LUCY BOSTON: A WOMAN IN PLACE, A WOMAN OUT OF TIME
BY GAYE JEE
For a story truly to hold the child's attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him.
From the introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim.
INTRODUCTION
Lucy Boston was an extraordinary woman. Born just before the beginning of this century, she is best known for her children's books, the Green Knowe series, which were published during the 1950's - 70's. Yet writing was by no means her first or only passion. She loved landscape and the natural world and became an early campaigner against environmental pollution. She was an accomplished painter, and was passionate about music.
In the late 1930s she found a focus for all her future endeavours, both artistic and practical - her Norman Manor house beside the river Ouse in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. For two years she restored the house as near as possible to its original state, removing later features, uncovering fireplaces and knocking down walls. The house became her obsession. It is situated in what at the time was a remote village seemingly untouched by the first ominous rumblings of rural tourism and industry. She had first seen the house in 1915 while visiting the area. In her autobiography, 'Memory In A House,' she recalls,
In 1915 Hemingford Grey was wrapped in this primeval quietness, which in fact remained unbroken for another generation. Every time I took a punt out, I passed the north front of the old Manor, of which I knew neither the name nor the history ... I was not to know it was waiting for me, but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar ... (Ref: p 172)
She had found her ideal setting. During the war years she held musical evenings for airmen from the nearby RAF base, thereby combining her delight in sharing both her house and the music she loved so dearly. She was an obsessive gardener and specialised in growing old species of roses. When she could not be in her garden she sewed a series of masterful patchwork quilts. And beginning in her early sixties, she wrote a series of magical children's books mostly set in the Manor and its gardens. They are not the best known or most skilfully written children's books, but they have a quality which captures above all else Lucy Boston's unique sense of place. What might she have achieved if she had begun to write earlier? Did her tight focus on the Manor provide a bottomless well of inspiration, or did it constrict her imagination, making her a more narrow writer than she might have become? Was her writing necessary to her or simply another aspect of a rich and varied life lived by a woman bursting with energy and creativity? In this essay I shall attempt to explore these questions by examining her work, its strengths and weaknesses and the vital link between the work and the Manor.
Lucy Boston was born into a strict Wesleyan family in 1892. She nevertheless displayed an unusually independent spirit which led her to leave Somerville College Oxford after a few terms and become a nurse, first in England and then in France during the First World War. She writes about these events in Perverse and Foolish, the earlier volume of her autobiography, as if it was quite the normal way of things that girls would go to university and travel abroad to work in the opening years of this century.
Lucy was fortunate to come from a wealthy family and be financially independent. Her father was dead and her mother, after attempting to damp down her daughter's adventurous temperament, seemed to resign herself to having little real control over her life.
She married a distant cousin in 1917 but separated from her husband in the mid 1930's. During her marriage, which produced one son, she and her husband were early environmentalists, campaigning in particular against the pollution of the beautiful countryside around their house in Cheshire, which was slowly being poisoned by the chemical factories in the area. Lucy had developed a passionate love for natural landscape as a child and this love was the primary source for everything that was to follow in her life.
Her marriage lasted 20 years and after splitting with her husband, Lucy lived in Florence, Salzburg and Vienna. While in Vienna, she enroled in a studio to study drawing and painting and this, together with her passion for music, became the focus of her enthusiasm. The imminent outbreak of the Second World War saw Lucy returning to England and renting a flat in Cambridge where her son was at university. Soon after this she bought the Manor at Hemingford Grey and began the renovation of the building, followed by the creation of the garden from what was was little more than a scythed field.
By the beginning of the fifties, she had completed the house and the structural work on the garden. Lucy had, prior to the writing of her first Green Knowe book, written an adult novel entitled Yew Hall which was set in the house. However it was not to be for some years that she set about getting it published. In the interval, she wrote The Children of Green Knowe. In Memory in a House, she gives her reasons for beginning to write as ' ... I had written the first of the Green Knowe books, partly because I was hard up, but more to people the place for myself.' (Ref: p. 288)
Again, Lucy Boston's extraordinary character shines through - both her confidence in her own abilities and her honesty about her reasons for beginning to write. She submitted Yew Hall and The Children of Green Knowe together and both were accepted by Faber.
Thereafter, she wrote five more books in the Green Knowe series, plus another seven for children, including The Sea Egg which she was to say later was her own favourite. There were also two volumes of autobiography: Memory in a House and Perverse and Foolish; another adult book, Persephone and a book of poems, Time is Undone. Of these, most of the children's books are still in print, as are the autobiographies which have been republished by Lucy's family as part of the trust which has been set up to keep up the Manor. The adult novels and poems are out of print.
Lucy Boston was never a fashionable author and in these days of action-packed children's books with colourful and zany illustrations, it is perhaps surprising that her books, with their unsensational written style and beautiful but somewhat static monochrome pictures (by her son Peter) have any audience at all. It is likely that the majority of children come to the books via their parents who loved them when they were small. But I believe the child who enjoys Lucy's books has to be a special kind of child. A child with an imagination that can be kindled by what books do not say as well as what they do say, a child who is perhaps familiar with loneliness, who is searching for a place which embraces and is embraceable by their own imagination. Lucy Boston found that place at the Manor in Hemingford Grey. Her gift to children was to share it with the freshness of her own child's perspective.
THEMES
When addressing members of the English Society at Bulmershe College, Reading in 1972, Lucy Boston said,
My books are ... very earthy, very rooted, mostly about solitary lost children or an escaped gorilla, who became completely enfolded in a sure place, as real as it is remote, and are passionately and possessively at home in it. And so is every child reader who comes to it: clearly children need it. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 9)
Here she encapsulates all her main themes. Firstly, her identification and sympathy for those who have no place they can call their own. In my conversation with Jill Paton Walsh, who was a friend from the late 1970s until Lucy's death, Ms Paton Walsh said that she believed Lucy felt a sense of displacement herself. This comes through strongly in her autobiographies. Even though she was one of six children, she never seemed to fit easily into the conventional ways family life expected of her. Since Lucy's father's death when she was six, her mother seems to have become permanently distracted - as though she expected the children to know how to behave without actually giving them any instruction.
It was, for example, considered quite acceptable for all the adolescent children of the family, including several cousins, to sleep outside in sleeping bags on hot summer nights. Yet it was unthinkable that Lucy should spend part of the night lying next to a favourite male cousin who pointed out various constellations to her, particularly as this cousin had previously been found to have laid his head in Lucy's lap during one of their long walks together. Lucy must have received a curious double message from her mother had not been concerned until she suddenly realised - obviously with a considerable shock - that there could be sexual implications. No wonder Lucy, with her instinctive boldness of spirit found this confusing; she was obviously bemused by rules that seemed to her completely arbitrary and without logic.
The above is one example of how Lucy's early life must have shaped her attitudes towards authority; there are many others. Always her sympathy was with the underdog, with anyone or anything being manipulated by others for their own ends. She had an uncomplicated attitude towards truth and her own beliefs: she stuck to them without compromise and could never understand how anyone else could act differently.
The Manor in Hemingford Grey must have seemed to be the place where at last she could fully be herself, and having discovered it, she shared it with anyone who could appreciate it - she often said the house and a visitor's reaction to it were a test in themselves - friends, artists and later with the children who were to identify with the lonely boys and girls in her books.
Underlying all the other themes in her work was that of the love of nature and dismay at the way it was disappearing. In her early fiction this manifested itself in detailed descriptions of her house and garden; it could have been that this enabled her to deny what was happening in the outside world.
In her fiction, she presents the house as a settled, safe place, immune from the incursions of modernisation. However, in her letters to her friend, Hilary Bourne, and in Memory In A House, she tells of her horror as modern life intrudes. She talks of the 'cruel blow' occasioned by the field immediately next to her garden being turned into a playing field. And in 1972, as part of the address she gave at Bulmershe College, she said
...In the last twenty years all the country has been whittled away ... The lanes have become streets; the river flows by concrete banks; traffic roars all day; and boats looking just like cars follow one another up and down stream, all breathing each other's diesel, while the wake of the boats washes the eggs out of the moorhens' nests. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 9)
In Memory In A House, she writes,
What I want to evoke is the feeling I had at the time, not foreseeing the future, that the past of the house from the beginning still existed - the winds coming off its hay-fields, the clouds trailing shadows across the familiar woods, all the sounds of song birds, cocks, cattle and sheep, pump and bucket, axe and saw; the overriding tyranny of the seasons, the human fears and isolation, the deep passion and strong earthy loyalties. There was reverence for memory and, et expecto, the belief in a future. I was lucky enough to have caught it whole. I therefore know it and love it as no one else can, since that context has been wiped out, with its dignity and breadth. (Ref: p. 258)
As the years went on, she must have come to realise that it was not only her personal habitat which was being destroyed - the destruction was going on world-wide. Thus her books become more and more concerned with the loss of natural beauty and the dirtying of the world. In what was to be her most critically acclaimed book, A Stranger At Green Knowe, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1961, the first third of the book is spent describing the natural habitat of a family of gorillas in the Congo and how the gorillas’ancient way of life is savagely ended by a party of men who cross their paths while destroying the jungle.
In the Sea Egg (1967) she wrote what she described afterwards in a letter to her friend Hilary Bourne as 'my In memoriam to Cornwall'; the book tells of the unspoilt coastline and clean empty beach and was based upon the area around Kynance Cove. In Memory In A House, Lucy writes, 'Just as it was published, the Torrey Canyon blotted out Kynance under black oil.' (Ref: p 322)
This destroyed her image of Cornwall forever, and she was to say at Bulmershe College,
Certainly I could never have written 'The Sea Egg' ... if I had known that in the middle of the ocean an area from horizon to horizon is a heaving carpet of our rubbish. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 11)
It must have been the painful realisation that mankind has destroyed and defiled the natural world from the beginning of time which led to her final Green Knowe book, The Stones of Green Knowe. The book is set in the twelfth century as the house is being built. The boy who is to live in the house with his family is Roger d'Aulneaux and as in the other Green Knowe books, he meets children from other centuries who live in the house. But for the first time in the books, he meets children from the future and already, when he travels forward in time to 1660, he can see that the landscape has changed:
... the fields seemed immeasurably wider, as if the forest had drawn back'. (Ref: p.44)
By the time he arrives in the twentieth century, we are told
... the first thing he noticed was the stale dead air, with a general smell that he didn't know. He had a quick nose that gave him instant warnings. The forest of course was not there, so rich in its own smell. It was now a mass of houses starting only a few fields away from him ... (Ref: p. 102)
At the end of her address to Bulmershe College, Lucy said,
When I try to imagine writing another book, I simply come up against this: all the words that I would use seem to have lost the meaning they used to have, and I don't know how to go on. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 13)
In spite of this, she did go on to write The Stones but the optimistic message that Green Knowe as an entity had survived the centuries, was not intended to blot out the bitterness she felt over the destruction of her beloved natural world.
She believed that she had been fortunate to be born in time to experience the world untouched, although it was only apparently untouched by the end of the 19th century, since most of the elements of industrialisation were in place; they simply had not become prevalent. In Perverse and Foolish, she describes the family house as being in a street of 'small identical, barely genteel houses'. Lucy's early childhood, although comfortably wealthy, seems to have been restricted both physically by bleak surroundings and mentally and emotionally by the strict Wesleyan tenets to which her family adhered.
When her father died this restriction was greatly intensified by reduction of means and her mother's literal interpretation of the scriptures. Again, from Perverse and Foolish:
'Every word ... was literally true, including the creation of the world in six days. But to the ten commandments she added four more:
Thou shalt not drink alcohol;
Thou shalt not go to the theatre;
Thou shalt not play cards;
Thou shalt not dance.'
(Ref: p. 51)
(By all accounts, as soon as she could, Lucy became an enthusiastic practitioner of at least three of the additional 'thou shalt not's'; whether she was also a card player she does not mention.)
So when the fatherless family moved to Westmorland for a year, the shock of suddenly experiencing untamed nature at first hand must have been all the more extreme for a child who had hitherto been so restricted. In Perverse and Foolish, Lucy writes, ' ... my real life began at ten years old.' (Ref: p.53)
This was the beginning of her overriding passion for the natural world and when she came to write for children, she felt an urgent desire to communicate this feeling to them.
Linked to Lucy Boston's dismay at the destruction of the natural world around her is the theme of time and the wisdom which can be gained.
Critics of Lucy Boston take issue with her refusal to handle the realities of life for children growing up in the middle and late twentieth century, but it was more important to her to convey with her adult sensibility the joy of a child's intimate contact with nature. She does this by playing with time. Firstly, the central adult in the Green Knowe books is a great-grandmother; her name, Mrs Oldknow, itself a reference to the wisdom that comes with time. By her gentle encouragement and lack of prying, each child who comes to the house finds the adventures that he or she needs. Tolly, Mrs Oldknow's own great-grandson finds a family and a home to call his own. Ping, a Chinese refugee identifies with Hanno, the escaped gorilla.
In the best of the books, it is as if the displaced and damaged children who come to Green Knowe come to a place where time is suspended so that a healing can take place. And they learn from this place of safety truths which are a necessary part of their growing up - about death, what it is like to be blind, slavery, prejudice and cruelty.
I do not think Lucy Boston set out to be didactic, rather she wanted to fire children up with her own passions so that they would discover and experience the world for themselves, move out of the dull standardisation which she perceived was being imposed upon all of us and allow themselves to flourish as individuals.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE FICTION
Although Lucy Boston published nearly twenty works, including two adult novels, a play and a volume of poetry, it is for her Green Knowe series of children's books for which is best known, plus The Sea Egg, which is set in Cornwall.
The first of the Green Knowe books was published at the same time as Yew Hall, one of her two adult novels. It is often said that the first novel any author writes is autobiographical and Lucy Boston was quite open about this in Yew Hall. She writes in the preface,
This book is the result of a conversation between the author and three friends, in the course of which it was jokingly suggested that their appearance and relationship was all that was required for a novel. (Ref: p. 7)
However, the autobiography, apart from the features mentioned above did not occur in the events in the book, but in the extended opportunity it gave Lucy Boston to write about her house and garden. The characters in the text play out a plot which although slow to start, gathers momentum and finishes excitingly, but they are dwarfed by the character of the house and the influence the narrator perceives it has upon them. There are long passages of description of the building and the garden - and indeed gardening - which I feel would be unacceptable in a novel published today. We would require something more 'pacey' and stripped down - and the resultant book after editing would probably be about a third the length that it actually is - little more, in fact than a long short story.
However, it must not be forgotten that Yew Hall was Lucy Boston's first attempt to write a book. Although she had been known for telling wonderful stories since a girl, the making up and telling of a story to friends and relatives, where the action must of necessity be kept moving, is very different to the freedom of writing a novel. Of course Lucy wrote about her pre-occupations: all writers do. The difference is that the early work of most writers never sees the light of day, and it is only after repeated failures and criticism that what they write begins to approach the state of being publishable. (I am talking about those writers who do reach that stage, of course.)
The plot of Yew Hall may be summarised as follows: the narrator - an elderly lady - owns a fine old house, part of which she must let to tenants in order to afford to run it. Her new tenants are a young married couple who are subsequently joined by the husband's twin brother. The beautiful wife is jealous of their relationship, attempts to seduce the brother (whether she succeeds is not clear) and then tries to poison her husband. The brother, upon discovering this, kills the wife and then commits suicide. The interest and subtlety of this book lie in the narrator's relationship to each of the other protagonists; she has a horrified fascination for the wife and respects the husband for his good looks, honesty and integrity. She falls in love with the brother, although she knows from the outset there can never be any possibility of a reciprocal relationship between them, since there is too great an age gap.
The novel is like a Russian doll - in the middle is the tiny thin plot of the wife and the two brothers. The next layer is the narrator's relationship with each of them and enveloping all this is the overwhelming effect the house has upon all the characters.
The Children of Green Knowe, although originally written as a children's book, had been accepted by Faber for inclusion in their adult list. However Lucy felt that the book would not be complete without the other-worldly illustrations drawn for it by her son Peter, so it was published as a children's book after all.
Lucy says in Memory In a House, '... as I insisted on Peter's drawings it was ruled that pictures were only for children, so I became a children's writer. I did not at the time realise what a step down this was.' Despite this ironical reflection, I believe she had found her niche; she could write for children in the most direct and refreshing way, with no hint of having to write down to them - something I suspect she would have been incapable of doing. 'I do not know how anyone can judge of what they write unless they are writing for themselves.' she writes in Memory in a House.
The book concerns a lonely little boy, Tolly, coming to stay with his great-grandmother for the first time. His father and step-mother are abroad during the school holidays and he has been expecting to have to remain at boarding school over Christmas. Arriving at Green Knowe at night in a rowing boat, with flood waters lapping up to the steps of the house, already the reader is infused with a wonderful sense of mystery about what is going to happen. Tolly mirrors those thoughts as he walks into the strange entrance hall:
'What if my great-grandmother is a witch!' he thought. Above the vases, wherever there was a beam or an odd corner or a door-post out of which they could, as it were, grow, there were children carved in dark oak, leaning out over the flowers. Most of them had wings, one had a real bird's nest on its head, and all of them had such round polished cheeks they seemed to be laughing and welcoming him. (Ref: p. 17)
His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning ... He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made her face more like her. She was wearing a dress of folded velvet that was as black as a hole in darkness ... 'So you've come back!' she said, smiling ... (Ref: p. 17)
These two passages demonstrate something at which Lucy Boston, and which she uses especially in her first two Green Knowe books: she sets up an atmosphere which is subtly disturbing and then immediately softens it by the warmth of her description. She may not always explain a mystery, but she never lets it become frightening.
During Tolly's stay at Green Knowe, he becomes increasingly aware of the house and its history. Mrs Oldknow gives him the freedom to do as he wishes, providing a safe place to come back to and report his adventures. Soon Tolly starts to become aware that he and Mrs Oldknow are not the only inhabitants of the house.
At breakfast on the first morning of the stay, he has noticed a painting of three children and their mother and grandmother which is hung in the dining room. The children, Toby, Alexander and Linnet, who lived in the house in the seventeenth century, begin to play a tantalising game of hide and seek with him. The presence of the children is handled with great originality and skill. The word 'ghost' is never used; these are real children who have the ability to exist in more than one time. Some of the descriptions of their appearances send a pleasant tingle up the spine, but they are never so frightening that a child would be kept awake by them. Rather, they would long to be there with Tolly, to share his adventure:
As he went along the entrance hall, past one of the big mirrors, something in it caught his eye. It looked like a pink hand. The glass reflected a dark doorway on the other side of the stairs. Behind the door-post, flattened against the wall on tiptoe to make themselves as thin as they could, their faces puckered with holding in their laughter, he saw Linnet and Alexander. It was Linnet's hand on the door-post. There was no mistake, he knew them. 'I spy!' he shouted, whisking round to chase them, but they did not run away, they simply vanished. (Ref: p. 63)
In the evenings, Tolly sits with his grandmother by the fire and she tells him stories of the children and their lives in the house. Tolly comes to feel that if only he can make himself receptive, the children and their animals will play with him and become his friends. And this does happen at the end, after Tolly, who has put on Toby's coat, has succeeded in his other most ardent desire: that of meeting Toby's magical horse, Feste, who although remaining invisible takes food from his hand:
He went pattering off towards the house, but skirted round the garden path ... because in imagination he was riding a high spirited horse and needed room to gallop. As he came along the lawn he saw the children grouped near the tree. Linnet was holding one of the partridges in her lap ... Toby was coatless, wearing a shirt which had full sleeves ... with lace at the wrist ... Alexander was standing by with a handful of nuts which he was cracking between his teeth and eating. The squirrel was on his sleeve helping itself out of his palm. (Ref: p. 150)
Whenever Tolly meets the children, they always form a tableau for him - he never sees them running, climbing or in the act of hiding. They are always posed, as for a painting. This increases the feeling of magic; they are real children, yet they are also not real.
It should not be supposed that the book is simply a sugary narrative of fantastic events. There are many moments of frustration for Tolly, where he wants so much to see the children, but cannot make it happen. He learns to be accepting and finds that he must let them come to him. There are also some wonderfully poignant moments, such as when he is forced to face up to the reality of children's death. Tolly and his great-grandmother have been going through the contents of an old toy box. Tolly has found Toby's sword and is poking it into his bedclothes.
'Stop putting swords through the bed-clothes,' said Mrs Oldknow in an ordinary voice. 'Did Toby use it?' asked Tolly solemnly. 'He never stuck it into anyone, if that is what you mean ... ' 'Why doesn't he want it now?' Mrs Oldknow looked at him with an uneasy wrinkled face. Then she sighed. 'Because he's dead,' she said at last. Tolly sat dumbfounded, with his big black eyes fixed on her. He must have known of course that the children could not have lived so many centuries without growing old, but he had never thought about it ... 'Are they all dead?' he said at last. 'They all died together in the Great Plague ... Toby and Alexander and Linnet and their mother all died in one day ... only the poor old grandmother was left, too unhappy to cry.' (Ref: p. 75)
The delicacy with which Lucy Boston handles the above passage and many others like it distinguishes her as a very special writer for children. She has paced it in exactly the way difficult subjects are dealt with by sensitive parents. Mrs Oldknow does not wish to thrust harsh knowledge upon Tolly, yet she knows she must tell him the truth when he is ready to hear it. And it is one of the first times we sense Mrs Oldknow's awareness of her own mortality, in her uneasy wrinkled face and her evident identification with the grandmother of the three children.
The Chimneys of Green Knowe (1958) begins with a disappointment for Tolly - and for the reader. Tolly is home for the holidays again, but discovers to his horror that the painting with Toby, Alexander and Linnet in it has been lent to an exhibition, and worse, that Mrs Oldknow is thinking of selling it to pay for some essential repairs to the house. Without the picture, the children are not in the house, so Tolly prepares himself for a lonely holiday.
In place of the beloved painting is another, this time depicting a fashionable lady in a carriage. She is Maria Oldknow who lived with her family in the house at the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly that if only they could find Maria's jewels, which were lost during a fire, they could get the other painting back and have the house repaired. It's not long before he meets Susan, Maria's daughter. Susan is blind and is much more 'flesh and blood' than the enigmatic and mysterious children in the previous book. The time-slips in this book work both back and forwards - sometimes Tolly sees Susan in 'his' time and sometimes in 'hers'.
Because Susan is blind, she does not have an awareness of herself as one of 'the others'; rather, she thinks of Tolly as a relative and is not particularly concerned about the different periods of time each inhabits. Susan is another lonely child. Her fashionable mother finds her embarrassing and her grandmother is too pious and hard-hearted to do more than remind her that her blindness is certainly a punishment. Her nanny Mrs Softly treats her like an invalid and will not let her learn to fend for herself; her cruel brother, Sefton, teases her.
Once again, Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly stories, this time about Susan and her family's life in the house, which had at the time, as had the real Manor, been eccentrically extended so that the original Norman building was enclosed within a Regency mansion. The plot of this book is stronger than in The Children; instead of each story about the family being a separate cameo which ultimately had no effect on the present-day story, they are linked to form a continuous narrative which runs alongside Tolly's adventures.
The book might just as well have been called 'The Patchworks of Green Knowe', since a recurring motif throughout the book is the mending of the old patchwork quilts from around the house, which had originally been made by Susan's grandmother. As Tolly asks about the fragments of fabric, his great-grandmother tells the story of the characters to whom they relate.
One of Lucy Boston's most vivid characters appears in this book - Jacob, an African slave boy, who has been bought by Susan's father, Captain Oldknow, both to give him his freedom and provide a companion for the otherwise friendless Susan.
Lucy Boston took on quite a challenge here - to portray a black child who speaks in broken English without parodying him; to show his difference without making him seem 'uncivilised' and to capture his intelligence and warmth without patronising him. Of course she cannot avoid the subject of racial prejudice - Maria and Sefton taunt him and dress him like a monkey, while the grandmother calls him a 'black heathen' and is shocked that her son could have chosen such a companion for his daughter. Even the Captain calls Jacob 'Sambo' before he knows his real name.
The Chimneys was written in the days when Little Black Sambo was still considered acceptable reading for children, but even so Lucy Boston handles the subject of race with sensitivity - she does not ignore it, but shows how a person with different gifts can transform the life of one as sheltered and cut off as Susan.
The climax of Jacob and Susan's story is the fire which destroys the new mansion, leaving the thick stone walls of the Norman hall intact. Susan is trapped alone in her room, too disorientated by the noise and smoke to find her way out. Jacob, having on a previous occasion been made to climb up the chimney by Sefton as a joke, climbs again to rescue Susan and guides her back down the chimney. She has come to trust him in all things, including when he shows her how to climb trees, so climbing down inside the chimney seems very little different to someone who cannot see.
Meanwhile, Tolly is pre-occupied by the stories of Susan and Jacob. He simulates blindness by blindfolding himself, so he can understand what Susan experienced, and he climbs the trees Susan and Jacob climbed, where he finds their initials carved high in the branches. Although Susan, apparently because of her blindness, is frequently seen by Tolly, for a long time, he is unable to see Jacob; he only hears him calling like a bird from high up in a tree or sees one of his arms as he reaches out from a clump of reeds to catch a duckling to give to Susan to hold. It is not until three-quarters of the way through the book that Tolly, returning to the house in the evening after discovering a secret passage in the garden under a ruined tower, hears low voices in the living-room.
Susan was sitting on the rug by the fire plucking at it with her fingers ... Jacob ... was standing looking out of the window. ... Susan stopped (speaking) as Tolly came in. 'Who's there?' 'Nobody there, Missy.' 'It's me,' said Tolly. 'Ai, Ai!' said Jacob and if his woolly hair could have stood on end it would have done. And then he suddenly saw Tolly. 'Who's that, Missy?' 'It's alright, he's a friend of mine. He's my cousin Toseland.' (Ref: p. 120)
In a delightful twist, in Jacob's reaction, we suddenly see Tolly as one of 'the others'. But this is to have its advantages. In what is really an added-on section of plot, Sefton and the valet, Caxton are trying to sell a boy to the press-gang. The boy is hiding in the tunnel under the ruined tower and neither Susan nor Jacob dare to go to him to take food or tell him that Captain Oldknow will return that evening and save him. Of course Tolly is invisible to everyone else in the house, so he can go to him. (How he can transport the basket containing the food without it being seen is not explained, but one is so caught up in the story upon first reading that one does not think about this.)
As Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly the story of the boy's rescue, Tolly suddenly recognises the part he played in it.
... Tolly's feet came down to the floor with a thump. 'I wondered however much longer they were going to leave poor Fred Boggis alone in the tunnel. I know he had candles, but, Granny, he was scared.' Mrs Oldknow stopped abruptly in her sewing, her needle held motionless in mid-air, and looked at Tolly ... 'I might have known it was you! I was going to tell you about the strange boy who came in the nick of time and was never seen again. I always thought it was Alexander.' (Ref: p. 131)
By Mrs Oldknow's reaction, the reader is once again given the sense that the old lady exists in the centre of all that has happened in the house; nothing seems impossible to her, even if occasionally she herself can still be surprised.
At the end of the book, Tolly, while exploring the cavity between the ceiling and the roof, finds Maria's jewels, where they had apparently been hidden by Caxton at the time of the fire. This solves Mrs Oldknow's financial problems and the painting of Linnet and her family is restored to its rightful place. Once again, Tolly's home and 'family' are safe.
The Children and The Chimneys resemble each other in structure - the stories about the family coming to life and the child, Tolly, becoming involved with them. Both books, especially the first, have an fragile intricacy which beguiles the reader.
The River at Green Knowe (1959) was a departure in many ways. I suspect Lucy Boston was looking for a new direction in which to take the Green Knowe stories, probably realising that it would be impossible to maintain the atmosphere of magic created by the structure of the first two books.
Green Knowe has been taken for the summer by two middle aged women, Dr Maud Biggin and her companion Miss Sybilla Bun. Dr Biggin is an eccentric archaeologist who is writing about an ancient race of giants. She decides to invite her niece, Ida, to stay for the summer and also sends to the 'S.P.S.H.D.C. - Society for the Promotion of Summer Holidays for Displaced Children - for two more children to keep her company. This is our introduction to Ping, the Chinese boy who is the main character in A Stranger at Green Knowe and to Oskar, a Polish boy.
The story concerns the children's adventures on the river, mostly early in the morning and after dark, when they can be sure there will be no other visitors to spoil the peace. Disappointingly, the events of the book do not gel into a plot. There are many separate adventures, both magical and non-magical, which culminate in the children discovering a real giant. They contrive to show the giant, who by the end of the book has joined a circus, to Dr Biggin. Of course, being an adult, she insists that it must be a trick, despite the fact that she would like nothing more than proof for her theories.
If Lucy Boston lost her way in the plotting of this book, it has some compensations in the characters she created. The two women are wonderfully eccentric; by believing that children need only to 'fed and turned out like cats', they provide an ideal backdrop to the adventurous children. They also give more scope for humour than in the previous two books as in this description of Dr Biggin:
She had spent much of her life digging up old cities and graves ... and had got into the habit of searching the ground for fragments. She could not bear a vacuum cleaner because it gave her nothing to look at. Her shambling way of walking made her look rather like a monkey, and if a chimpanzee were let loose in a shop to choose its own clothes it would choose much the same as she was wearing. (ref: p.5)
The three children also have distinct personalities; fiery Ida, heroic Oskar, dreamy and sensitive Ping. As in all the books, the children have a boundless capacity for experiencing joy in the natural world, and for the first time, Lucy Boston lets her children be gently mocking to the adults who are looking after them, as well as letting the reader know that adults are not always either right or invincible.
Thoughtful Ping is the central character in A Stranger (1961), the Carnegie Medal winning book which saw Lucy Boston back up to her full inventive strength and finding the new direction which she had been seeking in The River. The story-line, although divided into three sections, is linear - there is no moving back and forwards through time - and it is the only one of the books which has no magic in it, although its effect is so magical one would not necessarily realise this upon the first reading.
The opening section of the book, which occupies the first third, is a detailed description of the gorilla's natural habitat and his life in the forests of the Congo. It also tells of the slaughter of his father and the young gorilla's capture. The length of this passage is quite audacious. Do we really need all the detail we are given, when the actual effect it has upon the plot could be summed up in a single sentence? I think Lucy Boston intended to draw the attention of children once more to the tragedy of the loss of the natural world and the brutality of trees being torn down and habitat destroyed. It may be out of balance with the rest of the book, but it also builds sympathy for the young gorilla, named Hanno by his captors, so that we can fully understand his plight when he is confined at the zoo.
The second section is the meeting between Ping, while on a school trip, and Hanno, who by now is fully grown. Ping is totally absorbed in him and talks to the keeper who allows him to give Hanno a peach, which, he says will ensure that Hanno always remembers him.
Hanno then escapes from London Zoo and by (it must be admitted) an astounding co-incidence, finds himself a hiding place in the garden at Green Knowe where Ping is staying for the holidays. Being a refugee, Ping identifies intensely with Hanno, whom he imagines yearning to return to the forests of the Congo where he was captured.
Ping is presented with an agonising dilemma - should he tell Mrs Oldknow about Hanno, in which case he knows she will be obliged to inform the authorities who are looking for him, or should he say nothing and deceive someone he loves dearly.
Ping knows that Hanno cannot return to the zoo as it is a wholly alien environment to him. He also knows he cannot stay at Green Knowe forever because there would not be enough food or cover to sustain him. In the end, the decision is taken out of his hands when Hanno is traced to the garden. As his pursuers close in, a stampeding cow, who is being chased by a farmer and his men, in her panic runs straight at Ping who falls to the ground. Just as Ping is expecting to be gored by the cow's horn, Hanno swings down from the trees and saves him by throwing the cow over onto its back and breaking its neck. As the pursuers come within sight of Ping, they assume he has been mauled by Hanno and shoot the gorilla dead.
Ping is of course greatly saddened by the loss of Hanno, but he is in no doubt that the gorilla has chosen to die, rather than return to confinement.
'He's dead,' he said clearly and too composedly. 'It's all right. That is how much he didn't want to go back, I saw him choose.' (Ref: P. 166)
Although the cow and Ping's rescue from it adds drama to Hanno's final confrontation with his tormentors, it also rather muddies the waters. Hanno's motivation appears to be to save Ping; he risks his life by showing himself, when he could have remained hidden. When he is then confronted by the men pursuing him, he recognises the same hunter who killed his father. Hanno prepares to attack him as the bullet is fired. This is not the same as choosing to die rather than be recaptured. We must assume therefore, that Ping's interpretation of Hanno's actions and the gorilla's actual intentions were different, which is unsatisfactory.
This does however, highlight the overwhelming achievement of the book - the portrait of Hanno and all he stands for. Who are we, Lucy Boston seems to be saying, to imagine we know what an animal is thinking? Apart perhaps from the confusing ending, Lucy Boston resists any temptation to anthropomorphise him. Where he has characteristics in common with humans she says so, but she gives him a simple dignity and strong but straightforward emotions which are most un-humanlike. Hanno is of nature and his capture and almost casual destruction represents that of the whole of the natural world.
Before she wrote The Stranger, Lucy Boston spent many hours at the zoo observing Guy the gorilla to gain an understanding of his personality, so much so that she formed quite a close relationship with his keeper, much as Ping does in the book. Indeed, the book was inspired by Guy rather than him simply being used as research for it. In a letter to her friend Hilary Bourne in 1959, she wrote, 'I still haunt the gorilla in the Zoo, trying to coax a book out of him.'
In an interview by Emma Fisher in The Pied Pipers, she makes it clear what the gorilla represented to her:
I was utterly astonished that there could be such a thing ... And he just met the case of something that could stand for a total misuse and abuse of life ... Whereas I feel, like the Buddhists, that the whole of life, whatever it is, matters. And certainly sentient and intelligent life like that ought to be treated exactly as we treat our own. (Ref: p 281)
In the final book whose plot I am going to describe, An Enemy at Green Knowe (1964), we are back in the world of magic. But this time it is not the fascinating interactions between children from different times, but real malign black magic perpetrated by a thoroughly nasty modern-day witch, Dr Melanie D Powers.
This is the last of the really potent Green Knowe stories. The subsequent Castle of Yew and Nothing Said, which were written for younger children and The Stones of Green Knowe, which came thirteen years later, are so slight of plot that it is difficult to engage with them.
The children at the house this time are Tolly and Ping who have somehow met - we are not told how - and have formed a perfect friendship. (For the enthusiastic reader of the Green Knowe books this seems to be just as it should be, and one is in pleasant anticipation of adventures ahead.)
Dr Powers has moved to a house near to Green Knowe and is trying to find something which was secreted in Mrs Oldknow's house by the mysterious Dr Vogel who was tutor to the consumptive Roger, the son of the house in 1930. Mrs Oldknow and the boys soon realise that this something, if found, will give the aptly named Dr Powers much more power than she has any right to have, so she must be kept from it at all costs.
A dark brooding atmosphere presides over the whole book. Dr Powers begins her onslaught in a friendly enough way, but almost immediately betrays her sneaky, petty use of magic, much to the disgust of Ping and Tolly. In the following delicately creepy passage, she has refused a cake during the tea party to which Mrs Oldknow invites her, but then as she prepares to leave the tea table,
Tolly ... saw one of the little cakes move, jerkily, as if a mouse was pulling it. Then it slid over the edge of the plate and twitched its way across the table and into the twiddling fingers held behind Miss Power's back. (Ref: p.45)
As the book progresses, Dr Power's falsely sweet facade drops until Mrs Oldknow and the boys are confronted with her malign power. She tries to trick Mrs Oldknow into selling the house to her and almost succeeds in doing so. Firstly she tries hypnotism and then a series of plagues visited upon the house and garden, including caterpillars which eat Mrs Oldknow's beloved roses, cats which attack the wild birds and finally snakes which threaten and sicken the old lady and the two boys. Mrs Oldknow is for the first time shown as uncertain - she has to question where her priorities lie; she cannot endanger the children for the sake of the house, however much she loves it.
Each of the plagues is overcome by something which is infused with the strength and magic of the house itself - the roses are eaten by the birds which Mrs Oldknow feeds every day. The cats - and this is one of the most magical passages in Lucy Boston's entire work - are frightened away by the returning spirit of Hanno, whom Ping invokes using some magic of his own:
On the spot where his splendid friend had been shot, Ping dug a hole. In this he laid the long black hair (from Hanno's coat) and with the scissors cut of some of his own that fell to mix with it, and tears fell too without his intention because he had loved Hanno more than he could understand. He brushed the earth over it, hung the prayer bell on the tree, and said his prayer in his boy lover's voice, 'O Hanno, come just once again,' then leaving the prayer bell fluttering a tongue of paper that waved in the air the one word HANNO, he went away ...
He did not know how long he had been standing there when there arose from the inner garden such a spitting and screeching of cats as never was heard at any witches' Sabbath ... Deep quiet followed. Not even that chuckling grunt that Ping would have so loved to hear ...
'He came when I called him,' he said proudly. (Ref: p. 100)
Ping himself rids the house and garden of the snakes by discovering and disposing of the snake's egg which contained the spell which had attracted them in the first place.
But Dr Powers has some nasty tricks up her sleeve; she tries to get blind Susan (from The Chimneys) to help her by stealing out of the dustbin bits of the worn-out patchwork pieces that had come from Susan's nightdress. But Tolly's own quilt also contains pieces of the fabric, so when Susan is invoked, he is woken by the quilt being pulled off the bed, it having been caught up in the magic. He manages to stop Susan by intoning a spell he and Ping have learned as part of the defence they are putting up against Dr Powers.
Eventually, the boys find what Dr Powers was looking for - a witches' book written on a dried bat - and use her own magic against her by invoking her secret name. Her power leaves her and she flees from the house as though spat out - a crumpled, bewildered woman with no threat left in her.
The story ends rather oddly with Ping and Tolly looking in the Persian glass that they have been using to keep watch on Dr Powers - it reflects the future and past, not the present - and seeing their fathers coming up the path together. This, being completely unprepared for, makes for a rather lame ending to what is a very exciting story.
CHARACTERISATION
The children's author and critic John Rowe Townsend was a personal friend of Lucy Boston in her later years. However, he is not one of her work's greatest admirers. Lucy herself quite cheerfully remarked in an interview, when asked what she thought of more 'realistic' children's books, including those of J R Townsend, 'Well, I know he hates mine. He's written nicely about them in one of this books about children's stories, but he says quite firmly that they're not his cup of tea.' (Ref: The Pied Pipers, p. 284)
In his obituary of Lucy Boston, published in the Guardian May 31st, 1990, he writes with affection for the author, but also comments, 'Lucy Boston was not, in my view, outstandingly good at constructing plots or portraying character.'
Lucy Boston may not have been outstandingly good at portraying character in all cases, but this becomes irrelevant where she is using her characters to portray elemental concerns such as good and evil, as is often the case.
Mrs Oldknow appears in all the Green Knowe books except one; she is the 'good' influence the children can always rely upon. Yet we know very little of what she is thinking, as none of the stories are written from her point of view. She remains enigmatic; we know she is wise, playful and kind but we can gain no idea of how she views the action or what her emotions are except in rare instances. This does increase the sense of mystery - perhaps she knows so much, she would spoil the surprises the children experience, or perhaps she is largely unaware of what is going on.
There is also a character type which recurs in several of the books: the proud, selfish, cruel yet fascinating woman. She is at her worst as Melanie Powers, is softened into silliness as Maria in The Chimneys, has her counterpart in the desirable Arabella in Yew Hall and a brief appearance as the aristocratic seducer in Persephone. It would be interesting to know what the origin of this character was. It is as though this character embodies abstract evil and threat to the house, as each of them, except the last, either wants to possess it or to change it into something which in some way reflects themselves. In the same way Mrs Oldknow, as Lucy Boston's alter ego, represents a benign influence in protecting it and letting it be as much like itself as possible. Perhaps the sinister character is an embodiment, either conscious or unconscious, of Lucy Boston's own fear about what would happen to the house when she herself was no longer there and is therefore woven into the very fabric of the stories, surfacing from time to time as an actual character.
We are given a much stronger sense of the children's characters as real human beings; they come complete with idiosyncrasies, especially Tolly, Ping, Susan and Jacob. Perhaps a test of a rounded character would be whether one could answer the question, 'How would that person react in such and such situation?' With Susan and Jacob, one could easily make a prediction and probably with Tolly and Ping, but almost certainly not with Mrs Oldknow.
A SENSE OF PLACE
I do not have space here to discuss The Sea Egg, curiously Lucy Boston's own favourite among her books even though it is not set at Green Knowe, but in Cornwall. It does not fall within the Green Knowe canon and to my mind does not have the power of those books. It is however, yet another example of what was most vital to Lucy Boston in the writing of her books - the dual themes of the natural world coupled with sense of place.
In no other children's literature is one place so repeatedly and obsessively evoked. We are all aware that The Wind in the Willows was set on the Thames near Marlow, Alice in Wonderland in Oxford and Winnie the Pooh in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, but all these places merely act as backdrops for the action taking place in the stories. Green Knowe is always an active part of the story. It drenches everything in its atmosphere and suspends the reader in a world that is both mysterious and comforting. Children, both the fictional ones in the books and those who hear the stories, feel they have come home, but with none of the connotations of the commonplace that most homes have.
One must however ask whether this preoccupation inhibited Lucy Boston as a writer; she once said herself, 'All my water is drawn from one well ... I am obsessed by my house.' But did the house release her creativity as a writer, as is suggested by Eleanor Cameron in The Green and Burning Tree, or would it have erupted out of her anyway, perhaps earlier and in a more diverse form if she had never lived there? We shall never know the answer to this.
As part of my research I talked to several friends of Lucy Boston, including Jill Paton Walsh, who knew her in her later years, Elizabeth Vellacott, the painter who lived with Lucy during the war and then moved to a house nearby where she and Lucy remained friends until Lucy's death, and Hilary Bourne, who had known Lucy well from before World War II until the late seventies. I also interviewed Diana Boston, Lucy's daughter-in-law. The picture they gave me of the writer was of a woman who was so bursting with creativity in every direction, that her life was simply too busy until she was in her late middle age when she finally began writing. I was able to gather disappointingly little information about Lucy's methods or motivation for writing from my interviews. It seems she simply did not talk about it, even in her letters to Hilary Bourne, to whom she sent many of her books chapter by chapter as they were written.
Her late start as a writer and intense commitment to other preoccupations could be the reasons that Lucy Boston may not have reached her full potential. Although she naturally wrote in beautifully clear, evocative prose, her imagery vividly enriched by her painter's eye, her plots are sometimes thin and often disjointed, especially in her adult novels. In very few instances does she manage to inject her sense of humour into the stories - and she had a wicked sense of fun as the letters written to Hilary Bourne demonstrate. She uses whatever she needs to make her stories appealing to children, even if the most unlikely coincidences are involved, such as Hanno happening to arrive at Green Knowe after his escape from the zoo.
Although largely I think she was an exciting writer because she was so instinctive, if she had begun writing when she was younger she would perhaps have been more willing to learn the craft without detriment to the art; she would perhaps have successfully progressed beyond the house, instead of which, her fiction began to decline in quality by the mid-1960s, when she was already over seventy.
However, it may be that she did not find writing all-compelling; although unlike some professional writers to whom sitting down to do a day's writing is often described as little more than a chore, I am sure she continued to find much pleasure and fulfilment in doing it. However, if she had been given a choice, say between her rose garden and writing, the roses would have won every time. And of course there would have been no contest whatsoever between the house and the writing. In the interview she gave for The Pied Pipers in the early seventies, she is quite unrepentant about her lack of 'professionalism':
I'm against all theoreticians, especially about writing. No original writing could result from a theory, could it? I myself am totally unprofessional, and never go to any of these conferences. After all I only write in the winter; in the summer I do my garden and take people round ... (Ref: p.284)
Lucy Boston went on to write two incisive volumes of autobiography which are fascinating reading as social documents, though they mostly avoid giving the insight into her motivations that one writing an essay about her writing would have liked.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I would say that Lucy Boston, writing at a time when other great children's writers, such as C. S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce and J. R. R. Tolkein were also producing their most important work, was an imposing figure in children's serious fantasy literature. If she has not the breadth and craft of these other writers, she can surely go as deep in creating atmosphere and tackling the real dilemmas of life. Green Knowe is a place which is more present to children than Narnia could ever be, because it is just one step away from reality, rather than a whole other world.
In his 1965 monograph about Lucy Boston, Jasper Rose says that some aspects of her writing are old fashioned. He gives the example of the extra piece of good fortune at the end of most of the books, something that was popular in Victorian children's literature - Tolly going to a school locally instead of returning to his hated boarding school, Ping finding his father and so on - and this may be true. But overall, I think she was a thoroughly contemporary writer, one of the first to write directly to children, rather than as an adult writing for children. If her books have these days been largely superseded by the harsher, more subversive books by the likes of Roald Dahl, it is at the expense of the more moonlit, mysterious world of Green Knowe, the safe place she had created for the lost and displaced child within herself and which she could share with the generations of children to follow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
L M Boston:
Books for Children
The Children of Green Knowe (Faber, 1954 and Puffin Books 1994)
The Chimneys of Green Knowe (Faber, 1958 and Puffin Books 1976)
The River at Green Knowe (Faber, 1959 and Puffin Books 1976 & 1977)
A Stranger at Green Knowe (Faber, 1961 and Puffin Books, 1977)
An Enemy at Green Knowe (Faber, 1964 and Puffin Books, 1977)
The Castle of Yew (Bodley Head 1965, Puffin Books 1968)
The Sea Egg (Faber, 1967 and Puffin Books 1984)
Nothing Said (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)
The Horned Man (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)
The House That Grew (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972)
The Stones of Green Knowe (The Bodley Head, 1976 and Puffin Books
1979)
Books for Adults:
Yew Hall (Faber, 1954)
Persephone (Collins, 1969)
Poems:
Time Is Undone (privately printed, 1977)
Autobiography:
Memories (incorporating Perverse and Foolish, 1979 and Memory in a
House, 1973), (Colt Books, 1992)
Books About Lucy Boston:
Lucy Boston (monograph), (Jasper Rose, Bodley Head, 1965)
Lucy Boston Remembered (Reminiscences collected by Diana Boston),
Oldknow Books, 1994)
Criticism:
Twentieth Century Children's Writers (Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick,
Macmillan, 1978)
The Pied Pipers (Interviews with the influential creators of
Children's literature), (Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher,
Paddington Press, 1973)
The Green and Burning Tree (On the writing and enjoyment of
children's books), (Eleanor Cameron, Atlantic, Little, Brown,
1969)
The Uses of Enchantment (Bruno Bettelheim, Penguin Books, 1991)
Also letters from Lucy Boston to Hilda Bourne, now held at
Ditchling Museum.
PERSONAL APPENDIX
It's tea-time on a Wednesday in the middle sixties. I'm sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching a woman reading a story to me. I watch Jackanory every week. Just a man or a woman with a book, reading out loud. No pictures, no sound effects. Or at least that's how I remember it. And I don't remember any other stories except this one: It is The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston. I am completely, utterly, drawn into the story. I see myself in that old house, can hear the ephemeral laughter of the children that lived there hundreds of years ago. There is no barrier between me and the experience of being in the book. Soon I have spent my pocket money on buying a copy for myself and I learn to my delight that there are several others in the series.
I gobble them all up greedily, hungry to hear more about the world of Green Knowe, welcoming the children of the past and present as old friends and greeting newcomers into the stories at first warily and then as part of the furniture.
The name of the author meant nothing to me. No doubt she was some unapproachable adult writing about a make-believe world. I didn't think much about her really. As the years went on I would occasionally re-read one of the Green Knowe books and find myself still enthralled, still transported to those isolated islands of enchantment among all the other books I was also reading as an adult.
Then one day when I was in my early thirties, my mother sent me a press cutting from her local newspaper in Cambridgeshire. Lucy Boston, it said, was very happy to show people round her house and garden in Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, where her Green Knowe books had all been set. How could that be? This side of the looking-glass, Green Knowe was the most powerfully magical place I had ever read about, so how could it exist in real life? Of course, I had to find out.
Lucy Boston, the press cutting informed me, had published her first book when she was 62. That was in 1954 and now it was the late eighties so she must be - I counted up the years - 96! It seemed that she lived in a Norman manor house, allegedly the oldest continuously inhabited dwelling in England. I was starting to realise that the facts behind the books were as amazing as the stories themselves.
I wrote to Mrs Boston asking if I could go to visit her and having received permission from her, I arrived in Hemingford Grey one bitterly cold Sunday morning in November, the sun reflecting pink off the hoar frost that encrusted the ground and trees.
A central figure in the Green Knowe books is the great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, an infinitely wise old lady who has both the otherworldliness of a fairy godmother and the down-to-earth manner of the ideal grandmother, that is to say, the grandmother any child would choose for him or herself. It was difficult therefore not to expect Lucy Boston herself to be Mrs Oldknow. And in some ways she was, physically, although interestingly she must have turned into her, rather have been writing about herself at the time, since it was over 30 years since she had created the character.
I remember I wanted to take some flowers to her, but the only ones I could find were huge white chrysanthemums. I knocked at the door and as I waited for her to answer it, stood feeling rather uncomfortable with what suddenly seemed like the most vulgar flowers in the world. The door opened to reveal a bright-eyed though stooped figure in a woolly hat. 'Mrs Boston, I'm ...' I began, holding out the chrysanthemums. She smiled. 'Just what I wanted', she said, opening the door a little wider to reveal a tiled entrance hall which contained vases of flowers, flowers in a butler's sink and pots of flowers jostling together on the draining board. She had evidently received many visitors over the past few days.
That morning, she showed me round the garden and house which had been her home for over fifty years and which are central to virtually all her writing.
Lucy Boston was by no means a 'dear old lady'. Even in her nineties she had a slightly forbidding manner, although from accounts by her friends and family she had a very gay nature and loved to give parties - but only once you were accepted as part of her circle. As a mere visitor, and not even a child, which she more unfailingly took to, she did not waste any effort in trying to get me to like her, but showed me round her domain in a polite but distant manner. After all, she had spent much of her life showing her house and garden to visitors and had obviously long before developed a set pattern of doing so. She was nearly blind when I met her, but knew the house so well you would never have guessed it.
She showed me the artefacts she had collected over the years, so that children visiting The Manor could more readily believe in it as 'the real Green Knowe': the ebony dormouse, the broken board from Feste's stable, the witch ball and her own rocking horse ...
In her dining room, French windows led out to the garden. There was a tapping on the glass as we sat in front of the fire and Lucy slightly absent-mindedly opened the doors and gave a biscuit to a squirrel which was waiting on the threshold. She said nothing of this, but I later found it was typical of the many incidents her acquaintances mention of the trust animals had in her and the way she almost lived the magic in her books.
BY GAYE JEE
For a story truly to hold the child's attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him.
From the introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim.
INTRODUCTION
Lucy Boston was an extraordinary woman. Born just before the beginning of this century, she is best known for her children's books, the Green Knowe series, which were published during the 1950's - 70's. Yet writing was by no means her first or only passion. She loved landscape and the natural world and became an early campaigner against environmental pollution. She was an accomplished painter, and was passionate about music.
In the late 1930s she found a focus for all her future endeavours, both artistic and practical - her Norman Manor house beside the river Ouse in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. For two years she restored the house as near as possible to its original state, removing later features, uncovering fireplaces and knocking down walls. The house became her obsession. It is situated in what at the time was a remote village seemingly untouched by the first ominous rumblings of rural tourism and industry. She had first seen the house in 1915 while visiting the area. In her autobiography, 'Memory In A House,' she recalls,
In 1915 Hemingford Grey was wrapped in this primeval quietness, which in fact remained unbroken for another generation. Every time I took a punt out, I passed the north front of the old Manor, of which I knew neither the name nor the history ... I was not to know it was waiting for me, but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar ... (Ref: p 172)
She had found her ideal setting. During the war years she held musical evenings for airmen from the nearby RAF base, thereby combining her delight in sharing both her house and the music she loved so dearly. She was an obsessive gardener and specialised in growing old species of roses. When she could not be in her garden she sewed a series of masterful patchwork quilts. And beginning in her early sixties, she wrote a series of magical children's books mostly set in the Manor and its gardens. They are not the best known or most skilfully written children's books, but they have a quality which captures above all else Lucy Boston's unique sense of place. What might she have achieved if she had begun to write earlier? Did her tight focus on the Manor provide a bottomless well of inspiration, or did it constrict her imagination, making her a more narrow writer than she might have become? Was her writing necessary to her or simply another aspect of a rich and varied life lived by a woman bursting with energy and creativity? In this essay I shall attempt to explore these questions by examining her work, its strengths and weaknesses and the vital link between the work and the Manor.
Lucy Boston was born into a strict Wesleyan family in 1892. She nevertheless displayed an unusually independent spirit which led her to leave Somerville College Oxford after a few terms and become a nurse, first in England and then in France during the First World War. She writes about these events in Perverse and Foolish, the earlier volume of her autobiography, as if it was quite the normal way of things that girls would go to university and travel abroad to work in the opening years of this century.
Lucy was fortunate to come from a wealthy family and be financially independent. Her father was dead and her mother, after attempting to damp down her daughter's adventurous temperament, seemed to resign herself to having little real control over her life.
She married a distant cousin in 1917 but separated from her husband in the mid 1930's. During her marriage, which produced one son, she and her husband were early environmentalists, campaigning in particular against the pollution of the beautiful countryside around their house in Cheshire, which was slowly being poisoned by the chemical factories in the area. Lucy had developed a passionate love for natural landscape as a child and this love was the primary source for everything that was to follow in her life.
Her marriage lasted 20 years and after splitting with her husband, Lucy lived in Florence, Salzburg and Vienna. While in Vienna, she enroled in a studio to study drawing and painting and this, together with her passion for music, became the focus of her enthusiasm. The imminent outbreak of the Second World War saw Lucy returning to England and renting a flat in Cambridge where her son was at university. Soon after this she bought the Manor at Hemingford Grey and began the renovation of the building, followed by the creation of the garden from what was was little more than a scythed field.
By the beginning of the fifties, she had completed the house and the structural work on the garden. Lucy had, prior to the writing of her first Green Knowe book, written an adult novel entitled Yew Hall which was set in the house. However it was not to be for some years that she set about getting it published. In the interval, she wrote The Children of Green Knowe. In Memory in a House, she gives her reasons for beginning to write as ' ... I had written the first of the Green Knowe books, partly because I was hard up, but more to people the place for myself.' (Ref: p. 288)
Again, Lucy Boston's extraordinary character shines through - both her confidence in her own abilities and her honesty about her reasons for beginning to write. She submitted Yew Hall and The Children of Green Knowe together and both were accepted by Faber.
Thereafter, she wrote five more books in the Green Knowe series, plus another seven for children, including The Sea Egg which she was to say later was her own favourite. There were also two volumes of autobiography: Memory in a House and Perverse and Foolish; another adult book, Persephone and a book of poems, Time is Undone. Of these, most of the children's books are still in print, as are the autobiographies which have been republished by Lucy's family as part of the trust which has been set up to keep up the Manor. The adult novels and poems are out of print.
Lucy Boston was never a fashionable author and in these days of action-packed children's books with colourful and zany illustrations, it is perhaps surprising that her books, with their unsensational written style and beautiful but somewhat static monochrome pictures (by her son Peter) have any audience at all. It is likely that the majority of children come to the books via their parents who loved them when they were small. But I believe the child who enjoys Lucy's books has to be a special kind of child. A child with an imagination that can be kindled by what books do not say as well as what they do say, a child who is perhaps familiar with loneliness, who is searching for a place which embraces and is embraceable by their own imagination. Lucy Boston found that place at the Manor in Hemingford Grey. Her gift to children was to share it with the freshness of her own child's perspective.
THEMES
When addressing members of the English Society at Bulmershe College, Reading in 1972, Lucy Boston said,
My books are ... very earthy, very rooted, mostly about solitary lost children or an escaped gorilla, who became completely enfolded in a sure place, as real as it is remote, and are passionately and possessively at home in it. And so is every child reader who comes to it: clearly children need it. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 9)
Here she encapsulates all her main themes. Firstly, her identification and sympathy for those who have no place they can call their own. In my conversation with Jill Paton Walsh, who was a friend from the late 1970s until Lucy's death, Ms Paton Walsh said that she believed Lucy felt a sense of displacement herself. This comes through strongly in her autobiographies. Even though she was one of six children, she never seemed to fit easily into the conventional ways family life expected of her. Since Lucy's father's death when she was six, her mother seems to have become permanently distracted - as though she expected the children to know how to behave without actually giving them any instruction.
It was, for example, considered quite acceptable for all the adolescent children of the family, including several cousins, to sleep outside in sleeping bags on hot summer nights. Yet it was unthinkable that Lucy should spend part of the night lying next to a favourite male cousin who pointed out various constellations to her, particularly as this cousin had previously been found to have laid his head in Lucy's lap during one of their long walks together. Lucy must have received a curious double message from her mother had not been concerned until she suddenly realised - obviously with a considerable shock - that there could be sexual implications. No wonder Lucy, with her instinctive boldness of spirit found this confusing; she was obviously bemused by rules that seemed to her completely arbitrary and without logic.
The above is one example of how Lucy's early life must have shaped her attitudes towards authority; there are many others. Always her sympathy was with the underdog, with anyone or anything being manipulated by others for their own ends. She had an uncomplicated attitude towards truth and her own beliefs: she stuck to them without compromise and could never understand how anyone else could act differently.
The Manor in Hemingford Grey must have seemed to be the place where at last she could fully be herself, and having discovered it, she shared it with anyone who could appreciate it - she often said the house and a visitor's reaction to it were a test in themselves - friends, artists and later with the children who were to identify with the lonely boys and girls in her books.
Underlying all the other themes in her work was that of the love of nature and dismay at the way it was disappearing. In her early fiction this manifested itself in detailed descriptions of her house and garden; it could have been that this enabled her to deny what was happening in the outside world.
In her fiction, she presents the house as a settled, safe place, immune from the incursions of modernisation. However, in her letters to her friend, Hilary Bourne, and in Memory In A House, she tells of her horror as modern life intrudes. She talks of the 'cruel blow' occasioned by the field immediately next to her garden being turned into a playing field. And in 1972, as part of the address she gave at Bulmershe College, she said
...In the last twenty years all the country has been whittled away ... The lanes have become streets; the river flows by concrete banks; traffic roars all day; and boats looking just like cars follow one another up and down stream, all breathing each other's diesel, while the wake of the boats washes the eggs out of the moorhens' nests. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 9)
In Memory In A House, she writes,
What I want to evoke is the feeling I had at the time, not foreseeing the future, that the past of the house from the beginning still existed - the winds coming off its hay-fields, the clouds trailing shadows across the familiar woods, all the sounds of song birds, cocks, cattle and sheep, pump and bucket, axe and saw; the overriding tyranny of the seasons, the human fears and isolation, the deep passion and strong earthy loyalties. There was reverence for memory and, et expecto, the belief in a future. I was lucky enough to have caught it whole. I therefore know it and love it as no one else can, since that context has been wiped out, with its dignity and breadth. (Ref: p. 258)
As the years went on, she must have come to realise that it was not only her personal habitat which was being destroyed - the destruction was going on world-wide. Thus her books become more and more concerned with the loss of natural beauty and the dirtying of the world. In what was to be her most critically acclaimed book, A Stranger At Green Knowe, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1961, the first third of the book is spent describing the natural habitat of a family of gorillas in the Congo and how the gorillas’ancient way of life is savagely ended by a party of men who cross their paths while destroying the jungle.
In the Sea Egg (1967) she wrote what she described afterwards in a letter to her friend Hilary Bourne as 'my In memoriam to Cornwall'; the book tells of the unspoilt coastline and clean empty beach and was based upon the area around Kynance Cove. In Memory In A House, Lucy writes, 'Just as it was published, the Torrey Canyon blotted out Kynance under black oil.' (Ref: p 322)
This destroyed her image of Cornwall forever, and she was to say at Bulmershe College,
Certainly I could never have written 'The Sea Egg' ... if I had known that in the middle of the ocean an area from horizon to horizon is a heaving carpet of our rubbish. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 11)
It must have been the painful realisation that mankind has destroyed and defiled the natural world from the beginning of time which led to her final Green Knowe book, The Stones of Green Knowe. The book is set in the twelfth century as the house is being built. The boy who is to live in the house with his family is Roger d'Aulneaux and as in the other Green Knowe books, he meets children from other centuries who live in the house. But for the first time in the books, he meets children from the future and already, when he travels forward in time to 1660, he can see that the landscape has changed:
... the fields seemed immeasurably wider, as if the forest had drawn back'. (Ref: p.44)
By the time he arrives in the twentieth century, we are told
... the first thing he noticed was the stale dead air, with a general smell that he didn't know. He had a quick nose that gave him instant warnings. The forest of course was not there, so rich in its own smell. It was now a mass of houses starting only a few fields away from him ... (Ref: p. 102)
At the end of her address to Bulmershe College, Lucy said,
When I try to imagine writing another book, I simply come up against this: all the words that I would use seem to have lost the meaning they used to have, and I don't know how to go on. (Ref: Lucy Boston Remembered, p. 13)
In spite of this, she did go on to write The Stones but the optimistic message that Green Knowe as an entity had survived the centuries, was not intended to blot out the bitterness she felt over the destruction of her beloved natural world.
She believed that she had been fortunate to be born in time to experience the world untouched, although it was only apparently untouched by the end of the 19th century, since most of the elements of industrialisation were in place; they simply had not become prevalent. In Perverse and Foolish, she describes the family house as being in a street of 'small identical, barely genteel houses'. Lucy's early childhood, although comfortably wealthy, seems to have been restricted both physically by bleak surroundings and mentally and emotionally by the strict Wesleyan tenets to which her family adhered.
When her father died this restriction was greatly intensified by reduction of means and her mother's literal interpretation of the scriptures. Again, from Perverse and Foolish:
'Every word ... was literally true, including the creation of the world in six days. But to the ten commandments she added four more:
Thou shalt not drink alcohol;
Thou shalt not go to the theatre;
Thou shalt not play cards;
Thou shalt not dance.'
(Ref: p. 51)
(By all accounts, as soon as she could, Lucy became an enthusiastic practitioner of at least three of the additional 'thou shalt not's'; whether she was also a card player she does not mention.)
So when the fatherless family moved to Westmorland for a year, the shock of suddenly experiencing untamed nature at first hand must have been all the more extreme for a child who had hitherto been so restricted. In Perverse and Foolish, Lucy writes, ' ... my real life began at ten years old.' (Ref: p.53)
This was the beginning of her overriding passion for the natural world and when she came to write for children, she felt an urgent desire to communicate this feeling to them.
Linked to Lucy Boston's dismay at the destruction of the natural world around her is the theme of time and the wisdom which can be gained.
Critics of Lucy Boston take issue with her refusal to handle the realities of life for children growing up in the middle and late twentieth century, but it was more important to her to convey with her adult sensibility the joy of a child's intimate contact with nature. She does this by playing with time. Firstly, the central adult in the Green Knowe books is a great-grandmother; her name, Mrs Oldknow, itself a reference to the wisdom that comes with time. By her gentle encouragement and lack of prying, each child who comes to the house finds the adventures that he or she needs. Tolly, Mrs Oldknow's own great-grandson finds a family and a home to call his own. Ping, a Chinese refugee identifies with Hanno, the escaped gorilla.
In the best of the books, it is as if the displaced and damaged children who come to Green Knowe come to a place where time is suspended so that a healing can take place. And they learn from this place of safety truths which are a necessary part of their growing up - about death, what it is like to be blind, slavery, prejudice and cruelty.
I do not think Lucy Boston set out to be didactic, rather she wanted to fire children up with her own passions so that they would discover and experience the world for themselves, move out of the dull standardisation which she perceived was being imposed upon all of us and allow themselves to flourish as individuals.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE FICTION
Although Lucy Boston published nearly twenty works, including two adult novels, a play and a volume of poetry, it is for her Green Knowe series of children's books for which is best known, plus The Sea Egg, which is set in Cornwall.
The first of the Green Knowe books was published at the same time as Yew Hall, one of her two adult novels. It is often said that the first novel any author writes is autobiographical and Lucy Boston was quite open about this in Yew Hall. She writes in the preface,
This book is the result of a conversation between the author and three friends, in the course of which it was jokingly suggested that their appearance and relationship was all that was required for a novel. (Ref: p. 7)
However, the autobiography, apart from the features mentioned above did not occur in the events in the book, but in the extended opportunity it gave Lucy Boston to write about her house and garden. The characters in the text play out a plot which although slow to start, gathers momentum and finishes excitingly, but they are dwarfed by the character of the house and the influence the narrator perceives it has upon them. There are long passages of description of the building and the garden - and indeed gardening - which I feel would be unacceptable in a novel published today. We would require something more 'pacey' and stripped down - and the resultant book after editing would probably be about a third the length that it actually is - little more, in fact than a long short story.
However, it must not be forgotten that Yew Hall was Lucy Boston's first attempt to write a book. Although she had been known for telling wonderful stories since a girl, the making up and telling of a story to friends and relatives, where the action must of necessity be kept moving, is very different to the freedom of writing a novel. Of course Lucy wrote about her pre-occupations: all writers do. The difference is that the early work of most writers never sees the light of day, and it is only after repeated failures and criticism that what they write begins to approach the state of being publishable. (I am talking about those writers who do reach that stage, of course.)
The plot of Yew Hall may be summarised as follows: the narrator - an elderly lady - owns a fine old house, part of which she must let to tenants in order to afford to run it. Her new tenants are a young married couple who are subsequently joined by the husband's twin brother. The beautiful wife is jealous of their relationship, attempts to seduce the brother (whether she succeeds is not clear) and then tries to poison her husband. The brother, upon discovering this, kills the wife and then commits suicide. The interest and subtlety of this book lie in the narrator's relationship to each of the other protagonists; she has a horrified fascination for the wife and respects the husband for his good looks, honesty and integrity. She falls in love with the brother, although she knows from the outset there can never be any possibility of a reciprocal relationship between them, since there is too great an age gap.
The novel is like a Russian doll - in the middle is the tiny thin plot of the wife and the two brothers. The next layer is the narrator's relationship with each of them and enveloping all this is the overwhelming effect the house has upon all the characters.
The Children of Green Knowe, although originally written as a children's book, had been accepted by Faber for inclusion in their adult list. However Lucy felt that the book would not be complete without the other-worldly illustrations drawn for it by her son Peter, so it was published as a children's book after all.
Lucy says in Memory In a House, '... as I insisted on Peter's drawings it was ruled that pictures were only for children, so I became a children's writer. I did not at the time realise what a step down this was.' Despite this ironical reflection, I believe she had found her niche; she could write for children in the most direct and refreshing way, with no hint of having to write down to them - something I suspect she would have been incapable of doing. 'I do not know how anyone can judge of what they write unless they are writing for themselves.' she writes in Memory in a House.
The book concerns a lonely little boy, Tolly, coming to stay with his great-grandmother for the first time. His father and step-mother are abroad during the school holidays and he has been expecting to have to remain at boarding school over Christmas. Arriving at Green Knowe at night in a rowing boat, with flood waters lapping up to the steps of the house, already the reader is infused with a wonderful sense of mystery about what is going to happen. Tolly mirrors those thoughts as he walks into the strange entrance hall:
'What if my great-grandmother is a witch!' he thought. Above the vases, wherever there was a beam or an odd corner or a door-post out of which they could, as it were, grow, there were children carved in dark oak, leaning out over the flowers. Most of them had wings, one had a real bird's nest on its head, and all of them had such round polished cheeks they seemed to be laughing and welcoming him. (Ref: p. 17)
His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning ... He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made her face more like her. She was wearing a dress of folded velvet that was as black as a hole in darkness ... 'So you've come back!' she said, smiling ... (Ref: p. 17)
These two passages demonstrate something at which Lucy Boston, and which she uses especially in her first two Green Knowe books: she sets up an atmosphere which is subtly disturbing and then immediately softens it by the warmth of her description. She may not always explain a mystery, but she never lets it become frightening.
During Tolly's stay at Green Knowe, he becomes increasingly aware of the house and its history. Mrs Oldknow gives him the freedom to do as he wishes, providing a safe place to come back to and report his adventures. Soon Tolly starts to become aware that he and Mrs Oldknow are not the only inhabitants of the house.
At breakfast on the first morning of the stay, he has noticed a painting of three children and their mother and grandmother which is hung in the dining room. The children, Toby, Alexander and Linnet, who lived in the house in the seventeenth century, begin to play a tantalising game of hide and seek with him. The presence of the children is handled with great originality and skill. The word 'ghost' is never used; these are real children who have the ability to exist in more than one time. Some of the descriptions of their appearances send a pleasant tingle up the spine, but they are never so frightening that a child would be kept awake by them. Rather, they would long to be there with Tolly, to share his adventure:
As he went along the entrance hall, past one of the big mirrors, something in it caught his eye. It looked like a pink hand. The glass reflected a dark doorway on the other side of the stairs. Behind the door-post, flattened against the wall on tiptoe to make themselves as thin as they could, their faces puckered with holding in their laughter, he saw Linnet and Alexander. It was Linnet's hand on the door-post. There was no mistake, he knew them. 'I spy!' he shouted, whisking round to chase them, but they did not run away, they simply vanished. (Ref: p. 63)
In the evenings, Tolly sits with his grandmother by the fire and she tells him stories of the children and their lives in the house. Tolly comes to feel that if only he can make himself receptive, the children and their animals will play with him and become his friends. And this does happen at the end, after Tolly, who has put on Toby's coat, has succeeded in his other most ardent desire: that of meeting Toby's magical horse, Feste, who although remaining invisible takes food from his hand:
He went pattering off towards the house, but skirted round the garden path ... because in imagination he was riding a high spirited horse and needed room to gallop. As he came along the lawn he saw the children grouped near the tree. Linnet was holding one of the partridges in her lap ... Toby was coatless, wearing a shirt which had full sleeves ... with lace at the wrist ... Alexander was standing by with a handful of nuts which he was cracking between his teeth and eating. The squirrel was on his sleeve helping itself out of his palm. (Ref: p. 150)
Whenever Tolly meets the children, they always form a tableau for him - he never sees them running, climbing or in the act of hiding. They are always posed, as for a painting. This increases the feeling of magic; they are real children, yet they are also not real.
It should not be supposed that the book is simply a sugary narrative of fantastic events. There are many moments of frustration for Tolly, where he wants so much to see the children, but cannot make it happen. He learns to be accepting and finds that he must let them come to him. There are also some wonderfully poignant moments, such as when he is forced to face up to the reality of children's death. Tolly and his great-grandmother have been going through the contents of an old toy box. Tolly has found Toby's sword and is poking it into his bedclothes.
'Stop putting swords through the bed-clothes,' said Mrs Oldknow in an ordinary voice. 'Did Toby use it?' asked Tolly solemnly. 'He never stuck it into anyone, if that is what you mean ... ' 'Why doesn't he want it now?' Mrs Oldknow looked at him with an uneasy wrinkled face. Then she sighed. 'Because he's dead,' she said at last. Tolly sat dumbfounded, with his big black eyes fixed on her. He must have known of course that the children could not have lived so many centuries without growing old, but he had never thought about it ... 'Are they all dead?' he said at last. 'They all died together in the Great Plague ... Toby and Alexander and Linnet and their mother all died in one day ... only the poor old grandmother was left, too unhappy to cry.' (Ref: p. 75)
The delicacy with which Lucy Boston handles the above passage and many others like it distinguishes her as a very special writer for children. She has paced it in exactly the way difficult subjects are dealt with by sensitive parents. Mrs Oldknow does not wish to thrust harsh knowledge upon Tolly, yet she knows she must tell him the truth when he is ready to hear it. And it is one of the first times we sense Mrs Oldknow's awareness of her own mortality, in her uneasy wrinkled face and her evident identification with the grandmother of the three children.
The Chimneys of Green Knowe (1958) begins with a disappointment for Tolly - and for the reader. Tolly is home for the holidays again, but discovers to his horror that the painting with Toby, Alexander and Linnet in it has been lent to an exhibition, and worse, that Mrs Oldknow is thinking of selling it to pay for some essential repairs to the house. Without the picture, the children are not in the house, so Tolly prepares himself for a lonely holiday.
In place of the beloved painting is another, this time depicting a fashionable lady in a carriage. She is Maria Oldknow who lived with her family in the house at the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly that if only they could find Maria's jewels, which were lost during a fire, they could get the other painting back and have the house repaired. It's not long before he meets Susan, Maria's daughter. Susan is blind and is much more 'flesh and blood' than the enigmatic and mysterious children in the previous book. The time-slips in this book work both back and forwards - sometimes Tolly sees Susan in 'his' time and sometimes in 'hers'.
Because Susan is blind, she does not have an awareness of herself as one of 'the others'; rather, she thinks of Tolly as a relative and is not particularly concerned about the different periods of time each inhabits. Susan is another lonely child. Her fashionable mother finds her embarrassing and her grandmother is too pious and hard-hearted to do more than remind her that her blindness is certainly a punishment. Her nanny Mrs Softly treats her like an invalid and will not let her learn to fend for herself; her cruel brother, Sefton, teases her.
Once again, Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly stories, this time about Susan and her family's life in the house, which had at the time, as had the real Manor, been eccentrically extended so that the original Norman building was enclosed within a Regency mansion. The plot of this book is stronger than in The Children; instead of each story about the family being a separate cameo which ultimately had no effect on the present-day story, they are linked to form a continuous narrative which runs alongside Tolly's adventures.
The book might just as well have been called 'The Patchworks of Green Knowe', since a recurring motif throughout the book is the mending of the old patchwork quilts from around the house, which had originally been made by Susan's grandmother. As Tolly asks about the fragments of fabric, his great-grandmother tells the story of the characters to whom they relate.
One of Lucy Boston's most vivid characters appears in this book - Jacob, an African slave boy, who has been bought by Susan's father, Captain Oldknow, both to give him his freedom and provide a companion for the otherwise friendless Susan.
Lucy Boston took on quite a challenge here - to portray a black child who speaks in broken English without parodying him; to show his difference without making him seem 'uncivilised' and to capture his intelligence and warmth without patronising him. Of course she cannot avoid the subject of racial prejudice - Maria and Sefton taunt him and dress him like a monkey, while the grandmother calls him a 'black heathen' and is shocked that her son could have chosen such a companion for his daughter. Even the Captain calls Jacob 'Sambo' before he knows his real name.
The Chimneys was written in the days when Little Black Sambo was still considered acceptable reading for children, but even so Lucy Boston handles the subject of race with sensitivity - she does not ignore it, but shows how a person with different gifts can transform the life of one as sheltered and cut off as Susan.
The climax of Jacob and Susan's story is the fire which destroys the new mansion, leaving the thick stone walls of the Norman hall intact. Susan is trapped alone in her room, too disorientated by the noise and smoke to find her way out. Jacob, having on a previous occasion been made to climb up the chimney by Sefton as a joke, climbs again to rescue Susan and guides her back down the chimney. She has come to trust him in all things, including when he shows her how to climb trees, so climbing down inside the chimney seems very little different to someone who cannot see.
Meanwhile, Tolly is pre-occupied by the stories of Susan and Jacob. He simulates blindness by blindfolding himself, so he can understand what Susan experienced, and he climbs the trees Susan and Jacob climbed, where he finds their initials carved high in the branches. Although Susan, apparently because of her blindness, is frequently seen by Tolly, for a long time, he is unable to see Jacob; he only hears him calling like a bird from high up in a tree or sees one of his arms as he reaches out from a clump of reeds to catch a duckling to give to Susan to hold. It is not until three-quarters of the way through the book that Tolly, returning to the house in the evening after discovering a secret passage in the garden under a ruined tower, hears low voices in the living-room.
Susan was sitting on the rug by the fire plucking at it with her fingers ... Jacob ... was standing looking out of the window. ... Susan stopped (speaking) as Tolly came in. 'Who's there?' 'Nobody there, Missy.' 'It's me,' said Tolly. 'Ai, Ai!' said Jacob and if his woolly hair could have stood on end it would have done. And then he suddenly saw Tolly. 'Who's that, Missy?' 'It's alright, he's a friend of mine. He's my cousin Toseland.' (Ref: p. 120)
In a delightful twist, in Jacob's reaction, we suddenly see Tolly as one of 'the others'. But this is to have its advantages. In what is really an added-on section of plot, Sefton and the valet, Caxton are trying to sell a boy to the press-gang. The boy is hiding in the tunnel under the ruined tower and neither Susan nor Jacob dare to go to him to take food or tell him that Captain Oldknow will return that evening and save him. Of course Tolly is invisible to everyone else in the house, so he can go to him. (How he can transport the basket containing the food without it being seen is not explained, but one is so caught up in the story upon first reading that one does not think about this.)
As Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly the story of the boy's rescue, Tolly suddenly recognises the part he played in it.
... Tolly's feet came down to the floor with a thump. 'I wondered however much longer they were going to leave poor Fred Boggis alone in the tunnel. I know he had candles, but, Granny, he was scared.' Mrs Oldknow stopped abruptly in her sewing, her needle held motionless in mid-air, and looked at Tolly ... 'I might have known it was you! I was going to tell you about the strange boy who came in the nick of time and was never seen again. I always thought it was Alexander.' (Ref: p. 131)
By Mrs Oldknow's reaction, the reader is once again given the sense that the old lady exists in the centre of all that has happened in the house; nothing seems impossible to her, even if occasionally she herself can still be surprised.
At the end of the book, Tolly, while exploring the cavity between the ceiling and the roof, finds Maria's jewels, where they had apparently been hidden by Caxton at the time of the fire. This solves Mrs Oldknow's financial problems and the painting of Linnet and her family is restored to its rightful place. Once again, Tolly's home and 'family' are safe.
The Children and The Chimneys resemble each other in structure - the stories about the family coming to life and the child, Tolly, becoming involved with them. Both books, especially the first, have an fragile intricacy which beguiles the reader.
The River at Green Knowe (1959) was a departure in many ways. I suspect Lucy Boston was looking for a new direction in which to take the Green Knowe stories, probably realising that it would be impossible to maintain the atmosphere of magic created by the structure of the first two books.
Green Knowe has been taken for the summer by two middle aged women, Dr Maud Biggin and her companion Miss Sybilla Bun. Dr Biggin is an eccentric archaeologist who is writing about an ancient race of giants. She decides to invite her niece, Ida, to stay for the summer and also sends to the 'S.P.S.H.D.C. - Society for the Promotion of Summer Holidays for Displaced Children - for two more children to keep her company. This is our introduction to Ping, the Chinese boy who is the main character in A Stranger at Green Knowe and to Oskar, a Polish boy.
The story concerns the children's adventures on the river, mostly early in the morning and after dark, when they can be sure there will be no other visitors to spoil the peace. Disappointingly, the events of the book do not gel into a plot. There are many separate adventures, both magical and non-magical, which culminate in the children discovering a real giant. They contrive to show the giant, who by the end of the book has joined a circus, to Dr Biggin. Of course, being an adult, she insists that it must be a trick, despite the fact that she would like nothing more than proof for her theories.
If Lucy Boston lost her way in the plotting of this book, it has some compensations in the characters she created. The two women are wonderfully eccentric; by believing that children need only to 'fed and turned out like cats', they provide an ideal backdrop to the adventurous children. They also give more scope for humour than in the previous two books as in this description of Dr Biggin:
She had spent much of her life digging up old cities and graves ... and had got into the habit of searching the ground for fragments. She could not bear a vacuum cleaner because it gave her nothing to look at. Her shambling way of walking made her look rather like a monkey, and if a chimpanzee were let loose in a shop to choose its own clothes it would choose much the same as she was wearing. (ref: p.5)
The three children also have distinct personalities; fiery Ida, heroic Oskar, dreamy and sensitive Ping. As in all the books, the children have a boundless capacity for experiencing joy in the natural world, and for the first time, Lucy Boston lets her children be gently mocking to the adults who are looking after them, as well as letting the reader know that adults are not always either right or invincible.
Thoughtful Ping is the central character in A Stranger (1961), the Carnegie Medal winning book which saw Lucy Boston back up to her full inventive strength and finding the new direction which she had been seeking in The River. The story-line, although divided into three sections, is linear - there is no moving back and forwards through time - and it is the only one of the books which has no magic in it, although its effect is so magical one would not necessarily realise this upon the first reading.
The opening section of the book, which occupies the first third, is a detailed description of the gorilla's natural habitat and his life in the forests of the Congo. It also tells of the slaughter of his father and the young gorilla's capture. The length of this passage is quite audacious. Do we really need all the detail we are given, when the actual effect it has upon the plot could be summed up in a single sentence? I think Lucy Boston intended to draw the attention of children once more to the tragedy of the loss of the natural world and the brutality of trees being torn down and habitat destroyed. It may be out of balance with the rest of the book, but it also builds sympathy for the young gorilla, named Hanno by his captors, so that we can fully understand his plight when he is confined at the zoo.
The second section is the meeting between Ping, while on a school trip, and Hanno, who by now is fully grown. Ping is totally absorbed in him and talks to the keeper who allows him to give Hanno a peach, which, he says will ensure that Hanno always remembers him.
Hanno then escapes from London Zoo and by (it must be admitted) an astounding co-incidence, finds himself a hiding place in the garden at Green Knowe where Ping is staying for the holidays. Being a refugee, Ping identifies intensely with Hanno, whom he imagines yearning to return to the forests of the Congo where he was captured.
Ping is presented with an agonising dilemma - should he tell Mrs Oldknow about Hanno, in which case he knows she will be obliged to inform the authorities who are looking for him, or should he say nothing and deceive someone he loves dearly.
Ping knows that Hanno cannot return to the zoo as it is a wholly alien environment to him. He also knows he cannot stay at Green Knowe forever because there would not be enough food or cover to sustain him. In the end, the decision is taken out of his hands when Hanno is traced to the garden. As his pursuers close in, a stampeding cow, who is being chased by a farmer and his men, in her panic runs straight at Ping who falls to the ground. Just as Ping is expecting to be gored by the cow's horn, Hanno swings down from the trees and saves him by throwing the cow over onto its back and breaking its neck. As the pursuers come within sight of Ping, they assume he has been mauled by Hanno and shoot the gorilla dead.
Ping is of course greatly saddened by the loss of Hanno, but he is in no doubt that the gorilla has chosen to die, rather than return to confinement.
'He's dead,' he said clearly and too composedly. 'It's all right. That is how much he didn't want to go back, I saw him choose.' (Ref: P. 166)
Although the cow and Ping's rescue from it adds drama to Hanno's final confrontation with his tormentors, it also rather muddies the waters. Hanno's motivation appears to be to save Ping; he risks his life by showing himself, when he could have remained hidden. When he is then confronted by the men pursuing him, he recognises the same hunter who killed his father. Hanno prepares to attack him as the bullet is fired. This is not the same as choosing to die rather than be recaptured. We must assume therefore, that Ping's interpretation of Hanno's actions and the gorilla's actual intentions were different, which is unsatisfactory.
This does however, highlight the overwhelming achievement of the book - the portrait of Hanno and all he stands for. Who are we, Lucy Boston seems to be saying, to imagine we know what an animal is thinking? Apart perhaps from the confusing ending, Lucy Boston resists any temptation to anthropomorphise him. Where he has characteristics in common with humans she says so, but she gives him a simple dignity and strong but straightforward emotions which are most un-humanlike. Hanno is of nature and his capture and almost casual destruction represents that of the whole of the natural world.
Before she wrote The Stranger, Lucy Boston spent many hours at the zoo observing Guy the gorilla to gain an understanding of his personality, so much so that she formed quite a close relationship with his keeper, much as Ping does in the book. Indeed, the book was inspired by Guy rather than him simply being used as research for it. In a letter to her friend Hilary Bourne in 1959, she wrote, 'I still haunt the gorilla in the Zoo, trying to coax a book out of him.'
In an interview by Emma Fisher in The Pied Pipers, she makes it clear what the gorilla represented to her:
I was utterly astonished that there could be such a thing ... And he just met the case of something that could stand for a total misuse and abuse of life ... Whereas I feel, like the Buddhists, that the whole of life, whatever it is, matters. And certainly sentient and intelligent life like that ought to be treated exactly as we treat our own. (Ref: p 281)
In the final book whose plot I am going to describe, An Enemy at Green Knowe (1964), we are back in the world of magic. But this time it is not the fascinating interactions between children from different times, but real malign black magic perpetrated by a thoroughly nasty modern-day witch, Dr Melanie D Powers.
This is the last of the really potent Green Knowe stories. The subsequent Castle of Yew and Nothing Said, which were written for younger children and The Stones of Green Knowe, which came thirteen years later, are so slight of plot that it is difficult to engage with them.
The children at the house this time are Tolly and Ping who have somehow met - we are not told how - and have formed a perfect friendship. (For the enthusiastic reader of the Green Knowe books this seems to be just as it should be, and one is in pleasant anticipation of adventures ahead.)
Dr Powers has moved to a house near to Green Knowe and is trying to find something which was secreted in Mrs Oldknow's house by the mysterious Dr Vogel who was tutor to the consumptive Roger, the son of the house in 1930. Mrs Oldknow and the boys soon realise that this something, if found, will give the aptly named Dr Powers much more power than she has any right to have, so she must be kept from it at all costs.
A dark brooding atmosphere presides over the whole book. Dr Powers begins her onslaught in a friendly enough way, but almost immediately betrays her sneaky, petty use of magic, much to the disgust of Ping and Tolly. In the following delicately creepy passage, she has refused a cake during the tea party to which Mrs Oldknow invites her, but then as she prepares to leave the tea table,
Tolly ... saw one of the little cakes move, jerkily, as if a mouse was pulling it. Then it slid over the edge of the plate and twitched its way across the table and into the twiddling fingers held behind Miss Power's back. (Ref: p.45)
As the book progresses, Dr Power's falsely sweet facade drops until Mrs Oldknow and the boys are confronted with her malign power. She tries to trick Mrs Oldknow into selling the house to her and almost succeeds in doing so. Firstly she tries hypnotism and then a series of plagues visited upon the house and garden, including caterpillars which eat Mrs Oldknow's beloved roses, cats which attack the wild birds and finally snakes which threaten and sicken the old lady and the two boys. Mrs Oldknow is for the first time shown as uncertain - she has to question where her priorities lie; she cannot endanger the children for the sake of the house, however much she loves it.
Each of the plagues is overcome by something which is infused with the strength and magic of the house itself - the roses are eaten by the birds which Mrs Oldknow feeds every day. The cats - and this is one of the most magical passages in Lucy Boston's entire work - are frightened away by the returning spirit of Hanno, whom Ping invokes using some magic of his own:
On the spot where his splendid friend had been shot, Ping dug a hole. In this he laid the long black hair (from Hanno's coat) and with the scissors cut of some of his own that fell to mix with it, and tears fell too without his intention because he had loved Hanno more than he could understand. He brushed the earth over it, hung the prayer bell on the tree, and said his prayer in his boy lover's voice, 'O Hanno, come just once again,' then leaving the prayer bell fluttering a tongue of paper that waved in the air the one word HANNO, he went away ...
He did not know how long he had been standing there when there arose from the inner garden such a spitting and screeching of cats as never was heard at any witches' Sabbath ... Deep quiet followed. Not even that chuckling grunt that Ping would have so loved to hear ...
'He came when I called him,' he said proudly. (Ref: p. 100)
Ping himself rids the house and garden of the snakes by discovering and disposing of the snake's egg which contained the spell which had attracted them in the first place.
But Dr Powers has some nasty tricks up her sleeve; she tries to get blind Susan (from The Chimneys) to help her by stealing out of the dustbin bits of the worn-out patchwork pieces that had come from Susan's nightdress. But Tolly's own quilt also contains pieces of the fabric, so when Susan is invoked, he is woken by the quilt being pulled off the bed, it having been caught up in the magic. He manages to stop Susan by intoning a spell he and Ping have learned as part of the defence they are putting up against Dr Powers.
Eventually, the boys find what Dr Powers was looking for - a witches' book written on a dried bat - and use her own magic against her by invoking her secret name. Her power leaves her and she flees from the house as though spat out - a crumpled, bewildered woman with no threat left in her.
The story ends rather oddly with Ping and Tolly looking in the Persian glass that they have been using to keep watch on Dr Powers - it reflects the future and past, not the present - and seeing their fathers coming up the path together. This, being completely unprepared for, makes for a rather lame ending to what is a very exciting story.
CHARACTERISATION
The children's author and critic John Rowe Townsend was a personal friend of Lucy Boston in her later years. However, he is not one of her work's greatest admirers. Lucy herself quite cheerfully remarked in an interview, when asked what she thought of more 'realistic' children's books, including those of J R Townsend, 'Well, I know he hates mine. He's written nicely about them in one of this books about children's stories, but he says quite firmly that they're not his cup of tea.' (Ref: The Pied Pipers, p. 284)
In his obituary of Lucy Boston, published in the Guardian May 31st, 1990, he writes with affection for the author, but also comments, 'Lucy Boston was not, in my view, outstandingly good at constructing plots or portraying character.'
Lucy Boston may not have been outstandingly good at portraying character in all cases, but this becomes irrelevant where she is using her characters to portray elemental concerns such as good and evil, as is often the case.
Mrs Oldknow appears in all the Green Knowe books except one; she is the 'good' influence the children can always rely upon. Yet we know very little of what she is thinking, as none of the stories are written from her point of view. She remains enigmatic; we know she is wise, playful and kind but we can gain no idea of how she views the action or what her emotions are except in rare instances. This does increase the sense of mystery - perhaps she knows so much, she would spoil the surprises the children experience, or perhaps she is largely unaware of what is going on.
There is also a character type which recurs in several of the books: the proud, selfish, cruel yet fascinating woman. She is at her worst as Melanie Powers, is softened into silliness as Maria in The Chimneys, has her counterpart in the desirable Arabella in Yew Hall and a brief appearance as the aristocratic seducer in Persephone. It would be interesting to know what the origin of this character was. It is as though this character embodies abstract evil and threat to the house, as each of them, except the last, either wants to possess it or to change it into something which in some way reflects themselves. In the same way Mrs Oldknow, as Lucy Boston's alter ego, represents a benign influence in protecting it and letting it be as much like itself as possible. Perhaps the sinister character is an embodiment, either conscious or unconscious, of Lucy Boston's own fear about what would happen to the house when she herself was no longer there and is therefore woven into the very fabric of the stories, surfacing from time to time as an actual character.
We are given a much stronger sense of the children's characters as real human beings; they come complete with idiosyncrasies, especially Tolly, Ping, Susan and Jacob. Perhaps a test of a rounded character would be whether one could answer the question, 'How would that person react in such and such situation?' With Susan and Jacob, one could easily make a prediction and probably with Tolly and Ping, but almost certainly not with Mrs Oldknow.
A SENSE OF PLACE
I do not have space here to discuss The Sea Egg, curiously Lucy Boston's own favourite among her books even though it is not set at Green Knowe, but in Cornwall. It does not fall within the Green Knowe canon and to my mind does not have the power of those books. It is however, yet another example of what was most vital to Lucy Boston in the writing of her books - the dual themes of the natural world coupled with sense of place.
In no other children's literature is one place so repeatedly and obsessively evoked. We are all aware that The Wind in the Willows was set on the Thames near Marlow, Alice in Wonderland in Oxford and Winnie the Pooh in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, but all these places merely act as backdrops for the action taking place in the stories. Green Knowe is always an active part of the story. It drenches everything in its atmosphere and suspends the reader in a world that is both mysterious and comforting. Children, both the fictional ones in the books and those who hear the stories, feel they have come home, but with none of the connotations of the commonplace that most homes have.
One must however ask whether this preoccupation inhibited Lucy Boston as a writer; she once said herself, 'All my water is drawn from one well ... I am obsessed by my house.' But did the house release her creativity as a writer, as is suggested by Eleanor Cameron in The Green and Burning Tree, or would it have erupted out of her anyway, perhaps earlier and in a more diverse form if she had never lived there? We shall never know the answer to this.
As part of my research I talked to several friends of Lucy Boston, including Jill Paton Walsh, who knew her in her later years, Elizabeth Vellacott, the painter who lived with Lucy during the war and then moved to a house nearby where she and Lucy remained friends until Lucy's death, and Hilary Bourne, who had known Lucy well from before World War II until the late seventies. I also interviewed Diana Boston, Lucy's daughter-in-law. The picture they gave me of the writer was of a woman who was so bursting with creativity in every direction, that her life was simply too busy until she was in her late middle age when she finally began writing. I was able to gather disappointingly little information about Lucy's methods or motivation for writing from my interviews. It seems she simply did not talk about it, even in her letters to Hilary Bourne, to whom she sent many of her books chapter by chapter as they were written.
Her late start as a writer and intense commitment to other preoccupations could be the reasons that Lucy Boston may not have reached her full potential. Although she naturally wrote in beautifully clear, evocative prose, her imagery vividly enriched by her painter's eye, her plots are sometimes thin and often disjointed, especially in her adult novels. In very few instances does she manage to inject her sense of humour into the stories - and she had a wicked sense of fun as the letters written to Hilary Bourne demonstrate. She uses whatever she needs to make her stories appealing to children, even if the most unlikely coincidences are involved, such as Hanno happening to arrive at Green Knowe after his escape from the zoo.
Although largely I think she was an exciting writer because she was so instinctive, if she had begun writing when she was younger she would perhaps have been more willing to learn the craft without detriment to the art; she would perhaps have successfully progressed beyond the house, instead of which, her fiction began to decline in quality by the mid-1960s, when she was already over seventy.
However, it may be that she did not find writing all-compelling; although unlike some professional writers to whom sitting down to do a day's writing is often described as little more than a chore, I am sure she continued to find much pleasure and fulfilment in doing it. However, if she had been given a choice, say between her rose garden and writing, the roses would have won every time. And of course there would have been no contest whatsoever between the house and the writing. In the interview she gave for The Pied Pipers in the early seventies, she is quite unrepentant about her lack of 'professionalism':
I'm against all theoreticians, especially about writing. No original writing could result from a theory, could it? I myself am totally unprofessional, and never go to any of these conferences. After all I only write in the winter; in the summer I do my garden and take people round ... (Ref: p.284)
Lucy Boston went on to write two incisive volumes of autobiography which are fascinating reading as social documents, though they mostly avoid giving the insight into her motivations that one writing an essay about her writing would have liked.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I would say that Lucy Boston, writing at a time when other great children's writers, such as C. S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce and J. R. R. Tolkein were also producing their most important work, was an imposing figure in children's serious fantasy literature. If she has not the breadth and craft of these other writers, she can surely go as deep in creating atmosphere and tackling the real dilemmas of life. Green Knowe is a place which is more present to children than Narnia could ever be, because it is just one step away from reality, rather than a whole other world.
In his 1965 monograph about Lucy Boston, Jasper Rose says that some aspects of her writing are old fashioned. He gives the example of the extra piece of good fortune at the end of most of the books, something that was popular in Victorian children's literature - Tolly going to a school locally instead of returning to his hated boarding school, Ping finding his father and so on - and this may be true. But overall, I think she was a thoroughly contemporary writer, one of the first to write directly to children, rather than as an adult writing for children. If her books have these days been largely superseded by the harsher, more subversive books by the likes of Roald Dahl, it is at the expense of the more moonlit, mysterious world of Green Knowe, the safe place she had created for the lost and displaced child within herself and which she could share with the generations of children to follow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
L M Boston:
Books for Children
The Children of Green Knowe (Faber, 1954 and Puffin Books 1994)
The Chimneys of Green Knowe (Faber, 1958 and Puffin Books 1976)
The River at Green Knowe (Faber, 1959 and Puffin Books 1976 & 1977)
A Stranger at Green Knowe (Faber, 1961 and Puffin Books, 1977)
An Enemy at Green Knowe (Faber, 1964 and Puffin Books, 1977)
The Castle of Yew (Bodley Head 1965, Puffin Books 1968)
The Sea Egg (Faber, 1967 and Puffin Books 1984)
Nothing Said (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)
The Horned Man (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)
The House That Grew (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972)
The Stones of Green Knowe (The Bodley Head, 1976 and Puffin Books
1979)
Books for Adults:
Yew Hall (Faber, 1954)
Persephone (Collins, 1969)
Poems:
Time Is Undone (privately printed, 1977)
Autobiography:
Memories (incorporating Perverse and Foolish, 1979 and Memory in a
House, 1973), (Colt Books, 1992)
Books About Lucy Boston:
Lucy Boston (monograph), (Jasper Rose, Bodley Head, 1965)
Lucy Boston Remembered (Reminiscences collected by Diana Boston),
Oldknow Books, 1994)
Criticism:
Twentieth Century Children's Writers (Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick,
Macmillan, 1978)
The Pied Pipers (Interviews with the influential creators of
Children's literature), (Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher,
Paddington Press, 1973)
The Green and Burning Tree (On the writing and enjoyment of
children's books), (Eleanor Cameron, Atlantic, Little, Brown,
1969)
The Uses of Enchantment (Bruno Bettelheim, Penguin Books, 1991)
Also letters from Lucy Boston to Hilda Bourne, now held at
Ditchling Museum.
PERSONAL APPENDIX
It's tea-time on a Wednesday in the middle sixties. I'm sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching a woman reading a story to me. I watch Jackanory every week. Just a man or a woman with a book, reading out loud. No pictures, no sound effects. Or at least that's how I remember it. And I don't remember any other stories except this one: It is The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston. I am completely, utterly, drawn into the story. I see myself in that old house, can hear the ephemeral laughter of the children that lived there hundreds of years ago. There is no barrier between me and the experience of being in the book. Soon I have spent my pocket money on buying a copy for myself and I learn to my delight that there are several others in the series.
I gobble them all up greedily, hungry to hear more about the world of Green Knowe, welcoming the children of the past and present as old friends and greeting newcomers into the stories at first warily and then as part of the furniture.
The name of the author meant nothing to me. No doubt she was some unapproachable adult writing about a make-believe world. I didn't think much about her really. As the years went on I would occasionally re-read one of the Green Knowe books and find myself still enthralled, still transported to those isolated islands of enchantment among all the other books I was also reading as an adult.
Then one day when I was in my early thirties, my mother sent me a press cutting from her local newspaper in Cambridgeshire. Lucy Boston, it said, was very happy to show people round her house and garden in Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, where her Green Knowe books had all been set. How could that be? This side of the looking-glass, Green Knowe was the most powerfully magical place I had ever read about, so how could it exist in real life? Of course, I had to find out.
Lucy Boston, the press cutting informed me, had published her first book when she was 62. That was in 1954 and now it was the late eighties so she must be - I counted up the years - 96! It seemed that she lived in a Norman manor house, allegedly the oldest continuously inhabited dwelling in England. I was starting to realise that the facts behind the books were as amazing as the stories themselves.
I wrote to Mrs Boston asking if I could go to visit her and having received permission from her, I arrived in Hemingford Grey one bitterly cold Sunday morning in November, the sun reflecting pink off the hoar frost that encrusted the ground and trees.
A central figure in the Green Knowe books is the great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, an infinitely wise old lady who has both the otherworldliness of a fairy godmother and the down-to-earth manner of the ideal grandmother, that is to say, the grandmother any child would choose for him or herself. It was difficult therefore not to expect Lucy Boston herself to be Mrs Oldknow. And in some ways she was, physically, although interestingly she must have turned into her, rather have been writing about herself at the time, since it was over 30 years since she had created the character.
I remember I wanted to take some flowers to her, but the only ones I could find were huge white chrysanthemums. I knocked at the door and as I waited for her to answer it, stood feeling rather uncomfortable with what suddenly seemed like the most vulgar flowers in the world. The door opened to reveal a bright-eyed though stooped figure in a woolly hat. 'Mrs Boston, I'm ...' I began, holding out the chrysanthemums. She smiled. 'Just what I wanted', she said, opening the door a little wider to reveal a tiled entrance hall which contained vases of flowers, flowers in a butler's sink and pots of flowers jostling together on the draining board. She had evidently received many visitors over the past few days.
That morning, she showed me round the garden and house which had been her home for over fifty years and which are central to virtually all her writing.
Lucy Boston was by no means a 'dear old lady'. Even in her nineties she had a slightly forbidding manner, although from accounts by her friends and family she had a very gay nature and loved to give parties - but only once you were accepted as part of her circle. As a mere visitor, and not even a child, which she more unfailingly took to, she did not waste any effort in trying to get me to like her, but showed me round her domain in a polite but distant manner. After all, she had spent much of her life showing her house and garden to visitors and had obviously long before developed a set pattern of doing so. She was nearly blind when I met her, but knew the house so well you would never have guessed it.
She showed me the artefacts she had collected over the years, so that children visiting The Manor could more readily believe in it as 'the real Green Knowe': the ebony dormouse, the broken board from Feste's stable, the witch ball and her own rocking horse ...
In her dining room, French windows led out to the garden. There was a tapping on the glass as we sat in front of the fire and Lucy slightly absent-mindedly opened the doors and gave a biscuit to a squirrel which was waiting on the threshold. She said nothing of this, but I later found it was typical of the many incidents her acquaintances mention of the trust animals had in her and the way she almost lived the magic in her books.
