The Wire | 'Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead'
An excerpt from Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (Dorothy):
"Her audience was rather limited because for many years she had not left her own house and garden. She had an objection to walking or passing over ground that did not belong to her. For that reason she never visited the farms the owned. Most of the village children had never seen her and she had become a terrifying figure in their minds. They thought she could hear everything they said with her ear trumpet, and that instead of a tongue she had two curling snakes in her ugly mouth. When the children grew up and some of them became maids in Willoweed House they were almost disappointed to discover she wasn't so strange as they expected; but they told their friends how she had three freak moles all stuffed in her bedroom on a bamboo table, and that she had catgut laces in her corsets, and how they would often hear her whistling to herself in bed in the mornings when they took in her morning tea—also that she used to eat black biscuits out of tins. They told these things in hushed whispers and they sounded sinister and dreadful."
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