Meeting Elizabeth Goudge
by Priscilla Valk
Priscilla sent me this reminiscence by email. It is reproduced here by her kind permission. --Manon
Elizabeth Goudge & I exchanged letters back in the early 1970's after I read The Child From the Sea. During our trip to the UK in May of 1973, she was kind enough to invite my husband, 6-year-old daughter, Carrington, and me to have tea with her at Rose Cottage on Dog Lane near Henley-on-Thames.
On our arrival, Miss Goudge's friend, Jessie, met us at the canary yellow front door and welcomed us into the pleasant gloom of the low oak-beamed interior. EG was in frail health, but presently descended the narrow stone stairs from her morning rest above. She had on a dusky deep pink dress--the color that my mother used to call "ashes of roses."
EG herself served us tea before her aged fireplace while Jessie hovered in the background. My trembling cup rattled in its saucer like a small earthquake. We had cookies that Miss Goudge called "angel's trumpets." Across the room that spanned the cottage front to back, was a glass front cupboard displaying Aunt Mary's "little things" from EG's book, "The Scent of Water." (From which my old house gets its name, "Appleshaw." There were a number of apple trees here when I named it)
After tea EG led us out to her garden behind the cottage where we all sat on a round wide-edged well. I remember looking back at the cottage covered in purple wisteria blooming all the way to the eaves. By this time I was noticing all the similarities to Froniga's cottage--how the cat, Pen, had been described as sitting on a round well's ledge as we were now doing. When I spoke of the similarities, Elizabeth smiled, nodded her head, and invited us to follow her around to the secluded side of her cottage.
There she stooped & cut sprigs from her rosemary bush for me (I still have them). Straightening from her work, she turned and pointed down Dog Lane to a hedgerow that divided it from a meadow, and said, "When I first moved here in the 1950's, I saw Froniga step through that hedge. Then she disappeared before my eyes. I never saw her again."
Ever since I have wondered if there really was a historical Froniga Haslewood. Might EG have had records of her cottage going back to the 1600's--or was this beautiful gypsy phantom only a mysterious unnamed ghost that inspired her novel, "The White Witch?"
There was no question as EG spoke that late May day, that in her mind the shade she saw was Froniga.
Miss Goudge died in 1984, and Jessie stayed on in Rose Cottage. During the early 1990's a fire ravaged the cottage and renovations changed its character. In 2000 Rose Cottage was sold to a man who intends to "modernize" it this coming April. He told a friend that he had never heard of Elizabeth Goudge.
This may read like a story but it is a true one.