"Mary Stewart - Thorny Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

healer, who would have been classed in an earlier day as a wise woman
or even a witch. She looked it. My mother, a handsomer version of
her, had the same abilities. Merciless to the healthy, disliking all
other women as a matter of principle, indifferent to children and
animals, she was nevertheless endlessly patient with small babies, and
was a splendid nurse to the sick. A couple of generations earlier she
would have been carrying jellies and soups to the ailing and deserving
poor in the parish, but those times were past, and instead she presided
over village working-parties and made jams and jellies which she sold
("We need the money, and besides, they don't value anything they get
for nothing" ) and when there was an accident at the pit she was there,
along with my father and the doctor, and as useful as either.

We lived in a bleak, ugly colliery village in the north of England.

Our house was well built, but hideous, far too big, and very cold.

The water was limestone-hard, and always icy; my mother had never in
her youth known hot water laid on, and she saw no reason to waste money
by using the damper at the back of the vast, extravagant Eagle range.
If we needed hot water for washing, we boiled it in pans on top of the
range. Baths were allowed once a week, two inches of warmish, hard
water. Coal was expensive at a pound a ton, but the vicarage and
church got their electricity free, so in my small, arctic room at the
top of the house I was sometimes allowed a
single-bar electric fire to keep the Thorny/sola cold at bay. I never
remember having hands or feet free from chilblains; this did not count
as an ailment, but merely as weakness, and was ignored.

The vicarage lay at one end of the village, isolated beyond the church
in its own large garden, where my father, aided by the old sexton ("I'm
a powerful digger; I has to be" ) spent every hour he could spare from
his parish duties. On one side of our grounds ran the main road; on
the other three sides were graveyards.

"Quiet neighbours," we used to say, and they were. I never remember
being troubled by the thought of all the bodies buried so near at hand,
and our normal short cut to the village lay through the oldest field of
graves. But it was a grim place for a solitary child, and I suppose my
childhood was as bleak, as comfortless, and even lonelier than the
Brontes' cold upbringing at Haworth. It had not always been so. I had
my own small Golden Age to look back on; my brief span of dream days
that made the real days of childhood bearable.

Until I was seven years old we had lived in a small village of two
hundred souls or (hereabouts. It was an unimportant little parish, and
we were very poor, but the place was lovely, my father's work was easy,
and the house was compact and comfortable. That vicarage was ancient,
low and white, with a white rose rambling over the porch, and ivied
walls with beds of sweet violets beneath. There was a summerhouse set