by Dennis Butts
He then tries to make a toy boat, then a canoe, then a Bevis-sized boat. But ‘the planks are not to be fitted together by just thinking you will do it.’
No. This would not do; Bevis could not wait long enough; Bevis liked the sunshine and the grass under foot. Crash fell the plank and bang went the hammer as he flung it on the bench, and away they [Bevis and Pan, his spaniel] tore into the field, the spaniel rolling in the grass, the boy kicking up the tall dandelions, catching the yellow disc under the toe of his boot and driving it up in the air.
Then, there is a subtle change. As one critic remarked, the book seems to go on and on, like Bevis’s boyhood, into a seamless succession of happy incidents. Bevis and his friend Mark learn to swim (as with learning to sail or shoot Jefferies does not leave out the hours of failure!); then they play at being savages; and then they are involved in a long and exciting war game with the local boys, in which Bevis distinguishes himself by sheer toughness – he is pushed over a cliff and pulls himself up again by clinging to thistles.
Then they learn to sail, contrive a boat, build a gun (Jefferies provides a detailed template for this), and provision a cave on an island in the lake. But how to escape from their homes, unnoticed? ‘They had been thinking over how they should get away from home to live on the island without being searched for . . . [and] with the usual contradiction of the mind they earnestly set about to deceive their friends, and were equally anxious not to give them any pain . . . ’ But it is harvest-time, and it is not too difficult to find an alibi – staying with a mutual friend.
And so Bevis and Mark spend a week on the island, almost fending for themselves (although they recruit a local girl to help them), and slaughtering virtually any animal they come across (this is not PC land – they manage to kill an otter that ‘was as rare there as a black fox’). They make biscuits and bake them in the fire, and (being well-read children) blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. They play cards, and Mark wins.
‘Double Bezique!’ shouted Mark; ‘and all the money’s mine!’
Pan looked up at the noise.
‘The proper thing is, to shoot you under the table,’ said Bevis: ‘that’s what buccaneers do.’
‘But there were no revolvers when we lived,’ said Mark: ‘only matchlocks.’
‘Shovel them up,’ said Bevis. ‘Broad gold pieces, but you won’t have them long. I’m tired tonight. I shall win them tomorrow, and your estate, and your watch, and your shirt off your back, and your wife – ’
‘I shan’t have a wife,’ said Mark, yawning as he pocketed the coins, which were copper. . . . ‘Oh, no! thank you very much!’
A week is not very long, but when they return, Bevis’s mother and his sister, Frances, encounter a rather different character to the one they knew:
In those days of running, racing, leaping, exploring, swimming, the skin nude to the sun, and wind and water, they built themselves up of steel, steel that would bear the hardest wear of the world. Had they been put in an open boat and thrust forth to sea like the Vikings of old, it would not have hurt them.
Frances played with Bevis’s golden ringlets, but did not kiss him as she had been used to do. He looked too much a man. She placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder, but did not speak to him as once she had done. Something told her this was not the boy she ordered to and fro.
Bevis himself is rather ambivalent about growing:
He ran along the bank to a spot whence he knew he could see the old house at home through the boughs. He wanted just to look at it – there is no house so beautiful as the one you were born in – and then he ran back.
For many children’s writers (and perhaps for many adult readers of children’s books) childhood is an ideal golden world, as in Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days. Even in the face of the stark evidence of their own childhoods, or the obvious fact that in reality only a very few children have childhoods even remotely idyllic, adults often want to give their children – and themselves – an image of some kind of perfection. (This is, perhaps, why unhappy or unpleasant children’s books are received with such loud protestations.) Jefferies captured the essence of the ideal childhood – its freedom, its zest for life, its free play, and free play of the imagination, and set it in a world so detailed that we are convinced of its reality. The original location of Bevis’s world has been lost, as a visit to Coate Reservoir near Swindon, where the book is set, rather grimly demonstrates; and Bevis’s childhood, ten years condensed into one glorious summer, is a world that never could have existed.
9. How Much Gold Was in Pevensey Castle?
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1908)
See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip’s fleet.
See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died . . .
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion’s camping place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul.
There can be few things that mark the generation gap more clearly than an old children’s book that deals with history. Child readers, demonstrably, can cope with minor oddities of speech, dress, and behaviour, even if a book is sixty years old – witness the continued popularity of Enid Blyton’s books, with or without ‘modernising’ tinkering. They might find child characters’ behaviour odd, but comprehensible (although some child readers find the activities of Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons to be positively dangerous, and their parents irresponsible). But when it comes to books that depend on a shared knowledge of English or Roman history, as do Kipling’s Puck and Rewards, the case is very different. Modern children do not have the necessary, and assumed, base of historical knowledge to draw upon.
This is not a lament for changes in the teaching of history, or a political point, but a practical one: to read Kipling’s two affectionate portraits of English history requires specialised knowledge – and Kipling assumes a great deal of it. His implied reader knows about not merely Romans, and Saxons and Normans, but Queen Elizabeth and Sebastian Cabot and Nicholas Culpepper – otherwise, many of these stories will be full of exquisite sounds, but not signify a great deal.
Puck of Pook’s Hill arose from, and is set around, Kipling’s English house, Batemans, near Burwash in Sussex. His account of it in the otherwise circumspect autobiography, Something of Myself of 1937, presents an easy – perhaps enviably easy – familiarity with history. First his local workmen sink a well:
When we stopped, at twenty-five feet, we had found a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a worn Cromwellian latten spoon and, at the bottom of all, the bronze cheek of a Roman horse-bit.
In cleaning out an old pond which might have been an ancient marle-pit or mine-head, we dredged two intact Elizabethan ‘sealed quarts’ that Christopher Sly affected, all pearly with the patina of the centuries. Its deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge . . .
You see how patiently the cards were stacked and dealt into my hands? . . . Earth, Air, Water and People had been – I saw it at last – in full conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or reached our valley.
This transformed, after some false starts, into a book in which Puck, ‘the oldest thing in England’, conjures from the Sussex woods figures from the past, who tell (Kipling’s) two children, Dan and Una, stories of their times. Puck contains two main story sequences. In the first, the legendary smith of the Norse gods, Weland, fallen on hard times, forges a sword for a young Saxon knight, Hugh. Although the sword fail
s him in his first fight at the Battle of Hastings, Hugh forges a friendship with one of the Norman invaders, Sir Richard Dalyngridge, and together they begin the process of making a unified England through the good management of their manors. Then they have an adventure with Viking raiders, and bring back boatloads of gold from some African shore. The gold lies at Pevensey for 100 years until some time around 1210, when King John is attempting to resist signing of the Magna Carta. It is discovered by Kadmiel, a Jewish moneylender – a Prince of his nation – who sinks it into the sea so that the King is forced to concede justice to every man in England: without the gold, the King cannot continue to fight the Barons.
‘Well,’ said Puck, calmly, ‘what did you think of it? Weland gave the Sword! The Sword gave the Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It’s as natural as an oak growing.’
In the troubled times of 1906, it was also a lesson in tolerance and inclusiveness. This, Kipling is saying, is how England (and by implication, the empire) was built – on tolerance, mutual love and respect, and that even the most excluded and despised were part of the pattern.
In the second sequence, Parnesius, an English-born Roman Centurion, defends Hadrian’s Wall against the invading Norsemen in the fading days of the Roman Empire. Kipling’s young Romans, as has often been pointed out, behave very like Indian Army subalterns, and while the Empire is temporarily saved by their bravery, brotherhood and common decency, they cannot, Kipling stresses, save an Empire that has become corrupt and divided. Another timely lesson.
But to appreciate either the text or the subtext, readers need to know at least something about the Spanish Armada (1588), the Battle of Hastings (1066), and the first Roman invasion of Britain (55BC). Rewards and Fairies, a much darker and disparate set of stories requires knowledge of Queen Elizabeth I, the magnificently-named René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec (who, as every schoolboy obviously used to know, invented the stethoscope), Napoleon and Talleyrand, and a good many others now lost to the school curricula. Along with these specific characters, there are social and racial attitudes. As Puck says to Kadmiel:
‘Remember, Master, they do not know Doubt or Fear.’
‘So I saw in their faces when we met,’ said Kadmiel. ‘Yet surely, surely they are taught to spit upon Jews?’
‘Are they?’ said Dan, much interested. ‘Where at?’
Puck fell back a pace, laughing. ‘Kadmiel is thinking of King John’s reign,’ he explained. ‘His people were badly treated then.’
‘Oh, we know that,’ they answered, and (it was very rude of them, but they could not help it) they stared straight at Kadmiel’s mouth to see if his teeth were all there. It stuck in their lesson-memory that King John used to pull out Jews’ teeth to make them lend him money.
This extract, from the final story ‘The Treasure and the Law’ (which Kipling felt was ‘too heavy for its frame’), demonstrates Kipling’s confidently casual approach to historical reference, and his mastery of the essence of the historical novel – to give the impression of historical veracity which makes his fictional characters believable. At one key point, Kadmiel bribes one Langton to change the text of the Magna Carta from ‘To no free man will we sell, refuse, or deny right or justice’, to ‘To none will we sell . . . ’ Kipling does not feel the need to point out that the real Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, was an advisor to the Barons: his original readers, unlike a certain contemporary Prime Minister, would not have been puzzled over the meaning of Magna Carta.
Dan, Una and Puck
Kipling’s allegorical purposes are perhaps better served now that a generation of readers does not have the historical knowledge to realise quite how romantic a writer he is – how far he manipulates time and history to his own purposes. The account of the politics of the time in ‘The Treasure and the Law’, Baron against Baron and Baron against King, are more than slightly skewed for dramatic effect, just as the quantities of gold, ‘wedge upon wedge, packet upon packet of gold and dust of gold’, that Hugh and Sir Richard are given by Witan, seem slightly nebulous. Sir Richard waits on the beach with the gold ‘all tied in an old sail’ for the horses to take it to Pevensey in three loads. They lower the gold into the well, set in the wall of the castle, and when, 100 years later, Kadmiel removes the gold, it takes him some time to do so. ‘[F]rom Sabbath to Sabbath I dove and dug there . . . I drew up many good loads of gold, which I loaded by night into my boat’. A ‘little boat’ that he had moored ‘on the mud beneath the Marsh-gate of the castle.’
I saw that if the evil thing remained, or if even the hope of finding it remained, the King would not sign the New Laws, and the land would perish.
Kadmiel casts the gold into the sea: ‘A King’s ransom – no, the ransom of a people!’ We may be dealing with symbolic quantities of gold, and romanticised history, but we are also dealing with a master storyteller. As Kipling noted:
That tale brought me a prized petty triumph. I had put a well into the wall of Pevensey Castle circa A.D.1100, because I needed it there. Archeologically, it did not exist until . . . 1935 . . . when excavators brought such a well to light.
In a multiracial world, one might think that Kipling’s (perhaps surprising) doctrine of tolerance would be popular, even if Puck might mistakenly be prescribed as a nationalistic text. But it could be that Kipling’s prose, a hymn to England, is too leisured for any contemporary children’s book. Dan and Una take their little dinghy down the narrow stream:
When they reached the Otter Pool, the Golden Hind grounded comfortably on a shallow, and they lay beneath a roof of close green, watching the water trickle over the flood-gates down the mossy brick chute from the mill-stream to the brook. A big trout – the children knew him well – rolled head and shoulder at some fly that sailed round the bend, while once in just so often the brook rose a fraction of an inch against all the wet pebbles, and they watched the slow draw and shiver of a breath of air through the tree-tops.
Perhaps this kind of prose is only history too.
10. Would Bobbie’s Train Have Stopped in Time?
E. Nesbit, The Railway Children (1906)
One of the most memorable, not to say iconic, images in Lionel Jeffries’s 1970 film of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children is of Jenny Agutter standing on the tracks as the train approaches, desperately waving a flag made of her red flannel petticoat. It is pretty dramatic in the book, too:
The train came rattling along, very fast.
‘They don’t see us! They won’t see us! It’s all no good!’ cried Bobbie . . .
‘Keep off the line, you silly cuckoo!’ said Peter fiercely.
It seemed that the train came on as fast as ever. It was very near now . . . The front of the engine looked black and enormous. Its voice was loud and harsh.
‘Oh, stop, stop, stop!’ cried Bobbie. No one heard her. At least Peter and Phyllis didn’t, for the oncoming rush of the train covered the sound of her voice with a mountain of sound. But afterwards she used to wonder whether the engine itself had not heard her. It seemed almost as though it had – for it slackened swiftly, slackened and stopped, not twenty yards from the place where Bobbie’s two flags waved over the line. She saw the great black engine stop dead, but somehow she could not stop waving the flags.
The scene is a classic example of bestselling novelist’s technique: the dramatic confrontation. The Railway Children has these in spades, usually demonstrating that children can best adults: for example, the episode of Peter and the sleeping Signalman, Bobbie and the drunken Bargeman, the children and Perks the Porter and, most dramatic of all, Bobbie confronting the train.
Bobbie’s confrontation is one of two remarkably effective examples of the quasi-realistic novelist taking an invisible step away from probability to manufacture a dramatic moment. The other, perhaps even more iconic in the film, I shall come to in a moment.
Jeffries filmed The Railway Children on the Ke
ighley and Worth Valley Railway, a ‘preserved’ or ‘heritage’ railway in West Yorkshire, which has also appeared in films and TV shows such as Sherlock Holmes, Last of the Summer Wine, Sons and Lovers, Poirot, and A Touch Of Frost. The engine that stops just in time is the now retired ex-GWR 0-6-0 pannier tank number 5775. The fact that the film is set in 1905, and the engine was built in 1929 is a forgivable anachronism (just as the engine that bursts into the first scene of Claude Whatham’s film of Swallows and Amazons – set in 1930 – is an Ivatt 2-6-2 tank built some time after 1946). Jeffries makes great play of the engine stopping only a yard away from Bobbie, in a dramatic manner of which Nesbit would undoubtedly have approved.
But is this rural scene what Nesbit had imagined?
Bobbie stops the train
The Railway Children may well, as Julia Briggs suggests, have had its roots in Nesbit’s childhood memories of playing beside the railway at Halstead in the 1860s: indeed the character of the émigré, who Bobbie finds at the station and takes home to her mother, may have been inspired by Nesbit’s friend Stepniak, who was run down by a train. The story of The Railway Children, Julia Briggs notes ‘seems to be set around Halstead, with “Maidbridge” combining elements of Tonbridge and Maidstone’; and if so, the railway she was thinking of was not the single-line, rural railway as at Keighley (or the Bluebell Railway, scene of the 2000 remake). Halstead for Knockholt station (so named so as not to confuse it with Halstead in Essex) was built in 1876, a wayside station on the South Eastern Railway ‘cut off’ through Orpington, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge which opened in 1868. This was, and is, a main line with, as The Railway Children shows, regular expresses – the midnight town express, for example. It is also double-tracked (‘ “Trains keep to the left, like carriages” said Peter, “so if we keep to the right, we’re bound to see them coming.” ’) Even in 1905, the ability of an express train weighing over 200 tons and running at sixty miles per hour to come to an emergency stop, even if it had been fitted with the new (for that era) Westinghouse brake, would have been even less than now. And so the stopping distance required would have been more than 500 yards – over a quarter of a mile. With the best responses possible by the driver, Bobbie wouldn’t have had a chance.