Chilling Memories

Beautiful perhaps. A beauty experienced, not just observed. English beauty. Isolation. Flowers and trees blooming. The English country doing what it does . Outside time. Outside the rest of life. Green and lovely. Looking from the window- I liked a high room with a good view so I could see the woods as the sun came up in the morning. The trees shading the flowers beneath them, which gives them more colour and more contrast.

I startled a deer in the deepest part of the wood one morning. We startled each other. It vanished in a moment, crashing through the undergrowth.

They were ways of avoiding the things we were supposed to do. I took my axe and went off alone all day to chop up fallen trees into disposable lumps. I could do it. Alone among the fallen timber, and with the strength and energy to turn it into logs you could pick up with one hand. It felt good. Primitive. And it was very slow. Time didn’t matter then. 

I awoke each morning and looked out of the window. On occasions I saw women gathering herbs for the kitchen. There was a tennis court and a croquet lawn, which could have been used but it seemed wrong to use them, too civilized. It was meant to feel rough and wild.

The house was very old, very big, and designed for comfort and pleasure. All the beauty of the land was visible from the windows of the rooms, because if we can, we live in beauty, and the erstwhile owner could

Bells I was charged with ringing. They meant something that wasn't really anything. Post breakfast cigarette on the terrace. With chat and views of the park. Walking the paths through the wood, crossing a stream, hearing only insects and the chirping of birds. Thinking the thoughts that you can think at those moments. Outside life and outside time.