Hello there,
It's Mandy here.
Thanks so much for joining me tonight.
It's always rather exciting starting a new book.
And tonight is the first chapter of Elizabeth and her German Garden,
Which is written by and is a kind of autobiography of Elizabeth von Arnim.
Some of you may have listened to The Enchanted April over on Free Tracks here on Insight Timer.
This is a very different kind of listen,
But hopefully you'll find it just as enjoyable.
Mary Annette Beauchamp,
Known to us today as the writer Elizabeth von Arnim,
Was born in Sydney,
Australia on the 31st of August,
1866.
At the time,
Her family was living in a very prestigious home on Kirribilli Point in Sydney.
Her father had been born in London into an artistic and cultured family,
And he was the first of his brothers to migrate to Australia,
Where he'd made his fortune in Sydney as a shipping merchant.
Anyway,
More about Elizabeth and her family are on.
Before I go ahead tonight,
Please feel free to make yourself really comfortable and settle down into your chair or your bed.
Relax your hands.
Drop your shoulders.
And soften your jaw.
That's great.
So if you're ready,
Then I shall begin.
May the 7th.
I love my garden.
I am writing in it now in the late afternoon loveliness,
Much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower.
Two owls are perched near me and are carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales.
The gentleman owl says,
And she answers from her tree a little way off,
Beautifully assenting to and completing the remark,
As becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me,
But I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.
This is less a garden than a wilderness.
No one has lived in the house,
Much less in the garden,
For 25 years,
And it is such a pretty old place that the people who might have lived here and did not,
Deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town,
Must have belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed.
Noseless too,
Though it does not sound pretty,
But the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves.
I am always happy out of doors,
Be it understood,
For indoors there are servants and furniture,
But in quite different ways,
And my spring happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness,
Though it is not more intense,
And there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my frostbound garden,
In spite of my years and children.
But I did it behind a bush,
Having a due regard for the decencies.
There are so many bird cherries around me,
Great trees with branches sweeping the grass,
And they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderest green,
That the garden looks like a wedding.
I never saw such masses of them,
They seem to fill the place.
Even across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east,
And right in the middle of the cornfield beyond,
There is an immense one,
A picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.
My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows,
And beyond are great stretches of sandy heath and pine forests,
And where the forests leave off,
The bare heath begins again.
But the forests are beautiful in their lofty pink-stemmed vastness,
Far overhead the crowns of softest grey-green,
And underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet,
And everywhere the breathless silence.
And the bare heaths are beautiful too,
For one can see across them into eternity almost,
And to go out onto them with one's face toward the setting sun is like going into the very presence of God.
In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird cherries and greenery where I spend my happy days,
And in the middle of the oasis is the grey stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights.
The house is very old and has been added to at various times.
It was a convent before the Thirty Years' War,
And the vaulted chapel,
With its brick floor worn by pious peasant knees,
Is now used as a hall.
Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes pass through more than once,
As is duly recorded in archives still preserved,
For we are on what was then the high road between Sweden and Brandenburg the Unfortunate.
The Lion of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to his convictions,
But he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns,
Who were not without convictions of their own,
Sending them out onto the wide empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of silence here.
From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the plain,
With no obstacle in the shape of a hill,
Right away to a blue line of distant forest,
And on the west side uninterruptedly to the setting sun,
Nothing but a green rolling plain with a sharp edge against the sunset.
I love those west windows better than any others and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the house,
So that even times of hair brushing may not be entirely lost,
And the young woman who attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties about a mistress recumbent in an easy chair before an open window,
And to not profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time.
This girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the garden and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me.
The people round about are persuaded that I am,
To put it as kindly as possible,
Exceedingly eccentric,
For the news has traveled that I spend the day out of doors with a book and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook.
But why cook when you can get someone to cook for you?
And as for sewing,
The maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could,
And all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.
We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as well make use of this place by coming down and living in it.
Those five years were spent in a flat in a town,
And during their whole indeterminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy,
Which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there,
Here was this very dear place with dandelions up to the very door,
All the paths grass-grown and completely effaced,
In winter so lonely,
With nobody but the north wind taking the least notice of it,
And in May,
In all those five lovely Mays,
No one to look at the wonderful bird cherries and still more wonderful masses of lilacs,
Everything glowing and blowing,
The Virginia creeper madder every year until at last in October the very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses,
The owls and the squirrels and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme,
And not a living creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes,
Which got into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows.
All that was here,
Peace and happiness and a reasonable life,
And yet it never struck me to come and live in it.
Looking back,
I am astonished and can in no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here,
In this faraway corner,
Was my kingdom of heaven.
Indeed,
So little did it enter my head to even use the place in summer that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every year until at last in the early spring of last year,
Having come down for the opening of the village school and wandering out afterwards into the bare and desolate garden,
I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a garden.
Shall I ever forget that day?
It was the beginning of my real life,
My coming of age,
As it were,
And entering into my kingdom.
Early March,
Grey quiet skies and brown quiet earth,
Leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the dampened silence.
Yet there I stood,
Feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child.
And the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak and the world was full of hope and I vowed myself then and there to nature and have been happy ever since.
My other half,
Being indulgent and with some faint thought perhaps that it might be as well to look after the place,
Consented to live in it,
At any rate for a time,
Whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks from the end of April into June,
During which I was here alone,
Supposed to be superintending the painting and papering,
But as a matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone out of it.
How happy I was!
I don't remember any time quite so perfect,
Since the days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar on my eleven o'clock bread and butter onto a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and daisies.
The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its charm,
But I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now than then and never would endure to see them all moan away if I were not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as ever.
During those six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights.
The dandelions carpeted the three lawns.
They used to be lawns,
But have long since blossomed out into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed and under and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas,
White anemones,
Violets and selendynes in sheets.
The selendynes in particular delighted me with their clean happy brightness so beautifully trimmed and newly varnished as though they too had had the painters at work on them.
Then when the anemones went came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon's seal and all the bird cherries blossomed in a burst.
And then before I had a little got used to the joy of their flowers against the sky came the lilacs,
Masses and masses of them in clumps on the grass with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west front of the house a way down as far as one could see shining glorious against a background of firs.
When that time came and when before it was over the acacias all blossomed too and four great clumps of pale silvery pink peonies flowered under the south windows I felt so absolutely happy and blessed and thankful and grateful that I really cannot describe it.
My days seemed to melt away in a dream of pink and purple peace.
There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house so that on the plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my other half calls my fantaisie de règle as regards meals that is to say,
Meals so simple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a tray and I lived,
I remember,
On salad and bread and tea the whole time sometimes a very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me as the old lady thought,
From starvation.
Who but a woman could have stood salad for six weeks even salad sanctified by the presence and scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses.
I did and grew in grace every day though I have never liked it since.
How often now oppressed by the necessity of assisting at three dining room meals daily two of which are conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper maintenance of the family dignity and all of which are pervaded by joints of meat how often do I think of my salad days forty in number and of the blessedness of being alone as I was then alone.
And then the evenings when the workmen had all gone and the house was left to emptiness and echoes and the old housekeeper had gathered up her rheumatic limbs into her bed and my little room in quite another part of the house had been set ready.
How reluctantly I used to leave the friendly frogs and owls and with my heart somewhere down in my shoes lock the door to the garden behind me and pass through the long series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly pails of painter's mess and humming a tune to make myself believe I liked it go rather slowly across the brick floored hall up the creaking stairs,
Down the long whitewashed passage and with a final rush of panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door.
There were no bells in the house and I used to take a great dinner bell to bed with me so at least I might be able to make a noise if frightened in the night though what good it would have been I don't know as there was no one to hear.
The housemaid slept in another little cell opening out of mine and we two were the only living creatures in the great empty west wing.
She evidently did not believe in ghosts for I could hear how she fell asleep immediately after getting into bed.
The dinner bell was a great solace it was never wrong but it comforted me to see it on the chair beside my bed as my nights were anything but placid it was also strange and there were such queer creakings and other noises.
I used to lie awake for hours startled out of a light sleep by the cracking of some board and listen to the indifferent snores of the girl in the next room.
In the morning of course I was as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold perspirations of the night before but even the nights seem to me now to have been delightful and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in every wind and snatched a fearful joy I would gladly shiver through them all over again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house empty of servants and upholstery.
How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful new papers sometimes I would go into those that were finished and build all sorts of castles in the air about their future and their past would the nuns who had lived in them know their little whitewashed cells again all gay with delicate flower papers and clean white paint and how astonished they would be to see cell number 14 turned into a bathroom with a bath big enough to ensure a cleanliness of body equal to their purity of soul they would look upon it as a snare of the tempter and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked at the blackness of my nails the day I began to lose the first whiteness of my soul by falling in love at 15 with the parish organist or rather with the glimpse of surplus and Roman nose and fiery moustache which was all I ever saw of him and which I loved to distraction for at least six months at the end of which time going out with my governess one day I passed him in the street and discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock coat combined with a turndown collar and a bowler hat and never loved him anymore the first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect but I had not a thought of anything but the peace and beauty all around me then he appeared suddenly who has a right to appear when and how he will and rebuked me for never having written and when I told him I had been literally too happy to think of writing he seemed to take it as a reflection on himself that I could be happy alone I took him around the garden along the new paths I'd had made and showed him the acacia and lilac glories and he said it was the purest selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were with me and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning I tried to appease him by offering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood ready at the foot of the little veranda steps when we came back but nothing appeased that man of wrath and he said he would go straight back to the neglected family so he went and the remainder of the precious time was disturbed by twinges of conscience to which I am much subject whenever I found myself wanting to jump for joy I went to look at the painters every time my feet were full taking me to look at the garden I chotted diligently up and down the passages I criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done in all the rest of the time I wrote regularly and sent my love but I could not manage to fret and yearn What are you to do if your conscience is clear and your liver in order and the sun is shining?
To be continued
