How the Heather Looks Read online

  To John and Ian, and to Lucy

  who went back to find the door

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Caldecott Country

  2. The Open Road

  3. A Peak in Narnia

  4. In Quest of Arthur

  5. Down to Camelot

  6. The River Bank

  7. Johnny Crow’s Garden

  8. Looking at History

  9. Little Countries of the Mind

  10. Forests, Moors, and Gardens

  11. Beyond the Door

  Afterword

  Notes on Further Reading

  Foreword

  In 1958 our family came into a modest windfall – enough to put into effect a long-cherished dream of spending a summer holiday in England. My husband and I are each half English, we had each spent time in England as children, and each of us – by circumstance, education, and inclination – was steeped in English history and literature.

  We cannot claim erudition for our children, but books, conversation, games, genes, and osmosis had made Anglophiles of them. Lucy, aged two and a half, knew her nursery rhymes, having learned them from Randolph Caldecott’s Picture Books and L. Leslie Brooke’s Ring o’ Roses, both illustrated with scenes from English country life. She also knew Brooke’s Johnny Crow’s Garden and she had pored over the pictures in his Golden Goose Book and his illustrations in A Roundabout Turn by Robert H. Charles. When she was very young indeed she had been introduced to A. A. Milne’s Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin, and she was quite well acquainted with the world of Beatrix Potter. It would be another twelve-month before she began to read, but could one truly say that she was illiterate?

  Ian, almost nine, worried his teachers because he was a better listener than he was a reader, but he had managed to assimilate and accumulate an astonishing amount of lore. He was, in his way, as fond of history as his father, who holds a Ph.D. in the subject. He seemed unable to make anything of the mysteries of Dick and Jane (authors mercifully anonymous) but he liked to listen to Beowulf (also anonymous). His favorite indoor toys were wooden blocks, model soldiers, maps and dioramas. When outdoors, he and his friends engaged in elaborate war games which seemed to require that endless amounts of army surplus equipment be festooned from every knobby shoulder and hip bone. To the naked eye, these little wars may have seemed the ordinary contests between “good guys” and “bad,” but it was Romans and Britons, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Napoleon and Wellington who waged their battles in our suburbia.

  Ian also liked to draw. Sometimes he drew maps (of places both real and imaginary) but mostly he drew soldiers. In order to do a good job of it he pored over his own and his father’s books. He especially liked Howard Pyle’s illustrations of knights in armor. He also liked Life’s Picture History of Western Man, the Puffin Picture Book of Armor by Patrick Nicolle, Weapons: A Pictorial History by Edwin Tunis, and Robert Lawson’s illustrations for a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress. These were for looking, although he liked to hear the texts, too. For pure listening, Ian preferred Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He also liked ballads and folklore, archaeology and history, and the verse and poetry of A. A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Walter de la Mare. Revealingly, his favorite poem was “The Land of Counterpane,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Almost since he was born we had told Ian that he would be able to see “all that” when he went to England. Now, as Lucy was old enough to look and listen, we heard ourselves saying the same thing, with less conviction. Our children were so literal! They besieged us with questions. Would we see where Rat and Mole had had their picnic? Could we climb to the Enchanted Place at the Top of the Forest? Would we go down to towered Camelot? Could we pay a call on Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle? Privately we adults told each other that of course such places did not exist in reality, but the children’s faith was unfaltering – and unnerving. Perhaps, we said, a few of the places really did exist. Perhaps, we said cautiously, we could seek them out.

  We began by writing letters to the British Travel Association and the British Information Services. Both agencies were exceedingly kind, but not very helpful. The information we needed was not in their files. Pig iron production – but not Piglet! It is true that there were all sorts of guides to “Shakespeare Country” and “Scott Country” and “Hardy Country,” but these were not the landscapes sought by our children. We tried writing directly to authors. Some publishers would not forward letters, some authors would not answer, some authors were dead. We were undaunted. We did not want to be lion hunters. Places, not people, were what interested us. We would explore for ourselves.

  I ransacked our old favorite books, going over the familiar ground like a detective in search of clues. The Arthur Ransome books, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, even the Pooh books, had maps in the end papers. Were they totally imaginary or could we orient them to an atlas? I searched out more information at the public library and found more books to bring home and read aloud to the children. My husband, who is a reference librarian, brought home biographies and autobiographies of children’s authors for me to study. Perhaps something in a writer’s life would give a concrete clue to the places described in his books. A kind friend presented me with a twenty-year back file of Horn Book, the magazine of books and reading for children. I combed these for details concerning the lives and works of authors and illustrators.

  The more I read the more convinced I became that the children were right. Most places in children’s literature are real. We could find them if we searched. All we needed was faith. I was reminded of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

  I never saw a moor,

  I never saw the sea;

  Yet know I how the heather looks,

  And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God,

  Nor visited in heaven;

  Yet certain am I of the spot

  As if the chart was given.

  This book, then, is the story of how Ian and Lucy went to see for themselves “how the heather looks.” Ian and Lucy had the faith. It was left to their parents to arrange for passage and to invest in Bartholomew’s Road Atlas of Great Britain.

  CHAPTER 1

  Caldecott Country

  We were bound for Whitchurch, just thirty miles down the road from Liverpool. A few hours before, we had disembarked from a staid, broad-beamed Cunard liner, which had taken more than a week to cross the Atlantic. While still on shipboard we had discovered a 1957 Saturday Book in the ship’s library and had read a delightful article on Randolph Caldecott, the early illustrator of children’s books. Whitchurch, we read, was the town in which Caldecott had lived as a very young man, and scenes in the town and the countryside roundabout had been immortalized in his Picture Books.

  In a last-minute decision we had set it as a cautious destination for our first day’s journey. We were glad now that we had not been more ambitious. We had arranged months beforehand to rent a car at the docks, but when we were met by the car rental company’s agent we discovered that by some mischance or inefficiency we could not be supplied with the kind of car we had requested. We knew, of course, that English cars are small, by American standards, but the car actually supplied must have been built for midgets. Somehow we managed to wedge ourselves and four suitcases into an impossible space and to set off undaunted. Well, almost undaunted. There was something peculiar about the gearshift, which worked without benefit of clutch, but we told ourselves cheerfully that John would soon get the hang of it. He never did.

  Now we were racing down the Great Chester Road, on the wrong side, it seemed to us, in a strange car which we barely knew how
to rein in at the crossroads. We had hoped to see the famous arcades of Chester, but the road bypassed the town almost before we knew where we were, and town gave way to open countryside. Chester is where Randolph Caldecott was born and went to school. Thinking of him now as John tried to get the knack of shifting gears without a clutch, I was about to say that driving the new car put me in mind of the desperate John Gilpin on his runaway steed, perhaps Caldecott’s most successful portraiture. Looking at the grim-set look in my husband’s eye I decided to forgo the literary allusion.

  Instead, I turned my thoughts to Whitchurch. We planned to drive into town, consult the local librarian, take some Caldecott Picture Books out of the library or buy them in the local bookshop, and stroll about town identifying the house where he had lived, the familiar scenes he had sketched as background for the nursery rhymes. Ah, innocence! Suddenly, before we expected it, we saw a small brick building marked Whitchurch Council School standing by itself along the roadside. John stopped the car so Ian and I could go in and ask the teacher to direct us. I wondered what it would be like to talk to children who walked to school each morning over the very fields and country lanes made famous in the Caldecott illus trations. Did every household own a dog-eared copy or two, or did the teacher have the thrill and pleasure of introducing the books? If so, the experience must be akin to holding a child up to the mirror for the first time and letting him recognize what it is that the rest of the world holds dear.

  It was a one-room branch schoolhouse that we had found. The children, sitting at double desks, stared at us, round-eyed. Ian hung back at the door, too shy to enter. Despite the calendar’s claim to June, the air outside was chill and raw. Every door and window in the tiny schoolroom was open. The children sat with their feet on stone flags and I noticed that the walls were red brick, patchily covered with thin plaster. The thought flashed through my mind that even the children were burnished to the same hue as the bricks, as though they, too, had sprung from the clay. The boys sat with knobby red knees bare, gaping at Ian in his long flannel-lined blue jeans with turned-up cuffs. The young teacher had never heard of Randolph Caldecott. I explained as best I could, but she shook her head, not comprehending why Americans should come so far to look for a man who illustrated nursery rhymes. She obviously thought our quest frivolous and our interruption rude (which it may have been), but she suggested we continue into town and ask for more information at the Town Hall. Ian, who had blushed scarlet under the gaze of boys his own age, was glad to make his escape.

  We came to the square-towered church at the top of the High Street and plunged down the hill into the town. The shops and inns were crowded, people spilling out of the buildings, over the narrow sidewalks, and into the streets. At last we saw a building marked Town Hall and John suggested that Lucy and I hop out while he and Ian found a place to park. I had to hold Lucy in my arms to breach the crowd near the doorway, but once inside we made our way easily to a dank little library on the ground floor. The girl at the desk said that the librarian was on holiday, and she wrinkled her brow in thought when I asked about Randolph Caldecott. She had seen a book about him somewhere in the library, but it was not in the children’s section. She went to look in the shelves and came back with Henry Blackburn’s Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir written in 1886, the year Caldecott died. I settled gratefully to taking notes, resigning myself to the stark fact that none of Caldecott’s own books was to be had.

  Randolph Caldecott was a bright, handsome, pleasant boy when he came to Whitchurch in 1861. Not much is known of his early childhood except that it was a happy one and that he was head boy at the Henry VIII grammar school in Chester. There he is remembered as having spent hours drawing, modeling from clay, and carving from wood. He, like us, must have come down from Chester on the Great Road on the day he first came to Whitchurch. Perhaps an apprentice job in a bank does not seem to us ideal for a fifteen-year-old boy who loved beauty and the out-of-doors, but young Caldecott fell in love with Whitchurch from the very first. As careful and thorough with a column of figures as he was with his own drawings, he does not seem to have been in a state of rebellion against his apprenticeship. His zestfulness soon endeared him to his fellow workers and townspeople alike, for he made friends easily and joined in the life of town and countryside. His biographer and close friend, Henry Blackburn, reports that he took lodgings “in an old farmhouse about two miles from town where he used to go fishing and shooting, to the meets of hounds, to markets and cattle fairs.”

  At this point in my reading Lucy became restless. I took the book back to the desk and went out with her into the cobbled courtyard in the rear of the building. Travel with a two-year-old can be complicated, but it has its compensations. Because of Lucy I had left the musty library and we now found ourselves in the middle of a market fair, watching and listening in fascination as the hawkers cried their wares – cheap crockery, sharp knives, plastic shopping baskets. Before our very eyes we saw the end of an era as many a farmer’s wife rushed to buy the new garish pink or blue synthetic carryall in preference to her old hand-caned basket. My only comfort was uncharitable. The plastic handles looked as though they would break easily and in that case they could not be mended.

  Caldecott must have loved Whitchurch especially on days such as this, when the inns were filled to overflowing, when red-faced farmers argued the price of a bull on every street corner, when the farmers’ wives came to gossip and haggle at the stalls in the market place or the little shops that line the High Street. I have never seen so many beautiful babies. Beside them Lucy, usually considered rosy, looked a trifle pale and unhealthy. I found that Lucy, in her fleece-lined pale pink snow suit, and I, in my Joseph’s colors raincoat, were being stared at and studied, even as I was studying the local inhabitants. (This was the sort of scene that Caldecott would have loved to dash off for the pages of the Graphic!) The women, on that rainy day, bore little resemblance to the “lasses” in the Picture Books. They wore navy blue mackintoshes or brown or black wool coats, and they covered their heads with plastic hoods. The bare-kneed children wore high black boots and navy blue mackintoshes belted with a wide buckle at the waist. Only the men, and especially the old ones, seemed unchanged by time. True, the fabrics they wore were transformed by a century’s progress, but their silhouettes were the same as that of the old gaffers in Daddy Darwin’s Dovecote. The stained and colorless mackintoshes reached only to the knee, for all the world cut on the same lines as the peasant smocks worn a century ago. Boots had replaced gaiters, but the hats (whatever their shape on the day of purchase) were as round and limp as the one worn by the farmer who sows his corn in The House that Jack Built. And everywhere was the same broad, beefy countenance, also made familiar by that same farmer.

  John and Ian came shouldering their way through the crowd and we held a family council. The car had been parked in the inn yard at the Swan but there were no rooms for hire. We had arrived in Whitchurch on the day of the semiannual cattle market. Farmers had flocked there from all over Shropshire and beyond. It was already afternoon. We should decide about a night’s lodging, but we were too tired and hungry to make decisions. We bought tomatoes from one stall, cheese from another, and made our way back to the car to drive out into the country.

  Down a narrow lane we found a wide (though muddy) spot to park near a gate, and pulled over for a picnic. Never had food tasted so good! After nine days of elaborate menus aboard ship we reveled in this simple fare and the freedom to eat it when and where we chose. The children sat astride the gate and gazed across the misty fields to wide horizons and rolling hills beyond. A blackbird sang out, the notes hanging like dewdrops in the still air. Suddenly, we heard a “whuffle” and the sound of heavy hoofs coming toward us down the road. A huge horse, similar to the one in A Farmer Went Riding, came into sight over the hedges. Two ruddy-faced boys sat upon his broad back, not astride but with one pair of feet dangling “port,” the other, “starboard.” Like the country people whom we had se
en in the market place, they wore boots to their knees. Their bony young wrists and hamlike hands shot out from rough tweed sleeves be-spangled with drops of mist. They seemed all of a piece with their heavy fetlocked steed, but one of the boys slid from the Percheron’s back and unfastened the gate. No word was spoken. The children scrambled down quickly and we all watched in silence as the giant horse was led around our little car. I do not think any of us would have been greatly surprised to see the Ford Anglia crushed like an eggshell beneath one of the hoofs. In a moment boys and steed were lost to sight along the hedge, but we stood staring, as though we had seen a vision. This was pure Caldecott!

  We drove back into Whitchurch and counted ourselves lucky to find a hotel room for ourselves and Lucy at the Old Vic, and a tiny, chintz-hung room for Ian in a respectable pub a few doors up the street. The motherly middle-aged barmaid said she would see that he was tucked in properly at night and that she would bring him his breakfast in the morning. We then set out to explore the town and to find if anyone could give us a clue to where Randolph Caldecott had lived. The town museum was like a family attic, filled with stuffed ducks, an embroidered waistcoat, a magnificent Ark with Mr. and Mrs. Noah and one hundred animals hand-carved from wood. A few faded brown ink sketches by Caldecott hung on the wall. The old woman who acted as char and custodian knew only that he had been a famous man, but where or why she was not sure. John was almost sure he had seen similar sketches in the hallway at The Swan, so we walked down the hill to Watergate Street. There could be no doubt. The Swan was the original of The Angel, the inn to which the Three Jovial Huntsmen had repaired after the chase, but the proprietor’s wife knew little beyond that. She suggested the newspaper office. The editor remembered that Caldecott had died “in Florida – you know, one of those South Seas places,” because he had read it in an old book by Blackburn that had been kicking around the office until he presented it to the library. We seemed to have gone full circle.