 |
 |
|
|
|
||||
After a week of gypsying we shall, I am sure, long for hot baths and civilization. Hence to London. First we shall seek the ancient City which, with Bridge and Tower, is fraught with connotations of nursery rhyme and history-cum-legend. Marcia Brown's Dick Whittington and His Cat is the first "real" book that our son has tackled. How right he was to choose it! The tale is so old that it is worn down to the Anglo-Saxon nub. And how right she was to illustrate it with those spare black-and-mustard linoleum block prints! Now, like ragged Dick, we shall be off to London, to walk the same streets, to gape at the crowds, and to listen to those very bells. Victorian-Edwardian London will give us Sara Crewe, the Bastables (of Blackheath, to be sure), and the Darling children's Peter Pan. Then there is the London of Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins, and the London of Ballet Shoes and Theater Shoes (by Noel Streatfeild), and the exciting, wonderful London of today. One of the sights we do not want to miss is the chimpanzee's tea party at the London Zoo. I remember it from my own childhood with particular affection. Half the fun is in watching the reactions of the well-bred English children as one "guest" upsets a pot of tea over another's head. How all those Christopher Robins and Alices revel in vicarious misbehavior! It is here that L. Leslie Brooke must have come with his sketch pad to "catch" those amiable apes (and all the other denizens of the Zoo) for Johnny Crow's hilarious garden parties. lan has long loved to roll those splendidly " irrelevant " words on his tongue, and now Lucy is at the stage where she carries Johnny Crow about with her. From London we shall explore into the countryside. L. Leslie Brooke's daughter-in-law, who was in New York a few months ago, identified for the Children's Room of the New York Public Library the farm and the people (especially the children) to be found in Ring o' Roses and The Golden Goose. Her husband, Henry Brooke, was the model for the two-year-old peering down at Tom Thumb in the meadow grasses and peeking over the table top in the kitchen when the cook finds Tom inside the fish. Lucy inspects every leaf and blade of grass with that same rapt gravity. Have we, by any chance, misunderstood her or failed to listen when she tries to tell us of something just as marvelous as a Tom Thumb? Perhaps we may even be able to stay at the very farm where the artist's family spent summer holidays, or, failing that, visit the house where he had a studio, in the village of Harwell, Berkshire. Although A. A. Milne lived in Chelsea, he had a summer home in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex, and it is here that we hope to see Owl's House and Pooh Corner, and to throw Pooh sticks off the bridge. One feels whole dimensions of time and space stretching out for Christopher: Where am I going? I don't quite know. Down to the stream where the king-cups grow — Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow — Anywhere, anywhere. J don't know."* Adults may be fooled by the clothes and the British accent. Children sense that there is little difference between Christopher's words and "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you do?" "Nothing." I hope we do meet a charcoal burner. Dan and Una did in Puck of Pook's Hill, and it is to Kipling's farm (now a National Trust at Burwash, Sussex) that we shall go next. Is the hill really there? By Oak, Ash and Thorn, it had better be'. And is it really a Pict house, "all green and ringed about with terraces"? This last is from " Childe Roland " in Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Tales, my favorite for storytelling. Jacob's scholarly notes in the back give a wonderful description of the long corridor and central room of the structure, but his pictures, alas! look as if thcy were printed on old blotting paper. There is a Pict house, too, in Arthur Ransome's Great Northern, but that is 'way up in the Hebrides. lan, like most children of today, is fascinated by archaeology. Will he be so scientific that we cannot walk around the hill "three times windershins," chanting all the while, "Open, door, open "? It may be too hot; we may be too dignified; we may be just plain scared! North from London we shall explore the Thames — "messing about in boats," if we are lucky. Maidenhead, as far as we can discover, is the original for Doctor Dolittle's Puddleby, and a few miles north, near the village of Pangbourne is the stretch of the Thames that is the site for The Wind in the Willows. E. H. Shepard has given a delightful account of his interview with Kenneth Grahame, and he tells how, following the aged author's explicit directions, he wandered along the river bank in search of that fabled picnic spot. Who can assemble (much less afford) a hamper full of delights such as Ratty shared with Mole that day of their first meeting? But even peanut butter will taste as never-before-or-since if only we can find their picnic place. Sometimes I almost hope that we don't find it, or, finding it, that we creep away to unwrap our wax paper elsewhere. It is strange to think of Kenneth Grahame and Hugh Lofting living so close to each other: the former so upper-class "British," Lofting so like his own beloved non-U character that probably they never met. Yet children find in both that same mystical respect for all life (and hence for the individual), those same qualities of kindness, loyalty and gentle laughter. There is extant some anxiety concerning Lofting's comic Negro characters. To well-meaning parents, teachers and librarians I would like to relate the story of a little American Negro boy who was living in Moscow, some years ago, when he caught the measles. His grandmother (who tells this story) read to him hour on hour from the lighted doorway in the hall. Finally her curiosity overcame her: "But Paulie, why do you like Doctor Dolittle so much?" And out of the depths of that darkened room came the reply: "Because he is so kind." Although Mary Norton lives in Chelsea, she places The Borrowers most explicitly in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, It sounds every bit as ridiculous as Puddleby-on-thc-Marsh, but to our surprise we can find it in our atlas. "We have written a letter to Mrs. Norton to ask whether there really is a Firbank Hall and if so, could we visit it. We feel like young Kate who, in The Borrowers Afield, pleads with Mrs. May: "Even if -we couldn't go inside, you could show me the grating and Arrietty's bank; and even if they opened the front door only ever so little, you could show me where the clock was. You could kind of point with your finger, quickly. . . ." We plan, of course, to walk along the gas pipe to Perkin's Beck. Already lan is saving hat pins, aspirin bottle lids, etc., to leave as tokens of international good will. The trick is to find things made to scale yet truly useful. lan's life is so bound up with his toy soldiers that one might say his mind's-eye has been brought down to Borrower level, but we blush to consider Arrietty's opinion of the plastic artifacts that come with the soldier sets. Our respect for Mrs. Norton's ingenuity and resourcefulness grows at every reading. There must be something about an island nation that engenders a genius for the miniature: the Japanese can make a landscape in a dish; the British excel at literary microtomy. No further proof is needed than the works of Beatrix Potter, each as meticulous in its craftsmanship as those embroidered buttonholes in The Tailor of Gloucester: The stitches of those buttonholes were so neat — so neat . . . The stitches of those buttonholes were so small — so small — they looked as if they had been made by little mice! It will be August when we arrive in the Lake Country, much too late for daffodils. On the west side of Lake Wmdermere lies Beatrix Potter's Hill Top Farm and village of Near Sawrey, now a National Trust. Here we shall see the very stove where Tom Kitten ascended the chimney; the dresser, plates and pitchers given immortality in those dear, familiar little books. Most of all we hope to be able to climb the hill at Newlands and walk along the very path that looks down on the rooftops of the farm, just as another red-haired " Lucie " did in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. It is strange to think that Squirrel Nutkin's adventures may have occurred on the same island claimed by the Blacks and Walkers in Swallows and Amazons. I am sure those stalwart, unsentimental children would have felt it served him right to lost his tail: they could not abide cheekiness. How I loved Arthur Ransome's books! How I longed for sensible parents who would let me sail and camp and live on strong tea and chocolate bars, shunning all but the company of my peers! What is (or was) there about the education of English children that seems to demand so much outward discipline but gives so much actual freedom? Even if the booh exaggerate, the seeds of actuality must be there. Of course, there is always present a phenomenal oldest child (descendant, I presume, of the Princess Alicia in The Magic Fishbone) who can do anything with half the fuss an ordinary mother can do, The Ransome books are so explicit that surely, with the help of the maps on the end papers, we shall be able to follow the adventures of the Walker children, duffers though we be, perhaps even spending, with the "Coot Club," a day on the Broads. Driving toward Edinburgh, we shall pass through Yorkshire and miles of blooming heather. I must have read Frances Hodg-son Burnett's Secret Garden a dozen times when growing up and, like most children, I felt I already knew the moors and had heard the wind " wuthering " across them long before I came to know the Brontes. There are, I know, several large mansions that could answer to the description of Misselthwaite Manor, but is there one in particular? I suspect not. Mrs. Burnett, although in some ways my favorite children's author, never gives one that sense of complete reality of place, so strong among most English writers. With things it is a different matter. She is an expert craftsman and her scenes are filled •with satisfyingly concrete details: Fauntleroy's clothes, Sara Crewe's oriental splendors, the tapestries and furniture and portraits of Misselthwaite. She can describe a room to perfection, but somehow the rooms described do not fit together to create a whole. Both Dorincourt and Misselthwaite always seem to me to be pasted together from scenes in The Illustrated London News. Perhaps she makes us too perceptive: we see everything through the eyes of an outsider unaccustomed to such luxury we never really live long enough in her mansions and castles to take everything for granted. I am afraid that Mrs. Burnett's own background must answer for this. Even in later years, when she was "accepted," it was always as a guest, so we never quite get the lay of the land. But out of deference to Little Lord Fauntleroy we must pay our shillings and tour at least one stately English home. Crossing the Border into Scotland, we shall drive on to Edinburgh and Robert Louis Stevenson's home at 17 Heriot Row. This place we know in our very bones, for we see it as a child sees it — from the inside looking out. Here will be the window from which he watched Old Leary make the rounds at night, and here the sofa behind which he crawled with his " little gun . . .behind the wall." Upstairs will be the room where he "dressed by yellow candlelight" or lay propped in bed to play with his toys in "the pleasant land of Counterpane." There has always been a special affinity between lan and the author of A Child's Garden of Verses. When he was a year old I used to read "Windy Nights" to him at bedtime. Of course, all he could get was the rhythm but he loved it and would rock his crib at a gallop. By the time he was six we had read Treasure Island and Kidnapped several times (and a short, perceptive biography which he enjoyed as much as any "story" book). Does lan like old maps, pirates, toy soldiers, elaborate games of history and make-believe because we read him so much Stevenson at an early age? No one is quite sure, chicken and egg have become so scrambled. We do know that lan has no recollection of a certain day when he was three and I had forbidden him to play with anyone because he had a cold. He insisted so stubbornly that he was going to play with "that boy who likes blocks" that I put him in his room and turned the key. "Now you listen to me," I scolded through the door. "You have a cold. You may not go out and no one may come in." There followed an hour's silence which, as any mother knows, can be fraught with foreboding. At length, unable to stand it any longer, I opened the door. lan had all his blocks out on the floor. Roads, harbors, castles and cities all led up to a sort of platform on which stood an open copy of A Child's Garden of Verses, illustrated by the Provensens. And there, on the page, dressed in a sailor suit of eighty years ago, was another little boy whose pictured edifice somehow had been conjoined and incorporated within the pattern made by the three-dimensional blocks strewn about on the floor. Suddenly to mind came Stevenson's poem, "To the Reader": As from the house your mother sees You playing round the garden trees, So you may see, if you will look Through the windows of this book, Another child, far, far away, And in another garden, play. But do not think you can at all, By knocking on the window, call That child to hear you. He intent Is all on his play-business bent. He does not hear; he will not look, Nor yet be lured out of this book. For, long ago, the truth to say, He has grown up and gone away, And it is but a child of air That lingers in the garden there. Be that as it may, lan had been playing with " that child " for more than an hour.We would like to see some of the Viking artifacts found at Sutton Hoo and to ponder, perhaps when the fog is stealing over the Fens, the particularly scarey parts from Dorothy Hos-ford's By His Own Might: The Battles of Beowulf. Robert Lawson's wonderful illustrations for Pilgrim's Progress have made a stirring adventure story out of that once formidable classic—we must remember while traveling through Bedford that the landscape furnished the topography for Bunyan's allegory. "We want to go to Nottingham and see the Sheriff's Keep (is it still standing?) and we wonder how much is left of Sherwood Forest. With Lucy and lan we shall resist the temptation to "do" Wordsworth, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and the others, not so much because they have been "done" so many times before but because most children do not attempt their works until they are in high school or college. Children are bored and unimpressed when dragged from one meaningless literary shrine to another. After all, in any pilgrimage it is the thrill of recognition that marks epiphany.
*A. A. Milne, " Spring Morning," When We Were Very Young. Dutton. [back]
From the February 1959 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
||||
ne
of the hazards of growing up is that we forget what we wanted to
do when we were children. I have wanted to live in a caravan ever
since I was eleven years old and read a wonderful book called The
Slowcoach by E. V. Lucas. Not even Toad's misadventures (in
The Wind in the Willows) served to daunt me. Doctor Dolittle
lived in a caravan, too, and of course all the self-respecting gypsies
we have ever read about (including those in The Borrowers Afield
and The Impractical Chimney Sweep). But let us face it:
like Toad, we know absolutely nothing about horses. All is not lost,
however, for the farmer from whom my husband, two children and I
plan to rent our vehicle will allow us to camp in a meadow overlooking
the Cornish sea. What care we if the shafts be empty!
 |
  
 
  |
||||||||
