Yesterday, it was the time to go to the next theatre show – this time being The Tempest. It was a lovely day, so we thought we ought to go early and then we would be able to walk round Stamford a bit before we saw the performance. I went in my rosy dress and Tilly got into her flowery top and shorts, it was so boiling! We went down to one of those stately home houses, where Isaac Newton was born, called Woolsthorpe Manor.
Isaac Newton was a famous scientist. He had to come back from Cambridge University to hide from the plague at that time. Yet there was something about him that didn’t make him a normal young man, his mother thought; he spent all day up in his room or outside in the garden by himself, thinking or reading or staring at the sky, or writing conclusions about something she found confusing. He would, it seemed, only talk to her and his step-sisters about the stars, and some scarcely interesting thing he then called ‘gravity’. Issac just wasn’t normal.
It was quite obvious his step-sisters weren’t too fond of him. They thought he was weird – what kind of a young man wanted to think about the sun and the moon and the stars whilst everyone else simply sits and listens? And then, they thought, nobody would look at his private notebooks and read his boring old conclusions, and it would all be forgotten. But it wasn’t. Was it?
The house had a nice feeling about it – a nice, country-side, bird-tweeting, bee-buzzing feeling. It felt so quiet and interesting, and everything seemed to have a good point about it – especially when Newton was scolded, “Go to your room!”, for he would have loved that. I’m quite sure he had a lovely time under that apple tree; well, until an apple bonked him on the head!
There were quite a few rooms in his house – the kitchen probably being the biggest – and each one had its own little scent that the neighbouring one could not follow. The kitchen smelt of dead rabbits and goose hide, which was definitely the worst, though it did have some herbs in with the bargain. The lounge had a distant rustic smell which probably came from the burning fire place, or that lovely, lovely grandfather clock in the corner of the room! Newton’s bedroom smelt sort of perfumed, but that was almost certainly because the window was the open, and the sun was shining in with a tingy smell about it. The Red Room did not smell nice to me – it was sort of sweaty and watery, but it had hints of nice stuff along with it. The other rooms smelt quite lovely. I would have liked the lounge’s smell best, I think.
There was also a science centre and a film, which was very good. There were lots of Newton’s amazing conclusions and experiments in the centre. One was a spinning circle, where you had to try to throw in the beanbag, and then see if it would carry on without falling when it reached the top of the circle. The staff man was very nice and helpful. I would certainly go again!
