How the Heather Looks

by Joan Bodger

  But as we drove along we became more cheerful. We decided that although Friar Tuck may have lived at Copmanhurst, he probably met Robin Hood farther downriver. That would explain why Robin did not connect him with the hermitage or recognize him at first. Quite satisfied with this solution, we turned our attention back to Robin Hood. Did he actually exist? Maurice Kean writes: “It matters not so much who or what he was as what people thought him to have been.” But driving through Nottinghamshire that day, we decided that there really was a Robin Hood and that he lived in Sherwood Forest. Having spent almost a whole summer chasing other will-o’-the-wisps, we had found them to be satisfyingly concrete when they were actually nailed down. I have great faith that folk memory has perpetuated a historical figure – a man of flesh and blood – who was not so very different from our image of the outlaw. Perhaps, in those grim times, he was not quite as jolly and generous as the nursery tales would have him, but he did represent a force against oppression. “He is the people’s Arthur,” writes Maurice Kean. I am one of those incurable souls who persists in believing in both.

  It was a long drive to Harrogate. We had chosen it for our destination because, on the map, it appeared to be at the very edge of the Yorkshire moors. It was to see a moor that we had come to England! Ever since reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden when I was ten I had wanted to see Yorkshire; reading the Brontë novels when I was older had intensified that longing. Then, the past winter, when it seemed that spring would never come, I had read The Secret Garden aloud to Ian so that now he was as eager as I to see “how the heather looks.”

  We had expected Harrogate to be a manufacturing town with dark satanic mills; instead we found an elegant watering place whose shops and restaurants and big hotels catered to fashionable ladies and tweedy gentlemen. Harrogate, besides being a spa, is a racing center, too. On several respectable door fronts we saw signs advertising bookie establishments. Our favorite read: Thomas Todhunter. Family Bookie. We Served Your Grandfather.

  We found rooms in a pleasant little hotel on Coldbath Road, and the next day we called the reference librarian at Leeds to ask if he could furnish any clues as to the whereabouts of the huge old house that Mrs. Burnett described so concretely in The Secret Garden. He told us that as far as he could discover there was no information extant on Misselthwaite Manor, but that the “secret” garden itself was reported to be one in the Cheetham Hill district of Manchester, many miles away and not in Yorkshire at all. He gave Margharita Laski as reference and later we were to read her book, Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett.

  Frances Eliza Hodgson, according to Mrs. Laski, was one of a family of five children who, after the death of their father, was forced to move from the fashionable Cheetham Hill district of Manchester to the shabby gentility of a house in Islington Square. It was while leaning out of the windows of her new home that Frances first saw the garden of the deserted house next door and began to weave stories about it. Mrs. Laski’s little biography is an astringent one. Not so the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett described in The Romantick Lady, a hymn of adoration written by her son, Vivian Burnett, the original model for Cedric Errol, Little Lord Fauntleroy. But despite his lamentable prose, Vivian Burnett does furnish another clue to the whereabouts of the garden. For a short time his mother owned the estate of Maytham Hall at Rolvenden, Kent, where there was an old walled garden, answering to the description of the one in The Secret Garden. She planted it with roses and used it as a private retreat where she did much of her writing. The garden is also described in a short story, “My Robin,” and in an adult novel, The Shuttle. I have been able to find no evidence that Mrs. Burnett ever visited Yorkshire, but such was her delight in contrasts that she showed no hesitation in picking up a lush, almost tropical, garden in Kent and setting it squarely in the Brontë country.

  Mrs. Burnett had evidently read the Brontë novels and profited by her reading. Miss Laski points out that she may have borrowed from Charlotte Brontë’s fragmentary Emma to give herself a starting point for Sara Crewe (also known as The Little Princess). In both the Brontë novel and Mrs. Burnett’s the plot begins with a spoiled and petted child being left at a young ladies’ seminary where she lives as a star pupil. The death or disappearance of the father who left her there is followed by the dwindling away of funds to pay for board and tuition, and by the heroine being plunged into virtual slavery. Charlotte Brontë died before she could finish her novel, but Mrs. Burnett was able to utilize the idea and to spin the tale out to a satisfying conclusion, employing her favorite plot tricks of the “different” child, impoverished gentility, a sleight-of-hand transformation, and the triumph of goodness and intellect over shoddiness and evil.

  Having been so successful with one plot idea borrowed from Charlotte Brontë, it was only natural that Mrs. Burnett would turn to the same source again. I do not mean, in any way, that she took over the plot entirely; I only wish to indicate that certain elements in The Secret Garden derive from Jane Eyre. They are used in an utterly fresh and unique context congenial to childhood. The arrival of Mary Lennox at Misselthwaite Manor is too reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s arrival at Thornfield to be pure coincidence. Mary was only ten, Jane almost twenty, but both were markedly plain young females who had made reputations for being “sour” and “contrary.” Both were orphans, and both came into a new life in a mysterious manor house on the Yorkshire moors – a house where the master was “abroad” most of the time, and the place run by servants. There is also the parallel of the tray-carrying nurse who issues from a door concealed behind a curtain or tapestry, and the mysterious “cry in the corridor” that makes one’s blood chill in the night.

  I suppose that an American’s approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children. Children’s literature is, in some ways, more important to us than it is to the English child. I contend that a child brought up on the nursery rhymes and Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the “inward eye” with the images in the books he reads when young, so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Brontë novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what “wuthering” meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.

  A week after leaving Northampton, when we were staying at Harrogate, in Yorkshire, John and I decided to drive over to Haworth, the village where Charlotte and Emily Brontë had lived and written their famous novels. We wanted to see the parsonage where they spent most of their lives and perhaps walk across the moors to the farmhouse which is said to be the counterpart of the one in Wuthering Heights. We did not expect Ian to be much interested since he was too young to know or appreciate the Brontë novels.

  As we made our way up the steep, cobbled streets of Haworth we wondered why anyone would ever set a village in such an inhospitable spot. Although it was on a height, the village did not seem to want to look out at the world. Rather, it turned inward to the fold in the hillside, one shop window peering into another. The church and the parsonage are at the top of the hill, barely separated from the rest of the village. The front of the house looks onto the foreshortened vista of a sunken garden and a churchyard to the side of it. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to step into the hallway and find it flooded with light from the moors that roll away from the rear of the house. According to Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s biographer, the Reverend Patrick Brontë was afraid of fire and would allow no curtains in the house. Su
nlight was a welcome visitor.

  We went through the house, which has been made into a museum. It holds a motley collection of memorabilia, some of it far-fetched in any connection to the Brontës. To the left of the entrance hall was a living room with a fireplace, and to the right was the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s study. Farther down the hall, behind the study, was the flagged kitchen where Tabby, the Brontë’s old housekeeper, held sway; and across from it, a storeroom. Although there were no curtains at the windows, faded turkey rugs partly covered the polished floors. The furniture was mahogany, upholstered in black horsehair. Victorian gloom was dissipated by the quantity of light allowed to enter and the delicate shades of gray and white which had been chosen for walls and woodwork. The whole house had an air of cheerful austerity.

  Upstairs were two large bedrooms, each with an adjacent smaller room. Part of the upstairs hall was partitioned off into a cupboardlike space that looked out over the front door to the garden and churchyard. This was known as the children’s study. It was here that the four children – Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Anne – spent long hours, their heads bent over minuscule scraps of paper, their grubby fingers busy with pens and crayons.

  “What are you doing, children?” asked the Reverend Patrick Brontë.

  “Just playing, papa. Just playing….”

  Ian had become bored with the tour of the house and asked permission to go downstairs. We thought he would probably go out into the garden, but when we looked for him we found him bent over a museum case, peering through the glass.

  “Hey, come here!” he called, when he saw us. “I’ve found something interesting. I think there was a boy living here, and he was just like me!”

  We, too, bent over the glass case. We saw a tiny scrap of paper, a little more than two inches square, on which a child had drawn some soldiers engaged in a battle. The drawing did look like one of Ian’s, but a neat little card attributed the work to Branwell Brontë. Across the top of the drawing the artist had written: “Battell of Wehglen.” Even the spelling was similar to Ian’s! There were other things in the case – tiny volumes, surely written under a microscope. They had strange titles: The Revenge: a Tragedy in Three Acts by Young Soult (In two Volumes); History of the Rebellion in My Army; Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine; List and Description of the Provinces of Angria.

  What did it all mean? At the time all I could guess was that these were some writings and drawings the Brontës had done as children and which the museum, patently unselective, had put on display. It did not occur to me until later that these works had any connection with the Brontës’ adult publications, except as foreshadowing of the genius to come. I assumed that they were the usual juvenilia, of interest mostly to Ian because he was a little boy interested in Napoleonic soldiers. On that afternoon in Haworth I was as ignorant about their importance as the Reverend Patrick Brontë had been, but due to Ian’s insistence I determined to pursue the matter as soon as I could find a good library. Months later, when we were home again, our whole family was to become fascinated by the childhood of the Brontës.

  What did the Brontë children do upstairs in the little room over the front door? A year after their sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died, when Branwell was not quite nine years old, his father brought home a box of soldiers from Leeds and put them by his son’s bed. He brought presents for the little girls, too: a box of ninepins, a toy village, a dancing doll – but it was the “Twelve Heroes” that caused the most excitement. Early next morning, Mrs. Gaskell tells us, Charlotte pounced on the tallest and handsomest of the lot and proclaimed: “This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke.” Emily chose “an oddly serious little fellow” whom she decided to call “Gravey,” and Anne chose a soldier whom she named “Waiting Boy.” Branwell may have been taken aback, but once having established that the soldiers were really his he could be generous. Each sister could keep her favorite as long as she remembered who was master, or Chief Genius. Bending over the remaining nine wooden figures, he picked out one for himself: “Bonaparte.” The other soldiers were given such names as Goody, Naughty, Cracky, Cheeky, Monkey, all according to real or fancied characteristics. Toys were not turned out by an assembly line in those days, as witness Andersen’s story of the lead soldier with only one leg. Some spark from the craftsman-creator must have lingered in the lineaments and stance of each tiny figure, giving it integrity and individuality and a sort of life of its own.

  For a year the Brontë children played with the soldiers, staging battles and re-enacting the great campaigns of Napoleon and Wellington. After all, Waterloo was only a dozen years past and children all over England must have been playing much the same games. Branwell, because the soldiers were his and because of his masculine interest in military science, was the acknowledged leader and director. By the next summer, however, constant warfare had palled and a new game was invented, a game called “Our Fellows.” The soldiers were divided and renamed. Each of the genii took unto himself an imaginary island and peopled it with inhabitants six miles high. Exaggerated stories were invented to fit the fabulous characters.

  By November, Branwell was grumbling that he had nothing to do, so now Charlotte took charge. Each child took for himself a new island, one actually to be found in Father’s atlas. Branwell chose the Isle of Man; Charlotte, the Isle of Wight; Emily, the Isle of Arran; Anne, the Isle of Guernsey. According to the rules of the game, each child was allowed to populate his island with any heroes he wished. Now the names of authors, statesmen, editors, scientists, explorers – most of the great names to be found in the newspapers of the day – emanated from the little room upstairs. Sometimes the soldiers took on the characteristics of these public figures, but just as often the great names were bent and twisted to fit the characters of the Twelve Young Heroes.

  The heroes went on a voyage to Africa. Maps were drawn and redrawn, the four islands were given made-up names, the whole world was divided among the four genii. Magazines, newspapers, histories were issued for the benefit of the Twelve. The geography and history of Glasstown became more real than the geography and history of Yorkshire; the inhabitants of Angria were better known (and known better) than the villagers of Haworth. Long after the last soldier had become lost or broken the “play” continued. Fantastic as it may seem, the novels and chronicles of Angria exceed in length and volume all the published works of the Brontës. F. E. Ratchfed, of the University of Texas, has published a bibliography of the Brontë juvenilia, entitled Web of Childhood, in which he discusses this curious microscopic literature with scholarly thoroughness. Many scenes and characters, he points out, have been lifted whole from the unpublished body of work to be born anew in the adult novels.

  Since our return from England there has been published a children’s book about Branwell’s soldiers. In The Return of the Twelves, a modern-day fantasy by Pauline Clarke, eight-year-old Max Morley finds twelve wooden soldiers under the attic floor in a Yorkshire farmhouse not far from Haworth, the village where the Brontës lived. Warmed by his small-boy affection, the little figures come to life. They talk to Max of the time, long past, when four genii – Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – loved them and ordered their destinies by imagining marvelous adventures for them. Max soon learns that he may not interfere with the sturdy independence of the Twelves, else the soldiers will “freeze” and become lifeless wood again.

  The book becomes most exciting when Max decides to help the Twelves return to their old home in the parsonage at Haworth. Pauline Clarke describes the Twelves’ trek across country and the stir it causes as rumors of their march seep through the countryside. One of the soldiers is observed and captured by a farmer who claims he saw the little figure filling a tiny sack with grain from the henyard. Two little girls, “rapt in some secret game,” hear a rustle in the “silvery green-gold world of the oats” and see a column of little men winding their way through the forest, singing “The Grand Old Duke of York” in thin, cautious voices. The two child
ren run home to tell the grownups, but of course they are not believed. However:

  Their fathers made excuses to take strolls along that field, and even lay down (when they hoped no one was looking) and gazed, feeling foolish, into the oats. Once down, they thought how possible it all sounded; the world of the nodding grain was so secret and reminded them of their boyhood….

  Something there is, in every Englishman….

  The day after driving over the moors to Haworth parsonage, we left our hotel at Harrogate and took the road to Darlington to see a favorite uncle of mine. Uncle Roger was a bachelor, but he knew what a little boy would like – and a little girl, too. First of all he walked us down to the train station, solemnly paid a penny each for our entrance fee, and proudly showed us George Stephenson’s tiny, shiny locomotive which stood in the middle of the platform. We were enchanted. It so happened that we owned a copy of Early British Railways, a King Penguin book by Christian Barman, so that we could appreciate the fact that this was the first British railway engine and that the track section it was set on had been part of the original Stockton-Darlington line.

  The track was of such narrow gauge that it looked like a toy, but by peering over the side of the platform, where modern trains came hissing into the station, we could see that it was the same width as used today. George Stephenson had been ordered to make his track “as wide as a country cart.” With characteristic thoroughness he rounded up one hundred local carts, measured their axle breadths, divided by one hundred, and came up with the average: 4 feet 8½ inches. From that day to this the measurement has stood as the standard gauge for British railways. Quite early in the history of railroading Stephenson had a chance to change his track width to 5 feet 6 inches, a gauge used by Spain, Portugal, India, and Argentina. But old George was obstinate and I, for one, am glad of it. English railways are tailored to fit their landscape. Like everything else in that landscape they have grown out of the past and are in harmony with its scale. In more romantic moments I like to think that the measurements of those old carts had been, in their turn, set by the width of the Roman roads.