The Death of Grass

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As sometimes happens, death healed a family breach.

When Hilda Custance was widowed in the early summer of 1933, she wrote, for the first time since her marriage thirteen years before, to her father. Their moods touched—hers of longing for the hills of Westmorland{2} after the grim seasons of London, and his of loneliness and the desire to see his only daughter again, and his unknown grandsons, before he died. The boys, who were away at school, had not been brought back for the funeral, and at the end of the summer term they returned to the small house at Richmond only for a night, before, with their mother, they travelled north.

In the train, John, the younger boy, said:

“But why did we never have anything to do with Grandfather Beverley?”

His mother looked out of the window at the tarnished grimy environs of London, wavering, as though with fatigue, in the heat of the day.

She said vaguely: “It’s hard to know how these things happen. Quarrels begin, and neither person stops them, and they become silences, and nobody breaks them.”

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