“When I read and re-read The Wind in the Willows, I am not experiencing Grahame’s life second-hand. If anything, I am experiencing my own life, my own reactions, in two timeframes.”
When I read and re-read The Wind in the Willows, I am not experiencing Grahame’s life second-hand. If anything, I am experiencing my own life, my own reactions, in two timeframes. Grahame’s little creatures are bold, funny, hearty. They have a genius for friendship. They love their lives and their homes but they are also suffused with a mysterious anguish and longing for something else, something apart. Especially the Rat, the fellow I had originally found so raffish and seductive because he didn’t care. He does care, too much sometimes; but he gets over it. And I’m still Mole, so of course I love him.
I’M GOING TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC AS HARD AS I CAN
The Enchanted Castle
by E. Nesbit
One evening when I was very young, my father called me into his studio. ‘Look, Jane,’ he said, pointing out the window, ‘there’s a fairy palace.’ So there was. It floated in the darkness, a building like an ancient Greek temple, square and columned with a triangular roof, very solid, but with transparent walls that blazed with golden light. I gasped. Every night for a long time, I would creep into the studio to see the fairy palace, for by day it was invisible, and I was afraid it had gone: but by nightfall it was always there, blazing away. And because there was no perspective, I had no idea how big it was. It might have been a great mansion, or it might have been very, very small.
I never wondered what sort of fairies they were, or why they would build a palace in St John’s Wood, or what they did inside it: it was enough just to behold. At some point, I must have realised that what I was seeing was a greenhouse in a neighbouring garden, indistinct and camouflaged in shadows by day but visible by night, when it was lit up from inside. Did that shatter my illusion? Not a bit of it. I could quite comfortably live with a double vision: the fairy palace was still there and I still believed in it because I wanted to believe, right up until the moment when I was ready and willing to let it drift away and replace it with a place to grow plants. And another reason I wanted to prolong the vision was because my father had revealed it to me.
That in-between time, when I believed in both the fairy palace and the greenhouse, demonstrates the ambiguity of magic for a child. E. Nesbit was the mistress of ambiguous magic, and she has influenced many writers for children who came after her. I entered into a contract with her: I would believe in the magic for as long as I was reading the book. It is a delicious state to be in, at once safe and enthralled. But it can’t last.
“I entered into a contract with her: I would believe in the magic for as long as I was reading the book. It is a delicious state to be in, at once safe and enthralled.”
The best-known of Nesbit’s books is probably The Railway Children, about a family living in a railway cottage where the children band together to prove the innocence of their wrongly imprisoned father. Thanks to a 1970 film adaptation, it gave many boys of my generation a crush on Jenny Agutter. I enjoyed this book, but for me it always took second place to the Nesbit fantasy books, which all involved an element of magic. I have them a little confused with one another, but they glow brightly like a jar of multicoloured lollies, in the days when lollies were a huge treat and not just sticky and unhealthy.
The magic was satisfyingly weird. It came about by means of a weird creature, a Psammead or a Mouldiwarp (how were you even supposed to pronounce the names?), and it took the children in and out of fantastic adventures that took place right in the middle of their ordinary daily lives. Not that their lives were ordinary to me: they were the lives of middle-class Edwardian children in London, and I remember being vaguely aware this was a long-ago world. I had a hankering to wear clothes like the girls in the pictures: dark dresses covered in white pin-afores, with wide-brimmed hats and button-up boots. Dashing and romantic, yet practical. You could run around in a way the corseted mothers couldn’t.
I loved E. Nesbit’s well-intentioned, fallible characters, Robert, Anthea, Jane and Cyril, who meet a wish-granting Psammead in Five Children and It, and whose adventures continue in The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet.
In Five Children and It the children can never think of quite the right wish; complications reliably follow. Nesbit applies the narrative clamp of logical consequences, not letting her characters off the hook as their misadventures escalate. The Psammead, an irascible malcontent not at all interested in providing happy outcomes, is no help when things go awry. The children can rely only on themselves.
I read and re-read this book when I was ten and eleven, knowing that I’d be just as susceptible to an impulsive magic wish, should the occasion arise. Inventive and funny, with quotidian details of Edwardian life sitting comfortably alongside magic, E. Nesbit’s books remain fresh and readable.
Fiona Wood
One boy wasn’t middle class and E. Nesbit made sure we knew it. He was a chimney sweep and he lived in a part of London called Deptford, and Nesbit kept telling me it was unlike any part of London I knew, for the houses were small and mean and grubby and only poor people lived there. I longed to go to Deptford and discover this exotic hellhole for myself. By means of a time warp, the boy travels back to England at the time of Henry VIII, where he is a lord in a ruff and doublet, master of a fine mansion, a member of the noble House of Arden, and I thought he was on to a pretty good thing: an exciting life as a chimney sweep, plus a second exciting life as a lord.
It’s hard to pick one book to re-read because I think of them all glowing in the Nesbit lolly jar, but my choice is The Enchanted Castle. Perhaps it has some echo of Blyton’s Castle of Adventure, but it’s a very different book. The magic in this case is a ring, but at first nobody realises it’s magic.
The hero was a boy who went into a park and found a beautiful princess sitting by a lake and singing a magic song:
Sabrina Fair,
Listen where thou art sitting…
I loved this song, and the name Sabrina, and E. Nesbit for making it up (until we read Comus at school many years later and I discovered the song was the work of Milton). The princess was an ordinary little girl pretending to be a princess with a magic wishing ring (only it really was magic) but Nesbit had me fooled for a while, just like the boy in the story: I was sure she was a real princess.
Anyway, she and the boy had adventures that must have involved an enchanted castle, though I don’t remember that at all. What I do remember is things coming to life by magic: ancient Greek statues, and stone dinosaurs at Crystal Palace. The dinosaurs really were there, and for ages I pestered my parents to let me go and see them. If they had, I think I would have been disappointed: they were apparently clunky-looking things, outdated by more recent scientific discoveries. There were much finer specimens at the Natural History Museum at Kensington, where I did go several times as a child, and stood in awe under the giant skeleton of the diplodocus. Also, although I didn’t know it, the magnificent Crystal Palace had burned down many years before, so altogether it would have been a wasted expedition.
Nesbit magic was not usually particularly frightening, but by far her most fearful creations were in The Enchanted Castle: the Ugly-Wuglies. They made me want to look away, but at the same time I couldn’t get enough of them. The girl, the boy and some other children were putting on a play for the grown-ups, and because the audience wasn’t big, they decided to make some extra audience members. So they put together some scarecrow-like men and women, constructed out of brooms and mops and clothes and string, and drew paper masks for faces, and sat them down in a row in front of the stage. At some point the girl thoughtlessly wished they were alive and would applaud the show. The magic ring did its trick and the Ugly-Wuglies came alive.
“Nesbit magic was not usually particularly frightening, but by far her most fearful creations were in The Enchanted Castle: the Ugly-Wuglies.”
Oh, how spooky they were. T
hey clapped with a horrible thudding of padded gloves. They got up and left the theatre with the clumsy movements of people made out of brooms and mops, and the ladies glided on empty skirts. They spoke a weird English without any consonants, because the paper masks didn’t have roofs to their mouths. They were terrifying because everything about them was flesh-crawlingly impossible.
As in a nightmare, the children raced out and tried to trace the Ugly-Wuglies’ progress and undo the spell. I particularly remember a horrible picture of a hedge with an Ugly-Wugly face poking through it. As time went on, the Ugly-Wuglies became more and more human-looking, but that didn’t diminish the horror: if anything, it enhanced it, because I always remembered what they were made of. In the end the spell was lifted and they disappeared, but the idea of them remained, hovering over the rest of the story. It was like a children’s version of the Frankenstein tale: the most awful thing you can think of is the thing you create yourself.
“It was like a children’s version of the Frankenstein tale: the most awful thing you can think of is the thing you create yourself.”
My re-reading copy is a 1994 Puffin Book, with a romantic castle cover picture in shades of misty russet and red. The book was first published in 1907, and this edition was first published by Ernest Benn in 1956. Eight other Nesbit titles published by Puffin Books are listed (Five Children and It, The Magic World, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, New Treasure Seekers, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet and The Wouldbegoods; I’ve read them all). There is a two-page unsigned biography: I learn that E. Nesbit was born in 1858 and was ‘a mischievous, tomboyish child who grew into an unconventional adult’. She and her husband, Hubert Bland, were founders of the Fabian Society and ‘the chaos of their Bohemian home’ became a socialist and literary centre for such friends as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. It doesn’t say how many children she had but it does say she adopted two more children.
‘Her clothing, haircut, lifestyle and habit of expressing herself forcefully and in public proclaimed her to be a woman who was trying to break out of the mould which English society demanded at the time,’ says the biography. I am not sure if this suggests a Virginia Woolf-style heroine or merely a ratbag, as Australians would say. She turned to writing for children after many years as a magazine writer for adults, when she was approached to write pieces about her childhood.
‘When Edith turned from describing the literary facts of her childhood to capturing in fictional form the happy and relaxed atmosphere she had known as a girl, the result was a series of children’s books which have remained firm favourites and bestsellers for decades,’ says the biography. The woman with the weird clothes and haircut and forceful ways of expressing herself intrigues me greatly; but first I must read her book.
The pictures are the original drawings by H. R. Millar, I remember them well, and they lure me in. They have a strong use of black, and are very Edwardian: all the females have an abundance of hair, and the drawing where Mademoiselle lets down her hair has a Klimtish air that is positively erotic. As to the text, I’ve forgotten more than usual, and I’ve muddled things up. I’ve got that ‘Sabrina Fair’ poem completely wrong; it’s not in The Enchanted Castle at all. (Later, I find out it crops up in another Nesbit book, Wet Magic, where it is used as a spell to summon a mermaid.) There is a boy, Gerald, and a girl who pretends to be a princess, Mabel; also Gerald’s younger brother Jimmy and younger sister Kathleen, and I’m not surprised I’ve forgotten them because they are not very interesting. Or not as interesting as Gerald, a persuasive lad who can wind adults round his little finger and has a habit of talking about himself in mock-adventure style as the intrepid hero of a romantic tale.
“The woman with the weird clothes and haircut and forceful ways of expressing herself intrigues me greatly”
So what is interesting about this story? It has a promising beginning. The siblings are staying at Kathleen’s school for the holidays (it’s somewhere in the countryside, not in London, as I’d remembered), under the care of Mademoiselle the French mistress, and they are allowed the usual great leisure and great latitude: off they go on an excursion which leads to a secret way into a magnificent garden, ‘a scene like a book about Italy’, with a lake and statues and deer and Grecian temples and a distant turreted building which must surely be the enchanted castle they have been longing to discover. Or is it? Jimmy is the sceptic: ‘I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing.’ But Gerald settles it: ‘Well, don’t let’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing… I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can.’
I was four years old when an aunt gave me a picture book called The Magic Brush, a ‘Japanese tale of long ago’ retold by Jane Carruth and illustrated by Kei Wakana. The Magic Brush tells of Mahrien, a kind-hearted orphan with a talent for drawing, who is given a beautiful paintbrush that makes everything he draws come to life. Mahrien uses his gift to help the poor, until a cruel overlord forces him to paint a mountain of gold. Mahrien surrounds the mountain with a sea and when the overlord sets sail, Mahrien paints a storm that destroys his ship.
Just as Mahrien’s brush brought his imagination to life, so the story sparked mine. For years I dreamed of having a magic brush like Mahrien’s, before realising I could create new worlds with words. It’s fair to say The Magic Brush opened my four-year-old mind to the transformative power of art.
Angela Savage
In the castle grounds, at the centre of a maze, they discover a sleeping princess, dressed in robes of pink silk, a veil and a crown. Awakened by a reluctant kiss from Jimmy, she says she is a princess who has been asleep for a hundred years – ‘How did you get past the dragons?’ – takes the children on a tour of the castle, gives them a magic meal (dry bread and cheese which is supposed to taste like anything they want) and shows them a secret cache of jewels, which she assures them are magic. By now, any reader would be sceptical, but there’s still a teasing, comical ambiguity which gives a subtle tension to the scene.
Then the princess puts on a ring that she declares will make her invisible, and the real magic begins. And this, sadly, is when I become uneasy and impatient in my reading. Up to this point I’ve been happy to go along with what I’m thinking of as the Nesbit atmosphere: a world where you try to believe in magic as hard as you can, but you’re also surrounded by the largely reassuring if aggravating everyday world, where you have to choose between pressing on into the maze or going back to retrieve your cold mutton sandwiches (food is always splendidly important in this story), or you rest after a long walk and wish your boots ‘did not feel so full of feet’. But the ring is a magic ring that does whatever you tell it to. One after the other, as they each wear the ring, Mabel becomes invisible, Gerald becomes invisible, the maidservant Eliza becomes invisible. The ring has more tricks: Mabel becomes four yards high, Kathleen turns into a statue, Jimmy becomes rich, a headless ghost appears. And then there are the Ugly-Wuglies: but more of them later.
It all sounds very action-packed and exciting, so why am I uneasy and impatient? Because the pacing is off, and the magic is banal. When you think about it, it should be loaded with horror. There should be nothing more terrifying than becoming invisible – especially as the children don’t realise at first that the ring’s effects are temporary. It does seem to cause some anguish and inconvenience and there is much observation of phenomena such as food disappearing into Mabel’s invisible mouth, but so many fantastic possibilities here are wasted in an episodic plot that has the resourceful Gerald using invisibility as an aid in catching burglars and doing conjuring tricks. It doesn’t help that much of the comedy is making fun of the lower orders: the plodding policeman, the maidservant and her beau. No doubt typical of the times, but you’d think a founder of the Fabian Society and the creator of a hero from Deptford would be more wary of condescension.
“It all sounds very action-packed and ex
citing, so why am I uneasy and impatient? Because the pacing is off, and the magic is banal.”
To me, potentially the most frightening event is when the ring becomes a wishing ring, and Jimmy thoughtlessly wishes he was rich. Before the other children’s eyes, he instantly grows and ages into a prosperous elderly man with no memory of his younger self, a caricature of a bigwig with an office in the city. The possibilities send a chill through me – what would it feel like to see your brother morph into this monstrous alien? – but it turns into yet another adventure for the resourceful Gerald.
Although Gerald is the most interesting of the children, I’m not that fascinated by his resourcefulness and his adventures. And I should take more care with my hypotheses. Last time I decided I needed strong, lovable characters. But they don’t quite emerge here, not even Gerald. And they certainly didn’t emerge in The Castle of Adventure. And yet that didn’t put young Jane off the story one bit.
Perhaps Nesbit’s allure lies in the promise of magic? She has many asides to the reader where she speculates on the nature of magic in a way which is sure to appeal to a child. I recognise these passages as true to my own childish thoughts about magic. ‘When you are young,’ she says, ‘so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true – such things, for instance, as that the Earth goes round the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening. And, as I am always telling you, the most wonderful things happen to all sorts of people, only you never hear about them because the people think that no-one will believe their stories, so they don’t tell them to anyone except me. And they tell me, because they know I can believe anything.’
Storytime Page 15