I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

First published in 1949, I love this fictional memoir of a teenage girl living in eccentric poverty in a remote Suffolk gatehouse before the War.  It is such a cosy and humorous read from the start as the heroine, Cassandra, sets the scene: 

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.

I love all the characters but my favourite is Stephen Colly: He has lived with us ever since he was a little boy - his mother used to be our maid, in the days when we could still afford one, and when she died he had nowhere to go. He grows vegetables for us and looks after the hens - and does a thousand odd jobs - I can’t think how we should get on without him. He has always been rather devoted to me; father calls him my swain.

When Miss Marcy, the librarian, calls round to chair an ‘Enquiry into the Finances of the Mortmain Family’ everyone’s income is written down as ‘nil’ apart from Stephen who will contribute his  25 shillings a week’s wages from working at Four Stones Farm, leaving him time to still work for the Mortmains in the evening.

Stephen is such a kind, honourable soul, and his ‘fair and noble’ good looks enable him to go to London  to model for photos,  and later to star in silent films. He saves up his earnings to buy Cassandra a small potable wireless for her birthday, only to be upstaged by her wealthy American friend Simon staying nearby who sends a a wireless and a gramophone combined with a blue record case to match. Nobody ever had such a glorious present. 

‘Yours has a real wooden case,’ I told him, ‘with such a beautiful high polish’.Oh, I was sorry for him! After all the months he had been saving up! I ran after him and, from the top of the kitchen stairs, I could see him staring at his little brown wireless. He turned it off, then went out into the garden with a most bitter expression on his face.

‘Oh, Stephen!’ I cried, ‘ It was a much bigger present from you. Simon didn’t have to save - or work for it.’ 

‘No, that was my privilege,’ he said quietly.

I love the description of Stephen’s room ‘in the  bit of the kitchen  where the hen-roosts were; father turned it into two two little rooms which Stephen and his mother had - hers is just a store-room now’.

...the narrow window was almost overgrown with ivy and the whitewash on the wall was discoloured and peeling off in flakes. On the chest of drawers his comb was placed exactly midway between a photograph of his mother with him as a baby in her arms, and a snapshot of me - both in aluminium frames much too large for them.

But it is Simon who has won Cassandra’s heart by the end of the novel. 

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