Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

Each year from early summer until some date in September we children dwelt in the Borders. It was a complete break, for there seemed no link between the Tweedside hills and either the woods or the beaches of Fife. In those weeks we never gave our home a thought, and with bitter reluctance we returned to it. The Borders were to us a holy land which it would have been sacrilege to try to join on to our common life.

We lived with our maternal grandparents in an old farmhouse close to the main Edinburgh-Carlisle road, where it descended from benty moorlands to the Tweed valley. My father's family had been for the most part lawyers in Edinburgh and in the little burgh of Peebles, and owners of a small estate in Midlothian; my mother's had for generations been sheep-farmers on the confines of three shires -- Lanark, Midlothian and Tweeddale. The whole countryside was dotted with our relatives. My grandmother was a formidable old lady, who ruled her household like a grenadier. She had the hawk nose and the bright commanding eye of her kinsman, Mr. Gladstone, and she did not readily suffer the fool. But for us children she had an infinite tolerance. "Never daunton youth," was her favourite adage; a text often on her lips was "Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged."