The Real Beatrix Potter

by Nadia Cohen

  Liz Hunter McFarlane added: ‘We cannot underestimate the buying power she had, and which she used for good.’

  Beatrix was a woman on a mission and she would not take no for an answer, but as she explained in one of her letters to Millie, misogyny was rife in this remote corner of England: ‘I had rather a row with the plumber – or perhaps I ought to say I lost my temper! The men have been very good so far; if he won’t take orders from a lady I may pack him off and get one from Kendal.’

  Beatrix was only too aware that her move was also causing her parents untold anxiety and shame, but in just a few short months she had become convinced that her future lay on the farm. The rugged outdoor lifestyle actually agreed with her, she felt stronger and healthier than she had in years and decided that if she left – even temporarily – all her hard work would have been for nothing.

  ‘If I come back to London, either I will begin a cold, or the cook will give notice, or something will prevent me going back to Sawrey, and I want so much to have a good month there, to garden and get extra fat for winter,’ she feared.

  Although her family begged Beatrix to return to London with them at the end of their annual summer holiday in Kendal, she adamantly refused. Rupert and Helen returned to London without their daughter, terrified at what her future might hold alone in the wild and windswept Westmoreland fells.

  Beatrix’s strong sense of family loyalty had not abandoned her entirely, and as that autumn wore on she agreed to be lured away from the farm to visit her elderly uncle Frederick Burton at his home in Wales. He had a large estate near Denbigh and Beatrix agreed to the trip in the hope of not only placating her parents, but also to pick up a few tips about managing rural land. It was a decision she regretted as soon as she arrived. Frederick’s farmhouse was draughty and she returned home with a bad cold. She did however take some inspiration from all the flowers in the estate’s formal garden, and decided to fill her own garden with daffodils and snowdrops. As soon as she was back from Wales, with no further family obligations on the horizon Beatrix set about restoring Hill Top in earnest, but the renovations turned out to be far more complicated that she had first thought, and she was left with no option but to move out for a few weeks. When electricity was first introduced to the area she immediately had it installed in her barns to boost productivity. Although she could easily afford it, she lived so frugally that she never had it at Hill Top.

  The house was rickety, and the walls were infested with rats – she counted ninety-six in total -- but to her this was all part of the character of the house. She remained resolutely cheerful regardless of the upheaval, even finding the rodents a delightful addition to her household and using them as the inspiration for her famous character Samuel Whiskers, which was the name she gave to a cat brought in to tackle the infestation.

  ‘Tabitha Twitchit is extremely pleased to see me,’ she wrote on her return. ‘I am afraid she is not pleased to see the hedgehog, which she disliked. The first thing I did when I arrived was to go through the back kitchen ceiling. The joiner and plasterer were much alarmed and hauled me out. I was very much amused. It was a bad ceiling.’

  John Canon’s wife, however, did not share Beatrix’s joy in the renovations. She was horrified that each stage of the building work revealed that yet more rats had been living not only outside in the barns, sheds and chimneys, but also in her mattresses and inside holes and passages within the thick walls of the house. Alarmed at discovering them hiding in almost every nook and cranny around the property, Mrs Canon suggested getting half a dozen cats to tackle the problem, but Beatrix would not hear of such a thing and pledged to protect her new rodent friends: ‘Imagine my feelings!’, she wrote. ‘The cats have not arrived yet, but Mrs Canon has seen a rat sitting up eating its dinner under the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon. It is indeed a funny old house, it would amuse children very much.’

  When she came later to write about the army of rats that threatened to overrun Hill Top in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, she sent Winifred Warne amusing accounts of little Samuel’s real life adventures. As time wore on however, and as she became more hardened to farm life, Beatrix started to appreciate why Mr and Mrs Canon had thought the rats were such pests. She was woken up one night by the sound of her chickens screaming as a rat had managed to get into their cage and caused carnage: ‘I got up and found a horrid big old rat in the hutch on the lawn. It was eating one chicken and had hurt two others. The dogs killed the rat, and the lame ones are recovering,’ she wrote in a rattled letter to Norman’s brother Harold Warne. She added that even Samuel Whiskers had managed to burrow into the chicken coop and had stolen ten eggs from under a hen.

  Her tolerance to rats notwithstanding, overall the Canons liked their new landlady, and she in turn had taken an instant liking to John’s common sense attitude and practical approach to running the farm. He was unlike anyone she knew in London, and she had huge respect for how hard he was prepared to work for her without complaint. In turn, Canon was constantly surprised at the stamina this upper-crust literary lady showed as they toiled together in even the harshest of weather conditions.

  Beatrix was taking an exceptionally keen interest in her herds of pigs and cattle, and Canon slowly but surely passed on the benefit of his many years of experience with Galloway cows and bulls. She was eager to learn from him and was even prepared to stay up until four o’clock one morning, to help as one of her seventeen cows as it struggled for hours to give birth.

  During her first few months on the farm Beatrix had been sentimental about all the animals, treating them as pets, giving them whimsical names, taking photographs of the lambs and sitting for hours in the pigsty, sketching the piglets in their natural habitat, and then adding little boots on to their trotters. Initially she dreaded the thought of seeing any of her beloved creatures being taken off for slaughter, but Canon taught her to see the pigs differently, and soon Beatrix no longer felt upset at breaking up a family, and realised that they were there solely to breed and then to sell for profit, nothing more.

  Over time she became hardened to the ways of the countryside, and the inevitable killing of animals became less and less distressing to her: ‘Oh shocking!’, she lamented at her own emotions. ‘It does not do to be sentimental on a farm. I am going to have some lambskin hearthrugs.’

  Beatrix soon taught herself not to be quite so tender hearted, although she continued to struggle with mixed emotions when it came to killing an animal which she would actually end up eating herself: ‘I was rather overdone in the head yesterday,’ she explained when a suckling pig was slaughtered to be served at her first Christmas dinner at Hill Top Farm. ‘The poor little cherub had such a sweet smile, but in other respects it was disagreeable. It is rather a shame to kill them so young; one has no sentimental feelings about a large bacon pig.’

  Whether she liked it or not Beatrix was starting to learn that these cute piggies were not pets for her to grow attached to, but rather she should start viewing them with her business head on – as little pots of gold. The profits from the pigs could then be ploughed back into the farm and she would soon be able to build up much larger herds of animals. There was money to be made from breeding the pigs, and together with her right-hand man John Canon, Beatrix rode around the local villages in her pony and trap selling her livestock to the neighbours.

  To Beatrix’s amazement she appeared to be gathering something of a reputation locally as a successful pig breeder. She was delighted by her new notoriety, which of course had absolutely nothing to do with children’s stories, watercolours or nursery rhymes. She wrote: ‘The whole district is planted out with my pigs; but we still take an interest in them because if they grow well we shall get a name for pigs. Such is fame!’

  Liz Hunter McFarlane explained how after several seasons on the farm, Hill Top had managed to heal Beatrix’s broken heart:

  Beatrix’s way of coping with the terrible tragedy was to throw herself into manual labour, she found hard
physical work took her mind off her woes and the frustrations she felt about the life she had left behind back in London. In the Lake District she felt revitalised and after a few quiet years she finally fell in love again.

  Chapter Eleven

  While Beatrix had managed to escape Bolton Gardens for good, hoping that her old life would soon start fading into a distant memory, her parents were not prepared to cut ties with their only daughter quite so swiftly. Even if Beatrix refused to travel down to London every time they demanded it, there was precious little she could do to stop the Potter household descending on her. When Rupert and Helen announced that they had decided to travel north to inspect the farm the following summer, there was no chance of stopping them.

  Beatrix took some comfort in knowing that her house was starting to look and feel exactly as she wanted it; she had carefully filled it with treasured items of furniture and several of Norman’s belongings which his family had given her when he died. She was proud of Hill Top but there was only one bedroom, and Beatrix knew her parents would disapprove of the modest standard of accommodation she could offer them. She managed to convince the Potters to rent a holiday home in nearby Keswick so she could at least visit them whenever she had a few days free. Beatrix was never particularly glad to receive visitors who threatened to shatter her tranquillity, regardless of how far they had travelled to see her. She had been born in the lap of luxury in a large household, but now she was content with toasting teacakes on her hearth. She relished her own company, and was more than happy to live frugally, but she knew her parents would not like it.

  Beatrix was relieved that Rupert and Helen agreed to her idea to stay in a house nearby, but the first thing they wanted to do was see the house and Beatrix’s beloved village for themselves, in a bid to understand just what all the fuss was about. When they arrived Rupert and Helen were baffled to find their daughter – who was living without servants for the first time in her life – fascinated by her litters of lambs and pigs, and the way she relished all the minutiae of village gossip, which seemed to include heated debates about subjects such as road sweeping and manure. That summer Beatrix had been cheerfully throwing herself into local life with enthusiasm, participating eagerly in the fetes, fairs and hotly contested flower and produce shows.

  What was abundantly clear to the Potters was that their mollycoddled daughter was actually much tougher than they had ever given her credit for, and even they were forced to admit that they did not have too much cause for genuine concern. Beatrix was certainly not in danger or distress as they had imagined, and what they could not fail to comprehend was that she seemed more robust and happy than they had ever known her. She appeared to have finally found a place where she belonged, and was savouring the freedom that had eluded her for so long. While their relationship would never be especially close, there was a gradual thawing and Beatrix made the effort to spend time with her parents every year as they continued to enjoy annual summer vacations in the Lake District.

  Sometimes they insisted on their daughter making the journey down to London so that she could escort them back to Lancashire. To Beatrix this felt like the most infuriating waste of her precious time. But out of an enduring sense of family duty she still felt obliged to return to London occasionally, when her parents were particularly insistent about it, although during every visit all she could think about was what she was missing back on the farm. Her parents seemed to think that Beatrix had nothing better to do besides pandering to their whims, when in fact she felt she had dozens of tasks mounting up in Sawrey.

  During one of her particularly tedious journeys to London, made simply so that she could travel with her parents back up to the Lakes, she wrote: ‘I am very impatient to go up north and plant a few more shrubs before things begin to bud. I am going to Windermere with my parents next Wednesday. I have a doubt whether it is the best place for them so early in the year. Of course I shall be going because I can get over to Sawrey and see the new lambs. I wonder how my poor lambs are getting on, in the snow?’

  Her parents did not like the Lake District in the winter, but Beatrix seemed to relish the notoriously wet and windy weather conditions that blighted the region. The biting rain certainly did not bother her, and with the help of Mrs Canon she was soon kitted out with appropriately hard wearing practical clothing, including thick tweed skirts and wooden clogs, like the other local women wore – the days of her mother dragging her to Kensington’s finest dress shops to try on impractical silk gowns were a faded memory. These days Beatrix was more likely to be seen stomping vigorously down the lanes, pushing a wheelbarrow or carrying heavy loads of firewood or straw. She often had a filthy old sack thrown over her head if the rain was particularly heavy that day. Beatrix was steadily putting on weight too, but it did not bother her, she insisted she needed it as protection against the cold. She may have looked stout and scruffy but she felt more invigorated and far healthier than she ever had amongst the smog and fumes in London. Beatrix felt completely certain that this was the life she had always been destined to live.

  Usually when outsiders moved to the Lakes, especially if they were deemed to be snobby, metropolitan types from London, the locals dismissed them as ‘off-comes’, regional slang for foreigners who usually did not stay too long. Somehow Beatrix managed to charm her new neighbours and convinced them she was there to stay, so she lost the label relatively fast and before too long she was widely regarded as a local.

  Although farming was now her greatest passion, it could be an unpredictable business and Beatrix still needed to ensure a steady income. She was not ready to forsake her old life quite yet, and inspired by her new surroundings she entered the most creative and productive period of her literary career, producing thirteen more books over the following eight years. Some of Beatrix’s best-loved work was published during this time – The Tale of The Pie and the Patty Pan, The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher, The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, The Tale of the Roly-Poly Pudding, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, The Tale of Tommy Tiptoes, The Tale of Mr Tod, The Tale of Pigling Bland, A Fierce Bad Rabbit and The Story of Miss Moppet.

  Warnes usually aimed to bring the books out to coincide with the lucrative Christmas market, boosting sales still further. Beatrix was being inspired by the sights, sounds and smells of the natural world, and all of these tales featured images of her beloved farm and the scenery surrounding the little village she now called home; the pages beautifully illustrated with the animals, flowers, trees and wildlife that surrounded her. Her kitchen at Hill Top can be seen in The Tale of the Roly Poly Pudding and the stairwell in Tom Kitten’s house bears a remarkable resemblance to her own, right down to the colour of the curtains.

  Further on in the same story there is a rare glimpse of the author herself, spotted in the distance with her wheelbarrow. The only other time she included a self-portrait was in The Tale of Pigling Bland after she kept a promise to a reader who made the suggestion in a letter from New Zealand: ‘I think I shall put myself in the next book,’ Beatrix replied. ‘It will be about pigs; I shall put in me walking about with my old Goosey sow, she is such a pet.’ Beatrix was so touched that the little girl, Louisa Ferguson, had made such an enormous effort to contact her from the other side of the world that they continued exchanging letters back and forth across the globe for many years afterwards.

  Beatrix struggled so much with making the character of Pigling Bland look like a convincing pig that she almost did not publish the book at all. Beatrix wrote to Joy Shapland, another young fan in Devon, saying that she had to stop writing for a while because she had been ill, adding: ‘Since then I have been drawing dozens of pigs! I have been so tired of them. But the printers said all the little friends would be disappointed if I did not screw out my usual Christmas book. I’m afraid it is not very good this time but I have done my best and I am well again, so I hope to do better next year,’ she added in the letter, which
was illustrated with an ink drawing of three pigs.

  Beatrix often remarked that she could not invent pictures from her imagination, her talents only stretched to copying what she saw around her. Some of the more distinctive landscapes featured throughout those books are still almost exactly the same today.

  She was at pains, however, to point out that her view of the world was not quite as narrow as people seemed to want to imagine. She did also feature numerous other locations beyond the Lake District – she drew The Flopsy Bunnies at Gwaynynog near Denbigh, while Little Pig Robinson included sketches from Lyme Regis, Hastings and Sydmouth,

  But the majority of the illustrations in these books written at Hill Top provided a glimpse into the classic Lakeland cottages and gardens of Beatrix’s new neighbours as the fictitious animals roamed the fields and lanes around Sawrey. The Tale of Ginger & Pickles featured the village shop, and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny was dedicated to the children of the Sawrey, although Beatrix only mentioned the village by name in The Tale of Tabitha Twitchit when she said: ‘A little dog indeed! As if there were no cats in Sawrey!’

  While Beatrix was fiercely proud of her little village, the last thing she wanted was hordes of her readers invading the place and trouping around trying to identify the places depicted in every illustration. Luckily the villagers were largely delighted by their newfound notoriety and often became rather competitive over whose house was featured, and whose was not, whenever a new book was published. They enjoyed spotting themselves, their homes or their pets in the pages of Beatrix’s books. She even included Mrs Canon in one of the illustrations for Jemima Puddle-Duck; the farmer’s wife could be seen appearing at the back door of the farmhouse to feed the chickens, while her children Ralph and Betsy were playing in the garden.