7 - ‘Windows Wide Open, yet Discreetly Veiled’: Notwithstanding (1913)

Summary

The idea of a country retreat was not a new one – for some years now Mary had depended on the safety valve offered by strategic visits to Preshaw, and she often had the use of Flora Lugard's cottage during her residence abroad. But some time in 1907 she took the significant step of leasing a house of her own in the country.

It is not clear what turned her thoughts to the small Suffolk village of Ufford, not a part of the country she seems to have known particularly well. But perhaps this was the point. She had probably first seen the village while visiting her cousin Margaret Grant (neé Beaumont) at nearby Melton Grange. Mary's sensitive pride had occasionally made her sarcastic about the Beaumonts, but she was on good enough terms with her cousin to take a young Stella Benson to the Grange a year or two later (it was a less than successful visit, and Stella noted acerbically that the Grants were very vain about their garden). Ufford itself was certainly picturesque, as well as continuing the familiar traditions of Hodnet, with its own library, Girls Friendly Society, Women's Institute and mothers' meetings, as well as a parish magazine featuring short stories, local news and advertisements for safety matches and Pear's Soap. In May Mary was writing excitedly to Matthew Nathan, now in Natal, ‘I am camping out in a perfect little cottage which I am thinking of taking if it suits my coquettish lungs, which wont inhale every air’.

The house she had alighted on – anyone looking for a cottage is likely to pass it many times in the lane without stopping – was old and attractive, with low ceilings and two front doors, a legacy of its former life as two separate dwellings. Immediately behind one of these doors is a large alcove, now used for bookshelves, but in Mary's day the source of much confusion – to her amusement, visitors would insist on knocking at this door despite the mesh where a panel had been taken out and clearly revealing legs of mutton on the other side.