She went skipping round the corner of the little sheep-house and saw Elfine, sitting on a turf and sunning herself.

Both cousins were startled.  But Flora was quite pleased.  She wanted a chance to talk to Elfine.

Elfine jumped to her feet and stood poised; she had something of the brittle grace of a yearling foal.  A dryad’s smile played on the curious sullen purity of her mouth, but her eyes were unawake and unfriendly.  Flora thought, ‘What a dreadful way of doing one’s hair; surely it must be a mistake.’

‘You’re Flora – I’m Elfine,’ said the other girl simply.  Her voice had a breathless, broken quality that suggested the fluty sexless timbre of a choir-boy’s notes (only choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost).

‘No prizes offered,’ thought Flora, rather rudely.  But she said politely: ‘Yes.  Isn’t it a delicious morning.  Have you been far?’

‘Yes… No… Away over there…’ The vague gesture of her outflung arm stretched, in some curious fashion, illimitable horizons.  Judith’s gestures had the same barrierless quality; there was not a vase left anywhere in the farm.

‘I feel stifled in the house,’ Elfine went on, shyly and abruptly.  ‘I hate houses.’

‘Indeed?’ said Flora.

She observed Elfine draw a deep breath, and knew that she was about to get well away on a good long description of herself and her habits, as these shy dryads always did if you gave them half a chance.  So she sat down on another turf in the sun and composed herself to listen, looking up at the tall Elfine.

‘Do you like poetry?’ asked Elfine, suddenly.  A pure flood of colour ran up under her skin.  Her hands, burnt and bone-modelled as a boy’s, were clenched.

‘Some of it,’ responded Flora, cautiously.

‘I adore it,’ said Elfine, simply.  ‘It says all the things I can’t say for myself… somehow… It means… oh, I don’t know.  Just everything, somehow.  It’s enough.  Do you ever feel that?’

Flora replied that she had, occasionally, felt something of the sort, but her reply was limited by the fact that she was not quite sure exactly what Elfine meant.

‘I write poetry,’ said Elfine.  (So I was right! thought Flora).  ‘I’ll show you some… if you promise not to laugh.  I can’t bear my children to be laughed at… I call my poems my children.’

Flora felt that she could promise this with safety.

‘And love, too,’ muttered Elfine, her voice breaking and changing shyly like the Finnish ice under the first lusty rays and wooing winds of the Finnish spring.  ‘Love and poetry go together, smehow… out here on the hills, when I’m alone with my dreams… oh, I can’t tell you how I feel.  I’ve been chasing a squirrel all the morning.’

(From Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons)

Happy National Poetry Month from Flora Poste, Elfine Starkadder… and me!