The Garden of Memories

Book excerpt: This 1922 fiction by Henry St. John Cooper, beautifully depicts social life, customs and Man-woman relationships in England. Cooper (1869 – 1926) was a creative English novelist of school and adventure fiction. Best known for creating, in 1908, the character Pollie Green, considered one of the most popular schoolgirl heroines,"According to his son, Cooper also wrote many "authorless" Sexton Blake stories for the Union Jack. His novel Sunny Ducrow was adapted into a 1926 film, Sunny Side Up. Excerpt from The Garden of Memories "They are wealthy folk, the Elmacotts, and they love their garden and pride themselves on it and hold that in all Sussex no soil can produce finer flowers and sweeter fruit, and though in this year of grace seventeen hundred and three the house, which is the Manor House of the Parish of Homewood, has no great antiquity, being scarce more than sixty years old, it has about it that completeness, those niceties of detail, the neatness and the order and the well being that are found only in the home which is ruled by a house-proud mistress."