by Dennis Butts
18. Did John Masefield Ever Meet Hitler or Stalin?
John Masefield, The Box of Delights (1935)
Did John Masefield ever meet Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin? That he encountered the latter seems unlikely, the former not impossible. The reason for asking the question is related to one of his best-known works The Box of Delights.
The Box of Delights is a much-loved children’s book. First published in 1935, it has often been reprinted in England and America, reaching an eleventh edition in 1994, and it is still in print. It has been the subject of many radio versions by the B.B.C., most memorably with the haunting music of Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony in 1943, but also in 1948, 1966 and 1995. It was also dramatised for B.B.C. Television in 1984. It seems to be one of those children’s classics of which Sanford Sternlicht, in his Twayne Monograph of 1977, said, ‘men and women read in their youth, remember all their days, and use to judge the imaginative quotient of their own lives.’
The Box of Delights is a children’s fantasy in the sub-genre sometimes defined as ‘magical adventure fantasy’, a form which depicts ordinary people coming into contact with magical beings or events, and which is lighter in tone and often more amusing than works of High Fantasy, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As such, the book’s virtues of exuberance and invention are pretty clear, for it abounds in memorable characters, humorous episodes and mysterious events. The story starts one wintry morning near Christmas when young Kay Harker is coming home by train for the school holidays and on the way back meets two mysterious clergymen who swindle him out of his pocket money. At the station he is befriended by an old Punch and Judy man who asks him to deliver the chilling message that ‘The Wolves are Running.’ Kay learns that the pseudo-clergymen are pursuing the old man for the box which he is carrying – the box of delights. An even more sinister plot gradually emerges as Abner Brown and his apparently friendly companions are gradually revealed to be members of a threatening conspiracy. Nearly always dressed in black, they pose as harmless clergymen, but prove to be spies, burglars and kidnappers. They make great use of the latest technology, aeroplanes, helicopters and submarines. They are prepared to cut telephone-wires and to jam railway-points; and they are able to manipulate the Press by giving it false information. They take over the nearby theological college as the base for the invasion of the whole of England. A Missionary Training College seems to be an unlikely centre for a political takeover, but the Cotswold mansion occupied by Abner Brown’s well-disciplined band of black-robed underlings has powerful and sinister overtones.
Significantly, Abner’s gang justify their actions by the kind of ironic linguistic distortion which anticipates the ‘Doublethink’ and ‘Newspeak’ in George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four. When they try to persuade Kay’s friend Maria to join their conspiracy, for example, they describe their criminal activities in the following hypocritical terms:
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘what are you: a gang of crooks?’ ‘Oh, no,’ she [the female conspirator] said, ‘a business community.’ ‘Oh’, I said, ‘what business does your community do?’ ‘Social services,’ she said. ‘Setting straight injustices with the least possible inconvenience to all concerned.’ ‘And how do you do it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another,’ she said.
These kinds of words, and this kind of justification, are more suggestive of political activities than ordinary crimes: the hypocritical manipulation of language, particularly in totalitarian states, became a familiar strategy in the latter part of the twentieth century, of course.
Another part of Abner Brown’s conspiracy had been to establish an outpost in the countryside near Kay’s home in Tatchester under the guise of a Missionary Training College out on the Chester Hills. This is the secret base for the gang’s activities, and the plan seems more like political infiltration than a criminal plot. Rex Warner’s allegorical novel The Aerodrome of 1941, which contrasts the muddled life of a typical English village with the discipline and mechanical superiority of the aerodrome outside the village, suggests a similar kind of threat. Grahame Greene’s wartime film Went the Day Well? (1942) is another powerful example of everyday life in England threatened by a take-over by hostile forces from outside. Here German paratroopers, disguised as British soldiers, take over a village in Buckinghamshire as the vanguard force for the invasion of England.
All the way through Masefield’s novel the threat posed by Abner and his fellow-conspirators is paralleled by references to, and then the actual appearance of, ferocious wolves. Kay notices what he thinks are Alsatian dogs at Musborough Junction in the first pages of the book, and the frightening warning, ‘The Wolves are Running’, recurs throughout the story like the leitmotif from a Wagnerian opera. Cole is obviously afraid of them, and Abner uses the phrase again as the gang’s slogan in chapter 3. Later, real and terrifying wolves actually threaten Kay in chapter 6, and in chapter 12 they make their last appearance when they attack Kay and his friends in the form of wolf-like aeroplanes and motor-cars.
The dramatic and emotional effect of John Masefield’s depiction of the evil forces present in The Box of Delights is very powerful, and our responses are surely related, at least in part, to our half-conscious recognition of historical and political parallels. Masefield seems to have begun writing the book in 1934, and completed it by May 1935. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and established the Gestapo in April of the same year. Stalin, already in power in Russia, had established his secret police, the N.K.V.D., in 1934. Mussolini, in power in Italy since 1922, had already abolished the freedom of the Press and set up his secret police. The Spanish Civil War was to break out a little later in 1936. Fascism, with its highly-disciplined forces, its secret agents, its violence, its show-trials and its territorial ambitions, was very much in the public mind when Masefield was writing his children’s story. According to Peter Vansittart, the editor of John Masefield’s Letters from the Front 1915-1917, Masefield made several visits to Nazi Germany, and called it ‘short spots in hell.’ One wonders if he knew that Hitler had been known by the nickname ‘Wolf’ from the early 1920s. Hitler’s military headquarters on the Eastern Front was known as ‘The Wolf’s Lair.’
The original cover of the first edition
A close reading of Masefield’s novel, and an awareness of its historical context, helps to explain the feelings of menace and oppression that form so strong a part of the book, and which disturb so many readers. The opposing forces are also powerful, and in the end they triumph. Kay and his friends Peter and the high-spirited Maria embody the traditional ‘English’ values of pluck, stubbornness and, of course, decency. At one point Abner even defines his opponents’ qualities as ‘cold sense . . . the English strong point’, like ‘fair play’ and ‘justice’. His remarks reveal a more sophisticated and manipulative sense of language than the criminal jargon we might have expected. Kay’s allies also include those familiar and upright representatives of English values, the Church of England and the police; and it is typical of Masefield’s vision of their Englishness that they are largely comical. The red-faced and complacent Police Inspector, though entirely amiable, is more interested in rabbits and conjuring than Kay’s suspicions of a conspiracy, while the benign Bishop of Tatchester and his clergy, despite the efforts of the Reverend Stalwart (characteristically a keen hockey-player and heavy-weight boxer), find themselves easy victims of Abner Brown’s machinations.
Allied with Kay and his friends are also what we might call the forces of Old England. The novel is permeated with an acute awareness of the British past and of its power to influence the present. This is not real history perhaps, but something like folk memory. Through Kay’s magical journeys, often in the form of dreams, he is able to visit Arthur’s Camp and see how pre-historic settlers fought against the wolves. Later he sees Roman soldiers also resisting them. Even more mysteriously, Kay is helped by figures from the leg
endary past, the White Lady and Herne the Hunter. Although they play a part in the unfolding of the plot, it is surely their symbolical significance which resonates throughout the novel, not only revealing connections and continuity between the present and pagan times and ancient legends, but representing, through their association with such images as deer and oak trees and dolphins, all the great creative forces of Nature.
Kay’s encounter with Herne the Hunter is typical:
Herne stretched out his hand. Kay took it and at once he was glad that he had taken it, for there he was in the forest between the two hawthorn trees, with the petals of the may-blossom falling on him. All the may-blossoms that fell were talking to him, and he was aware of what all the creatures of the forest were saying to each other: what the birds were singing, and what it was that the flowers and the trees were thinking. And he realised that the forest went on and on for ever, and all of it was full of life beyond anything that he had ever imagined: for in the trees, in each leaf, and on every twig, and in every inch of soil there were ants, grubs, worms; little tiny, moving things, incredibly small yet all thrilling with life.
At the end Kay and all the forces of England and of Old England triumph over Abner Brown and the forces of darkness. Written in the 1930s, when the rising threat of Fascism was threatening the world’s peace, The Box of Delights is a wonderful fantasy; not only charting a boy’s imagination through the account of his dream, but also depicting a time when metaphorically speaking the wolves were indeed running. John Masefield knew about war; he had served in France in the Red Cross in 1914, and later in the war visited the battlefields of the Somme and Verdun. He also suffered the loss of his son, who was killed in Africa in 1942.
We may be sure that he knew of the horrors of Hitler’s Germany, but did he actually meet Hitler, as his fellow writer Hugh Walpole did at Bayreuth in 1924? Of this the biographers tell us nothing. As for how much Masefield knew of Stalin and Soviet Russia, the records again are silent. It is a curious fact that in chapter eight of The Box of Delights, the Tatchester Times reports the violent goings-on in Tatchester with the bold headlines:
UNPARALLELED ATROCITY!
MORE HORRORS AT TATCHESTER
HAVE THE BOLSHEVIKS BEGUN?
Masefield certainly did not have the insights or experiences of another contemporary writer, Arthur Ransome, who had worked as a journalist in revolutionary Russia, but he must have had some knowledge about Stalin and his politics.
19. How Well Did George Orwell Really Know Billy Bunter?
George Orwell, Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940)
Critics of children’s literature are usually a fairly friendly crowd, at least in public, sympathetic to, and supportive of, each other’s efforts. There have, of course, been some exceptions. According to her biographer Denis Judd, Alison Uttley (1884-1976), the author of the ‘Sam Pig’ stories, couldn’t stand her neighbour, Enid Blyton (1897-1968), and Philip Pullman, among others, has expressed serious criticism of C.S. Lewis’s books about Narnia. Anne Fine, the author of Goggle-Eyes (1989), twice winner of the Carnegie Medal, savagely attacked Melvin Burgess, another Carnegie prize-winner, for his treatment of teenage sex in his novel Doing It (2003).
George Orwell’s critique of Frank Richards and his stories about Greyfriars School and its famous pupil Billy Bunter is not really of this order. His famous essay on ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, which first appeared in Horizon magazine in March 1940, is a brilliant account of the content of such publications as the Gem, Magnet and other popular children’s reading. Concentrating in particular on the school stories which appeared in the Gem and Magnet, Orwell analyses their stylised language and slang, their use of stereotyped characters and formulaic plots, and their absence of such topics as religion and sex. He thought that the name of author Frank Richards, the author of stories in the Magnet, must be a pseudonym for a team of writers, since he could not believe that the same person could have written so many stories in a series published from 1908 to 1940.
Orwell summarises the mental world of the Magnet as follows:
The year is 1910 – or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at Bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.
In May 1940, however, George Orwell had a great surprise when Horizon published a reply by ‘Frank Richards’, in which he revealed that his real name was Charles Hamilton, and that under such names as Frank Richards and Martin Clifford he had in fact written hundreds of stories for the Gem and Magnet and many other magazines since 1906. His first story about Billy Bunter and Greyfriars School had appeared in the Magnet in February 1908, and Richards continued writing it until paper shortages caused by the war led to the last appearance of the magazine on 18 May, 1940.
Orwell’s account of the Boys’ Weeklies and of the Gem and the Magnet is clearly affectionate. He calls Billy Bunter ‘a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal orders which never turn up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves.’ Orwell’s biographer Gordon Bowker suggests that he had probably read the Magnet as a schoolboy of seven or eight, almost from its very beginnings, and says that his passion for boys’ comics and children’s literature never left him.
Orwell’s essay stresses his belief in the important influence of early reading upon children’s development, and he points to various aspects of the Magnet which he does not like. First Orwell points out the way the stories are unrealistic and emphasise the ‘glamour’ of public-school life with its snobbery and its absence of working-class characters. Secondly, he draws attention to the absence of sex in these stories of adolescent boys and girls away at boarding-schools. ‘Sex is completely taboo’, he says. But what irritates Orwell most is the absence of what he calls ‘contemporary history’, by which he means any references to such issues as unemployment, Fascism and the European situation in general. Orwell says that these stories depict a fantasy world in which the clock seems to have stopped about 1910. He thinks that this matters because he believes that people draw their ideas from the stories they read, and are influenced by them. Many readers, he says, who consider themselves sophisticated are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood.
But is George Orwell’s account of these stories about Greyfriars School accurate? How reliable are his memories of the Magnet? How well did he really know Billy Bunter?
‘The working-classes only enter into the Gem and Magnet as comics or semi-villains’, says Orwell. But this is not quite true. Although they are usually only minor characters in stories which focus on the adventures of schoolboys, you will find a whole range of the lower classes appearing in the tales, ranging from beggars to circus-performers, and including fishermen, gypsies, a boot-maker, a green-grocer, a plumber, a glazier, the school gardener and the local policeman.
Orwell shrewdly notes that the Magnet’s depiction of the arrival at Greyfriars School of scholarship boys made it possible for readers from very poor backgrounds to project themselves into the public-school atmospher
e. In ‘A Lad from Lancashire’ in 1908, Frank Richards tells the story of Mark Linley, a working-class boy who wins a scholarship to Greyfriars and is scorned by the snobs at first, but gradually becomes popular. He is a studious pupil and wins prizes to help his family back home who are in financial difficulties because of his father’s poor health. He even wins five guineas in a short story competition by writing a tale about factory life. Richards repeated the idea in his 1911 story ‘By Sheer Grit!’ about another scholarship boy, Dick Penfold, the son of a cobbler, who again triumphs against the cads and snobs of the Remove. Thomas Redwing, the son of a poor fisherman, is another scholarship boy who makes good by winning the Memorial Scholarship which helps to pay his fees. In 1932 (at the height of the economic depression, in other words) Richards produced an extraordinary series of stories about Billy Bunter and a young vagrant called ‘Flip.’ Flip is a young pickpocket who has run away from the criminal underworld of Puggins’s Alley in London. Bunter feels sorry for him and rather improbably manages to get him a place in the second-form at Greyfriars. There is a distinctly Dickensian flavour to these pages. The story collapses into melodrama when Flip recognises a new teacher as a criminal, whose arresting officer, Inspector Brent of Scotland Yard, discovers that Flip is his own long-lost son! But those pages describing Flip’s early years of squalor still stand out.
Although there are often disputes, occasional elections and even a strike within Greyfriars School itself, George Orwell is quite right in drawing attention to the absence of references to them in the outside world. There is one notable exception: in February 1914 the Magnet published the story of ‘The Factory Rebels!’ While out of school visiting town, Bob Cherry and his chums discover that there is a strike at Hardinge’s Factory and go along, in Peter Todd’s words, ‘to see the fun.’ The boys learn that Mr Hardinge has sacked Bloggs, a demagogic blackguard, for bad behaviour, but that Bloggs has managed to incite his fellow-workers to support him, claiming unfair dismissal. The boys take the factory-owner’s side, and defend him in a pitched battle, and later prevent the workers from stealing Hardinge’s car and setting fire to the factory. (All the available police have apparently been called away to deal with another strike in a large town twenty miles away, but Frank Richards offers no explanation for this strike.) Bloggs’s bad character is finally exposed, and the ‘decent’ workers, realising that he has deceived them, return to work. The boys’ automatic support for the factory owner, before they know any of the facts, and his account of the workers’ violence, do not make this a pleasant story.