Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  But Beatrix had also discovered her farmhouse roof had no ridge poles to keep the slates in place during a storm or high wind, and she had fallen through the back kitchen ceiling. ‘I don’t think I ran any risk,’ she explained to Millie with more equanimity than she must have felt at the time. ‘It went down wholesale so it was not scratchy to my stockings, & the rafters were too near together to permit my slipping through. The joiner & plasterer were much alarmed & hauled me out. I was very much amused. It was a very bad ceiling, I was intending to have it patched up so it did not matter.’24

  Beatrix was delighted when Cannon bought sixteen Herdwick ewes so that there would be lambs at Hill Top the following spring. She wanted to help bring down fern from the moor which was used as bedding for the sheep: ‘I think I will go up next time with the cart & help the children to rake it, it is such nice dry crackly fern.’ In mid-October she celebrated the near completion of the interior improvements by lighting her first fire in the library. ‘I laid the fire & lit it myself & it went straight up directly & gives a great heat.’ She was also pleased with ‘the old fashioned high hob pattern’ on the mantel. It was all just as she wanted it.25

  Beatrix was also enjoying the traditions of her new neighbourhood and entertaining a few guests. She attended the harvest festival at St Peter’s church in Far Sawrey, enjoyed another visit from Gertrude Woodward and entertained Nurse Bond, the woman who took care of Beatrix’s former governess Miss Hammond. The latter was now old and suffering from rheumatism, but insistent that her nurse enjoy a holiday. ‘We got a walk before it began to rain,’ she told Millie, ‘we went along the other side of Esthwaite & looked at the charcoal burning in the wood, such funny mounds, banked up with turf, like a smouldering vocano.’26

  In October the rats had returned with reinforcements: ‘2 big ones were trapped in the shed here,’ she reported, ‘besides turning out a nest of 8 baby rats in the cucumber frame opposite the door… Mrs Cannon calmly announced that she should get 4 or 5 cats! imagine my feelings.’ Beatrix acquiesced when Mrs Cannon later reported seeing a rat ‘sitting up eating its dinner under the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon’. In spite of such infestations, Beatrix relished her life at Hill Top. She was able to stay most of the month, telling Millie, ‘I feel so very well, & eating so much I am almost ashamed of my appetite. Moreover I am absorbed in gardening. I am in course of putting liquid manure on the apple trees!! It is a most interesting performance with a long scoop.’27

  When she returned to London, Beatrix missed her farm. During the Christmas holidays she walked around Bedford Square where the Warne family had lived, noting sadly that the shutters were up at number 8, and wishing she was at back in Sawrey. The physical beauty of the place, as well as the hard physical work and mental concentration required of her, made her grief bearable. Hill Top Farm and the quaint village of Near Sawrey had become an integral part both of her life and her imagination. Her gardens, her house and her animals — even the rats — were to figure in the books she produced over the next several years. ‘I want to do a picture book someday of the village in the snow,’ she told Millie. ‘I had a nice little letter of thanks from little Betsy Cannon at the farm, signed “yours respectfully,” is it not a beautiful word?!’28

  For Christmas 1906 Beatrix had given Winifred Warne an illustrated story called ‘The Roly-Poly Pudding’, which featured her old pet white rat Samuel Whiskers and his wife, Anna Maria, now imagined as residents of Hill Top. While Tom Kitten would be set predominantly in the Hill Top garden and farmyard, with a few interior views of the farmhouse, the village duck pond, and the distant fell sides, ‘The Roly-Poly Pudding’ featured the interior of the farmhouse. She began it during the summer of 1906, intending it as a companion to Tom Kitten, but its publication was delayed because she lacked finished background sketches. Potter quite consciously used these Sawrey tales to celebrate her new identity as the owner of Hill Top Farm, even including herself in one of the illustrations. They all bear evidence of her growing involvement in village life and her pleasure in being at her farm, even if she could snatch only a few weeks each year from her family obligations.29

  The Tale of Tom Kitten, a story about manners and civility, was published in September 1907. Tom’s mother, Tabitha Twitchit, was named after one of Mrs Satterthwaite’s cats at Belle Green. The book was dedicated to ‘all Pickles — especially to those that get upon my garden wall’. ‘Pickle’ was a word that pleased Potter. She used it to identify free-thinking, exuberant people, like her cousin Caroline, or mischievous kittens and small children, who could not contain their enthusiasms and romped in her flowerbeds or apple orchard. Tom’s misadventures in quite ridiculous bib and tucker are set off by loving illustrations of Hill Top’s flower garden, imagined with the riotous abundance that she hoped it would have someday. The drawings detail some of the specific trees, flowers, shrubs and butterflies she had described in her letters to Millie over the summer. They are among the best of her work and give the book a special visual delight. Somewhat later she added a gaggle of farmyard ‘puddleducks’, which brighten up the story and give it an unexpected twist. Tom Kitten resembles Nutkin in its explanation of animal behaviour. Ducks are frequently seen with their heads underwater; Potter suggests in this story that they are looking for the clothes they have stolen from Tom Kitten and his sisters.30

  The farmhouse interiors are precisely rendered. The entrance porch with its large Brathay slate walls, the stone-flagged floors, oak panelling and deep-set windows were all original. She also included some of the small furnishings she had added: a beautifully rendered flowered washbasin, the caned chair where Tabitha washes her kittens’ faces, the new clock in the hall, the wall mirror, all faithfully illustrated. The white wicket gate at the end of the new walk is there, as is the lush fern-covered stone wall where the three kittens dance in various stages of undress, and from which they uncertainly watch the surly and slightly malevolent ducks with ‘very small eyes’ who are on their way to usurp the kittens’ discarded clothes. The views looking out from Hill Top over the fields are as true to nature as the flower garden. There is the gate at the end of Smithy Lane, and a view of Stoney Lane winding up the hillside toward Bank Wood, with the ubiquitous dry-stone walls marching over the fields and up the fells.31

  The real farm stock at Hill Top, including ducks and hens, increased rapidly after 1906, and their care occupied much of Beatrix’s attention. By the summer of 1907, in addition to the sixteen Herdwick sheep and Kep the collie, the first and favourite of Beatrix’s farm collies, there were six dairy cows, including an excellent milking cow called Kitchen. ‘They have got funny names,’ Beatrix wrote to Harold Warne’s daughter Louie in July. ‘I have got two lovely pigs, one is a little bigger than the other, she is very fat and black with a very turned up nose and the fattest cheeks I ever saw; she likes being tickled under the chin… I call her Aunt Susan.’ Dorcas, the smaller pig, was not as friendly and squealed loudly when Beatrix caught her by the ears. ‘But Aunt Susan is so tame I have to kick her when she wants to nibble my galoshes.’ Probably during that same summer, Beatrix sketched some of her barnyard animals in an exercise book with the idea of designing a painting book for children. The following year eight new pigs arrived, bringing the herd at Hill Top to fourteen, and Beatrix knew that some little pig would have to go to market. At Christmas 1908 she bought a ‘beautiful cow from another old woman’, who gave her a shilling for good luck. John Cannon had spent all the pig money on sheep so the farm now boasted ten cows and thirty-one sheep.32

  Beatrix was learning a great deal about farm animals, including how to care for the sick ones. With Mrs Cannon’s help, Beatrix nursed a sick calf, giving it medicine out of a hollow horn, called a drench, which she inserted into its mouth. After an emergency dose of brandy, the calf recovered, but the carthorse developed a toothache that also required attention. In August 1907 Beatrix told Millie she had been out early in the morning ‘photographing the lambs before they dep
art! oh shocking! it does not do to be sentimental on a farm. I am going to have some lambskin hearthrugs.’ As realistic as Beatrix was about the purpose of raising livestock, she occasionally found that being a farmer was not easy. The Hill Top Farm animals featured in her imaginative stories for children, but they were also the source of her income in the real world of fell farming and when necessary they were eaten.33

  Improvements to outbuildings and fields — building the new barn and milking parlours, laying water to the new kitchen, putting in field drains, and moving the farm track — took longer to complete than she had hoped, but the renovations, including indoor plumbing in the farmhouse, were finished by October 1907. ‘The new barn is very satisfactory,’ Beatrix reported to Millie. ‘I have come just in time to see the finishing & fittings, there is a large loft above & a stable for calves & bullocks below. The farm has done very well.’ She celebrated quietly. For the next two weeks she enjoyed clear weather when Esthwaite Water was like a mirror. ‘I think a still autumn day is almost the most beautiful time of year,’ she wrote, ‘but when there are such heavy hoar frosts at night it is always a chance whether the sun conquers the mist, or whether it turns to rain.’ Next Beatrix turned her energies to the inside of the farmhouse.34

  The first room to be sorted out was the front kitchen, or hall, as she called it. She kept the fireplace as it was because she wanted to sketch the old hearth for the ‘Roly-Poly Pudding’. But she put out more of her small personal treasures, as well as some of the old oak furniture she had begun to collect. ‘I have got a pretty dresser with some plates on it & some old fashioned chairs,’ she explained to Millie. She put out a cherished warming pan, uniquely designed to hold hot water rather than coals, that had belonged to her beloved Grandmother Potter, ‘& Mr Warne’s bellows which look well’. Soon she added a fine carved oak cupboard. A Schofields grandfather clock, inlaid with walnut, graced the half-landing on the stairs. Farmhouse chairs and a gateleg table completed the oak dining room. A pen wiper, a kettle holder, and later a framed collection of photographs of children she had never met, but who wrote to her and were now friends, as well as some of the gifts they sent, were put in the hall: especially the small bag made of woven grass that little Louisa Ferguson and her mother sent from Wellington, New Zealand. Her happiness made Beatrix almost giddy: ‘When I lie in bed,’ she wrote to Louie Warne, ‘I can see a hill of green grass opposite the window… and when the sheep walk across there is a crooked pane of glass that makes them look like this [drawing of weirdly misshapen sheep], and the hens are all wrong too; it is a very funny house.’35

  Beatrix was slowly but surely creating the new patterns of her life, unconsciously becoming as attuned to the seasons and rhythms of the farm year as she had become to those of the publishing world. She was always attentive to the details surrounding her books. Peter Rabbit had been translated into French and German, and now Warne’s were seeking publishers, but Beatrix was not always happy with the quality of the translations. ‘That French is choke full of mistakes both in spelling & grammar,’ she told Harold, finding it rather ‘flat’ and ‘too English’. She was more pleased with how Tom Kitten had turned out. ‘Some of the pictures are very bad, but the book as a whole is passable, and the ducks help it out.’36

  Beatrix spent Christmas afternoon 1907 with Millie and her mother at their new home in Primrose Hill, near Harold Warne’s house, enjoying the warmth and affection she found in their company. It had been a harsh winter and there was a lot of illness. Beatrix herself had a bad cold. She had called in the doctor in the hope of forestalling bronchitis or any more serious upper respiratory infections, to which she seemed especially susceptible. While she recuperated she worked on the sketches for The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, which would accompany The Roly-Poly Pudding as the books for 1908. She was also making clay models of book characters for statuette makers. She insisted on an active role in selecting licensing agreements for this merchandise. In April 1908 she accompanied her parents on their customary springtime holiday to the south coast, this time to Sidmouth, but her mind was on her lambs in the snow at Hill Top with little green to eat, and on Mrs Warne’s health. The kindly old woman had developed bronchitis, and despite Millie’s heroic nursing efforts, died on 25 April.37

  Beatrix was devastated. In a letter of condolence to Millie, written the following day from Sidmouth, Beatrix confessed, ‘I don’t feel as if I know how to write to you in your dreadful loss. I wish you had Norman to help you… But we must try to feel it is all ordered… Nothing could be happier and brighter than the memory we shall always have of your dear Mother. There could not be a more brave cheerful old lady, but it is rather early to talk dry common-sense.’ Beatrix’s letter includes a rare invocation of the hope of divine comfort. ‘I pray that God may give you strength and peace,’ she wrote. ‘I have kept feeling I ought to come [to the funeral], I have felt nearly worried to pieces.’38

  Beatrix returned to work on the story of a barnyard duck, Jemima, whom she imbued with certain autobiographical characteristics. Beatrix chose the name ‘Jemima’ almost certainly to honour the famous ornithological painter and illustrator Jemima Blackburn, whose Birds from Nature (1868) she had been given for her tenth birthday, and whom she had been honoured to meet in 1891. The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck appeared in July after several heated discussions with Harold about its dialogue and cover illustration. Jemima, the story of the naive duck in poke bonnet and shawl who wanders off to find a safe place to lay her eggs, was ‘a farmyard tale’ for Ralph and Betsy Cannon, the children of Potter’s farm manager. It was a story inspired in part by their mother, who held the view that ducks were poor sitters and was thus in the habit of confiscating the duck eggs and giving them to the Hill Top hens to incubate, but also by Beatrix’s amusement at her farmyard ducks. Both children and Mrs Cannon appear in the story, as do other Hill Top animals, especially the heroic collie, Kep, who rescues Jemima from certain culinary catastrophe at the hands of the elegantly mannered ‘sandy whiskered gentleman’. The story features Hill Top’s new barn and outbuildings, the wrought-iron gate Beatrix put in front of the kitchen garden, the rhubarb patch, the entrance porch of the farmhouse, the façade of the Tower Bank Arms in the village, as well as imagined aerial views of the countryside around Near Sawrey, and some beautifully rendered pink foxgloves in bloom. Jemima was an immediate success and inspired more merchandise, eventually including a popular soft ‘Jemima’ doll.39

  The Roly-Poly Pudding, published finally in October 1908, took its story line from the invasion of rats at Hill Top when Beatrix first bought the property and her ongoing battles against them. It was dedicated to an actual pet rat, long deceased, Mr Samuel Whiskers, and the dedication appropriately read, ‘In Remembrance of “Sammy”, The Intelligent pink-eyed Representative of a Persecuted (but Irrepressible) Race. An Affectionate little Friend, and most accomplished thief.’ It had black-and-white line drawings as well as full-colour plates and was a longer, more involved story than any of her previous tales. The story features Tabitha Twitchit and her poor son, Tom Kitten. Tom is imprisoned by the enterprising rats, Samuel and Anna Maria, who plan to make him into a pudding using ‘borrowed’ ingredients from the farm kitchen. Some children wondered if the artist used a live model ‘trussed up with string, like breast of lamb with stuffing’, so realistic is her drawing of Tom Kitten waiting helplessly to be rolled in pastry.40

  Beatrix’s adventures renovating the old farmhouse are incorporated into this tale, as are the architectural details of the house, its thick walls, the secret tunnels the rats had made behind the chimney, and its many cupboards, as well as the kitchen roof through which she had fallen. The hall of Hill Top and its furnishings are detailed in the colour illustrations. The range and the remnant of the large chimney-hood appear in several pictures, as does the half-landing, the upper hall and stair carpets, the claret curtains, the grandfather clock, the raised-panelled front door and the old timbers of the attic. The Hill Top interior is d
rawn with such accuracy that it soon became universally recognizable as what an old English farmhouse should look like, in much the same way that Mr McGregor’s garden came to stand for all vegetable gardens.

  Beatrix quite bravely drew herself into the story, where she can be seen standing at the end of Smithy Lane next to the Ginger and Pickles shop. There is a picture of Farmer Potatoes near his barn, to which Samuel Whiskers and Anna are racing with their wheelbarrow loaded with ‘borrowed’ bundles. Beatrix had taken a photograph of her near neighbour John Postlethwaite and copied from it for her book illustration. John Taylor, the village repair man, also appears, as John Joiner, the carpenter dog. The Tale of Samuel Whiskers is Beatrix’s tribute to the old farmhouse in much the same way as Tom Kitten and Jemima celebrate her garden and farmyard. The inclusion of the details of the interior of Hill Top and the view of the countryside from the Hill Top roof indicates that this book is a very personal one, clearly a celebration of her liberation from her parents’ house to one of her own.41