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A few days of drought and hot sun have dimmed the varying greens of the wide sweep of wood to a minor tone. There is a thickening of outline, a massing of shapes into solid colour, and along the lower fringe the first moonlike discs of the elder flower are starring the mass of green. Many people dislike elder, in spite of its virtues, but I can never stand under those drooping bushes laden with great umbels of flower without the thick, warm scent taking me straight back to the summers of my childhood. Summers which in my memory were never wet or cold, but a vista of long, warm days and purple evenings. Days when the great scarlet poppies flamed and dropped under the drawing-room window, the turtle doves crooned interminable in the shrubbery and one lived upon the edge of undiscovered mystery, for the door between reality and make-believe stood permanently ajar.
Extract from 'A Norfolk Notebook' by Lilias Rider Haggard.
