WELCOMEI CAPTURE THE CASTLEbyDodie SmithAlso by Dodie SmithThe Hundred and One DalmatiansThe Starlight BarkingI CAPTURE THE CASTLECopyright 1948, renewed 1976 by Dorothy Gladys Beesely.All rights reserved.Printed in the United States of America.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoeverwithout written permission except in the case of brief quotationsembodied in critical articles or reviews.For information, addressSt. Martin"s Press,175 Fifth Avenue,New york, N.y. 10010.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSmith, Dodie.I capture the castle by Dodie Smith.ISBN 0-312-18110-8 (hb)ISBN 0-312-20165-6 (pbk)I. titleFirst published in the United States by Atlantic-Little, Brown BooksFirst St. Martin"s Griffin Edition: May 1999I: THE SIXPENNY BOOKI am sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the restof me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog"sblanket and the tea-cozy. I can"t say that I am really comfortable,and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the onlypart of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have foundthat sitting in a place where you have never sat before can beinspiring--I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.Though even that isn"t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry isso bad that I mustn"t write any more of it.Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door.The view through the windows above the sink is excessively dreary.Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on theedge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretchto the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had latelyis good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. Itry to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight.Unfortunately, the more my mind"s eye sees green and gold, the moredrained of all color does the twilight seem.It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchenfire, near which my sister Rose is ironing, though she obviously can"tsee properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown.(I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularlyfetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has apink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery.Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearlytwenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger,feel older. I am no beauty but have a nea tish face.I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really ratherromantic--two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied thatshe saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruinsurrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is anunreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself wasbuilt in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to afourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The wholeof our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers init. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at theirfull height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all thatremains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by.But I won"t attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can seemore time ahead of me than I do now.I am writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquiredspeed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel-I intendto capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to begood for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now mystories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time Fatherobliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness witha desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the wordsflow out of me.I wish I knew of a way to make words flow out of Father. Years andyears ago, he wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, amixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry. It had a great success,particularly in America, where he made a lot of money by lecturing onit, and he seemed likely to become a very important writer indeed. Buthe stopped writing. Mother believed this was due to something thathappened when I was about five.We were living in a small house by the sea at the time. Father hadjust joined us after his second American lecture tour. One afternoonwhen we were having tea in the garden, he had the misfortune to losehis temper with Mother very noisily just as he was about to cut a pieceof cake. He brandished the cake-knife at her so menacingly that anofficious neighbor jumped the garden fence to intervene and got himselfknocked down.Father explained in court that killing a woman with our silvercake-knife would be a long, weary business entailing sawing her todeath, and he was completely exonerated of any intention of slayingMother. The whole case seems to have been quite ludicrous, witheveryone but the neighbor being very funny. But Father made themistake of being funnier than the judge and, as there was no doubtwhatever that he had seriously damaged the neighbor, he was sent toprison for three months.When he came out he was as nice a man as ever-nicer, because his temperwas so much better. Apart from that, he didn"t seem to me to bechanged at all. But Rose remembers that he had already begun to getunsociable--it was then that he took a forty years" lease of thecastle, which is an admirable place to be unsociable in. Once we weresettled here he was supposed to begin a new book. But time went onwithout anything happening and at last we realized that he had given upeven trying to write--for years now, he has refused to discuss thepossibility. Most of his life is spent in the gatehouse room, which isicy cold in winter as there is no fireplace; he just huddles over anoil-stove. As far as we know, he does nothing but read detectivenovels from the village library. Miss Marcy, the librarian andschoolmistress, brings them to him. She admires him greatly and says
