the winter months of
rotting sea mists were over. But in April the ladders striped her
house-front, and soon her windows and doors began to start luridly out
of their surroundings of mellowed tiles and brick. After much
deliberation she had chosen yellow for her colour, tastefully picked out
with green. She had always been partial to yellow--it was a colour that
"showed up" well, and she was also influenced by the fact that there was
no other yellow-piped dwelling on the Marsh.

Her neighbours disapproved of her choice for the same reasons that had
induced her to make it. They were shocked by the fact that you could see
her front door from half a mile off on the Brodnyx Road; it was just
like Joanna Godden to choose a colour that shrieked across the landscape
instead of merging itself unobtrusively into it. But there was a still
worse shock in store for public opinion, and that was when she decided
to repaint her waggons as well as her house.

Hitherto there had been only one shape and colour of waggon on the
Marsh--a plain low-sided trough of deep sea-blue. The name was always
painted in white on a small black wooden square attached to the side.
Thomas Godden's waggons had been no departure from this rule. It was
left to his daughter to flout tradition, and by some obscure process of
local reasoning, bring discredit to her dead father by painting her
waggons yellow instead of blue. The evil went deeper than mere colour.
Joanna was a travelled woman, having once been to the Isle of Wight, and
it suddenly struck her that, since she was repainting, she might give
her three waggons the high gondola-shaped fronts that she had admired in
the neighbourhood of Shanklin and Ventnor. These she further beautified
with a rich, scrolled design, and her name in large, ornate
lettering--"Joanna Godden. Little Ansdore. Walland Marsh"--so that her
waggons went forth upon the roads very much as the old men o' war of
King Edward's fleet had sailed over that same country when it was
fathoms deep under the seas of Rye Bay.... With their towering,
decorated poops they were more like mad galleys of a bygone age than
sober waggons of a nineteenth century farm.

Her improvements gave her a sense of adventurous satisfaction--her house
with its yellow window frames and doors, with its new curtains of
swaggering design--her high-pooped waggons--the coat with the brass
buttons that old Stuppeny wore when he drove behind her to market--her
drea