A Country House Christmas

Foreword

I AM DELIGHTED to have been asked to write a foreword to the new edition of my aunt’s charming book, Treasure on Earth. It is a fascinating account, beautifully illustrated by herself, of Christmas at Lyme in the first decade of this century, when she was a little girl.

A generation later, in 1925 when I was just ten years old, I, too, spent an unforgettable Christmas at Lyme. Nine of us in the party of sixteen were children so the fun we had was indescribable! That year, as seemed to happen more frequently in those days, there was a white Christmas and I vividly remember the excitement and almost ecstatic delight of sliding on the frozen lake, tobogganing in the park and having snowball fights with my numerous cousins. In the late afternoon, as it became dark, we would return to the house, accompanied always by the boys’ fox terrier, Mike, eat a colossal and delicious school-room tea and then play ping-pong in the Long Gallery. Later we would play games such as Charades and Dumb Crambo in the Hall, which was warmed by an enormous fire and embellished by a magnificent Christmas tree. How we laughed and talked and argued! In those days there was no silent watching of a television screen.

My family and I tremendously appreciate the welcome and kindness shown us when we visit Lyme. We are made to feel as if our roots are still firmly there and that we are in no way outsiders. The links with the past are still apparent and this was brought home to me at my husband’s funeral in June 1992. I was deeply touched when a lady came up to me at the tea-party, which had been so kindly arranged for us at Lyme after the service, and told me that she had been at my husband’s coming-of-age celebration at the house in 1936.

He loved Lyme profoundly and that is borne out by the fact that, as a young man, he spent many hours taking photographs of the house and processing and enlarging them in his dark room. He was also very proud of the manual skills taught him as a boy by various employees with whom he greatly enjoyed working in the holidays. In this way he acquired a useful knowledge of carpentry, electrical work and plumbing. Although unable latterly, due to ill health, to visit his old home very often he was tremendously pleased to know it is being maintained and loved as it so richly deserves.

I am certain that this book, about a way of life that will never again be experienced, will give pleasure to many people, both old and young. I hope also that it may, in some measure, illustrate the very deeply held affection felt for Lyme by so many members of different generations of the Legh family.

Priscilla Newton, March 1993

Since the foreword was written, Priscilla, Lady Newton has remarried and is now Mrs F C H Fryer.

KEY to the real identies and place names

For VYNE PARK read LYME

For VAYNE OR VYNE read LEGH OR LYME

For SIR THOMAS VAYNE read 2nd LORD NEWTON

Treasure on Earth

1906

IN THE NORTHERN HALF OF ENGLAND, IN A GREAT HILLY park bordering on three counties, stands an Elizabethan mansion, high amongst its hills on a tableland of lawns and terraces, stone-built round a central courtyard with a long, almost unbroken frontage and three rows of windows looking down the valley. Great stone buttresses support it on one side where the ground falls steeply and at their feet lies an Italian garden. Behind the house the ground rises again to the uninhabited moors.

One Christmas Eve, well before the First World War, a fine layer of snow already covered the slopes of the park and the sky was heavy with more to come. Not far from the house, in a wooded hollow beside a mill pool, deer were feeding from bundles of hay. Passing through this wooded valley, rising in serpentine twists and bends, a carriage drive wound its gradual ascent to the house, but cutting across it, running straight up the steep hillside, a narrow footpath gave a direct approach. Up this a little girl was climbing. She wore the black stockings and button-boots of her generation, an obviously home-made coat and skirt, and a hat secured by an elastic under her chin.

It was late afternoon.

Rabbits, looking almost black in the fading light, sped to their snowy burrows on either side of the path. A cock pheasant rocketed up almost from the child’s feet and made for the cover of the woods. Without pausing, she continued on her way. Excitement was mounting in her as she climbed. So short a time to wait now before the curtain rose on a drama of infinite delight—a gradual crescendo of bliss. To-night a large party of visitors was arriving, and from to-morrow for a whole fortnight one pleasure would succeed another.

There might, if this weather held, be skating or better still tobogganing, for which the slopes of the park were so well suited—but the weather did not matter. How could it, with a house full of delightful visitors and such a house to play in? There would be the Christmas tree with all its presents; games in the drawing-room, music and dancing in the hall, private theatricals in the Long Gallery; hide-and-seek all over the house, with people chasing each other in delicious terror the whole length of the long corridors; wonderful meals in the dining-room, dinners as well as luncheons even for little girls, and all the time everybody, particularly the grown-ups, happy, good-humoured, joking and jolly, ready at any moment to romp and play the fool.

This heavenly drama was just due to begin, and nothing short of some utterly remote possibility, severe illness or sudden death, could prevent it from happening—but quite rightly such a possibility never entered the child’s head.

At the top of the slope, where the footpath emerging from behind a row of old lime trees joined the drive just in front of the forecourt, the house was folly revealed. Lights shone in some of the windows glowing warmly behind red blinds. The Tudor mullions had been replaced by sash windows in the time of Charles II and the only portion of the façade still in its original state was the gate-house in the centre. Two small guard houses with barred windows and surmounted by couching lions flanked the wide-open gates of the forecourt.

The main approach to the house was a continuous ascent, the ground on the right hand falling away to wooded declivities, on the left rising in stretches of open country to a panorama of distant hills. Above the tree-tops in the middle distance rose a bare conical hill, its summit crowned by an ancient grey stone tower.

Suddenly the air was filled with the clamour of an army of rooks. The whole western slope of the hill was black with these birds, which every evening assembled here and, remaining for a few moments silent, as if in prayer, then dispersed to their roosting places in the lime trees near the house.

Still thinking of nothing but the coming delights, the child turned in at the forecourt gates. To her the house seemed to possess a living soul of its own and to be now waiting in a state of happiness that matched her own to take the arriving guests into its loving old heart.

From a mediæval manor standing in a royal forest it had been enlarged to its present dimensions in the time of Elizabeth, but ever since its origin and the grant of land by Edward the Black Prince to Sir Piers Vayne it had known no other owners but his direct descendants.

Each successive generation had left its impress on the place, adding to, altering and embellishing the original structure in lavish expenditure of material means and tender devotion, till it had become what it now was—a palace, but lived in and loved as a home.

The big central doorway led straight into the cloistered courtyard round which the house was built. Opposite, across the courtyard, another door led out to the terrace and gardens. But the child was bound for the housekeeper’s room, which opened off the cloisters, a very pleasant place to visit before going upstairs and where a warm welcome was always assured. Now, bursting in as usual, she found her friend Mrs. Campbell in best black dress and lace cap seated in her chair by the fire. The curtains were drawn and the table laid for tea for at least a dozen people.

Mrs. Campbell exclaimed at her appearance: Good gracious, Miss Phyllis, you’ve never been out in all this cold in only that thin jacket! And where are your snow boots?

"Oh, there’s hardly any snow yet; it’s all right. I want to find Jim Bowden and ask him to make us something for the play. Have you seen him? He’s not down at