How the Heather Looks

by Joan Bodger

  Ian and I returned to the hotel to tell John of our success. John decided it would be best to call Stowe School to gain permission to enter the grounds. Accordingly, he went down to the lobby to telephone to Stowe and was soon back with the report that we had permission “to do research” there. The caretaker would be told that we were coming. We would be allowed to explore the grounds to our hearts’ content, but on no account would we be allowed in any of the buildings.

  We set out under cloudy skies, driving south again. We turned off the main roads and by means of our trusty Bartholomew eventually came to a forlorn finger post marked Stowe. A mile or two brought us to a castellated gatehouse guarding the way to the Oriental Bridge. We remembered from Mistress Masham that it was at “this colossal Structure” that Captain Biddell, captor and exhibitor of the Lilliputians, “fell Victim to Intoxication,” dismounted from his horse, and fell asleep. According to the book:

  It was a moonlight Eve. The Torrent could be plainly seen issueing from the Other Sea, and all about the Land appear’d deserted. The Resolution to escape was taken on the Spot….

  Cables were rapidly made fast, the Strait Ropes of the Exhibition proving suitable. The Sheep and Cattle, slung from these, were quickly lower’d to the Ground…. It was the plan of Flimnap to transport his little world by Sea, until some Refuge on the further Shores could be discovered.

  The Bridge took us high over a reed-choked waterway, then down onto a bleak drive on the other side. We drove almost a mile and then, suddenly, we were in the courtyard of an enormous building. Surely it was as big as New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – perhaps bigger! We sat in the car for a few minutes, dazed by the magnitude. We saw no sign of a human being so we got out of our car (now tinier than ever, it seemed) and walked over to an archway in a wall which extended from the house. On either side of the arch was a niche holding a small pillar each of which at one time must have held a bust or statue. Ian immediately installed himself in an empty alcove and posed as a piece of statuary. We all jumped when the gravel crunched behind us. An old man, obviously the caretaker, asked what we thought we were doing? A silly grin froze on Ian’s face. I don’t know why we felt so foolishly guilty, but with Ian leaning on a denuded pillar it seemed rather difficult to explain that we were engaged in literary research.

  Something in our accents (or perhaps our behavior) led him to ask if we were “the Americans.” Having accepted our identification and warned us that he had been instructed to let us look through the grounds, but not the house, he asked us what in particular we wanted to see? We looked at each other in consternation. How could we tell him that we had come to look for Lilliputians – or, at least, the place where they lived. This man probably did not know that somewhere nearby, on an island in a lake, there was a summer house or neoclassical “repose” inhabited by descendants of Lilliputians who had colonized it in the eighteenth century.

  “We’d like to see the lake,” said John.

  The old man scratched his head and looked up at the dripping skies. “Well, you might as well go through the building. It’ll save you half a mile or so around the east wing.”

  We turned and gaped up at the multipillared palace looming ahead. We felt like pygmies – or Gulliver in Brobdingnag. The caretaker led us up broad shallow steps. We crossed a terrace and ascended more steps, this time guarded by lions. Our guide led us into a vast rotunda. Ladders and paint-spattered dropcloths leaned or drooped forlornly among the peach-colored marble pillars. The librarian in Northampton had told me that, even in its days of glory, part of the building was always being painted or repaired and had never been in repair all at once. We were not allowed to linger. We followed our guide through another pair of doors and found ourselves standing in a great neoclassical porch. All that had gone before was a mere back entrance. Now a landscape, a prospect, a whole world stretched before us, perspective marked by obelisk and monument. A green lawn sloped down to two lakes, “Quincunx” and the “Other Sea,” and far, far beyond loomed a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, final punctuation point at the world’s end.

  “It’s a mile down to the lakes,” said the old man from behind us.

  Our little party pulled itself together and toiled down the steps. It seemed foolish to stay in the open rain, so we made for the Wilderness of the east and sought shelter beneath the thick-branched yews. The land was marshy but we pushed on through briars and nettles until we came to a ruined temple. Plaster, fallen from the ceiling, lay about on the floor, and here and there the laths showed through. “That’s its skeleton,” said Ian, in morbid glee. I remembered that the librarian in Northampton had told me that when one of the Dukes of Bedford had found Roman ruins on his estate, the neighboring Duke of Buckingham had ordered that bigger and better Roman ruins be built at Stowe.

  We pushed our way through the Wilderness and came out on a sedgy shore which we followed along until we came to a boathouse. A leaky punt (Maria’s?) was moored there, badly in need of a bailing scoop. We walked further, our wet shoes squelching at every step, and came upon a low isthmus that divided the two seas. The water ran under the narrow earth lane there and tumbled through the artificial ruins of a “Gothick arch,” falling in a “Cascade” from the Upper to the Other Sea. Now, with the geography of Malplaquet spread before us, we tried to reconstruct the saga of those desperate Lilliputians. Having escaped from Captain Biddell at the Oriental Bridge, they had made an “Ark” from the receptacle in which they were usually carried and had towed it upstream. The quiet waters of the Other Sea had enabled them to embark their cattle, and they had made their “Way by Navigation” to the east bank where they hid themselves beneath the overhanging branches of a “prodigious Tree.”

  Next Evening, shelter’d by the Darkness, our Ark, as we may call it, having been hoisted with incredible pains along the Cascade to the Upper Sea, a Scout, who had been sent ahead in Order to survey the Country, return’d with Informations about the secret Island where we have ever since continued….

  We made our way through the low, wet bushes that edged the Upper Sea and came upon another ruined temple. It was desolate, damp, and flaking. Nearby was a plank bridge, a mere two or three yards long, which we crossed to reach a little island. Was this the site of Mistress Masham’s Repose? For a moment we were disappointed. It seemed so accessible. Besides, there was no little pavilion, not even the ruins of one. All we could find were the remains of a campfire, and a great stone urn surmounted by gargoyles that peered out at us from the nettles.

  The clouds lifted a little from the lake and we were able to gaze out across a sort of Sargasso Sea choked with duckweed. We thought that we could discern another island, a much larger one, but so overgrown with briars and nettles that until now it had been lost against the background of the Wilderness on the far shore. We retraced our steps across the plank bridge, along the shore, and across the isthmus. We squelched past the boathouse and the floundered punt. There was a peculiar light that shone upon the lake and made it difficult to see properly, but we satisfied ourselves that there really was an island at which we were looking. Larch and cypress trees had thrust their way up and up on the island and we could see that nettles and brambles were almost woven across it, making a sort of curtain. A cold wind shivered across the lake. Was that the shape of a domed roof beneath the vines? Perhaps in sunlight we could have caught a glimpse, a gleam, from the hidden Repose, but now the clouds lowered once again and we would have to run for it if we did not want to be caught sopping. I thought Ian would be bitterly disappointed, but it was he who consoled us.

  “But don’t you understand?” he asked. “Don’t you get it? If we can’t see anything it sort of proves it’s there!” His thinking may not have been strictly logical, but no doubt what he meant was that, if the Repose is difficult to see, difficult to reach, there is some hope that somewhere on the island there still exists a colony of Lilliputians.

  Despairing of making our way back to the car through the Wildernes
s and around the east wing, we had cut slantingly across the lawn (now pocked with golf bunkers) and walked along the Chestnut Avenue. We had tried to find a northwest passage through the labyrinth, had succumbed to a few moments’ panic when we kept coming back to the same door marked New Chemistry Laboratory, and had finally made our way back to the roadway that passed between the palace and some new brick buildings hidden among the trees to the west. I suppose it wasn’t really so far across the courtyard to our car, but something about the immensity of those curving pillared galleries seemed to make our progress a journey across the Steppes. Time and space were so out of kilter that I felt we had been gone for weeks, not hours.

  We came at last into Buckingham. The hands on the town clock had just passed three and we found that we were ravenously hungry and made our way directly to The Olde Gaol House Tea Room which stood in the middle of the town square. We entered somewhat timidly. To the right, just inside the door, a cellar yawned with twisting, corkscrew steps leading down to ominous darkness. Ian paused and peered hopefully downward, but no groans were heard. We continued into a snug little parlor, where we sat and ate incongruous pink-frosted cakes and gazed out on a slit of courtyard which made a triangular atrium in the middle of the building. Prisoners must once have used it to take the air, their faces turned upward toward the tiny wedge of sky. Weeds and mosses grew among the flagstones and a gangling tree made pathetic supplications toward the light.

  It was not until we had paid our bill and were out in the car again that we bethought ourselves of John Bunyan. We should have had tea in the Duke of Bedford’s gaol, said John, in order to see where Pilgrim’s Progress was written. It could not be more than twenty miles away; perhaps we could take it in on the way to Leighton Buzzard. As it turned out, we could not have done so, for the old County Gaol of Bedford was demolished in 1801. According to State of the Prisons in England and Wales, a report written by John Howard in 1785, the Bedford gaol was very similar to the one in Buckingham, where we had tea. Bunyan spent twelve years in the little prison in Bedford, a martyr to the cause of freedom of speech and conscience. His wife and children must have suffered as much as he, although he tried to make a living for them by making and selling lace. Sometimes he was allowed a few hours to attend church or to see his poverty-stricken family, but mostly he spent the dreary hours scribbling away at his great allegory. Self-taught and untraveled, he transmogrified his familiar Bedfordshire, studding the landscape with place names that still grip the language.

  Ian first came upon the tale when he was five years old and we lived in a university town whose large cooperative grocery store sold books along with bread and cheese. Books, in that community, were regarded as everyday essentials. You can imagine the temptation whenever I found myself there with the change from the weekly shopping still in hand! It was at such a moment that I came upon Ian sitting on the floor near the children’s bookshelf, immersed in a beautifully printed picture book, illustrated by Robert Lawson. Knights and castles, giants and dragons, and a host of grotesque characters more inventive and intriguing than any comic book held him riveted to the spot. I finally decided it was worth the ransom to get him home and counted out the money. I frankly admit I had been bored to tears by Bunyan when assigned to read his work in my teens, but rereading Mary Godolphin’s version of the text “retold and shortened for modern readers,” I learned to appreciate it as straight adventure fare for five-year-olds. For weeks afterwards every mud puddle was a Slough of Despond, every San Francisco street a Hill of Difficulty.

  If we had known what to look for, we could have seen Houghton House, the original of Bunyan’s “House Beautiful” at Houghton Conquest, near Ampthill, or we could have searched out Bunyan’s cottage at Elstow. But we were ignorant and, besides, in too much of a hurry to reach Leighton Buzzard. We wanted to see if we could find Firbank Hall and to find out if we could reconstruct the saga of The Borrowers. Borrowers, according to Mary Norton, are a race of tiny people who live under floorboards or behind wainscots and who live by “borrowing” from the human beings who inhabit the same house. Erasers, safety pins, nail scissors, name tapes, fountain-pen tops, postage stamps – all the paraphernalia of life that so mysteriously eludes us – is somehow put to use in a Borrower’s life. Borrowers live off human carelessness and folly. Usually, like the members of the Clock family in Mary Norton’s story, they lead lonely lives of quiet desperation, characterized by ingenuity and courage. Since they do not like to be surprised, they prefer quiet households with set schedules.

  The Borrowers in Mary Norton’s precisely realized tale live under a clock in an old house whose owner has been bedridden twenty years. When a small boy arrives and upsets the household, the Borrowers are forced to flee as refugees. Their adventures are further chronicled in The Borrowers Afield, Afloat, and Aloft. In a letter to her publisher Mrs. Norton had written that she and her brothers were brought up in a square old Georgian house, very like Firbank Hall. From clues gleaned from her books we were quite certain that it was near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. We felt like young Kate who, in The Borrowers Afield, pleads with Mrs. May to take her to Firbank:

  Even if we couldn’t go inside, you could show me the grating and Arrietty’s bank; and even if they opened the front door only ever so little, you could show me where the clock was. You could kind of point with your finger quickly….

  Mary Norton, as a child, showed talent as an artist, but when she was in her teens she was suddenly fired with the desire to become an actress, an ambition she eventually realized. She has an excellent eye for detail coupled with a fine sense of theater. Her protagonists are tiny but their emotions are on a human scale. Surely Arrietty is one of the most charming heroines in or out of literature. I often wish that the very real Anne Frank, hiding from the Nazis, could have known about her. How she would have warmed to the description of Arrietty scribbling away in her diary beneath the floorboards, listening to borrowed conversations on the other side of the wall. Anne and Arrietty share the same zest for life, the same faith in the ultimate goodness of mankind.

  Mrs. Norton’s sense of theater includes not only drama and characterization, but props and setting. The incongruity of her tiny characters and their use of human-sized jetsam is never lost sight of. She makes us look at the most mundane object with fresh and speculative eye. It is her capacity for “making do” and improvisation that captures the charm of childhood, when play is serious business. Clifton Fadiman, in an article in Holiday magazine, claims the spirit of play as explanation for the British preoccupation with the small, the snug, the understated. English folklore and literature abound with little people: fairies, pixies, goblins, elves, dwarfs, sprites, sprig-gins, Lilliputians, Hobbits, Borrowers. There must be something about an island nation that engenders a genius for the miniature: the Japanese can make a landscape in a dish; the British excel in literary microtomy. It is almost as though everyone on “this little isle” has a private world into which he can withdraw and explore – himself, perhaps? Surely his relationship to others.

  When Maria of Malplaquet (in Mistress Masham’s Repose) found her first Lilliputian and brought her, wrapped in a handkerchief, to the old Professor, he advised:

  … people must not tyrannize, nor try to be great because they are little. My dear, you are a great person yourself, in any case, and you do not need to lord it over others, in order to prove your greatness….

  T. H. White was all his life concerned with the clash of Might and Right, the relationship of Big and Little. One might say that this is the central theme of English children’s literature; indeed, of English history. It is well to remember that Anne Frank was held, and finally crushed, by men who had never known – or had lost – all sense of proportion. If such a sense – a common sense – is created through play, then we must learn to respect play’s importance and give it free rein.

  We did not find Firbank Hall that day, nor Perkin’s Beck, nor Mrs. May’s cottage. The town library was closed becaus
e of the holiday, and so were the shops. There was no one to ask, and even if there had been I doubt that we would have found much more specific information about Borrowers. Speculation we could supply ourselves and, looking at the map, we found ourselves doing so. Buckingham (and Stowe House) is quite close to Leighton Buzzard, connected by a network of waterways. Suppose that Spiller (huntsman, voyageur, Borrower-extraordinaire) should discover the colony of Lilliputians at Stowe? What if he should link the economy of the Lilliputians with that of the Hendreary family at Little Fordham? Little Fordham is rich in manufactured goods (borrowed, not made); the Lilliputians are agricultural, raising cattle and sheep to their own scale. Spiller, with Pod’s help, could carry on trade between them. Later, when Arrietty and Spiller have married and have stalwart sons of their own, they could engender a race something like the Vikings or the Phoenicians. They could explore strange streams, perhaps find colonies of other little people!

  I went, one day, to the British Information Services on Third Avenue in New York City. I told the librarian there that I would like to see the Ordnance maps (one inch to the mile) of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. What sort of information was I looking for, she inquired politely? I stared back at her, stone-cold-sober: “I wish to explore the trade possibilities between a colony of Lilliputians at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, and a clan of Borrowers near Leighton Buzzard.” Not a flicker, not a ripple, of amusement crossed her face.

  “Quite so,” she said politely. But I caught her gaze upon me as I bent over the maps.

  CHAPTER 10

  Forests, Moors, and Gardens

  The day after visiting Stowe and Leighton Buzzard, I was caught up again in the business of packing while John studied maps and plotted our course as though we were to embark on a polar expedition. Time and money were running short; it was only two weeks until we had to be back aboard our ship at the Cunard docks in Liverpool.