Midsummer's Eve Read Free Page A

fresh. There were two rooms in the cottage—one leading from the other. The one at the back was where he and his grandmother slept—she on the truckle bed with a red cover, and the black cat always slept at the foot of her bed. Digory’s place was on the talfat—a board placed immediately below the ceiling which I was able to visualize because I had seen it in some of the labourers’ cottages. There was a stone-paved yard at the back and in this was an outhouse in which Mother Ginny stored her concoctions—a source of income to her and which could cure anything from a cold in the head to a stone in the kidney. She was very clever; she could get babies for people who wanted them and get rid of them for people who didn’t want them. She was as clever as God.
    “She couldn’t be a god,” I told him. “She would have to be a goddess. Of course she is rather ugly for one of them, but I suppose some of them might have been ugly. There were the Gorgons and Medusa. Fancy having snakes for hair. Can your grandmother make her hair into snakes?”
    “Of course,” said Digory.
    I was very over-awed and longed to see inside Mother Ginny’s cottage though I feared to.
    The harvest had been bad that year. I heard my father talking very seriously to my mother about it. He said the farmers would be tightening their belts. Last year’s had not been too bad; but this one was really alarming.
    Jacco and I used to ride round the estate with him quite frequently. He wanted us to show an interest in it.
    “The most important thing for a landowner is to be proud of his estate,” he told us. “He has to care for it as he would for a person.”
    He always listened with sympathy to what the tenants had to say. It was said that having had to “rough it” himself, he had a special understanding of their troubles, unlike some squires who had been accustomed to soft living all their lives. My father was much loved for this quality as well as respected.
    Following on the bad summer came the hard winter. I awoke most mornings to see a frosty pattern on the windows; there was tobogganing down the hill and skating on the river. The gales were so strong that the fishermen could not go out. During most mornings people went down to the beach to collect driftwood. Fires were needed all through the day and night to keep the house reasonably warm.
    We were all longing for the spring.
    And what a pleasure it was when it came—at last to see the buds appearing on the trees and in due course to hear the first cuckoo. I remember a spring morning when I went riding with my father. It was a holiday so I was free from my desk and my father had suggested I go with him on his rounds.
    We called at the Tregorrans’ farm and sat talking in the kitchen where Mrs. Tregorran brought forth a batch of currant buns from the oven and my father and I tasted one each and drank a glass of the Tregorran cider.
    Mr. Tregorran was a somewhat morose man; his wife was melancholy too. So gloom pervaded the house. Mr. Tregorran talked with habitual pessimism of the effect the weather had had on crops and livestock. His mare Jemima was in foal. He hoped luck would not run against him and that she would bring forth a healthy animal, though he doubted this, due to the conditions of the last months.
    “Poor Tregorran,” said my father as we rode away. “But he really enjoys bad luck so perhaps we should not pity him too much. Never look on the black side, Annora, or you can be sure fate will find a way of turning that side towards you. Now let’s call on the Cherrys and get the other side of the picture right away. I always like to do those two together.”
    Mrs. Cherry, the mother of six, was once again pregnant. It was a perpetual state with her. As soon as she was delivered of one child, another was on the way. But in spite of her constant disability, Mrs. Cherry was perpetually cheerful; she had a loud booming laugh which seemed to accompany all her remarks—funny or