Seven: Writers and Reading

Three Shropshire Writers – ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – ‘The Wind in the Willows’

AE Housman – AA Milne – Mary Webb – Annuals and Perennials

BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES FOR ‘SHROPSHIRE WRITERS’ ARTICLES

Usual names to crop up: poet AE Housman and novelist Mary Webb; work of both to be discussed at greater length in article

Mentioned but not always so readily, despite huge distinction, WW1 poet Wilfred Owen, born in Oswestry, partly brought up/educated in Shrewsbury

Housman, born Worcestershire, best known for A Shropshire Lad, first pub. 1896, sixty-three poems set in Shropshire; hadn’t even visited county when he started work on them

Webb, probably recognised now as quintessential Shropshire novelist, lived much of life in Shropshire, setting at least her two most famous novels Gone to Earth (1917) and Precious Bane (1924) well and truly in county, among south Shropshire hills

Wilfred Owen ‘local’ but not known at all for writing about Shropshire. Instead, unchallenged reputation as one of finest and most moving poets of WW1; necessarily deserves some coverage here, though not later relevant to purpose of Shropshire article as commissioned

Attended Shrewsbury Technical School; taught for short time at an elementary school in town. Joined Army 1915 aged 22; invalided home with ‘shell-shock’ following horrific trenches experiences

Then met Siegfried Sassoon who recognised and encouraged his remarkable writing talent, leading him to write some of his very best war poetry

Returned to France as late as August 1918, received MC for bravery but machine-gunned to death 4th November 1918, one week before end of War

Believed that news of his death, aged 25, reached parents in Shrewsbury on Armistice Day as town’s church bells were ringing in the peace

Wrote in introduction to first book ‘The poetry is in the pity’; best of his work lifts us above and beyond compassion for awfulness of individual suffering to become a statement about human nature itself, horror of the human condition

Quote Gordon Dickins: An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire (1987):

Wilfred Owen was surely Shropshire’s greatest writer, one whose words

transcend the particular and speak to all people for all time.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT FOR ‘CHILDHOOD READING’ RADIO PROGRAMME

PRESENTER: Were you brought up in a reading environment at home?

GB: Oh, yes, definitely. In our compact family of three, it was taken as given - we all did it. I can easily conjure a picture of any time during the 1940s sitting near the fire with my parents in the living room, all three of us reading. I may be sitting on my mother’s lap, being read to, while my father reads something else. Or, later, I would be reading something on my own. As soon as I could read for myself, I was reading in bed as well, including under the blankets with a torch long after being kissed goodnight and told to go to sleep.

PRES: Were you encouraged to read newspapers in those early years of your reading life?

GB: No, not until much later. All I knew then was that the Express had Rupert and the Giles cartoons. I didn’t always understand Giles but my father was very keen on him. He appeared to specialise more in newspapers and my mother more in books, but they both read plenty of both. The contradiction I never properly reconciled later in life was their taking both The Guardian and the Daily Express and, on Sundays, The Observer and the Sunday Express. It may have been the enlightened liberal motivation to appreciate both sides of the issue better, or perhaps having to be prepared when you needed to argue for or against. But perhaps it was nothing to do with politics. The Sunday Express had a puzzling character called Adam the Gardener. He wore a very poorly drawn beard, often had a spade or a dibber in his hand and gave hints on what to do with your sprouts and spuds. My parents were always keen gardeners – they had the wartime Dig for Victory leaflets – and they greatly respected this character. I would hear them in conversation now and again saying things like: ‘Raspberry canes? Ah, I think Adam was saying last week that . . .’ or ‘Time we did the pruning. Adam started doing his a fortnight ago.’

PRES: Did both your parents read to you?

GB: To my recollection, it was only my mother. Practically everything she read I demanded time and time again, and then later I read them to myself repeatedly. There was one book that we only read once - she got it from Shrewsbury Library – it was intended to give a young child some simple explanations about the functions and purpose of sex. It was, literally, about birds and bees and flowers, and how different creatures reproduced. I knew this was something a bit different, a bit important and a bit odd, but I’d no idea why. I think my mother composed her face and voice in particular ways that suggested seriousness. She did try to make the transfer from animals, insects, flowers and fish to people, which either made me giggle or feel uncomfortable, and we didn’t get terribly far with it on that occasion. She persevered with the book with difficulty but may never have tried it again. I did once sneak a quick look at it when she was out, in case there were some interesting pictures. There weren’t. In fact, that may have been the sum total of my sex education at home, apart from my father’s much later warning about the dangers of getting involved with prostitutes when I left home for London, aged nineteen.

PRES: So what were the key books you read then which stayed with you right through your life?

GB: There were two that counted more than any others. My most read book of all was Alice in Wonderland (though, for some reason, we never approached Alice through the Looking Glass during my childhood). I still have the battered copy of Alice that’s survived from those days - the large format red hardback edition, illustrated by Rene Cloke, published by P.R.Gawthorn Ltd, 55 Russell Square, London WC1. I still see it occasionally in a secondhand bookshop or a flea market. It was a Christmas present, though with no indication of the year, from ‘Mummy and Daddy’, inscribed on the flyleaf to that effect in my father’s careful handwriting. As well as the black and single colour illustrations, most chapters have one full colour glossy whole-page picture. That kind of quality suggests post-war production. I passed it on to our daughter Jenny during her childhood – and later retrieved it - and I can see that she went through the entire book, putting a red felt-tipped tick against every mention of the name Alice.

PRES: Can you recall some of the more significant incidents or impressions that have stayed in your mind?

GB: I know I was entranced by the business of growing smaller or larger and having to deal with the results. Most of the characters were wondrously strange and interesting – and sometimes quite frightening. The White Rabbit, constantly worried, late and twitching about, seemed like someone I could get to like and to help. I always thought ‘ “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice’ was a useful expression to have up one’s sleeve, and I managed to use it precociously on several occasions as I grew older. I responded with cosy respect to the patrician authority of the Caterpillar, though I never really enjoyed ‘You are old, Father William’. Pig and Pepper, the frog footmen, were a good double act worth developing further, but all the screaming in the Duchess’s kitchen, along with ‘Chop off her head!’ at every other moment annoyed me – though the soft features of the Cheshire Cat calmed me and relieved this worry while they remained in view. I was as mystified as Alice was at the idea of a smile existing unattached to any face.

PRES: And any others?

GB: Well, the craziness of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was always a favourite but once I’d appreciated and come to enjoy its loony logic, the wretched Queen of Hearts would arrive at the croquet game to frighten me again. I always found the Mock Turtle rather too sad a case although, as with several of the others, I was greatly intrigued by the games they all played with language. The climax in court in the final two chapters, with Alice on this occasion becoming progressively larger than every other creature around her, has all the recognisable features of the concluding phase of a nightmare. It has the wild confusion, the moment when, previously an observer, you become the centre of the action you’d hoped to avoid, and the sudden realisation and waking up as all the cards come flying down and, for just a few moments, dream and reality converge.

PRES: Is there an incident or a quotation that affects you more than anything else in the book?

GB: Yes, there is – for me, it’s rather in the same class as the ending of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners, which moved me much later in my life – obviously, in different ways. I find it impossible, still, to read the final paragraphs of Alice without tears. I included them as one of the readings at my mother’s funeral in 2003. As I said that day, they always reminded me of many of the major characters and their peculiarities, which made me want to start another reading of the book immediately. But, more than that, I was also celebrating the value to a small child of having a story read to him, as my mother had read this one to me, dozens of times, and of the sharing of feelings and understanding between parent and child that takes place during that experience. Here, at the very end of the book, Alice has just left the scene, ‘thinking, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been’:

READER:

But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand,

watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful

Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:

First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands

were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into

hers – she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss

of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes

- and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became

alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by – the frightened

Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool – she could hear the rattle

of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal,

and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution –

once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes

crashed around it – once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the

Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air,

mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock Turtle.

So she sat on with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though

she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality –

the grass would be only rustling in the wind and the pool rippling to the waving

of the reeds – the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the

Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy – and the sneeze of the baby,

the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew)

to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard – while the lowing of the cattle in

the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-

time, be herself a grown woman, and how she would keep, through all her riper

years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather

about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a

strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she

would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys,

remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

PRES: Yes, that’s a beautiful piece, isn’t it? As you said, it’s partly a summary of the whole book, but there’s much more there. There’s the flavour of childhood and its wonderful innocence, but also of childhood being left behind, wistfully, and our later responsibilities for our own children – stimulating and brightening their lives with stories like Alice, just as your mother had done for you . . . But there was another book that was central to your young life, wasn’t there? Can we hear about that now?

GB: Well, I know my mother enjoyed Alice, enough to read it to me over and over again. But the book she most truly loved through all my life – not just when I was young - was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. It was first published in 1908, the year after she was born. She kept our old Methuen Modern Classics 1944 copy with her own books and would never let me take it away. Now at last it has its place in my own bookcase.

PRES: Good. It’s a marvellous book for a child because it focuses on new experiences unfolding and horizons expanding - and the making of new friends. Did you find it reflected your own young life in that way?

GB: Looking back on it now, it was particularly appropriate. The Water Rat shows the Mole all about the river for the first time, and takes him further into the wider world – and that’s exactly what my mother was doing for me. She it was who introduced me to the River Severn at Shrewsbury at an early age and took me out on it in a rowing boat on summer afternoons. And it was as much through her as anyone that I became more aware, day by day, of a wider world – by direct experience and, with her persistent encouragement, by reading about it. The first part leads you gently, as a concerned parent would, into the world as Ratty shows Mole things he had never even dreamed about, and introduces him to his best friends. He meets Badger, Otter and eventually Mr Toad. Rat knows everything and everyone, and poor Mole seems to know so little, but is tremendously thrilled by it all. Then that first, and quietly moving, climax comes in the chapter ‘Dulce Domum’ when the two travellers return to Mole’s home at Christmas and, as Mole drifts off to sleep, he reflects on what he’s learned and how limited his earlier life has been. He knows, however, that he can embrace ‘the new life’ fully now, realising confidently that:

. . . he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things

which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the

same simple welcome.

After this, the book changes its focus to follow the riotous adventures of Mr Toad. This phase, full of action, is punctuated by two very untypical chapters with an other-worldly flavour, hinting at the further layers of experience that lie beyond ‘ordinary’ life and perceptions. ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ has beautiful descriptive passages, especially as Ratty is transported by the hypnotic effect - almost the pain - of the ‘intoxicating melody’ that finally possesses them both. Rat and Mole, just this once, seem to have contacted the profoundest forces of Nature, and they know it has happened.

Then, in ‘Wayfarers All’, Ratty meets the Sea Rat whose stories of his adventures in the South bring on a debilitating trance-like state in the Rat, almost a mental breakdown (with fits of ‘violent shivering’ and ‘dry sobbing’), as the glamour and magic of another life work their wild effects on him. Mole gently talks him back to sanity with details of the coming harvest season and the natural progress through autumn towards winter. It works and Ratty is restored to the world where he belongs.

PRES: So, no sooner has the Mole come to terms with the world he hardly knew about, than those episodes seem to be offering yet more alternative styles of living – the brash, risk-taking materialism embodied in Toad, the mystical powers of the natural world and a kind of escapism through travel in strange, exotic territories.

GB: We may be close to the moral of the whole book here, that it’s best to live well in the world you know and understand, instead of dreaming how it might all be otherwise. I think that’s built into the final climax scene - the successful battle, led by Badger, with the stoats and the weasels for repossession of Toad Hall. Mole distinguishes himself in this action, and is complimented by Badger as ‘Excellent and deserving animal!’ You feel that Mole has been fully stretched and not been found wanting. He is confident and knows now what he can do. He has arrived and can take his deserved, mature place in the world among the others. Even the wilful Toad ‘was indeed an altered Toad!’ Ends are tied up, debts settled where due and the four friends pursue their respectable lives ‘in great joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions’. What impresses me is how extremely well it still reads today, despite being written nearly 100 years ago. Its concerns and its language both strike me as more modern than dated.

FROM THE MEMOIR

My father was especially smitten by AE Housman’s ‘sense of place’, and there were always two copies A Shropshire Lad (The Richards Press Ltd., London) in our house, my father’s leather-bound 1912 edition, and my mother’s later, non-leather one, the 48th reprint since the book first came out. My mother passed her copy on to me before I left home, probably in my very late teens. I still have that copy today and, following her death, I retrieved the other from among her books.

I believe that her favourite opening lines come from Poem II:

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough

Was this partly because we had a cherry tree in our front garden, just outside my bedroom window? Who knows. It certainly reflects the way my mother was more romantically inclined, and more inclined to respond candidly to beauty than my father. By contrast, he often quoted these much more specific and place-related opening lines from poem XXXI whenever we experienced a spot of rough, windy weather:

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

That poem probably gave me the false memory that the collection contains a wealth of Shropshire place names. This is not the case, though there are clearly enough of them to locate the whole work securely in this county. Out of the sixty-three poems, the only places mentioned are Clee, Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Bredon, Buildwas, Uricon, Knighton, Hughley – plus my favourite quartet where Housman quotes a local jingle to introduce Poem L:

Clunton and Clunbury,

Clungunford and Clun,

Are the quietest places

Under the sun.

But if he’s short on mentioning places in his poetry, Housman takes tremendous notice of the countryside itself and what it contains. This is what makes him a poet of Shropshire, or at least of a typical rural shire. He gives us its geology, its natural history, its human activity and its weather. Everything is there in the vocabulary: summer, streams, track, hawthorn, shires, hills, dales, soil, skies, fields, farm, trees, woodland, bloom, snow, lane, mill, goldcup, dandelions, mist, blackbird, heath, bank, sheep, leaves, aspen. There are plenty more examples. Something of the kind appears in practically every poem, not simply as background context but as natural, unavoidable presence, the everyday ‘given’ of life in rural Shropshire. As you read through the whole book, these images pile up insistently, but never obtrusively, to provide an accumulated hinterland of countryside existence.

I have two particular favourites. One takes me back to Wilfred Owen through the way Housman lifts us from the specific to the universal. I mentioned it as my father’s favourite, Poem XXXI ‘On Wenlock Edge . . .’ Importantly for me, it focuses on the observation that, whatever the weather – stormy in this case – we are only the latest people to experience it. He takes us rapidly back to the Romans who were stuck with ‘yonder heaving hill’ in the relevant season. While ‘the Roman and his trouble/Are ashes under Uricon’, we share his experience across time:

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;

The tree of man was never quiet:

Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I.

The other contains one of the most quoted phrases of any English poet. Dennis Potter used it as the title of his celebrated television play about recalling and revaluing events in boyhood. It is Poem XL and anyone wanting an expression of the deepest nostalgic pangs for lost innocence will find it in these eight short lines:

INTO my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

In A Writer’s Britain (Thames and Hudson, 1979), Margaret Drabble suggests that, through his sequence of poems, Housman develops a place no-one can reach, one ‘from which the poet is forever and inexplicably exiled.’ It seems as though, having never known the place before, he selected Shropshire as the suitable vehicle for his own interior yearnings, a Shropshire that could never really have been known or inhabited, except perhaps in a childhood fantasy. The ‘land of lost content’ is a region of the mind alone. I’m still more than pleased that my somewhat distant and emotionally inhibited father was able to respond as fully as I know he did to the poignant stimulus of Housman’s work.

My friend Michael Evans had AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books at home, and I must have read his. I had Milne’s collection of poems When We Were Very Young, perhaps my first introduction to poetry. It was first published by Methuen in November 1924, with ‘decorations’ by Ernest H Shepard. My copy, a dark blue hardback, is the sixteenth edition of 1927 – it was reprinted six times in 1925 alone. It was clearly second-hand when I first had it, and probably picked up by my father in South Wales during the War. The front is gold-embossed with three images of characters from the poems and the crest of City of Cardiff High School for Girls (1895) with the motto Tua’r Goleuni – Towards the Light. The flyleaf, still there years ago, is missing now so we no longer know who it was awarded to. Shepard’s delightful, often wistful, detailed line drawings appear on most pages and I coloured many of them in, not too carelessly and sometimes with considerable restraint. Even so, I wish now that I’d left them alone and not put my pencil scribble on so many of the pages.

Milne is very strong on rhythms. Many of these pieces bounce, lilt and often gallop briskly down the page. When your first three lines are ‘James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree’, you have a rich variety of rhythmic possibilities to exploit. He employs repetition frequently to good effect, as in ‘The King asked/The Queen, and/The Queen asked/The Dairymaid’ where this initial structure, including its syllabics, drives the nature of the entire poem ‘The King’s Breakfast’. Regularities like these make the verses very easy to learn and remember, often for the rest of your life.

This is another book first read to me and then read by me to myself over years and years, a familiar companion that drew me back repeatedly for its characters, its easy but varied lyrics and rhymes, and for its modest, indefinable comforts. Many of the poems are spoken by the Christopher Robin character as he experiences different aspects of his daily life: going to the market, playing with a puppy in the countryside, walking in the town, playing with his toys, going to the zoo, at the seaside, functioning in a grown-up world with a good deal of confidence and in complete safety. In fact, anything that does frighten him slightly is often an invention of his own mind, lurking behind the curtain but not actually there at all.

Many of Shepard’s drawings also remain firmly in the memory. Whenever we’ve been for lunch to The Mill at Sculthorpe during the summer, where the cows wander across their field to drink in the river, his illustration to ‘Summer Afternoon’ is exactly replicated in reality as ‘Six brown cows walk down to drink’ and ‘Up and down the river darts a blue-black swallow’. ‘The Invaders’ is another pure ‘nature’ poem with long lines and heavier, more reflective rhythms than most of the others.

As a young child’s world rubs shoulders with the adult world, their relative values can’t always coincide. The grown-ups often fail to understand the child’s self-contained mind-set, where animals, dreams, toys, imagination, stories and so-called reality mingle together in a single, very personal, experience. This is precisely where we live at that stage, in a world of our own. ‘The Doctor and the Dormouse’ seems to be a very simple and slightly funny poem, but probably best expresses this notion for me. The Dormouse lives in a beautiful flowerbed, wanting nothing in the world except to be left there in peace. The interfering Doctor believes he is ill and would benefit from a change of environment. Different flowers are planted in the bed but the Dormouse ‘turned over to shut out the sight’. Then he realises that he can pretend and create the world he prefers and wants to inhabit inside his own head. The foolish Doctor thinks he has found the cure. In fact:

The Dormouse lay happy, his eyes were so tight

He could see no chrysanthemums, yellow or white,

And all that he felt at the back of his head

Were delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

Of course, this remedy is completely at odds with the mind-expanding experiences so welcomed by Kenneth Grahame’s Mole. But we know he also understands, instinctively, that there are times when you need to withdraw yourself from the engagements of the wider world and close yourself and your mind away to focus on, or simply lose yourself among, your own thoughts and dreams. This is why those two strange, mystical chapters in The Wind in the Willows, which some people find intrusive, provide such valuable reflections on what it is to be human.

DRAFT ENTRY ON MARY WEBB FOR ‘SHROPSHIRE WRITERS’

A cluster of writers in the early years of the 20th century expressed, like Housman, the loss of innocence and the approach of permanent and damaging changes to the landscape. Robert Graves’s title Goodbye to All That signifies a farewell, not only to the lost lives and the horrors of the Great War, but also to the whole nature and structures of pre-war society in Europe. In this period, there was a flowering of poetry treating of countryside themes and novels set distinctly in specific parts of the country. The world those writers had known before had just changed, and changed massively for ever.

Mary Webb was born in 1881 in Leighton, a village south of Shrewsbury. She lived in Shropshire for about thirty-five of her forty-six years in places such as Much Wenlock, Stanton-on-Hine, Meole Brace near Shrewsbury, Pontesbury near the Stiperstones, and Lyth Hill near Bayston Hill. She also managed to spend considerable time in south Shropshire even when she and her husband were living in the south of England. She first moved away from Shropshire in 1911, aged 30, having married Henry Webb (who later taught at the Priory School in 1917). Her father was the most important and lasting influence on her appreciation of the natural environment, and his death in 1907 was a very damaging blow to her. She had wandered and explored lovingly through Shropshire, absorbing as she went an immense store of details of the natural world. In her Foreword to the first edition of Precious Bane (1924), she writes:

Shropshire is a county where the dignity and beauty of ancient things lingers

long, and I have been fortunate not only in being born and brought up in its

magical atmosphere, and in having many friends in farm and cottage who, by

pleasant talk and reminiscence have fired the imagination, but also in having

the companionship of such a mind as was my father’s – a mind stored with old

tales and legends that did not come from books, and rich with an abiding love

for the beauty of forest and harvest field . . .

Locating the setting of Webb’s novels, her biographer Gladys Mary Coles writes in her introduction to the Duckworth 1978 edition:

. . . part of the south-west Shropshire uplands where she was then living, the

remote hills, woods and valleys around the Stiperstones, a high range bordering

on Wales, crested by strange outcrops of rocks and cut here and there by the deep

fissures of quarries; and her characters are types of rural people she understood

well – products of a countryside which has coloured their humanity with its elements.

Webb’s novels achieved very little public recognition until after her death. This eventually occurred partly because Precious Bane, her fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Femina; and also on the recommendation of Prime Minister Baldwin, given during his speech to the Royal Literary Fund Dinner in 1928. This prompted Jonathan Cape to publish her collected works, which became best-sellers through the years leading up to the Second World War. After a long quiet period, her work has only quite recently come to the surface again and been reassessed, largely helped by the Mary Webb Society, founded in 1972.

Since the war, the ‘country novel’ has been rather generally dismissed. PN Furbank, in his essay on ‘The Twentieth-century Best-seller’ (Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7, first published 1961), hands down this not ungenerous judgement:

The country novel had its heyday in the twenties, when the builders were

also dotting the Home Counties with their fake Tudor farmhouses, called

‘Duffers End’ or ‘Old Hatcheries’. We can distinguish the country novelists

who write what in essence might have taken place equally well in a town or

garden suburb, but who obtain certain qualities of largeness and simplicity

from a country setting – for example Sheila Kaye-Smith – and those, like

Mary Webb, who create a country poetry and country phantasmagoria of their

own. Mary Webb’s novels of the Welsh border, with their shy, earthy, wildwood

heroines amid scenes of rustic violence and oddity, their pungent speech and

erotic nature-poetry, are clearly the offspring of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, though

shorn of any wider meaning. They are the most odd, and perhaps the most interesting,

of these novels, and had a great though rather brief vogue after Stanley Baldwin’s

public tributes to Precious Bane (1924) – their reputation suffered a good deal of

damage from Stella Gibbons’s parody Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

Nor is Margaret Drabble (A Writer’s Britain) inclined to write off the entire genre. She agrees that some of them were undoubtedly:

. . . imperialist or escapist, nostalgic or wearily imitative . . . But the roots of

the emotions which these writers struggle to express go deep and cannot be dismissed

so easily . . . One should perhaps see them as expressing a sense of alienation, a

desire for an impossible reunion.

This could certainly be true of Mary Webb. Her creativity fed itself exclusively on the Shropshire landscape and people. The periods spent away from her home territory in the later years of her life were distinctly marked by strain, distress and profound homesickness. Significantly, it is during precisely these years that she did most of her writing.

LETTER TO MYSELF AGED 12

King’s Lynn, Norfolk

June 2004

Dear younger Graham

You may not realise it, but you’ve reached the age now when you’ll already have read – and have had read to you by your (our) mother – the books that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I know for certain the images and feelings that will occupy your mind at the merest mention of Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows. I thought you might be interested in a few reminders of other boyhood reading that made more of a mark than you may realise at the moment.

The Rupert Annual has followed you all through your early years. As you know, it appears every Christmas as a present from ‘Auntie’ Norah. She’s the friend of your mother who works at Boots the Chemist and gets things there at staff price. Boots is different now: it doesn’t sell books and the lending library disappeared years ago. Your collection of Ruperts may not survive your imminent move to Staffordshire, or you may hang onto them for a few more years. I came across a secondhand copy of one recently, and found the writing style of the stories almost completely unreadable now. You’ll recognise the formula: every illustration of Rupert, Bill the Badger, Algy the Pug, their Oriental friends Tiger Lily and Pong-Ping and the Nutwood countryside has a rhyming couplet beneath it, and the story, in prose, beneath that. The couplet was a little summary of the action in the frame above it. Why can I still remember just one of them from all the Rupert stories I must have read?

Old Gaffer Garge says ‘Now, you two,

You’re trespassing. Be off with you!’

Every Annual gave you a good variety of stories, games and puzzles, things to colour, dots and numbers to join up and simple, harmless experiments involving ingredients you’d find in the kitchen cupboards. Once you’d read it all and done everything, there remained the most challenging task of all: the complicated paper folding activity. You always knew this one was beyond you. The instructions were difficult enough on their own, with dotted lines, arrows, letters, and flaps to fold in, over and under. The result should have been an elaborate paper box that would hold water, a windmill, a flower, a bird that might even fly when thrown. It required the sort of patience and persistence that your father possessed, but I know, as you do, that he never entirely welcomed the moment when you’d say, a few days after Christmas, ‘I wonder how we can make this.’ You really meant ‘I wonder how you can make this for me.’ He certainly completed some of them, but he also said, more than once – and probably did last Christmas - something like ‘We’ll have a look at it in a few days’ time, old boy’. Somehow you knew better than to remind him of this, and many of them remained unmade. Alfred Bestall wrote and illustrated those Rupert stories, and his biography, by his daughter, was published last summer.

Then there was the Empire Youth Annual, a huge and expensive book which Auntie Kit and Uncle Bill gave you each Christmas. Later, as the wind of political change blew through the British Empire, the title word ‘Empire’ was changed to ‘Commonwealth’. Has that happened yet? It was a rich mixture of stories, informative and educational pieces, and plenty of high quality illustrations. I’ve never seen a copy since those days and wish I’d kept one of the early ones, particularly to appreciate today the tone of the time in that imperial context. You’ll have recognised that the book’s central purpose is to bring young people like you into touch with youngsters in all the different parts of the world where the Flag flies. I recall some very good fiction, including stories about space and the future. You should have discovered how chocolate is made from cocoa beans in the Gold Coast (later Ghana), how kids get on in Canada during the long winters, or what daily life is like in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. There are historical appreciations of the exploits of great Empire builders, like Grenfell of Labrador, or of adventurers like Robert Falcon Scott. And insights into the lives of strange creatures, such as beavers or venomous snakes that live in other parts of the Empire, and something on branches of science as well. This is yet another book you go back to time and again, simply, I think, for the quality of what it does. You were probably given it when you were well into your reading years and there will come a Christmas when it doesn’t arrive. It may have ceased publication or perhaps Auntie Kit has decided to introduce you to something else as you move through your teenage.

There are two more books to mention here because, like the others, you returned to them incessantly as they became increasingly powerful fixtures in your life. Stevenson’s Treasure Island gripped you, grabbed you, intrigued you and frightened you for years. It seemed at the time as though every household in the land had a copy. So many who were boys then have spoken later of how they themselves became Jim Hawkins and lived all his desperate exploits in their imaginations. It’s one of the truly great adventure stories we know, and you and your friends were always acting it out. It meant making cutlasses and wearing eye-patches and peculiar hats and boots and talking rough like pirates. You may well know parts of it off by heart: the sound of the wooden leg coming down the lane to the Admiral Benbow; the voices of Squire Trelawny, Doctor Livesey, Captain Smollett and Blind Pew; Jim hiding in the apple barrel as the sailors plotted; the finding of not-so-mad Ben Gunn, though you always played him as completely crackers – it was more fun that way; the dead man’s chest, the Black Spot, Cap’n Flint and the Jolly Roger. Long John Silver is a brilliant prototype of the ‘lovable rogue’ character, wicked and criminal but irresistibly attractive as well, the morally ambivalent figure who, in the end, can’t be given the ultimate punishment he doubtless deserves. You’ll remember the ending as Jim concludes his narrative in that very vein:

Of Silver we heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg

has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old negress,

and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped

so, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them;

and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring

me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are

when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

Finally – and sadly, because I’ve never been able to find a trace of it again anywhere – Professor AM Low’s book Tick Tock, which I’m sure you’ve still got at the moment. Judging by the list of his qualifications and memberships on the title page, Low was a most distinguished scientist and you read his pale blue book from cover to cover, ad infinitum. It was a well-balanced combination of education and entertainment to teach the young, developing mind (that is, yours) how Nature works its innate way through the seasons of the year. A girl and a boy walking on the Downs find themselves introduced into the underworld storehouse, where all the seeds and bulbs and growing things are kept, waiting for their allotted moment to make for the surface to sprout into life and flourish. Before their eyes, all the processes of living plants are unfolded progressively in chapters like ‘Winter’, ‘Still Winter’ and ‘Only Just Still Winter’ until they’ve experienced the entire year’s cycle. It’s also a time trick because, having apparently lived through an entire year below ground, they emerge to find that it’s only a little bit later in the same afternoon. This means they’ll be home in time for tea, so often the required ending for children’s stories. Where did that book come from? You can see it there on your bookshelf, but where is it now? No one I’ve ever asked since I was your age has even heard of it.

We like or dislike particular books as a matter of individual taste. It depends who you are and what you want and what interests you. Fortunately, there are enough books in the world to provide for everyone’s needs. Sometimes you can make a terrible mistake and at other times be delighted by a new and unexpected discovery. Few of us would deny the value of the very activity of reading, and many know the very special value of those few books we constantly reread and came to love during our childhood. Because of what I know now, I can guarantee that you’ll never forget the books I’ve mentioned in this letter. You probably believe some other books are important to you now, but nearly all of them will fade in time. I’ll leave you with these three quotations to confirm the place and importance of books in our lives:

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men

of past centuries

René Descartes (1596-1650)(trans):

Le Discourse de la méthode, I

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and

treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life

John Milton (1608-1674):

Areopagitica

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever

Martin Tupper (1810-1889):

Proverbial Philosophy, Series I, ‘Of Reading’

Your older self,