I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.

I am no beauty but have a neatish face.

It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge and, as there was no doubt whatever that he had seriously damaged the neighbour, he was sent to prison for three months.

it was then that he took a forty years’ lease of the castle, which is an admirable place to be unsociable

All his natural gaiety has vanished. At times he puts on a false cheerfulness that embarrasses me, but usually he is either morose or irritable—I think I should prefer it if he lost his temper as he used to. Oh, poor father, he really is very pathetic.

Mother died eight years ago, from perfectly natural causes. I think she must have been a shadowy person, because I have only the vaguest memory of her and I have an excellent memory for most things.

(I can remember the cake-knife incident perfectly—I hit the fallen neighbour with my little wooden spade. Father always said this got him an extra month.)

one by H. J. Allardy which shows her nude on an old horsehair-covered sofa that she says was very prickly. This is called “Composition”; but as Allardy has painted her even paler than she is, “Decomposition” would suit it better.

Your father says that the men who paint me nude paint my body and think of their job, but that Macmorris paints my head and thinks of my body. And it’s perfectly true.

As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.

He grows vegetables for us and looks after the hens and does a thousand odd jobs—I can’t think how we should get on without him. He is eighteen now, very fair and noble-looking but his expression is just a fraction daft. He has always been rather devoted to me; father calls him my swain.

I shall have to get off the draining-board—Topaz wants the tea-cosy and our dog, Heloïse, has come in and discovered I have borrowed her blanket.

All right, Heloïse darling, you shall have your blanket. She gazes at me with love, reproach, confidence and humour—how can she express so much just with two rather small slanting eyes?

Perhaps I ought to have counted Miss Blossom as a piece of furniture. She is a dressmaker’s dummy of most opulent figure with a wire skirt round her one leg. We are a bit silly about Miss Blossom—we pretend she is real. We imagine her to be a woman of the world, perhaps a barmaid in her youth.

But things have happened to him so that he can’t write any more. You can’t write just for the wanting.”

Rose says I am always crediting people with emotions I should experience myself in their situation, but I am sure I had a real flash of intuition then.

I could easily go on writing all night but I can’t really see and it’s extravagant on paper, so I shall merely think. Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.

I don’t intend to let myself become the kind of author who can only work in seclusion—after all, Jane Austen wrote in the sitting-room and merely covered up her work when a visitor called (though I bet she thought a thing or two)—but I am not quite Jane Austen yet and there are limits to what I can stand.

Ab, our beautiful pale ginger cat, is keeping my stomach warm—I am leaning over him to write on the top of the cistern. His real name is Abelard, to go with Heloïse (I need hardly say that Topaz christened them),

flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.

How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse—see the sheer grey stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no sound of any kind came to us. Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.

there was a small window open near the front door that he could put Rose through to let us in. I was glad he said Rose and not me—I would have been terrified to be alone in the house for a second. Rose was never frightened of anything; she was trying to scramble up to the window even before father got there to lift her.

“It must have been beautiful once—and could be again,” he said,

the diamond-paned windows overlooking the garden and full of the sunset were beautiful, and I was already in love with the moat. While Rose and I were waving to our reflections, father went off through the short passage to the kitchen—

suddenly heard him shouting “The swine, the swine!” Just for an instant I thought he had found pigs, but it turned out to be his continued opinion of the people who had spoilt the house.

“Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.” Father sat down on the side of the bath and roared with laughter. He would never have anything in the bathroom changed so even the text is still there.

when at last we came out on the battlemented top of the tower it was worth it all—I had never felt so high in my life. And I was so triumphant at having been brave enough to come up. Not that I had had any choice; Rose had kept butting me from behind.

She had read bits of that book aloud to me until I got so frightened that mother stopped her.

We climbed the ridges and then Rose and I took hands and ran down the smooth slope—faster and faster, so that I thought we should fall. All the time we were running I felt extremely frightened, but I enjoyed it. The whole evening was like that.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” cried father. “I’ll have it if it takes my last penny.”

Mother said: “If it’s to be my cross, I suppose God will give me the strength to bear it.”

Mother brought us up to believe that he was a genius and that geniuses mustn’t be hurried.

for I would approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb and I cannot feel that I should give satisfaction.

Father said: “Let me add to your simple pleasure in Nature’s violence by reminding you that there will shortly be at least six glorious new leaks in our roof.”

He sat very still, just staring in front of him. It struck me how completely out of touch with him I am. I went over and sat on the fender and talked about the weather; and then realized that I was making conversation as if to a stranger.

“Hence the need for a little briskness,” said father. “Unless____;Of course, he’s a godlike youth. I’m rather glad he’s not devoted to Rose.”

“Oh, don’t bother your head about it. You’ve so much common sense you’ll probably do the right thing instinctively. It’s no use telling Topaz to advise you because she’d think it all very splendid and natural—and for all I know, it might be. God knows what’s to become of you girls.”

“I understand,” I said, “and I’ll be brisk—within reason.” But I wonder if I shall ever manage it. And I wonder if it is really necessary—surely Stephen’s devotion isn’t anything serious or grown-up? But now that the idea has been put into my head,

“You’re too old to believe in fairy tales.” I knew I had put my foot in it and thought I might as well go a bit further. “Honestly, father—aren’t you trying to write at all?” “My dear Cassandra,” he said in a cutting voice he very seldom uses, “it’s time this legend that I’m a writer ceased.

back there through the rain. It was slackening off at last. The air smelt very fresh. I leaned out over the garden and found it was much warmer than indoors—it always takes our house a while to realize a change in the weather.

Then she threw her head back, opened her arms wide and took a giant breath. “It’s only a whiff of spring, not whole lungs full,”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Rose. “I feel grim. I haven’t any clothes, I haven’t any prospects. I live in a mouldering ruin and I’ve nothing to look forward to but old age.”

“It’s the long, cold winter,” I suggested. “It’s the long, cold winter of my life,” said Rose, at which Thomas laughed so much that he choked.

I asked her to describe her exact feelings up there, but she said she hadn’t had any until she turned giddy. That is one great difference between us: I would have had any number of feelings and have wanted to remember them all; she would just be thinking of wishing on the stone head.

The last stage of a bath, when the water is cooling and there is nothing to look forward to, can be pretty disillusioning. I expect alcohol works much the same way.

For once Topaz had her lute in tune. And she was, most appropriately, playing “Green Sleeves.”

Topaz says that if they don’t find anything she will get bare branches and tie something amusing to them—if so, I bet it doesn’t amuse me; one would think that a girl who appreciates nudity as Topaz does would let a bare branch stay bare.

I thought of how different she had been in her black mood not half an hour before, and that made me remember her wishing on the devil-angel. Just then, a queer thing happened. Simon Cotton had seemed about equally fascinated by Rose and the kitchen—he kept turning from one to the other.