The Girl From the Sea and Other Stories by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Author:Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen [Andresen, Sophia de Mello Breyner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912868339
Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
Published: 2020-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

This story, passed on down the generations, became known throughout the North. And that is why, on Christmas Eve, we decorate our Christmas tree with lights.

THE BRONZE BOY

I

The Flowers

Once upon a time there was a marvellous garden full of huge lime trees, birches, oaks, magnolias and plane trees.

There were also rose gardens and orchards, flower beds edged with box, and very long paths flanked by walls of clipped camellia bushes.

There was a hothouse full of maidenhair ferns and other extraordinary plants, each of which had a metal tag attached, bearing the plant’s Latin name.

There was a big park, full of very tall plane trees, lakes, grottoes and wild strawberries. And there was a wheat field, full of poppies, and a pine wood in which heathers and ferns grew beneath the mimosas and the pines.

In one of the box-lined borders, there was a bed of gladioli.

Now, gladioli are very snooty flowers, and those gladioli were firmly of the view that their part of the garden was the most elegant spot in which to live.

‘All civilised gardens,’ they said, ‘have box hedges.’

Close to the gladioli stood a pergola covered in wisteria and furnished with tiled benches.

‘All the oldest gardens,’ said the gladioli, ‘have tiled benches.’

When they heard this, the box hedges smiled and murmured in a boxy voice, which is small and moist and green: ‘In the old gardens, there were box hedges and tiled benches, but no gladioli.’

The box family is a very ancient one, whereas the gladiola family only came into fashion in the last thirty years.

The gladioli, however, loved being gladioli and thought they were superior to almost all the other flowers.

According to them, roses were sentimental and old-fashioned, and carnations smelled of dentists. They scorned poppies and sunflowers, which grow wild. And as for the flowers on the heather or the gorse bushes that sprang up in the pine wood, the gladioli didn’t even consider them to be flowers.

‘They’re more a kind of prickly weed,’ they said.

And while the gladioli did secretly admire the camellias, they didn’t really respect them, finding them strange and irritating. Camellias are very different from gladioli: they’re vague and dreamy, distant and not in the least bit snooty. Their flowers are always half-hidden away among their hard, glossy leaves. However, one thing the gladioli did admire about camellias was their lack of scent, because, among flowers, having no scent shows great originality.

The flowers for which the gladioli felt genuine respect were the exotic flowers in the hothouse, the ones that had their names written on a metal label attached to them with a piece of raffia.

Unfortunately, the hothouse flowers rarely came out, because they were afraid of catching a cold. At night, when the other flowers went for a stroll, the hothouse flowers stayed at home. Only very occasionally, in August, did they venture forth. However, when they didn’t come out, they did receive visitors. And the gladioli would often go to visit them at night. The next day, they would tell the box hedges: ‘Yesterday, I went to visit my friend Orchid and my dear friend Begonia.

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