Charmed Lives 4
Charmed Lives 2
Charmed Lives 1
Complete Fanzine Index |
|
|
An Exploration of Green Knowe |
by Maureen Kincaid Speller
"In this house ... everything is twice."
So says Tolly, diminutive hero of The
Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston, on the night he arrives
at his great-grandmother Oldknow’s house. He’s referring to
the mirrors which are hung all over the house, and most particularly
to the one in his own bedroom, reflecting “the rafters, the
wicker cage, the rocking-horse, the doll’s house, the painted
box, the bed” but the comment turns out to even more apt than he
might have realised.
Tolly is a bright, imaginative child, in some ways very old for his
seven years. His father and step-mother are away in Burma, and his
great-grandmother’s invitation to her house, Green Knowe, or
Green Noah, as everyone calls it, has rescued him from another lonely
holiday at boarding school. It’s not unnatural, perhaps, that he
should be interested in the three children he sees in a portrait
hanging on his grandmother’s wall. They are, Mrs Oldknow tells
him, Toby, Alexander and Linnet, and they once lived in the house. And
in the days to come, as he explores Green Knowe, Tolly will realise
that they’ve not yet left it. Indeed, if his grandmother is to be
believed, he himself is not so much exploring the place as becoming
re-acquainted with it; he is, she informs him, like his grandfather
Toseland, whom she always called Tolly, and yet it’s clear that
to her he is also someone else for she often calls him Toby, as though
he is the boy in the picture, brought back to life. She and Boggis,
the gardener, agree that “he seems to belong here. … He has
it all hidden in him somewhere.”
In some ways, this seems to be true, for Tolly has an unerring
ability to ferret out the secrets of his grandmother’s house,
finding the children’s old hiding-places, discovering their toys,
solving the small mysteries posed by the stories told to him by his
grandmother. And gradually he comes to know the children themselves.
At first he only hears their voices and the noises they make as they
play with their toys. To Tolly this is tremendously frustrating for he
so wants to see them and to be able to play with them. “They’re
like shy animals. They don’t come just at first till they are
sure.” Mrs Oldknow reassures him, and so it proves to be. Through
glimpses in the many mirrors … and perhaps this is why they are
all over the house … and then in the secret house under the yew
tree, Tolly comes face to face with the three children and solves the
biggest mystery of the house, its peculiar name.
The Children of Green Knowe is undoubtedly one of the most
charming ghost stories ever written for children. The magical and the
mystical are skilfully blended with the everyday, to the point where
it’s difficult to tell what is real and what might be Tolly’s
imagination. It’s so difficult to resist a book where the
protagonists firmly believe that the statue of St Christopher attends
Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and that the topiary figure of Noah in
the garden was cursed by gypsies, where long-dead children play in the
house and garden, with the many birds and animals which seem to
congregate there (or are some of them really just topiary figures; one
can never be sure) and where there are so many tempting little
mysteries to be resolved.
On one level, it’s a child’s ultimate dream of
wish-fulfilment. Mrs Oldknow tells Tolly that he can do anything he
wants, and so the house and grounds are a blank canvas for his games
and exploration. He’s undoubtedly an old-fashioned child with a
great love of the past. He enjoys the stories his grandmother tells
him, stories which have a strange habit of intruding into the present,
often with the discovery of the artefacts involved, or another crumb
of knowledge. And the house itself is remarkable. Frequently described
as an Ark, and thus it appears when surrounded by flood waters, it’s
very old, almost a medieval castle to Tolly’s eye and filled with
wonders, from the vases of mysterious flowers which seemingly appear
on bare twigs to the mirrors, the carvings. It’s a house where
magic cries out to happen, where adventures simply have to take place.
As for Mrs Oldknow, she’s the perfect grandmother …
understanding, sensitive to a child’s needs, knowing just what to
do and say and the right moment at which to do it. Could a child want
anything more? And could the adult reader, in search of the perfect
delightful childhood possibly want anything more? Indeed not; there’s
almost too much already.
And as if that weren’t enough, the book itself is exquisitely
written. Lucy Boston trained as an artist and her descriptive
vignettes show a skilful observer at work. Take the scene in which
Tolly arrives at Green Knowe, and the description of the journey from
the station in the taxi, along flooded roads, with his view confined
to what he can see through “the two clear fans on the windscreen”
made by the windscreen wipers, or the magical description of the first
fall of snow before Christmas, “like millions of tiny white birds
circling home to roost”. She also has a sense of what will most
delight a child. Who can forget the scene where the chaffinch finds
the key to the children’s toybox, giving Tolly the wonderful
opportunity to unpack the chest, piece by piece, revelling in the
rediscovery of their toys. And what about Tolly’s conviction that
the Japanese carved mouse is real? Or that Toby’s horse, Feste,
is still in the stables, awaiting his master?
 And
as if this were not enough, she reprises the whole thing in a second
book, far less well-known but equally attractive. The Chimneys of
Green Knowe tells of the hunt for the Oldknow fortune, which
mysteriously went missing during the late eighteenth century, and
tells it through the medium of Tolly’s discovery of Susan
Oldknow, another child of the house. Susan is blind, at a time when it
was not considered worth encouraging those who were handicapped to
make anything of their lives and is in the care of a nanny, aptly
named Softly, who smothers her charge and refuses to allow her to do
anything for herself. Worse, Susan’s mother has no interest in
her child, beyond regarding her as an animated doll to be dressed and
played with, and taken away when she is bored. Susan, though, is
intelligent and has an independent spirit, as her father recognises,
and he does his best to encourage her, providing her with a tutor and
also with a servant, the irrepressible Jacob, a freed black slave boy.
As Tolly searches the house for the treasure, he uncovers Susan’s
possessions, the boxes of shells and seeds she liked to handle, and as
he plays in the garden, he retraces the adventures into which Jacob
led her. And in the evenings, as she repairs her patchwork, Mrs
Oldknow tells him the story of the house, of Susan’s mother, vain
and silly Maria; of her brother Sefton, a sly, deceitful wastrel, and
Caxton, the butler and an out-and-out scoundrel, and of Jacob himself,
rescued by Captain Oldknow, a gentle and humane man, but away from
home for much of the time. Tolly, meanwhile, discovers more about the
history of the house and its construction (the high point of this
story is a fire which destroys the elegant eighteenth century house,
revealing once again the original Norman house it had enclosed, and
which Captain Oldknow had always preferred).
Both stories are tremendously appealing, from beginning to end,
well-paced, well-told, and filled with many little pleasures. One
longs to see the house, to handle the many choice possessions, to meet
the child ghosts and to share adventures with them and Tolly; in
short, one longs to be Tolly, heir to this remarkable domain, and to
experience the extraordinary world in which the commonplace and the
mystical rub shoulders. But with The Chimneys of Green Knowe,
one can begin to see other preoccupations surfacing. There are the
domestic concerns, for example; Mrs Oldknow’s interest in her
birds, her old roses and her patchwork, Lucy Boston’s own
particular domestic interests (she was a considerable needlewoman,
making beautiful patchwork quilts, a feat all the more remarkable
because her eyesight was so very poor in her final years and she
refused to wear glasses).
There is also a great deal of the child in Lucy Boston’s
stories, reflecting, I suspect, the child in Boston herself. Whether
Boston liked children, I’m not sure. Her love for her son and her
grandchildren is not, I think, in doubt, as shown in published letters
and the patchwork quilts she made for them, but one often wonders
whether she really liked children as a species. Her fictional children
are by no means conventional — Tolly comments in The Chimneys
of Green Knowe that when he and his grandmother were together, he
forgot about being a schoolboy; they were just two people, and this
could be also said of Mrs Oldknow’s relationship with Ping. But
even when Mrs Oldknow herself is not present, those adults who are in
the story treat the child protagonists in an entirely unorthodox and
adult way. This is particularly so in The River at Green Knowe,
the most whimsical (and in some ways, most improbable) of the novels.
Indeed, I tend to think of it as a story devised by the children
themselves, rather as the Blackett and Walker children devised a story
in Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck. Oskar and Ping (both refugees)
and Ida, great-niece of the bizarre Dr Maud Biggin, almost a child
herself except where her academic studies are concerned, undergo a
remarkable series of adventures, centring on the river flowing past
Green Knowe (one cannot help but think that without the presence of
Mrs Oldknow, adventures in the house itself are not possible). Sailing
on the river at all hours of the day and night, they meet a giant,
flying horses, a mysterious hermit, while Oskar is inadvertently
shrunk to the size of a harvest mouse. Ironically, the only truly
plausible event occurs in the garden of Green Knowe itself when, after
discovering a mysterious bottle containing a message written in Latin,
the children witness a Stone Age ceremony in a wickerwork building on
the site of the house, thus confirming it as an ancient and religious
site, while also pulling the focus of the book away from the frivolous
once again. Even so, one cannot help but think of Boston revelling in
the fictional freedom denied her in her own strict Weslayan
upbringing, when all pleasures were considered wicked and sinful. I
think it does come through in Boston’s writing, for the pleasures
she recalls are those of the adult remembering childhood, the
nostalgic joys rather than the immediacy of real childhood experience,
where everything is so transitory, so very much of the moment.
And there is also a feeling for outsiders of all kinds. Tolly is, as
we’ve seen, something of a misfit, while Susan has been excluded
from society by virtue of her blindness and Jacob by virtue of his
colour. However, this theme becomes particularly evident in the fourth
book of the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe. Anyone
expecting another joyous romp through the world of Green Knowe is
likely to be disappointed, for the story revolves as much around a
gorilla as around the familiar characters of earlier stories. Indeed,
the novel opens with a long sequence describing the early life of a
gorilla, Hanno, who is captured and brought to live in London Zoo.
Here he is seen by Ping, a young Burmese boy who is a refugee in
London, and who has already paid a visit to Green Knowe (in The
River at Green Knowe), thanks to the well-intentioned but
haphazard hospitality of a temporary tenant. Ping recognises a kindred
spirit in Hanno and, before leaving the zoo, asks the keeper to give
Hanno a gift of fruit, significantly fruit that a complete stranger
had earlier insisted on giving to Ping. Such is the nature of
fictional coincidence that Ping finds himself returning to Green
Knowe, where this time he meets Mrs Oldknow, and that Hanno, when he
fortuitously escapes from the zoo, also makes his way to Green Knowe,
taking up residence in the garden’s bamboo thicket (though one is
inclined to think that Boston has here muddled pandas and gorillas).
Here, of course, he is discovered by Ping, whom he remembers because
of his scent on the fruit, and most of the second half of the book is
taken up with Ping’s efforts to conceal Hanno’s whereabouts,
and Mrs Oldknow’s efforts to stop hunters invading her sanctuary.
The ending is, inevitably, tragic. The story is regarded by many
critics as Boston’s finest work; certainly, her evocation of the
life of a young gorilla in the forest is admired for its accuracy.
Ping also figures in An Enemy at Green Knowe, written by
Boston’s own acknowledgement as a form of catharsis after a
particular unspecified battle involving the Manor House at Hemingford
Grey, the model for Green Knowe, and Boston’s own home. This is
quite the nastiest and most powerful of the Green Knowe stories, and
also the most serious in its examination of ideas of right and wrong.
Here, Ping, Tolly and Mrs Oldknow find themselves under siege from Dr
Melanie D. Powers, a witch searching for the magical books of Dr
Vogel, who once taught young Roger Oldknow, but who also studied
alchemy. Melanie D. Powers unleashes numerous magical plagues upon
Green Knowe, all of them thwarted by the boys, by Ping in particular.
He possesses the mystical quality that Tolly, practical and
down-to-earth, seems slightly to lack, although it has been noted
previously that Ping is old beyond his years, and certainly this book
comes nearest to overtly examining exactly who or what Mrs Oldknow
might be. Melanie D. Powers considers her to be a witch, though
clearly not a practitioner of the black arts, while Mrs Oldknow
herself employs a prayerbook to counter one particularly unpleasant
piece of magic. Her house, of course, is guarded by a full-size statue
of St Christopher, anathema to Melanie D. Powers, as well as by a
witch-ball and an old Persian mirror, while Mrs Oldknow herself is
protected by what she and the boys whimsically consider to be a druid’s
stone that she wears on a cord round her neck. And for sure, Boston
herself seems to be remarkably knowledgeable about certain aspects of
witchcraft, although one should bear in mind that the Folk Museum in
Cambridge has a collection of witchcraft artefacts.
There is also her deep involvement with her house and its surrounding
area, and her concern for its preservation, a concern which informs
all the stories, of course, but which surfaces again particularly in
An Enemy of Green Knowe and The Stones of Green Knowe,
by which time it is clear that Tolly, now older and wiser, will
endeavour to continue the Oldknow tradition of care for the house.
Lucy Boston’s love of her house is most explicit in The
Stones of Green Knowe, the final book of the series, written much
later than the others, describing as it does the story of Roger d’Aulneaux,
the first boy to live in the house, who watched it being built. We
also read of his adventures travelling through time to meet the other
children, Linnet, Toby and Alexander, Susan and Jacob, and of course
Tolly, to reassure himself that the house he loves will endure. The
theme of continuity through the ages is impossible to miss as the
different children move backwards and forwards in time. Admittedly, it’s
clumsily done, relying on the use of two standing stones, and strictly
unnecessary considering that the ghostly children have never before
shown any difficulty in meeting Tolly or, indeed, one another, but one
cannot doubt that Boston’s message is clear.
And of course, Boston’s signature figure, the wise, all-seeing,
all-knowing grandmother figure appears again, this time in the guise
of Roger d’Aulneaux’s grandmother, as mystical and secure in
her faith as her future counterpart. This time, though, Boston throws
in a surprise, with Tolly’s great-grandmother, though apparently
still alive, appearing as a teenage girl. Tolly, of course, recognises
her:
“I know you,” he said,
taking her hand. “I’d know you anywhere, any time. You’re
my grandmother. There’s only one of you.”
“Dear Tolly! I’ve always lived here you know. I’ve
seen and heard them all often.”
And that, I feel, is the key to the series,
that Mrs Oldknow is always there, in one guise or another, as the
genius locii, the spirit of the place. While the stories may be about
the children of the house, the uniting influence is almost always the
grandmother, and she is often referred to as “the grandmother”,
as though there were only the one. (That she is Tolly’s
great-grandmother is irrelevant, for she says herself, “What does
one generation more or less matter?”) Indeed, it’s surely
significant that Ping always calls her Grand Mother, perhaps echoing
the archetypal Great Mother.
What puzzles me is the relationship between Boston and her fictional
counterpart, Mrs Oldknow, for I feel sure that there undoubtedly is
one, given that Boston herself is so very much a part of the real
Green Knowe. Having put so much of her house into her stories, it
seems inconceivable to me that she wouldn’t put herself in.
Whether Boston saw herself as being the saintly Mrs Oldknow, I have no
idea (and grandmotherly figures feature in many of her stories, as
indeed does a certain house) but her autobiographical writings
(gathered in Memories, published by Colt Books) suggest that
she was often anything but a kindly grandmother figure. Irascible, at
war with anything and anyone vaguely representing authority or posing
a threat to her beloved home, feeling ever more out of step with the
times, a stickler for etiquette and propriety, and also very conscious
of her own dignity, she and Mrs Oldknow seem to be as diametrically
opposed in their behaviour as it’s possible to be. I’m
inclined to think, though, that Boston wouldn’t have seen this
dichotomy, not to judge from the way she gleefully recounted her
battles through the years. And if the Green Knowe books have
wish-fulfilment at the heart of their being, isn’t it the
greatest wish-fulfilment of all to write yourself into your own books
as the person you believe yourself to be? But whether or not Lucy M.
Boston was the embodiment of her creations is really beside the point,
though it certainly adds an extra frisson if you do happen to know the
circumstances of her life. The books themselves are the most important
things, and it would be difficult to find a set of books more magical,
more exciting, more beautifully written than those about the children
of Green Knowe.
edited and unless
otherwise indicated, written by
Meredith
Top | Home
News |
Autobiography | Picture Gallery | Book
List | A-Z of Related Worlds | Articles/Talks
| Interview | Book
Swap | Leave a Question | Other
DWJ sites | Contact Meredith
|
