The Big House on the Hill
Blue Hill, ME — About 1935
"We're going to Blue Hill! We're going to Blue Hill! Goodbye House! Goodbye, Garage, Garden, Tulips, Trees!" These were the words I would shout out as a small child, galloping around our house in Connecticut, in frenzied excitement on the day we were moving to Blue Hill for the summer holidays. Butterflies in my tummy, almost sick with excitement, anticipation brimming over, I couldn't wait until we piled into our old-fashioned station wagon, heavily laden with linens and children, to be off and away to summer in paradise.
The trip in those days took two days and was fairly arduous. We stopped midway in Portsmouth, NH in a red brick inn with two stone lions out in front. One time the wheel of our car fell off. Another time, Velvet Gray, my cat wouldn't come out from under the house. Another time I sat on and crushed the model airplane my brother Edwin had so carefully constructed out of balsa wood and tissue paper. But Blue Hill — Paradise — awaited! Nothing could diminish our spirits.
The house we lived in isn't there any more. Years after it was torn down, I found out that my brother's children didn't know where it had been. So I took Doug, Akran and Tasha to the empty spot where we as children had had such joyous times. I intended to walk them through the long-gone rooms and to recall as many memories as possible of those halcyon summer days.
As you entered through the front door under the welcoming porte cochere , there was a wide wooden-floored hallway that went forward to the porch where my grandmother walked and muttered to herself, "What have I done, what have I done?" when her small baby Eileen died only three weeks after our grandmother lost her husband.
Off this wide hallway was a formal parlor to the right and a large, cozy living room with fireplace and a bright red Oriental carpet with turquoise trim. I remember on rainy days hanging over the couch in that room, imploring our mother to give us ideas of what to DO. "What shall we do today?" was our wail. Color in your coloring books? Play with your clay? Paper dolls? Soap Bubbles? Puzzles? No. Oh, the boredom of a rainy day! Exquisite torture up here in our beloved Blue Hill with nothing to do!
Opposite the living room was the dining room where Nancy celebrated her June birthday parties. Her chair was garlanded with daisies and Nancy would sit proudly at the head of the table: Princess For The Day. Another time Eileen was having an important beau to lunch. (Could it have been Gordie Curtiss — Eileen's true love — later killed in World War II.) Edwin and Hughie had been sprayed by a skunk; they smelled absolutely awful. Eileen insisted that the boys not be allowed to sit at the dining room table with us — they should be fed separately. "No". said my mother, "They are part of the family and they should eat with us." So Eileen and her beau were the ones who were fed separately.
Earlier, when my mother was small, Uncle Donald had his birthdays there in that same dining room. My mother, then a little girl, had forgotten to buy him a birthday present so she rummaged in her father's golf bag and found two shiny new golf balls, wrapped them up and gave them to him. Another time I remember being challenged as to who could eat the most ears of corn the fastest. My brother Hughie was the winner, and I can't remember whether he ate round and round or back and forth. I was handicapped by missing front teeth.
Adjoining the dining room and separated by sliding doors was the Ball Room, which had a foot-peddling roller organ. If you put in a scroll with holes in it and pumped the pedals like mad, you could summon up a music box tune. The room was large enough for my cousin Shelby and me to bat tennis balls against the walls. This was the room where Charlie Coit asked me to dance a polka with him at the Rehearsal dinner the night before he and Eileen were married. The room was decorated with pine boughs. I wore my very first evening dress, made by Flora, our maid. It was peach taffeta on the top, puffed sleeves, a rust-colored velveteen bodice and a peach-colored ruffled skirt. I adored Eileen's handsome tall blond fiance and was overwhelmed when he bowed and asked me to dance. My first dance at my first ball!
Off the dining room was a swinging door that led to a pantry, and off the pantry was the deep freeze — not a modern refrigerated deep freeze with Frion but a very well-insulated room with sawdust and thick refrigerator doors with brass handles, the walls so thick, they kept things cool. the spacious square kitchen had a large, black iron wood-burning stove, deep lead sinks. This was the domain of the cook. I think even my mother felt out of place there. A little back door area with an ice chest and screen door led outside to the circular driveway where the ice man came in his truck and gave us little chips of ice to suck. All the tradesman came to that door: the fish man, the vegetable man, the milk man - a whole procession of tradesmen from whom my mother or the cook would buy provisions for the household.
On Sundays we would go to church, and, if we could remember ten words from his sermon, the minister would give us ten cents. I thought it would be safe to use words like "the", "and", "but", "to". but, alas, that didn't work. After church we would drive down to Mrs. Hinckley's shop to buy ice cream for our Sunday dessert. Mrs. Hinckley would "spill a little" so that we three cousins - Shelby, Hopey and I could each have a taste of that frozen, creamy delight.
Off the kitchen was a long hall and off this hall was the maids' dining room where we children were fed. Highchairs would be set around the table for the smaller babes, but the older children would have chairs, and after mixing our ice cream smooth, smooth, smooth (smooth enough for the King of England) we would get down from our chairs and march around and around the table, singing and taking a spoonful of ice cream every time we passed our place.
At the end of this long hall were bedrooms - lots of bedrooms. I am not sure quite how many because it was the maids' area and we didn't really go there much. Except, one bedroom had some trunks which contained chic tailored suits and exotic, plumed hats that my grandmother had worn in Italy. They fit us, for my grandmother had been quite petite. Sadly, we children were allowed to wear those gorgeous clothes (they should have been kept in a museum for posterity), but we children felt grand and exuberant as we galloped around the house, wearing those exotic clothes and shouting like Indians.
That did the downstairs. Then I took Doug, Akran and Tasha in our imagination up to the second story. I began over the maid's room at the end of the house. My bedroom was there at the very end of the second hallway. This is the story of this very big house: My grandmother bought the original brick building that had been built by Dr. Nathan Tunney for whom the road in front had been named. Before going to Europe for the summer, she had given free reign to an aspiring New York architect, telling him to add two wings to the side of the house, "With lots and lots of bedrooms so that the children could have lots and lots of guests." Travel to Maine in those days was difficult and prolonged so that visitors didn't come for short weekends, they came for long stays. So many bedrooms were needed, and so many bedrooms were created. As a baby, on my first visit to the Big House, I got lost. i wandered down one hall, then into another and into another. The house was so vast - 23 bedrooms in all - that I was completely confused and didn't know how to return to my mother.
To the right of my bedroom was a larger room with two single beds, belonging to my older brothers, Edwin and Hughie. I remember staying quiet for three days when my brother Edwin got lead in his eye. He and his tutor, David Rich, hd been pouring hot molton lead into a hole on the bungalow point. When it hit the cold stone, the lead spattered up into my brother's eye. Dr. Bliss came and lifted the thin sheet of lead off his eye but Edwin and all of us had to be very quiet for a few days. It was a worrisome and anxious time for there was a likelihood that he might be blind in one eye for life. But he wasn't.
I think there was another bedroom opposite the boys' room. It had pink walls. Shelby and Hope slept there. At the end of that hall leading back to the original part of the house and to my mother's bedroom, was a small single room on the right. This was the "nap" room. How irritating and bothersome to take naps in the middle of the day! How outrageous an interruption to summer fun. I was told that my sister Nancy had naps in that room. She would call out in a sleepy sing-song monotonous voice, "Wanna dink of watah, wanna dink of watah over and over again. Eileen, only slightly a year older than Nancy, finally got exasperated and said"Mother! Nancy wants a dink of water! Now div it to her!" Eileen was bossy and in charge even at that young age.
Near mother's room was another bedroom that reminds me of when my mother opened a bureau drawer and found a nest of mice. She was so terrified of mice that she involuntarily reached for me and, digging her fingers into my side, thrust me between her and the mice, True! Absolutely true! Self defense being stronger than motherly love. Across from the bathroom was "The Smelly room." It had blue walls, cribs, a white iron bed and was the room where the babies slept; Smelly Room because they wet their beds.
Nancy's room was half way down the second hallway leading to Mother's room. It overlooked the circular driveway in front of the house and the porte couchere sheltering the front entrance. Nancy could look out and see the ivy-covered walls of the original house and the dark blue-green of the trim. It was a small, charming room with a single bed and leaded glass bowed windows. Across the hall was Eileen's larger twin-bedded room, larger but with no view.
At the end of this hall was the original wing of the house. The broad hallway upstairs was directly above the hallway downstairs and ran at right angles to the two new wings added by my grandmother. So we had come to the more formal, older part of the house. One reached this by ascending the broad stairway leading up from the downstairs. It was these stairs which my grandmother descended when her baby girl Eileen died. It was these stairs that the doctor climbed to try to save little Eileen. (These incidents are recorded in Aunt Annette's memories of Blue Hill.) My mother's large, elegant bedroom in which she sometimes had breakfast in bed was a creamy colored room with touches of red. There was a living room at one end and the bed at the other. My mother slept outside in the screened-in sleeping porch if the nights were warm. Next to the room was a large green bathroom with a claw-legged tub, WC and sink.
Shelby, Hope and i used to play Dinkey toy cars under the Porte Cochere. We would sit on the front steps and rub our heels back and forth in the dirt to make dips in the little roads we constructed for our toy cars. We called these dips "Wheeees" after the dip in the road to Ellsworth where my Aunt Bo would excelerate the car just before the dip and then take her foot off the excelerator just as we went into the dip, making a Wheee of your head and stomach. We three little girls would spend hours constructing miniature villages - a house for the iceman, the fishman and the milkman. We created hospitals, schools, roads twisting and turning, our little cars going on endless errands, each of us chattering along, oblivious to the grown-up world around us. Our favorite thing was when our maids, Flora and Corinne, had the day off. They had a little roadster car with a rumble seat. We would set off for Toddy Pond with Ralph who was about our age. At Toddy Pond we swam and played and had a great time. Then we would drive to Ellsworth to have lunch at Lucini's restaurant and then to the movies and popcorn. Sheer Bliss!
I remember the time Nancy took Mother's car — at age 15 when she was just learning how to drive. Around and around the circular driveway she went until something happened and to everybody's dismay, she went shooting off across the field to the ice house, which brought her to an immediate lurching stop with dents in both car and ice house, and most probably, to her feelings as well . Near the ice house was a large circular well (it is still there!) with a green cover, and down in the well a one hundred year old trout swam and swam, around and around, to aeriate the water and keep it safe for drinking. We were in constant awe of that blind trout on its endless circular route.
We three younger cousins knew how to get nickels from Eileen and Nancy's boy friends. Shelby, Hopey and I would hide behind the couches where they were sitting and wouldn't go away till they paid us. Then we would walk down to the village to buy candy - chewing gum, ropes of licorice and cannon balls which change color as you sucked them. We bought these delights from Mason's lunch counter where there was a sign: "We don't know where Mom is but we have Pop on ice."
Sometimes, my brother Hughie would send us down to the village to buy him a candy bar. He would give us a penny to do the job for him. One time Mason's was having a sale. If you bought a Butterfinger for five cents, you could have a Clark Bar for a penny. Perfect! When we told Hughie about our triumph, he took the Clark Bar too, saying we couldn't have bought it without his 5 cent Butterfield bar, so the Clark Bar was his too. I don't think he got away with it though; our wails and shrieks of protest brought our mother into the fray, and I think we got to keep the Clark bar.
Another time this same pudgy brother, five years my senior, persuaded me to get down on my knees and repeat whatever he said. So I heard myself saying, "Oh wonderful, marvelous, handsome, clever, beautiful older brother Hugh, please give your horrible, despicable, inferior, stupid, terrible, fat, ugly sister Julie a candy bar, whereupon my marvelous, wonderful,handsome brother said, "No" and simply walked away.
Eileen and Nancy, ten and nine years older than we three cousins, had lots of beaux, so many I can't remember all their names. It was the era of cheap Model Ts. the boys painted their cars with giddy, bright colors — one was pale blue and shocking pink. Another was a wild green, yellow and red plaid. They cut the mufflers so you could hear them a mile away. They would circle our driveway as though in a circle, much to the delight of my older sisters. Another time shelby and i got out the tennis court roller from our barn and let it go down Tenny Hill. We almost died laughing as the round part of the roller rolled sedately down the steep hill, its handle swinging majestically back and forth like a metronome. We were terrified it might smash into a passing car; our laughter was part humor but mostly sheer, helpless mortification of what might happen.
One summer our handsome, charming Uncle Stuart, came to visit with his adorable blonde baby daughters, Sage and Stephanie. We treated those exquisite, platinum blonde young cousins as if they were our own real-life babies. Uncle Stuart made us a playground out in back of the house. It was in a large birch grove, and he bent down the supple birch trees so we could swing on them. It was paradise to play there.
Next to the playground was the septic tank which someone fell into. The thought of it was terrible. Shelby and I also had a mortifying game which involved touching our "pews" in the toilet. We dared each other to reach down and touch the brown thing floating there. Oh, the fear and dread of it! We would squeal and scream and then dash outside, shocked and horrified and run around as fast as we could to work off the horrific thing we had done. The memory of it still makes me shudder.
Raspberries grew behind the red barn at the end of the circular driveway. It was fun to go out there in the hot summer sun and pick the delicious fruit, though we had to be careful not to get stung by the bees that were buzzing around. The white barn at the back of the property had stables for ponies and horses. We didn't have any ponies, but my mother had had her own long-suffering pony and cart when she was our age. She used to drive her Dad to the country club to play golf. Instead we played among the rafters and beams, pealing with white paint, and luxuriated in the sweet-smelling hay in the loft. Nearby were five huge apple trees that gave us sweet, juicy yellow apples in early August. We started eating them in July, always getting sick, and then Dr. Bliss would come and our mothers would make us chicken broth. One of those apple trees is still there - it must be over one hundred by now, still giving a large crop of yellow apples, albeit smaller than I remember.
As Doug, Akran, Tasha and I left, the owner of the "Little House" next door greeted us and invited us to pick as many apples as we wanted. We took pictures of each other standing where the living room used to be and in front of the old apple tree — still giving its sweet fruit. Imagine! 100 years of bearing and no worms! I wish we could plant such a tree in our orchard at the Bungalow. Maybe these words will do so in a different way.
With love, Julie Pyle Nicholson
