Michael’s mother was Grannie’s child.  To see how she could be a child you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long brown hair plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with a blue ribbon.  But he couldn’t see how the three Aunties could be Grannie’s other children.  They were bigger than Grannie and they had grey hair.  Grannie was a little thing; she was white and dry; and she had hair like hay.  Besides, she hardly ever took any notice of them except to make a face at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now and then.  She did it with her head a little on one side, pushing out her underlip and drawing it back again.

Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her than when she was actually there.  She stood for him as the mark and measure of past time.  To understand how old Grannie was you had to think backwards; this way:  Once there was a time when there was no Michael; but there was Mummy and there was Daddy.  And once there was a time when there was no Mummy and no Daddy; but there was Grannie and there was Grandpapa.  Now there was no Grandpapa.  But he couldn’t think back far enough to get to the time when there was no Grannie.

Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.

Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he had to run down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the Heath, and cross the West Road, and climb the other slope to Grannie’s side.  And it was not till you got to the row of elms on Judge’s Walk that you had to go carefully because of the funeral.

He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his own side.  There were other houses there; but he knew his father’s house by the tree of Heaven in the garden.

* * * * *

The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the Heath.  A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a breastwork, enclosed it on three sides.  From the flagged terrace at the bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the Heath.  There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden.  The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open, row on row.  It barred the promontory from the mainland.  And at the back of it, beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath still parted it from the hill road that went from “Jack Straw’s Castle” to “The Bull and Bush.”  You reached it by a lane that led from the road to the Heath.

The house belonged to the Heath and the open country.  It was aware of nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and Harrow on the Hill.  It had the air of all the old houses of Hampstead, the wonderful air of not acknowledging the existence of Bank Holidays.  It was lifted up high above the town; shut in; utterly secluded.