I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

Even when we stopped concentrating he went on holding my hand, but I don’t think it meant anything; I rather fancy it is an American habit. On the whole, it felt just friendly and comfortable, though it did occasionally give me an odd flutter round the shoulders.

It was only while I was changing that I fully realized what I had let myself in for—I who hate cold water so much that even putting on a bathing-suit makes me shiver. I went down the kitchen stairs feeling like an Eskimo going to his frozen hell.

I said to God: “Please, I’m doing this for my sister—warm it up a bit.” But of course I knew He wouldn’t.

shoulder; he looked wonderful. I felt that what with the moonlight, the music, the scent of the stocks and having swum round a six-hundred-year-old moat, romance was getting a really splendid leg-up and it seemed an awful waste that we weren’t in love with each other—

“Congratulations, Simon—I see the beard has gone! Rose dear, I’m sure you know all that I’m wishing you.” I must say I thought that was rather neat; but it didn’t seem to strike Rose as having any double meaning.

Oh, darling, do you remember how we stood watching the woman buying a whole dozen pairs of silk stockings and you said we were like cats making longing noises for birds? I think it was that moment I decided I would do anything, anything, to stop being so horribly poor.

P.S. I have a bathroom all to myself and there are clean peach-coloured towels every single day. Whenever I feel lonely, I go and sit in there till I cheer up.

I do call it a sign of a beautiful nature if a girl who is in love and surrounded by all that splendour is lonely for her sister.

But suppose I were in love with him, as Rose is? That’s too hard to imagine. Then suppose it were Neil—because since he went away I have wondered if I am not just a little bit in love with him.

What I’d really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to. Of course no life is perfectly happy—

Heavens, I’m not envying Rose, I’m missing her!

There used to be two of us always on the look-out for life, talking to Miss Blossom at night, wondering, hoping; two Brontë-Jane Austen girls, poor but spirited, two Girls of Godsend Castle. Now there is only one, and nothing will ever be quite such fun again.

Ab has just walked in, mewing—it must be tea-time; that cat has a clock in his stomach.

It is like a flowering in the heart, a stirring of wings—oh, if only I could write poetry, as I did when I was a child! I have tried, but the words were as cheap as a sentimental song. So I tore them up.

I had a sudden longing to lie in the sun with nothing on. I never felt it before—Topaz has always had a monopoly of nudity in our household—but the more I thought of it, the more I fancied it. And I had the brilliant idea of doing my sunbathing on the top of the bedroom tower,

“It’s pure Surrealist,” said Simon, laughing. “I can never understand why there are so many derelict iron bedsteads lying about in the country.”

One thing he said was that he would never get used to the miracle of the long English twilight. It had never before struck me that we have long twilights—Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

You’re the kind of child who might develop a passion for Bach.” I told him I hadn’t at school. The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.

Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return—that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.

Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn’t. You can’t get insurance money without paying in premiums.

“It’d be most unfair not to—you’d be doing religion out of its very best chance.” “You mean ‘Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity’?”

“How the intelligent young do fight shy of the mention of God! It makes them feel both bored and superior.”

“And do religious people find out what it’s all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle?” “They get just a whiff of an answer sometimes.”

“Well, for inexperienced pray-ers it sometimes is. You see, they’re apt to think of God as a slot-machine. If nothing comes out they say ‘I knew dashed well it was empty’—when the whole secret of prayer is knowing the machine’s full.”

I took a chance on getting my face right in time for tea and had a very good cry, with cake and milk afterwards; and felt so much better than I usually do, even after crying, that I wondered if I really had come by some little whiff of God while I was in the church.

I can’t think why misery makes me lean against walls, but it does.

For once, I didn’t feel like crying; I wanted to shriek. So I ran out in the rain to an empty field a long way from anywhere and screamed blue murder;

And doing things for others gives you a lovely glow.” “So does port,” I said cynically.

Now it is very odd, but I have often told myself things through Miss Blossom that I didn’t know I knew.

You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.”

“But that’s how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too—only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.” Which way of life was best—hers or the Vicar’s?

I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villa...

what my mind’s eye was trying to tell me was that the Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people—he by his religion, she by her kindness to others.

And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering—perhaps, in a way, life itself.

You can’t cry on Heloïse; she thumps her tail sympathetically, but looks embarrassed and moves away.

I feel terribly sorry for love-lorn dogs. I can’t say Heloïse is minding much, though—she is looking rather smug.…..

Hyde Park has never belonged to any London—that it has always been, in spirit, a stretch of the countryside; and that it thus links the Londons of all periods together most magically—by remaining forever unchanged at the heart of the ever-changing town.

why one has the desire to describe beauty. “Perhaps it’s an attempt to possess it,”

I suppose it’s the complete identification with beauty one’s seeking.”

Even a broken heart doesn’t warrant a waste of good paper.