OCR Text |
Show i j. in in in ii in i i in )M r ii i r i : - J" : 1 1 - ': ' x j i , ' ' - ; ' i S . . i " 1 ; ' . - . : - ' 5 " ' ' - 1 ; s r ' , j, " " ' ' X "j . " A r -! 1 x At the End of an English Sylvan Path. Prepared by National Geographic Society, Washington, L. C. W.U Service. IF ANYONE wants to know the English countryside, let him go house hunting. On such a quest he will discover Nature's cozy-corners that casuals never find. They are everywhere, but as ingeniously concealed as a bird's nest. There may even be a sign which says, "Dangerous "Dan-gerous narrow road. Enter at your own risk." But that is just the kind of place to insist upon- penetrating. Enter on foot if you are afraid, but the car can squeeze in. You find yourself in one of those incompara-' incompara-' ble roads like tunnels of living green. Earthen banks of ivy and wild flowers rise ten feet high to be topped by tall trees sprung from the original hedge planted a hundred hun-dred years ago. The road keeps you guessing by making such curves that there is no penetrating the secret se-cret of what lies ahead. All at once a gate. Within, a bit of woodland, flower-brightened ; beyond be-yond that, a sunny garden, moldy mossy walls, lattice windows, creepers creep-ers all abloom and reaching to the roof tiles, which are toned from dull red to gentle green by two centuries cen-turies of soft rains and sun. Who would not penetrate the wood to gaze closer especially when armed with a handful of permits from a real estate firm? You pass through the bit of flowered woodland wood-land gay with yellow primrose patches and massed bluebells. But on emerging from the screening trees and seeing the open garden lying in the sun and the house forming form-ing a part of It, you gasp and halt. This Is the house of your dreams. A servant appears and explains that the house is to-be-let and is at your service ; the lease is for sixty-five sixty-five years! Exclamation marks rattle rat-tle about in your head. Peculiar Rental Customs. You select another house which you consider a perfect gem, only to be told that it Is not available for "Instant possession." The present tenant has the place for four years longer. These, and other interesting rental rent-al customs you may learn in English Eng-lish real-estate offices. Mnyfair is full of fascinating real-estate offices, offi-ces, most of them seeming like private pri-vate homes, with their open fires, Chippendale chairs, and bookcase desks. "Mr. Upperton and Tartners" Is the diverting and reticent sign over the door of one of these. Lovely way of expressing it ; Upperton, Stoggs, Chair and Jones is outdone by the dignity of "and Partners." Any of these gentlemen can tench the eager American client new uses of English words and phrases in real-estnte jargon, whether or not he offers the ideal ancient house and romantic garden. And It Is, here that you learn that the rent of unfurnished unfur-nished houses Is denoted In pounds sterling, while the furnished house smartly demands guineas an extra shilling on each pound. You also learn that company's water "laid on" merely means that domestic water flows from taps Instead In-stead of being pumped up from well or cistern. Indeed, one must not visibly shudder to learn that for 200 years houses have been occupied occu-pied by gentry, modern smart people peo-ple among them, who have had no running water, no lights except kerosene lamps, no telephones. Incredible! In-credible! Without the tireless English Eng-lish servant, the English gentry must have died out for lack of comforts. com-forts. One of the Partners may ask you strange-sounding questions. "Are you prepared to pay dilapidations?" dila-pidations?" That Is disconcerting. "But I don't want a house that is actually in a state of decay." The Partner patiently explains that any sort of damage or breakage break-age must be restored by the tenant. Y'uir hill for dilapidations may bo Only 'our shilling, about one dollar. for a flower holder. But It often happens that one must assume the dilapidations of the previous tenant, ten-ant, which may include repairs and decorations of Importance. So it is a word to excite suspicion. What the American adventurous spirit asks of England for the summer sum-mer is a smallish house, even a cottage. cot-tage. But it must be under a style name like Tudor, or more romantically romantic-ally Elizabethan, or perhaps, Queen Anne and the Georgian, either late or early. Hunting a Country House. The hunt for the ideal takes on the aspect of a tour. It Is possible to get about by commodious omnibuses. omni-buses. They set you down on the main roads, where local motor cars with drivers can be hired. Gradually you come to know the districts not too far from London where certain types of the ideal house have sprung from the soil. It is a requisite of the ideal English Eng-lish small house that it should look as If it had pushed Itself np from Nature's laboratory of the earth, Just as the shrubs, flowers, and trees have done. They are close kin. Districts not too far from London Lon-don contain an entrancing variety of old styles. The house of carved Interiors and scrolled gables Is a specialty of Kent; the thatched roof hides beside the roads of Hampshire's Hamp-shire's New Forest; the cottage of light-gray stone makes glad the villages of the Cotswolds; and the Georgian, or rather Eighteenth century cen-tury houses, scatter their elegant lines in all parts of the land. Timber Tim-ber and plaster houses tempt one almost everywhere with their Tudor charm. You come to one of the richest of all districts for those who hunt the Ideal house when you arrive at the hills of the Cotswolds. Gradually Grad-ually its little stone houses catch you la the spell of their beauty. They spread themselves beside the road, taking on almost human qualities. qual-ities. They lift their gables with dignity; they spread their mullioned windows with frankness. Their symmetry sym-metry seems of the highest art, yet It Is said these lovely houses were built by simple artisans. They took the warm, light stone of the land, and even the roof tiles are made of It. All seems a pearly gray, and on this ideal color climb the bright flowers of the garden. Many Enticing Places. You linger long and drift from road to lane, from village to farm, drinking In every detail of these houses the Tudor ornament over the leaded windows, the lovely flat arch of the front door, the beauties beau-ties of the back of the house, the flowers and a cunning use of shrubs and creepers piling one thrilling beauty upon another against the light-gray stone. In Sussex and Kent, hunt out the old farms and the nncient houses of villages. They have a beauty all their own, with. their bricks turned to pink and softened brown. Many have an end gable of stone fashioned fash-ioned In the grand curves which fascinatingly recall the Walloons who brought with them their own traditions of art when driven to England by religious persecutions. Those curvilinear gables have, too, a Spanish flavor, a late Renaissance caper of free-drawn curves. Fascinating Fasci-nating interiors those Walloon cloth weavers constructed to make the homes of their exiles resemble those they had left. In Kent is found that enticing structure, the house of timber and pbister or timber and brick Ingeniously Ingeni-ously laid. It is eternally lovely, be-wllderinglv be-wllderinglv fantastic, now did modest mod-est man fancy such a house easy to build and practical? The beams, black and exposed, seem to represent repre-sent superhuman effort in the interest inter-est of beautv. The curved ones, the purelv ornamental ones, fascinate the eve. The overhanging second story is a fantastic denial of architecture's archi-tecture's law of the large base. |