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I should like to pay a special tribute to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated. Like a gentle, enthusiastic, and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong.
my jam jar of caterpillars.
Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers,
This doll’s-house garden was a magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures I had never seen before.
He was the perfect companion for an adventure,
If I slipped when climbing a dew-shiny bank, Roger appeared suddenly, gave a snort that sounded like suppressed laughter, a quick look over,
If I found something that interested me – an ant’s nest, a caterpillar on a leaf, a spider wrapping up a fly in swaddling clothes of silk – Roger sat down and waited until I had finished examining it.
‘What fools we are, eh? What fools, sitting here in the sun, singing. And of love, too! I am too old for it and you are too young, and yet we waste our time singing about it. Ah, well, let’s have a glass of wine, eh?’
At first he was tethered by a leg in the garden, but as he grew tamer we let him go where he pleased.
He learned his name in a very short time, and we had only to call out once or twice and then wait patiently for a while and he would appear,
Roger would creep up to Achilles and lick his front vigorously in an attempt to get the grape juice that the reptile had dribbled down himself.
when the licks became too overpowering and moist, he would retreat into his shell with an indignant wheeze, and refuse to come out until we had removed Roger from the scene.
As usual when a problem arose the entire family flung itself with enthusiasm into the task of solving it.
for I found that by writing things down I could learn and remember much more.
Flies, heat-drugged, would crawl slowly on the walls or fly drunkenly about the room, buzzing sleepily.
I realized, of course, that this vandalism was not intentional, but even so I was annoyed.
One hot, dreamy afternoon, when everything except the shouting cicadas seemed to be asleep,
his magnificent moustache, orange and white with nicotine and age,
In spite of his toothless gums, Yani tore large pieces of the bread off and champed them hungrily, swallowing great lumps that made his wrinkled throat swell.
So, absorbed and happy, we would pore over the microscope. Filled with enthusiasm, we would tack from subject to subject, and if Theodore could not answer my ceaseless flow of questions himself, he had books that could. Gaps would appear in the bookcase as volume after volume was extracted to be consulted, and by our side would be an ever-growing pile of volumes.
Anemones, delicate and easily wind-bruised, lifted ivory flowers the petals of which seemed to have been dipped in wine.
I fill the house with good books and I find your bedside table simply groaning under the weight of cookery books, gardening books, and the most lurid-looking mystery stories. I can’t think where you get hold of these things.’
When the last glow-worm had dragged his frosty emerald lantern to bed over the hills of moss, and the sun rose, the wall was taken over by the next set of inhabitants.
On hearing that we had planned a moonlight picnic and swim he reminded us that on that particular night there was no moon.
on the morrow.
I gazed through the window at the sky, watching the pink spread across the olive tops, extinguishing the stars one by one,
The person who plucked him was careless enough to put him in with a bunch of Michaelmas daisies. Fatal, absolutely fatal! You have no idea how cruel the daisy family is, on the whole. They are very rough-and-ready sort of flowers, very down to earth, and, of course, to put such an aristocrat as a rose amongst them is just asking for trouble.
Do you know that some people think it’s kind to change the water every day? Dreadful! You can hear the flowers dying if you do that. I change the water once a week, put a handful of earth in it, and they thrive.’
It seemed to me, in the gloom, that the flowers had moved closer to her, had crowded eagerly about her bed, as though waiting for her to tell them something.
they learned to fly. The early stages consisted in leaping off the table on the veranda, flapping their wings frantically, and gliding down to crash onto the stone flags some fifteen feet away. Their courage grew with the strength of their wings, and before very long they accomplished their first real flight, a merry-go-round affair around the villa.
He had large, very blue eyes that had a pleasant humorous twinkle in them,
Tottering mounds of hot scones; crisp, paper-thin biscuits; cakes like snowdrifts, oozing jam; cakes dark, rich, and moist, crammed with fruit; brandy snaps brittle as coral and overflowing with honey. Conversation was almost at a standstill; all that could be heard was the gentle tinkle of cups, and the heartfelt sigh of some
