where, in the season, a photographer took up his daily abode. His whole stock in trade was half a dozen of those delightful triumphs of the scene-painter’s art which representa lady and gentleman in bathing dress, or riding like Templars two at once on a donkey, with holes to put your face through. We would have given a week’s pocket money to be