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My Easter Holidays by Noel Streatfeild

The Anthology by Noel Streatfeild

The Anthology by Noel Streatfeild

If someone said to you which is the loveliest holiday of the year, what would you answer? Would you decide on winter because of the glories of Christmas and all the parties and gaiety? Or perhaps you would choose the summer holiday, for most people the going-away holiday. The fun of travel or meeting new people and making new friends. Myself I think I would choose spring, for at its best our English spring is as beautiful as anything in the world
I never think of spring without remembering the home-sick Robert Browning writing in Italy:
‘Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there.’ Describing so exquisitely those first pale, pale green leaves – ‘the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf’. And later on: ‘Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops at the bent spray’s edge.’
I think the weather has changed since I was a child, and not always for the better. For I can recall vividly some drenching summer holidays. But in exchange we used to have the most beautiful Easters which we seldom get now. The Good Fridays are the days I particularly remember. We were taken to some kind of children’s service and then, clutching picnic baskets and wood for tying up primroses, we took a train to what was then a small village called Crowhurst. Crowhurst was famous for primroses. We had a favourite wood, and there sticking up through the dead leaves was a yellow haze of primroses.
Mind you, though we loved going to Crowhurst, which included treats like hot cross buns for our picnic, it was by no means a holiday. We had been sent to work and any inclination to ‘stand and stare’ was frowned upon. Each one of us, however small, was expected by the end of the day to produce a full basket of primroses, each bunch carefully tied, ready to decorate the church on Saturday morning.
Easter Day in my memory was always fine too. My mother went out as soon as she got back from early service and hid our eggs in the garden. She was a wonderful hider, doing the eggs up in different coloured papers to match the flowers in the garden. It was seldom all the eggs were found before we were taken to church, so we had another egg hunt when we came home. I suppose it did rain and may even have  been cold on some days during the holiday, especially when Easter was early. But what I remember is flowers. Marsh marigolds that grew by a stream, wood anemones, bluebells, in one place cowslips, and the blackthorn looking like a white Christmas tree.
[From ‘The Noel Streatfeild Easter Holiday Book’ published in 1974 by J M Dent & Sons]

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