by Joan Bodger
Fast forward. By the 1970s I was remarried and living in Canada. I had begun to write again and went to England to do research on a novel (which I never finished). For six weeks I lived in Glastonbury (Arthur’s Avalon) in a cottage on the flanks of the Tor. My nearest neighbor was Geoffrey Ashe, the Arthurian scholar. The next year I was invited to tell the story of Tristan at a gathering of Arthurian scholars assembled at Cambridge University. The conference was called by Robert Wilhelm, a Catholic theologian and a storyteller. After the conference I went with a friend to Wildboarclough, in the Peak District, to visit the Green Chapel described in the thirteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Her great grandfather had been a gamekeeper on the estate. As one of his perks he was allowed to charge sixpence for a view of Ludd’s Cave, also known as the Chapel of the Green Knight. That same year I joined a walking tour along the Welsh Border.
A few years later my second husband died. Partly to divert me, Robert Wilhelm and his wife, Kelly, asked me to help them put together a tour of our own: A Winter’s Journey to King Arthur’s Britain. The tour was a success but Robert, who languishes in winter’s gloom, chose to head off in other directions. With his and Kelly’s blessing I continued to follow my own passion, which is to seek the lore of Britain in Britain’s landscape. Every year, for ten more years, I somehow persuaded a new little band of stalwarts to accompany me on my quest. Standing in all weathers I declaimed the adventures of King Arthur and his knights in the very places where the stories might have happened. Every year I learned more, saw more, understood more about something but dimly perceived when I made that first “joyful journey” so long ago. Toward the end of those questing years I found myself writing:
Now I see more clearly how a truth, too big to be expressed except in art or poetry, can hitch itself to a landscape. The process of attachment engenders another dimension to the idea, enlarges it and makes it visible through time as myth incarnate (if you consider the planet as a living being). The myth may fade, the place may lose significance, but like a sleeping hero, like a recumbent goddess, the truth will remain. When the time is right it will re-emerge to support what needs to be expressed. Then the landscape will be rediscovered, the story told again, the truth revealed for a new age.
Would-be pilgrims have sometimes asked me, anxiously, whether they can make the same journey. Will it be the same? Is there anything left? They remind me of children to whom I am about to tell a story. Is it true? they ask. My stock reply is, It’s truer than true. Often there is one child, determined not to be impressed, who says scornfully, I’ve already heard that story. I am immediately interested. You have? So have I. But since the last time I told it, and since the last time you heard it, the earth’s gone ’round the sun, the rain’s fallen into the brook, and the brook’s run into the river. Even if you’ve heard the story before, even if I tell it word for word just like the first time, you’ve changed and I’ve changed and the story will change.
You can never step into the same river twice.
And yes, if you go you will see what we saw – and more. May your journey be joyful.
Notes on Further Reading
The sources I mention above in the book are still helpful, but since then a flood of new treatises on children’s books and authors (many of them repetitive) have been published. The good news is that I now live in downtown Toronto, less than two miles away from the world-famous Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, where I can read to my heart’s content. Not wishing to overwhelm you with the excesses of a computer printout I have plowed through a pile of books published since 1965 in order to select those few that add to or make clearer my directions for the journey. One new source (on Arthur Ransome) actually corrects what I had written! Caution: These texts are chosen for pragmatic purpose; they are not necessarily the best books on their respective subjects. Titles are loosely arranged under the chapter headings in How the Heather Looks.
Maps. British Ordnance (1 mile to 1.25 inches) are the best, hard to acquire (except locally), and expensive. Meantime, content yourself with the AA Big Road Atlas of Britain 4 Miles to 1 Inch. The size of the atlas (11 × 14 inches) makes it unwieldy to carry, but large scale is necessary to show a number of historic, ancient, and pre-historic sites. Good index. Published by the Automobile Association. ISBN 0–861452380.
Chapter 1 Caldecott Country
Randolph Caldecott: Lord of the Nursery by Rodney K. Engen (London: Oresko Books, 1976).
Yours Pictorially: Illustrated Letters of Randolph Caldecott (London: Frederick Warne, 1976).
Hutchins notes, in his acknowledgments, the Caldecott Library, Whitchurch, Shropshire – now Salop – which should be worth a visit. No doubt someone there will offer clear directions. I didn’t know about such a place in 1958; perhaps it did not exist then.
Chapter 2 The Open Road
For notes on Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, see notes to Chapter 6 and Chapter 11.
Chapter 3 A Peak in Narnia
Beyond the Wild Wood: The World of Kenneth Grahame, Author of The Wind in the Willows by Peter Green (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1982). An abridged, edited, and redesigned version of Green’s earlier work, published in 1959. A lavish edition with helpful photographs. In the past ten years I have made annual visits to Fowey, in Cornwall, and have walked past the Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch house, which overlooks the estuary. Grahame often stayed there but I am not persuaded that Rat’s house could be found near such a broad, busy, and open sheet of water. According to Green, the seeds of Wind in the Willows were sown on boating trips Grahame and “Q” took upriver to Golant. I know now that the River Fowey becomes narrower and more mysterious above Golant.
C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor by Lionel Adey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1998). In Chapter 6, “Children’s Storyteller,” Adey reminds me that Lewis used “Archenland” as a place name in The Horse and His Boy. My hunch is that the name is borrowed from Archenfield, a tiny independent kingdom that existed from the time of the Roman-Celts to the fourteenth century, between Brecon and Herefordshire. It was a hotbed of early Christianity in Britain. Neither Welsh nor English, its borders constantly shifting, Archenfield appeared on few maps. A picture of the Golden Valley, which comprises most of what was once that lost kingdom, hung in C. S. Lewis’s bedroom from early boyhood, although he never went to see the place until his honeymoon, late in life. The Golden Valley seemed to represent to him all that was beautiful and unseeable, a parallel world, his Shadowlands. Perhaps it was his Narnia. Also recommended is the motion picture Shadowlands.
The Celtic Alternative: A Reminder of the Christianity We Lost by Shirley Toulson (London: Rider Press, 1989. Repub. by Random House, 1996.) See the sketch of the Cross of St. Piran on page 54. This little book opened my eyes, helped me to “read” the countryside with new comprehension.
Chapter 4 In Quest of Arthur, and Chapter 5 Down to Camelot When you go to Glastonbury, plan to head for the Gothic Image Bookstore on the High Street and browse there. A cottage industry of books on Arthur and other mysteries thrives in and around Glastonbury. Geoffrey Ashe, who started the Arthurian revival in the 1950s, is still among the most reliable and best of authors on the subject. Try to find a paperback copy of his Quest for Arthur’s Britain (London: Paladin, 1977), a collection of essays edited by him, or Avalonian Quest (London: Methuen, 1977). Or The Discovery of King Arthur, published in conjunction with Debrett’s Peerage, 1985.
A good local guide is Glastonbury, Maker of Myths by Frances Howard-Gordon. Published by Gothic Image in Glastonbury, it affords good maps and directions to help you get your bearings. John and Caitlin Matthews have too many titles to list here. Gothic Image carries most of them. I like her Ladies of the Lake and his Sir Gawain. And don’t overlook John Michell, especially his New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury. A practical guide, despite its title, is On the Trail of Merlin: A Guidebook to the Western Mystery Tradition by Deike Rich and Ean Begg, H
arperCollins, 1991. It even supplies road map numbers. If Merlin’s your man, don’t miss The Quest for Merlin by Nikolai Tolstoy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985). It will take you to Hart Fell, near Edinburgh, in Scotland.
A curious little book, so far available only in Hereford and the nearby bookstore town of Hay-on-Wye, is Arthurian Links with Herefordshire by Mary Andere. Or write to Logaston Press, Little Logaston, Woonton Almeley, Herefordshire HR3 6QH. You will find yourself back in Archenfield, on the Welsh Border. Which is not a bad place to be.
Chapter 6 The River Bank
See Peter Green’s coffeetable edition of Beyond the Wild Wood above. Try to get your hands on a Bartholomew’s Map of the Thames. It unfolds and unfolds and unfolds, showing every tiny cove, isle, ait, meander, and backwater. The map room in your nearest big city reference library probably has a copy. Order one through a bookstore or on the Web.
Chapter 7 Johnny Crow’s Garden
In the early 1960s, during the “Profumo Affair,” I often saw a familiar face staring at me from the front page of the New York Times. It was the face of Sir Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, quoted as “deploring the situation.” The same face, sixty years later, stares from the pages of “Ring o’ Roses,” the face of “the little boy who cries in the lane” in the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” To cheer him up, I suppose, I sent Sir Henry a copy of the chapter about the Brooke family, after my book was published in 1965. Perhaps I also inspired him, eventually, to write a book about his father: Leslie Brooke and Johnny Crow (London: Frederick Warne, 1982).
Chapter 8 Looking at History
Kipling and the Children by Lancelyn Green (London: Elik Books, Ltd. [All Saints Street], 1965). An update to my sources. Useful, although I did not find anything particularly new.
Death of the Corn King and Goddess in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Historical Fiction for Young Adults by Barbara L. Talcroft (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1995). Risk-taking and insightful. I wish I had had this book in 1958.
A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales by Jacquetta Hawkes (London: Abacus, 1978). Originally published in 1951, this book is updated every few years even though the author has died. A classic.
Also recommended is Bartholomew’s Map of Roman Britain.
Chapter 9 Little Countries of the Mind
The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh: The Story of A. A. Milne and His Writing for Children by Ann Thwaite (London: Methuen, 1992). Good photographs of the actual favorite places: Cotchford Farm, Pooh-stick Bridge, The Enchanted Place at the Top of the Forest (Galleon’s Lap cum Gill’s Leap). Page 82 orients the famous end-paper map to the real map. Clearly locates Upper Hartfield between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells, thirty-five miles southeast of London. A. A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh by Ann Thwaite (Toronto: Random House, 1990). The scholarly biography.
The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne (London and Toronto: Methuen Ltd./McClelland & Stewart, 1974). From the horse’s mouth: Christopher Robin–Billy Moon, all grown up, wavers between pride and exasperation as he describes his childhood and boyhood. He takes the reader step by step through the Forest, around the neighborhood.
Chapter 10 Forests, Moors, and Gardens
Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett by Ann Thwaite (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1974). The Secret Garden is placed once and for all squarely at Maythan Hall, in Rolvenden, Kent. Someone aptly described FHB (who wrote my favorite book) as having “vulgarity of manner and distinction of soul.” To my astonishment I discover that there is a statue in her honor in Central Park, Manhattan, “near Mount Sinai Hospital. Statues of a boy and girl – perhaps a romantic epitome of the spirit of children’s literature – stand in a garden, but it is not a secret garden; and few people who play there notice the inscription or listen to stories as the committee hoped that they would.”
Robert Louis Stevenson by Paul Binding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). The Lantern Bearer: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by James Playsted Wood (New York: Pantheon, 1965). Neither of these books has an index.
Robin Hood by J. C. Holt, professor of medieval history, University of Cambridge (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984). With 15 illustrations and 4 maps. Blurb: “People’s hero or lawless marauder? Who was the ‘real’ Robin Hood – or was there none? And how did the legends of a violent era become the romantic tales of today?” Chapter V, “The Physical Setting,” is especially helpful. Holt assesses the evidence for an historical Robin Hood.
Robin Hood: Green Lord of the Wildwood by John Matthews (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 1993). Matthews is not so much concerned with proving, or disproving, the authenticity of an historical figure. He sees and celebrates Robin as an embodiment of the Green Man, the Life Force of Britain. His truth lies in myth.
Chapter 11 Beyond the Door
A History of the Writing of Beatrix Potter by Leslie Linder (London: Frederick Warne, 1971). Very good on the stories’ origins, their attachment to specific place. See, for example, on page 135, a discussion of Squirrel Nutkin’s relationship to Derwent Water and Mr. Brown’s abode on Saint Herbert’s Island.
The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter by Margaret Lane (London: Frederick Warne, 1978).
Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman by Judy Taylor (London: Frederick Warne/Penguin, 1986). A fresh approach.
The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, prologue and epilogue by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976). Ransome is coy about pinning down places.
Captain Flint’s Trunk by Christina Hardument (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984). The author read through boxes of papers left by Arthur Ransome to Leeds University and decided to follow up tantalizing clues to the whereabouts of the places he describes, especially Wild Cat Island. She and her four children explored the Lake District on foot, by car, and by boat. End papers for her book show both the “official geography” of the Lakes and the “Ransome geography.” Ransome was something of an old fox: Wild Cat Island is an amalgam of several islands in Windermere and Coniston Water. He told me somewhere else! Lots of photographs. This is a must read.
The Life of Arthur Ransome by Hugh Brogan (London: Pimlico Press, 1984). Chapter X, on Swallows and Amazons, attacks the problem of the whereabouts of Wild Cat Island head on. He comes up with pretty much the same conclusion that Christina Hardument did. Brogan is especially good on aligning the characters in the books with the real children Ransome knew.
For the record: When I interviewed him I told Ransome about our day at Newlands, near Derwent Water. I spoke about Saint Herbert’s Island. Perhaps out of perversity (he was a perverse old man) he told me that Wild Cat Island was in Derwent Water. If so, Mr. Brown’s island would be the Swallows’ island. I don’t really believe that now. What I do believe is that Mr. Brown, Captain Flint, and Arthur Ransome all have something in common. They prided themselves on their grumpiness.
Copyright © 1959, 1961, 1965, 1999, 2009 by Joan Bodger
Afterword and Notes on Further Reading Copyright © 1999 by Joan Bodger
First published in 1965 in Canada by the Macmillan Company of Canada Limited,
and in the United States by The Viking Press, Inc.
McClelland & Stewart Emblem edition published 2009
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bodger, Joan
How the heather looks : a joyous journey to the British so
urces of children’s books /
Joan Bodger; illustrated by Mark Lang.
First published 1965.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-1295-2
1. Literary landmarks–Great Britain. 2. Children’s literature, English–History
and criticism. 3. Great Britain–Description and travel. I. Title.
PR109.B6 2010 820.9′9282 C2009-905037-4
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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