A different history and a different future (Anne Rooney)

I've been reading The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge) to MB recently. Even though the book was already old when I was reading it, and the Victorian setting long gone, it's much more distant to her. When I read it, it was less than 30 years old (published 1947). My grandparents were born at the tail end of the Victorian era. I knew what most of the words meant, and the idea of having a jug and bowl of water to wash yourself, a candle in your room, a fire to warm you, were not alien, just a bit antiquated — my grandparents had lived like that, and still had an open fire as their only heating. For MB, the book is nearly 80 years old. No one lives like that any more. A governess is what you have if your parents are Russian oligarchs who move around a lot. A candle in your room is because you want the nice smell, or to be a bit New-Agey, but you could turn the light on if you just wanted illumination. 

It's not just books. I took a look at my old primary school the other day. It still has the 'temporary' classrooms installed after World War II. That was understandable when the war had ended just over 20 years before. It's not really excusable 60 years later. The two oldest teachers in the school were war widows/spinsters — First World War-widows/spinsters. There were still bombed landscapes. A book like The Silver Sword (Ian Serraillier) told the story of adults we knew, refugee children grown-up. Our parents had been evacuees. MB's brother was born longer after the invasion of Iraq than I was after the Second World War. I was born closer to the First World War than MB was to the Vietnam War, closer to the Great Depression than her brother was to the end of the Cold War.

We not only have different pasts but different futures. It's terrifying that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with the full force of climate change and everything it will bring. But looking back at my parents' ideas of the future I would see gives me pause for thought. My father assumed he would leave school and be sent to fight in the Second World War. They assumed I would grow up into an age of space travel, flying cars and nuclear war. In fact, I grew up into an era of Cold War, climate change and everything computerised and stored in the Cloud. 

Perhaps MB's world won't be characterised by being overheated and flooded and dominated by job-and-culture-wrecking AIs, but something else completely unanticipated, whether good or bad. The future has often been predicted, and to some degree moulded, by science fiction. The geeks who read Asimov and watched Star Trek grew up to be astrophysicists, software developers, and robotics engineers. If a biotech and genetics-leaning generation follows from the pandemic, who knows what future they will bring, and face? It probably won't be whatever we expect. 

Anne Rooney

Out now:

Baby Owl, illustrated by Qu Lan, Oxford University Press, 2023

 

Elizabeth Goudge - by Sue Purkiss and (mostly) Carol Lefevre

 A few weeks ago, I was in Wells, my nearest (very small) city, when, walking past this beautiful house, I noticed a blue plaque on the wall outside it. As you see, Elizabeth Goudge once lived here. 

People don't talk about Elizabeth Goudge much these days. But I remember reading some of her books years ago and thoroughly enjoying them: Green Dolphin Country was one, and The Dean's Watch was another. I'd always imagined the setting of the latter to be Wells, but I didn't realise that it actually was.

I decided I should find out more about her, realising that I knew practically nothing. Then a few days later, imagine my surprise when an email dropped into my inbox about a new book, a sequel to another of Goudge's books - one I remember my daughter loved listening to: The Little White Horse. Would I be interested in hosting a blog post by the author of the book? Yes, I most certainly would.

Here it is - and it's fascinating. Many thanks to Carol, and to Emily Beater for arranging.

 

When The Last Page of a Cherished Book is Not The End

Carol Lefevre

By writing a sequel to a famous, prize-winning, classic children’s book, I may appear to have come to children’s literature via a sneaky back door, but I can promise, hand on heart, that from start to finish The Silver Moth was a labour of love. When I began writing it, I was so carried away with my plan that I hadn’t even realised I would need permission. However, I quickly learned that I couldn’t just return to Moonacre many years after the original book was set (by which time Maria Merryweather had grown up and become a sprightly, still-elegant grandmother) to begin my own telling of what took place there during the First World War.

With this realisation began the process of approaching the Trustees of Elizabeth Goudge’s Estate for their blessing, which in time I received. And it was a great thrill to be given this chance, because as a child The Little White Horse had been more to me than a book: it was a private world I partly lived in.

I think what affected me most as a child reader was the romance of the room that belonged to the orphaned Maria Merryweather. I don’t know how many times I read the chapter in which she is introduced to her tower bedroom with its child-sized door, its vaulted ceiling that culminates in a sickle moon and stars, but it worked its magic on me then, and it still has power over me now.

In those days my family lived in remote parts of Australia. Photographs from that time show that the houses we occupied were plain, and there were few luxuries. Playmates, too, were scarce, so books became my friends. As a solitary child, pets were also valued companions, and I was quick to bond with Elizabeth Goudge’s enchanted animal characters.

The Little White Horse and I became inseparable, for with Elizabeth Goudge’s love of beautiful places and her genius for detail, she had conjured another world for me, one in which houses and food and clothing were never utilitarian but were transformed by her pen into a kind of poetry. When you love a book, and inhabit it thoroughly, it becomes part of you, and the last page is never really the end.

 

Born in England in 1900 in the cathedral city of Wells, Elizabeth Goudge was twelve years younger than Virginia Woolf, though from her writing she might have been a good deal older. Her father was a theologian and her mother a native of Guernsey in the Channel Islands, and the combination of this with being an only child seems to have instilled in the young Elizabeth the Edwardian sensibility she would retain for the rest of her life.

A theologian’s genteel daughter she may have been, but it is inconceivable that, as a female novelist writing in the early 20th century, Elizabeth Goudge did not read Virginia Woolf. In 1928 She may even have attended Woolf’s Cambridge lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges that would be published the following year as A Room of One’s Own.  What convinces me of this is that in her own quiet way Elizabeth Goudge made such rooms a real possibility for both her female heroines and her readers.

Not only did Maria Merryweather take ownership of the room with the sickle moon and stars, but in Linnets and Valerians, written twenty years after The Little White Horse, Nan Linnet, a classic Goudge heroine – brave, sweet-natured, adventurous and yet reflective – becomes the recipient of a perfect little parlour. And it was through such gifts that readers like me (still too young to have heard of Virginia Woolf) began to dream of something for ourselves that, until then, would have seemed an impossible extravagance.

Elizabeth Goudge wrote The Little White Horse through the dark days of the Second World War. It was said to be her own favourite of her books, and perhaps this was because of the escape that writing it must have provided her from the awfulness of daily life at that time. As it turns out, daily life in our own time is no less alarming, and we could all still do with a good dash of magic.

What better place to adjourn to then than a valley where a unicorn still lingers? Throw in a gathering of gypsies, a little aeroplane hidden in a farmer’s field, and a forbidding castle that a young heroine must brave alone for the noblest of reasons. Although The Silver Moth is set during the First World War and does not ignore its immense darkness, there is still plenty of loveliness at Moonacre. I hope it will bring new readers to The Little White Horse, and that in time it will become well-loved for its own magic.

 

The Silver Moth, a sequel to The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge, was published by SPCK on the 23^rd September 2022, and is available to purchase here 

Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse by Paul May

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge won the Carnegie Medal in 1946, the year of its publication, and it is just as much of a wartime book as We Couldn’t Leave Dinah and Visitors from London. It was written in the heart of the Devon countryside that forms its setting and Elizabeth Goudge wrote that ‘those were the war years and it was good to escape sometimes from the fearful realities of that time into a world where a unicorn cantered behind the trees.’

 

This is a pastoral novel. The action takes place in the bucolic semi-paradise of Moonacre, a country estate hemmed in by hills and the sea, entirely separate from the rest of the world, in the year 1842. As I read it, I was reminded of many other stories. The unicorn theme suggested Alan Garner's Elidor, a book that didn't win the Carnegie, apparently because the judges, astonishingly, didn't like the Charles Keeping illustrations. Then that pastoral quality made me think both of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and of the Ahlbergs' Each Peach Pear Plum.

The Winter's Tale element includes a shepherd for the heroine, Maria, to fall in love with and marry. Humbling her pride to marry a common shepherd is one of the things she has to do to redeem the sins of her ancestors. Except that this shepherd is not a prince in disguise like Florizel, but possibly a god or a hero from the past. He's called Robin, but he also has echoes of the god, Pan, as he makes his first physical appearance: 'Maria . . . was aware of a slim brown figure bounding towards her, of a curly head lowered like that of a butting goat, and then over went the Black Man flat on his back . . .'

The Black Men are not black-skinned, but like Tolkien's Black Riders or the Arthurian Black Knight are dressed in black and carry black cockerels on their shoulders. Their blackness is a symbolic absence of colour which is contrasted with the heightened colour of everything else in Moonacre—this really is a very colourful book. And it's not just the colours; all the senses are enhanced, and feelings too. People take one look in each others eyes and love each other instantly. There is magic in the air. 

At first, because everything in Moonacre seems so lovely and so perfect, I found myself thinking of Ursula LeGuin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. That story concerns a city where everyone lives in unimaginable happiness, but at a cost. In a windowless room somewhere in the city a small child is imprisoned in misery. ‘If the child were brought up out of that vile place . . .all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.’ All the residents of Omelas know about the child. They are shown the child at a certain point in their adolescence and told of the bargain: the happiness of thousands depends upon the misery of one. And some of them, having been shown, walk away.

 

Illustration by C. Walter Hodges

Well, The Little White Horse isn’t that kind of a story, it turns out, but the darkness is there all the same. Moonacre is a genuine paradise, rather like the Garden of Eden, into which people have brought their own trouble. This trouble takes a variety of forms – greed, cruelty, deceit, envy, curiosity (strange one that) vanity, and being aggravating. The task of the heroine, Maria Merryweather, is to purge the evil from Moonacre through courage and self-sacrifice. I think that Elizabeth Goudge was probably influenced in her plotting by Shakespeare’s comedies, and it’s no coincidence that a lot of marrying goes on at the end.

 

This is, like LeGuin's, a moral story. It appears in places to be explicitly didactic, although it is the characters rather than the author who make such statements as this: ‘That’s our family motto, my dear . . .It is also, perhaps, a device for linking together those four qualities that go to make up perfection – courage, purity, love and joy.’ But the high moral tone is usually slightly undermined in some way, in this case thus: ‘Sir Benjamin paused a moment and then with intense relief suddenly bellowed, “Sausages!!!” For a moment Maria thought that Sausage was another thing that one must have to attain perfection . . .’

That mention of 'purity' is important. There are several references in the book to the Virgin Mary, and Maria's name is no coincidence. The myth is that only a virgin can tame the unicorn, and this must have been in the author's mind, but in the end, having sown all the seeds (and this is a very plotty book) she seems to have decided not to go down this route, the route which Alan Garner did take in his novel.

 

On another occasion, Loveday Minette warns Maria, 'Don’t make my mistakes, Maria, whatever you do.'

    'What were your mistakes?' asked Maria

    'Too many to tell you,' said Loveday, 'but they all grew out of being aggravating and losing my temper.' 

 

     'I’m like Lady Letitia, Loveday,' Maria says, a few pages later,  'I don’t like pink either.'

     ‘What?’ cried Loveday. ‘You ride there beside me, Maria, and dare to tell me that you don’t like pink?’ And Loveday drew herself up, and her eyes flashed cold fire and she seemed to be freezing all over.’

 

I think it’s this kind of thing that makes the moralising acceptable. Even the vicar, who delivers damning moral judgements on his parishioners, is not above reproach. All the characters, including our heroine, have their flaws and contradictions, and in this self-contained world the bad people are bad for understandable reasons and are willing, in the right circumstances, to be reformed. Marcus Crouch says ‘The Little White Horse is a ‘moral tale’, an allegory, in which an acceptable lesson is carried through the medium of an enchanting story. Children, who in any case are less averse to a moral than their elders, have shown no wish to complain that this story, with its excitement, its vividly realised setting and its many colourful characters, is concerned with the nature of good and evil and with the importance of self-discipline.’

 

I think that’s right. Reviews on Amazon and Good Reads are a real mixture of praise from modern children and from adults who loved the book when they were young and still reread it today. There's very little  'I bought this for my granddaughter and she seems to love it'. And a whole new audience has come to the book after J K Rowling said it was one of her favourites as a child, and acknowledged its influence on Harry Potter, chiefly through its extravagant descriptions of food.

 

Elizabeth Goudge

I have a feeling that this book might also have influenced Joan Aiken in her creation of the alternative England of James III, the setting for the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. Can anyone suggest a sensible reason why Joan Aiken never won the Carnegie? She was shortlisted once in 1968 for The Whispering Mountain, but that's all.

And, come to think of it, Loveday Minette's bit of relationship counselling is really quite sound and I will try to take it to heart. 'Don't be aggravating and keep your temper.'

Paul May's website

The Importance of Food by Vanessa Harbour

I can remember hearing the wonderful Barry Cunningham talking about the importance of food at a Golden Egg Academy workshop many years ago and it is something that has stuck with me ever since. He spoke about how food and meals are something that a child can empathise with. Children understand food.

Food can be used as a powerful tool in writing. It can illustrate so much so easily, adding depth. Regardless of what sort of genre your story is that you are writing – realist, historical, fantasy, sci-fi etc – you need to consider your food or how people are going to be sustained. Use it effectively and it can have a real impact. Lifting your narrative. Food can be used to show social standing, poverty, wealth, celebrations, emotions etc.

I believe J.K. Rowling with her Harry Potter stories is the master. I get my students to read her work to see how cleverly she uses food and meals. Think of the meals at the Dursleys in comparison to meals at the Weasleys. One might not have as much money but the meals are full of love. Then, of course, there are the feasts at Hogwarts.

Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse is another author who was brilliant with food. I remember it from when I was a child and there was a tea scene that stuck with me. Her description was extraordinary and so evocative. I dreamt of having a tea like that. (It never happened)

I love the way Vashti Hardy describes food. She is another one who writes really evocatively: ‘Their parents made delicious pumpkin soup and pie, spiced with cinnamon; it tasted like autumn.’ (From Wildspark published by Scholastic, 2019)

When I write I try to ensure that the reader can get truly involved in the experience and it is something they can relate to. It is part of the dramatization. With Flight, I did a lot of research into what they might be eating at the time. My current work in progress I have been writing some scenes where the characters have been involved in preparing food.

I am sure you all have your own favourite ‘food’ books perhaps in the comment section below tell me about them.

I was going to write a different post today as it is election day. I felt I ought to write something about hope but in all honesty, I am terrified. I am worried about today and what is going to happen. All I am going to say is that we have got to keep writing children’s books that show there is hope, there is a way out and that there is a way that they can take control. There are stories they can escape into.

 Keep writing and may today’s result be the one you want it to be.

Dr Vanessa Harbour

@VanessaHarbour

www.vanessaharbour.co.uk

http://chaosmos-outofchaoscomesorder.blogspot.com