The Houses in Between [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD I see from somé old letters that as long ago as 1940 I wrote to my agents asking them to obtain for me a copy of the music hall song contakiing the words: 'You could see the Crystal Palace if it wasn't for the houses in between.' The pathetic significance of the Crystal Palace had for long appealed to my imagination, and I wanted to make a növel out of the contrast between that fragile promise of peace and the dreadful realities of the years that followed. That the book, at last fmished, is published in the year when the centenary of the Palace is being celebrated is accidental. The idea remained in my head for a long time, came forward occasionally, and was put back again. I could not make up my mind what was the shape it should have. Then in 1947 I was invited to the birthday party of a lady who was ninety-nine years old. She was a spry old dear, clear-headed, and I talked to her of many things, and felt a sense of awe when I thought of the backward reach of her mind. She had been born before the idea of the Crystal Palace first entered Prince Albert's head! She was so old that she could have attended the opening at the age of three! And then I saw how the book must be written. It must be the personal record of someone old enough to have watched the feli progress of history from that day to this. But, even so, it remained unstarted until January of 1949. As to the places of the book. The beautiful Cornish estate here called Tresant exists and is unchanged to this day, but its name is not Tresant, nor is the book's Porteven in fact called Porteven. I have never been into the house on the estate, and know nothing of it. So I have had to invent a house. The reader must take that, and the Gaylord family living in it, as fictitious. Indeed, every character of the book is fictitious. There is not anywhere on the estate which I here call Tresant a chapel such as that which is deseribed as housing the Gaylord tombs. That chapel exists in all its mouldering melancholy. I have seraped mildew from the tombs there. But it exists in another part of Cornwall, many miles away from Tresant'. For the purpose of the book, I have permitted chapel and rstate a marriage of convenience. H. S.