The Haunted Wood, page 30
Mary Poppins’s battle with Miss Andrew has something of the character of a turf-war, then, rather than a simple goodieversus-baddie face-off. Miss Andrew – in whom, I fancy, we can detect a prototype of Roald Dahl’s Trunchbull – is the wrong sort of bossy and bad-tempered nanny, and Mary Poppins is the right sort.
If P.L. Travers sought in some sense to avert our eyes from the crumbling certainties of interwar society, Noel Streatfeild’s unusual Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage (1936) looked at them more directly. Ballet Shoes is about a household without men. It’s about an unconventional, non-nuclear, blended family. Its three girl protagonists Pauline, Petrova, and Posy are orphans, acquired in a series of unlikely circumstances and sent home in the opening pages by the eccentric, one-legged Great-Uncle Matthew to be brought up in his roomy house in the Cromwell Road by his adult great-niece Sylvia, also orphaned, and her old nurse Nana. The sort-of-paterfamilias, “Gum” (as Great-Uncle Matthew is known) is absent for the main part of the book, roaming the world on fossil-hunting expeditions (his mania for paleontology is reflected in the girls’ elective surname, Fossil) and returning only as a final-act deus ex machina. Gum is, like Mr Banks, a child-adult.
This set-up is suggestive. It allows the book to be directed squarely at a female readership, and to foreground the three girls’ agency in the world. But, written as it was by an author who was twenty when the Great War broke out, it also perhaps has an echo of the real experience for many households of the post-war shortage of men. The Fossils’ existence is precarious. “Garnie” – as the girls’ guardian Sylvia is known – has to take in lodgers, who become mentors to the girls. As the story progresses and, with the money running out, Gum shows no signs of returning from his travels, she even contemplates selling the house. The same social anxieties present in Mary Poppins are present here. Even as money grows tighter, there are a cook and a nurse at Cromwell Road – and Nana, though without quite the hauteur of Mary Poppins, bosses her employer, insisting from time to time that Gum get rid of some of his fossils, and getting her way.
The three girls attend stage school. Pauline (the pretty one) starts to flourish as an actor and the youngest, Posy, becomes a prodigious ballet dancer; while dark, tomboyish Petrova – even as she takes acting roles in her sister’s shadow – moonlights as a car mechanic and dreams of becoming a pilot. There’s a wan line of humor, drawn you’d have to think from experience, about the indignities of a second-rank acting career:
That Christmas, Pauline was engaged for the Fairy Godmother in a pantomime of ‘Cinderella,’ and Petrova was one of twenty-four jumping beans, who were to do speciality dances in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ in a theatre in the suburbs.
Far from being a weightless fantasy of artistic fulfillment, Ballet Shoes is deeply interested in the nitty-gritty of theatrical practice (Streatfeild herself worked for a decade as an actress), and it’s deeply interested in money: how it’s saved, how it’s spent, how it’s managed.
These aren’t girls living out a Ballerina Barbie dream. Even as their sisterly affection and occasional bickering is traced with a keen psychological touch, they are adolescents with careers: jostling for roles, helping to support the household, even pawning possessions to pay for audition frocks. Here, amid the pertly surreal comedy of Great-Uncle Matthew’s unworldliness and monomania (Gum seems to be a cross between Doctor Dolittle and Susan Cooper’s Merriman Lyon), is a streak of realism and a documentary view of the hazy border between childhood and adulthood.
When Pauline is engaged for a role before the age of majority (a child was allowed on the stage from her twelfth birthday), she has to get a license from the council to perform. The provisions of the Children Act are starting to trickle, visibly, into the literature of childhood:
Sylvia obtained from the Education Officer’s department of the County Hall a copy of the London County Council’s rules for children employed in the entertainment industries. They were all good, and framed to look after the employed child’s health and well-being.
The law demands that parents or guardians lodge a proportion of child actors’ take-home pay in a Post Office savings account but, when at the age of fourteen Pauline decides that she wants to keep more to help the family, she wins the argument:
‘I’m not putting any more in the post office.’
Sylvia, Petrova, and Posy stared at her.
‘A child,’ Posy recited, ‘has-to-put-at-least-one-third-of-its-earnings-in-the-savings-bank, or-as-much-more-as-may-bedirected-by-its-parents-or-guardian. This-is-the-law. I learnt that in French with Madame Moulin, I forget what the French was, but that was what it meant in English.’
Pauline looked braver than she felt. ‘It’s quite right. That is the law; but I’m not a child. I’ve just had my fourteenth birthday. The law lets me work; I don’t need a licence, and I can do what I like with my own money.’
The three girls have more than just survival in mind, though. From their early years, they are in the habit of swearing a solemn vow together every time one of them has a birthday:
‘We three Fossils vow to try and put our name into History books because it’s our very own and nobody can say it’s because of our Grandfathers.’
The Fossil girls are presented as female role-models; not princesses, not appendages, or helpmeets to boys. That’s made explicit in the closing words of the book: “‘I wonder’ – Petrova looked up – ‘if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?’” So it was to continue in Streatfeild’s many subsequent books. Ballet Shoes was followed up by Tennis Shoes (1937) – which also, bizarrely, includes a one-legged father figure – and their successors followed in a podiatric groove: Theatre Shoes, Party Shoes, Dancing Shoes, Skating Shoes, Family Shoes, Traveling Shoes. Here was a writer asking girls who they’d choose; or, you might say, in whose shoes they’d prefer to be.
* Valerie Lawson, Mary Poppins, She Wrote, [p].
† Interview with Boston radio station, quoted in Lawson, Mary Poppins, She Wrote, [p].
In the Ruin of the Year
J.R.R. TOLKIEN · T.H. WHITE
The Hobbit; The Sword in the Stone;
The Queen of Air and Darkness;
The Ill-Made Knight;
The Candle in the Wind
IF THE BOOKS OF THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930S HAD over them the long shadow of a terrible war past, those that came toward the end of the 1930s slipped into the shadow of a war to come. It’s widely noted that the experience of the Second World War lays its footprint firmly on the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), much of whose composition took place during the war years. The Lord of the Rings is tricky to fit into the story of children’s literature, though: it both belongs, and it doesn’t. Though it drew knowingly on a whole range of mythological predecessors, it did more than any other single book to create the magical fantasy genre as it now stands. Wizards, dragons, dwarves, elves, and goblins: every children’s book that contains them owes a debt to Tolkien. At the same time, with its thousand-plus-page heft and its intricately fastidious linguistic and political and mythological world-building, it is more likely to be found on the student than on the nursery bookshelf.
But that book’s predecessor, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937), is squarely a children’s book – both simpler in language, lighter in theme and brisker in tone than what was to come.* It’s also a book that insistently looks backward. If the general movement of children’s writing through the previous decades had been, at least on the surface of things, away from fairytales, Tolkien very knowingly set out to write a story that went back to those roots. It was a mythological quest narrative, with magical helpers and medieval military politics, monsters, and mazes and dark, dark woods.
C.S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, talking about the Narnia stories, described the exchange between Lewis and his great friend Tolkien:
They seem to have talked about the children’s literature of the late 1940s and early 1950s with dismay, finding nothing that they would have enjoyed as children or even could enjoy as adults. The literature that children were being expected to read and enjoy at that time seemed to teach them things that sensible parents would rather their children did not learn – all about ‘issues’ and ‘complexes’ and such. High Adventure, Chivalry, Personal Responsibility, Personal Commitment, Duty, Honor, Courtesy, and Honesty all seemed to have been dismissed as out of date or passé. Jack and Tolkien both agreed that such qualities and virtues were essential to human civilization and decided that they themselves had better have a try at writing about them. So they did.†
Lewis had his try, as Gresham indicates, in the early 1950s, but for Tolkien the project began much earlier.
His starting point was the sentence that begins the book: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Hobbits were an original contribution to fantasy literature’s mythological bestiary* and described as follows:
They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it).
In the story Tolkien tells, he gives his bestiary loving attention, filling it with wargs and spiders, dwarves and elves, talking eagles, shapeshifters, and trolls. Goblins, for instance, nasty grabby little creatures, are evoked with a run of epistrophe – “there were all the baggages and packages lying broken open, and being rummaged by goblins, and smelt by goblins, and fingered by goblins, and quarreled over by goblins.” When they’re annoyed, Tolkien relishes a Dr. Seuss burst of sound-effects: “The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description.” The narrative voice of The Hobbit, throughout, is tuned to be read aloud, full of such sound-effects and rhetorical patternings and peppered with conversational turns (“Now, you know enough to go on with. As I was saying…”) or exclamations: “Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him…”
Tolkien here, as seldom in The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t mind being funny. Gandalf is described as having “long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat,” and the description of Bilbo’s fright when Thorin blithely mentions that he expects some or all of the party “may never return” is pure Looney Tunes: “At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.”
There are certain unexpected parallels, when you strip away their very different set-dressings, between The Hobbit and The Wind in the Willows (the Shire is another avatar of the Riverbank; while Mirkwood and the Wild Wood share an atmosphere of unknown perils) – above all, in their most characteristic tension. which is that between wanderlust and the call of the hearth. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit divided, and the divide is in his very blood. As a Baggins, Bilbo is a pillar of the caricaturally conservative community of the Shire: “people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected.” But, since The Hobbit is the story of how he “had an adventure” and “lost the neighbors’ respect,” there’s a tearaway side to him too, which descends through his mother “the famous Belladonna Took.” She hails from a branch of the tribe considered “not entirely hobbitlike”: “once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up.”
Much of the comedy of the early part of the book (it’s quite some time before Bilbo embarks on his adventure) is in how the boisterous crowd of Dwarves disturb the bourgeois proprieties of his home. “Chip the glasses and crack the plates! Blunt the knives and bend the forks! That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates – Smash the bottles and burn the corks!” they sing cheerily as they do the washing-up. Bilbo tries to be polite, but he is, in modern idiom, more than a bit triggered. There’s an echo here, to my mind, of Beatrix Potter’s home-invasion fantasy The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse.
Yet as the story goes on, Took and Baggins wrestle for control of Bilbo’s soul. He is, after all, expressly recruited to the adventuring party as a “burglar” – anathema to law-abiding hobbit orthodoxy (and, we can notice, echo of the pretend-criminal games of pirates and bandits that are such a staple of the playground). When he later hears the dwarves singing, in this case about quests and treasure and their ancient homes rather than about washing-up,
something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.
As he approaches the end of his quest, “I am afraid [Bilbo] was not thinking much of the job, but of what lay beyond the blue distance, the quiet Western Land and the Hill and his hobbit-hole under it.” With the hurly-burly done and the battle lost and won, “The Tookish part was getting very tired, and the Baggins was daily getting stronger. ‘I wish now only to be in my own armchair!’ he said.”
Doesn’t that tension speak to one of the profoundest contradictions in childhood itself? Children want to grow up, and they want to remain children for ever. It’s the paradox encapsulated in the fractal narrative of J.M. Barrie’s “tragic boy.” Children yearn to have independent agency in the world, to be brave and consequential and grown-up, to see excitements and novelties, and their literature offers them fantasies of doing so; but at the same time they are deeply conservative. They long for the familiar, the safe, the comprehensible: to return home triumphant and to find, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, that “his supper was waiting for him, and it was still hot.”
That journey, and the twin impulses that send its hero on it, is the matter of The Hobbit. Bilbo, like every mythological quest hero, travels out into the big world, undergoes trials and tests, meets helpers, acquires magical objects (the dagger Sting and the Ring), discovers qualities in himself that the instigator of his quest saw but he did not, and returns to the safety of home transformed. The journey he makes consists of a string of set-piece encounters and is full of folkloric motifs.
The party’s very first encounter is with three trolls in a wood. With the dwarves captured, the trolls fall to arguing “whether they should roast them slowly, or mince them fine and boil them, or just sit on them one by one and squash them into jelly.” Bilbo plays a Rumpelstiltskin-like riddle-game with Gollum for the ring. There are magical prohibitions. In Mirkwood, like so many places of magical peril, our heroes are warned not to leave the path; and when staying with the were-bear Beorn, they are told, “you must not stray outside until the sun is up, at your peril.” visions of three magical feasts, each bigger than the last, are what lure the travelers into danger. There’s a black river of forgetting, which places one of the dwarves into a magical coma like a lotus-eater. Smaug, with a gap in his jewel-armored belly under “the hollow of the left breast,” has an Achilles armpit.
Tolkien’s evocation of the creatures and their environments is first rate – from the dank underground labyrinth of the goblins where he first encounters Gollum, via the hallucinatory menace of Mirkwood with its predatory spiders, to the echoing halls of the abandoned Dwarvish stronghold under the Lonely Mountain. The dreamlike quality of the progress through Mirkwood (in a story full of dreams and dreamlike states) is especially effective. When Bilbo stabs a giant spider: “Then it went mad and leaped and danced and flung out its legs in horrible jerks, until he killed it with another stroke; and then he fell down and remembered nothing more for a long while.”
As the story progresses, the convivial narrative register of the opening sections starts to take on graver accents. “There was little grass, and before long there was neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished. They were come to the Desolation of the Dragon, and they were come at the waning of the year.” Tolkien is dipping, here, into the ornate registers of the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon sagas that he draws on: “A whirring noise was heard. A red light touched the points of standing rocks. The dragon came.”; “The others remained with Dain, for Dain dealt his treasure well.”
Smaug and his pile of ancient treasure is a straight lift from Beowulf – and the third part of Beowulf, at that; the autumnal phase of the story when Beowulf is an old man and his heroic vigor is in eclipse. The Hobbit has a very Anglo-Saxon worldview – one in which the heroic age is already passing into legend and modernday man (or hobbit) is left to walk in awe around its ruins. Gandalf explains that he discounted a full-frontal attack on the dragon:
‘That would be no good,’ said the wizard, ‘not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary)…
The epic register in The Hobbit, though present, is kept in balance with its hobbit-scale humor. Gandalf is as much twinkly surrogate grandparent as he is powerful arch-mage. Even Thorin’s deathbed speech – in contrast to the grave sonorities of the Grey Havens chapter in The Lord of the Rings – is touchingly brisk and matter-of-fact.
‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!’ Then Bilbo turned away, and he went by himself, and sat alone wrapped in a blanket, and, whether you believe it or not, he wept until his eyes were red and his voice was hoarse. He was a kindly little soul.
