7
" Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . .
In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'
But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only _act_ Lilian and Diana; we could not _be_ them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life. "
― Rosemary Sutcliff , Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
8
" But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love. "
― Rosemary Sutcliff , Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
11
" My mother was determined that I should be able to walk two miles. If you could walk two miles, she said, you could get to most places you needed to get to. Actually, this is a fallacy. The fact that you can, with great difficulty, and taking an unconscionably time about it, walk two miles, will not get you anywhere you need, or at any rate want, to go. There were times when a wheelchair would have added another dimension to my life, but that was a forbidden subject; and it was not until many, many years later, long after my father and I were alone, that I took the law into my own hands and bought one; and instantly, dazzled with the new freedom that it brought me, swept my father off to his old haunts on an Hellenic cruise. "
― Rosemary Sutcliff , Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
14
" One night at the Old Vicarage that winter, we listened to Ivor Novello's "Perchance to Dream" on the wireless. It was only a few years old then, and its small, haunting, fragile hit-song 'We'll Gather Lilacs' was still a tune that one heard constantly, on the wireless, from orchestras in restaurants, being whistled in the street. To this day I have only to hear the first notes, in some programme of 'Golden Oldies', to go straight back to that time. What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia. "
― Rosemary Sutcliff , Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
