Gwen's Story: Sisters of the Quantock Hills (Quantock's Quartet) - Softcover

Ruth Elwin Harris began storytelling during the Second World War when she and her brother went to stay with their grandfather in his isolated Somerset house. "We led a very solitary existence," she says. "Not that we minded. We read a lot and made up stories to entertain each other." It is that house, christened Hillcrest, that plays an important part in her Quantock Hills series. "My grandfather bought it in the 1930s from three elderly sisters - all of whom had been painters. Their murals still remained on the stable walls. I used to think about those sisters and wonder about life in the village when they were young."

Gwen had not taken to Antony at their first meeting. He had been twelve when she and Sarah arrived for lessons at the Rectory study the morning after their mother's funeral, a thin-faced small boy with sharp, inquisitive eyes that watched every move the two sisters made. Gwen had been mortified to discover almost at once that Antony, though a year younger than her, was very much brighter. Worse, Mr. Mackenzie was a classicist and taught his son accordingly, while Gwen's main interests, botany and art, were not highly regarded. In addition Antony was a practical joker and a tease. Gwen, with no experience of boys or their behaviour, did not know how to cope. Though she liked and admired Mr. Mackenzie - love would not be too strong a word - she came to dread Rectory mornings. When her formal education came to an end a year later, with the agreement of Mr. Mackenzie and Frances, Gwen's relief had been not so much for the end of her lessons, but for the release it gave her from Antony's presence.
Strangely, their relationship changed immediately. Outside the Rectory study they were equals; indeed, in the
garden she was his superior. His cleverness no longer disStconcerted her as it once had. She had grown accustomed to his teasing. They were no longer companions thrown together by age and propinquity but real friends.
Even so, it surprised Gwen that her presence on the Quantocks walk should matter so much to him. Lying in bed later that night, she pictured him climbing out of his bedroom window, sidling through the churchyard, well out of sight of the Rectory drawing-room windows, secreting himself behind the broad-leafed fig tree at the corner of the stables to wait for her to emerge from Hillcrest. She told herself that his wish to see her had been no more than an excuse for the adventure he was always seeking. She did not mind. She was still flattered.
When, next morning, sounds of the Mackenzies' arrival sent her hurrying downstairs, she found herself hesitating in the passage outside the kitchen, unexpectedly shy. She waited a moment before opening the door. Antony looked up from stuffing food into his rucksack and grinned across at her. She blushed.

GWEN'S STORY: SISTERS OF THE QUANTOCK HILLS by Ruth Elwin Harris. Copyright (c) 1994 by Ruth Elwin Harris. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.