Enbury Heath

Stella Gibbons

Enbury Heath

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

Cold Comfort Farm

Bassett

Nightingale Wood

My American

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

The Rich House

Ticky

The Bachelor

Westwood

The Matchmaker

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

Here Be Dragons

White Sand and Grey Sand

The Charmers

Starlight

To

Gerald and Lewis

The characters in this story are fictitious.

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power which no subsequent connections can supply.

MANSFIELD PARK.

CHAPTER I

Hartley Garden had been a bad man but a good doctor, and he was much loved in Enbury Fields. A crowd half a mile long attended his funeral. It stopped the trams on their way up to Enbury Heath, and filled his youngest son, Francis, with a gloomy pride.

His only daughter, Sophia, sat looking out of the window of the first car behind the coffin, but she was not seeing the crowd; she was staring up at the pale blue sky over the Heath and the six delicate dark birch trees on the top of Minister Hill. The trees were bare, because it was January; and thin snow lay on the roofs.

Enbury Fields is in North London. A long ascent rises from Tottenham Court Road and soars until it ends in Minister Hill and in the little valleys and hillocks of Enbury Heath. The funeral was now crawling up this long hill on the way to the cemetery at Northgate; and the crowd pressed round the cars, staring at Francis and Sophia and wondering why Harry, the other brother, was not there.

‘Don’t show proper feelin’, does it, not turnin’ up for ’is dad’s funeral?’

‘Oh, all the young ones are the same nowadays. They don’t none of them show proper feelin’s, if you ask me. Look at ’er jumper. Pink. She might ’ave put on a black one; it wouldn’t ’ave killed ’er.’

Sophia, in fact, was thinking about her jumper. She was wondering whether she ought to have taken Uncle Preston’s advice, bestowed on her yesterday over the telephone, and bought something black. It was true that she had only five shillings in the world until Friday afternoon, and today was Wednesday, but she could have borrowed the money; anybody would have lent a person a pound to buy a black jumper to wear at their father’s funeral. That was just what had kept her from asking anyone; that, and the fact that she was not sorry her father was dead. Why should she wear mourning?