How the Heather Looks Page 12

  My mother’s book, a legacy from her childhood, is called The Parade, 1897: A Gift Book for Boys and Girls, and is edited by Gleeson White. Besides Brooke, the book includes such artists as Laurence Housman, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley. The list of authors includes Richard Le Gallienne, Sir Richard Burton, Mrs. Molesworth, and other eminent Victorians. Gleeson White was editor of The Studio, the most influential art magazine in London in the 1890s. In the winter issue of 1898, White wrote an article entitled “Children’s Books and Their Illustrators,” the first serious criticism of children’s-book design.

  Through the pages of his magazine, White appealed for the importance of being earnest – with children. He made his plea to a most sophisticated audience, an audience whose eye for line and detail had been made sharply aware by such diverse inspiration as a Japanese print, a page in The Yellow Book, a gown from Paris, an all-white room by Whistler. There was also a new concern for natural form, the viewpoint of art nouveau, both Romantic and scientific.

  A young artist living in London in the 1890s would not fail to notice whatever interested the Studio crowd, especially if it applied to his own field of illustration. L. Leslie Brooke had a sense of humor and a good eye. He had an almost Romanesque view of leaves and grasses, flowers, and small animals, which gave to their shape and textures a jewel-like intensity. Perhaps it was a growing sense of proportion that helped him to unclutter his work. Perhaps it was the influence of the art world and the help of serious criticism. I like to think it was the sweep and reality of the Downs.

  We were made to think of Leslie Brooke’s Three Little Pigs as we drove closer to Harwell. On either hand lay sun-flooded fields studded with the sort of hayricks I remembered from my first trip to England at the age of ten. They seemed to have disappeared in other parts of England. Farmers nowadays evidently find it easier and cheaper to squeeze the hay into tight rectangular bundles by the use of machinery and then to cover the stacks with tarpaulin or corrugated tin. In the fields near Harwell, however, we saw the hay stacked in the old way – circular and thatch-covered – so that here and there we saw what looked like a wattle hut or little cottage, but was really a hayrick. I said something about their looking like doll houses, but John held out for early Saxons. Ian wanted to know if Saxons had settled Jamestown, Virginia, because, if so, he had helped build a little house like that. We had visited Jamestown a week or so before the restored village was officially opened; a friendly workman had allowed Ian to help pulverize oyster shells for him and add them to his “stew” of mud and chopped straw.

  I could see John struggling with his cautious historian’s conscience. He cannot bear to oversimplify. “Well … yes … in a way we could say they were Saxons. But, on the other hand, it was much more complicated than that….”

  “I just wanted to know about straw houses,” said Ian a bit hastily. He was determined to be polite, but he knew about historians. They do run on. It was Lucy, though, who saved him from a long lecture.

  “Piggies live in straw houses,” she said with sudden firmness, then was quite put out when we all laughed. After all, what happened to the first little pig was no laughing matter.

  Harwell is not as remote from civilization as Blewbury, yet it is still a pleasant little village. A shade more suburban, perhaps, it is not as self-consciously “quaint” and relies far less on whitewashed brick. The architecture is a medley of period and style. The brick is apricot and mellow – the color of Harwell cherries. Most of the houses had gardens enclosed by high brick walls. We could see the tops of trees and decided that almost everyone in the village must have a small orchard in which to grow the famous cherries. Baskets of the translucent fruit were set out for sale along the roadsides and John and Ian went off to buy some. I took Lucy with me and set off in the opposite direction to look for L. Leslie Brooke’s house.

  So much of the village was enclosed behind walls that it was disappointing, but at length Lucy and I paused before an ancient cottage that fronted on the main street. It had such a high pitched roof that I wondered if it could have been the model for the one in “There Was a Man”:

  There was a man, and he had nought,

  And robbers came to rob him;

  He crept up to the chimney pot

  And then they thought they had him.

  A woman was standing in the doorway of the cottage and I asked if we might take a picture. She would give her consent, she said, only if we would wait a few minutes until school let out and we would take her little girl’s picture at one and the same time. I tried to explain that I was not a professional photographer, but she appraised my camera and its leather case and I could see that she thought she had struck a bargain.

  She was curious about why I should want to take a picture of her house, so I changed my tack and began new explanations, this time stressing the fact that I was a writer – not a photographer – and that I had come to Harwell to seek out the scenes made familiar by a famous artist, an artist who illustrated children’s books. She wrinkled her forehead when I mentioned Leslie Brooke and when I asked her if she knew of a place called Pillar House. She had never heard of Leslie Brooke, but Pillar House was just a few doors down the street. She hesitated, perhaps sorry she had admitted as much and afraid I might leave right then. A new thought seemed to strike her. Would we like to come inside?

  “Mind the child doesn’t trip,” she cautioned, as Lucy and I entered the tiny living room. I gazed about enchanted. The house was hardly bigger than the length and breadth of this one room. The beams were so low that if John had been there he would have cracked his head. How clean everything was! I wondered how many hours it took – how many centuries of spring cleaning – for whitewashed walls to achieve the texture of fresh-ironed linen. And the floor! No wonder she had warned us to be careful, for no two flags were of the same height or thickness, yet they were scrubbed to hues of pink and lavender, gray and mauve. Everything was out of plumb – jambs and lintels, sills and mantelpiece. A flight of stone steps wound upward to a loft above. Each step was worn by the feet of centuries.

  Now I knew where I had seen all this before. This was the house in which the crooked man had lived, along with his crooked cat, and the cat’s crooked mouse. No wonder they had seemed so well content in Leslie Brooke’s pictures. For all its craziness, the little house seemed to me the most solid piece of architecture I have known, rooted in time as well as space.

  The woman went over to the mantelpiece and moved the jar of flowers there closer to the center. She did it automatically, as a woman pushes a strand of hair from her forehead. It must have been a losing battle to keep anything placed squarely on that chimney piece, so shiny and black with age, but this woman was not the sort to give up easily. She interrupted my thoughts by asking, quite suddenly, how old Lucy was. As with most English people, she considered my child enormous.

  “My little girl was hardly as old as yours when we moved in here,” she said. “Of course we thought it was only temporary, but you know how hard it is to find housing, especially since the war. We put our name down for one of the Council houses – they’re new, you know, with real sinks and electricity laid on. I thought I’d go wild at first. I kept making my husband go check and see where we were on the list, and I used to wheel the baby in her carriage to watch the builders. Not that I always had time for that, though. I like things kept neat and in good order, and it’s hard work to keep this house that way.”

  “Oh, but it’s charming!” I burst out. “So small and snug and old.” Then I stopped and must have blushed furiously. How patronizing I must sound. What did I know about the heartbreak of keeping house in such a place – I who, with all my gadgets, am yet an abysmal housekeeper? How awful, if one really thought neatness and tidiness so important, to be sentenced to a lifetime of the picturesque!

  “Do you have long to wait?” I asked. “You must be fairly close to the top of the list by this time.” I tried to make my voice cheerful and sympathetic.

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sp; She shook her head and gave an odd little smile. “Oh, we got to the top all right,” she said, “but I wouldn’t move after all.” She must have sensed my astonishment, because she laughed outright. “My husband and all the neighbors thought I had gone clear out of my mind, but, …” she paused and let her eyes sweep the tiny room, “I found that living in this house had sort of changed me. I had worked so hard to make it clean and comfortable, and our garden was just coming into its own and I had got the old cherry tree to bloom again…. My husband decided to make some repairs before we moved (we didn’t want anyone to talk behind our backs after we left) and he cut into the walls. He found the house was much older than we had thought. It must be the oldest house in the village, and what’s more, it’s built on top of something even older. I went up and took another look at those Council houses and they looked raw and new and ugly, and you can hear the neighbors through the walls…. Ugh! I wouldn’t have any more to do with the flimsy things. And, of course,” she added demurely, “the landlord was only too anxious to renew our lease. He knows he has good tenants, and we made good terms.”

  When I went outside again, the village street was a maelstrom of dust and school children – thick boots, sturdy knees, rosy cheeks. It was late in the afternoon and traffic was pouring into town from the auto factories and atomic plant down toward Oxford. The village traffic director, in long white “overall,” stood in the center of the street, his face the color of Harwell brick. I diagnosed his trouble as high blood pressure, brought about from the constant frustration of trying to direct traffic at the very spot where the ancient Downs-life ends and the Atomic Age begins.

  John and Ian rejoined us, and we asked the policeman where we could find Pillar House. He pointed to a house across the street and we all stared at it. The house was whitewashed Georgian brick with a little portico at the entrance. I could not remember having seen it in either Ring o’ Roses or The Golden Goose. To one side of it was a high brick wall which evidently enclosed a garden. The double gate was open and sagging on its hinges. The traffic had suddenly dispersed and the policeman came over to talk to us. He had never heard of Leslie Brooke, he said. The house was now rented by an RAF captain, his wife, and two little boys. They were all away for the day and we could not possibly be allowed to enter the gate.

  Ian and Lucy were standing in the gateway, the only safe place for them since houses and walls rose abruptly from the street with no sidewalks to stand on. A car was coming, so we all drew back to stand with the children. I stole a good look at the garden. There was something vaguely familiar about it, but I was aware that the Guardian of Britain had his eye on me and I did not dare act too interested. The general impression I received was that the garden was not sacrosanct and that no one would greatly care if we went in. The lawn was mowed – but only just – and what flowers there were were peren nials much in need of weeding. Some toy trucks (or lorries) had been left out under a tree and I could see that whoever owned them had been having a glorious time making a network of muddy roads. A battered pail and spade suggested mud pies. Farther back I could see a shed. Something about its roof line tugged at my memory and I knew I must see it.

  Ian edged through the gate to get a better look at the trucks and Lucy had her eye on the pail. John was in deep conversation with the policeman when Lucy eluded my grasp and ran through the gate. By the time I had run after her and picked her up it seemed rather foolish to argue whether or not we should enter the Promised Land. I made my way to the back of the garden and stood back to look at the shed. It was obviously being used as a garage. There was a puddle of oil and several old inner tubes and tires about, but at one time the building must have been a stable. No, that wasn’t it either. It looked more the sort of place where a cow and a few chickens would be kept. A definite picture leaped into my mind and then I knew I had it:

  Cock-a-doodle-doo!

  My dame has lost her shoe;

  My master’s lost his fiddling stick

  And don’t know what to do.

  I looked up at the roof to see if any magpies were watching us, as in Ring o’ Roses. The roof was slate, but the slates looked fairly new and I wondered if there had once been thatch. There was something else about the roof that intrigued me. I walked into the garage and looked up. A large skylight had been cut into it to flood the interior with light. Of course! The place had once been used as an artist’s studio. This was probably the place where Leslie Brooke worked, looking out toward his beloved garden, those early years in Harwell.

  Leslie Brooke once wrote to a friend that his three great passions were children, books, and gardens. Johnny Crow’s garden was a much grander and more formal affair than the plot of ground that lay about Pillar House, but I am sure that in his years there Leslie Brooke “plied rake and hoe” with all the enthusiasm of a frustrated Londoner lately removed to the country. He must have been very proud of his rose trees, for they appear in several of his illustrations. We see them in the Johnny Crow books and in the story of the Three Bears. The best picture in Mrs. Hayden’s Travels Round Our Village is one of an old fellow in a flat straw hat, leaning on his hoe and gazing at “The First Bud on the Rose Tree.” Only a true gardener would have sought to capture that moment.

  Lucy had run back to be with her father and when I arrived he had scooped her up in his arms and was holding her over his shoulder. Ian was fairly dancing with impatience. I thought it was because he had been forbidden to play with the trucks but that was not it.

  “Look!” he said, excitedly. “‘Simple Simon’! See, here’s the pail … and the tree (he pointed upward)…. And there’s the way where the door goes out to the garden.”

  We gazed at where he was pointing and saw that he was quite right. True, there was no circular bench under the tree and the thrifty flower border that flourishes in the pictures had now been beaten into clay, but surely we were standing in the same garden. Leslie Brooke was hard at work on The Golden Goose Book while living at Pillar House. Our family likes to think that the garden there reappears in “The Story of the Three Bears.” But it is not only flowers that bloom in the climate of that place. Childhood flourishes, too. The antics of the Little, Small, Wee Bear must be very much like those of L. L. Brooke’s own small boys and the essential “familyishness” of the Bear family must have been borrowed from a source close at hand. Children are still enchanted by the warmth and coziness and “just-like-us” feeling that permeate the illustrations of the “Three Bears” story. I think that Leslie Brooke would be glad to know that two small boys still inhabit the garden of Pillar House. I do not think he would mind that Ian and Lucy trespassed there.

  Although the rest of us were quite content that we had found Johnny Crow’s garden, Lucy was not. Where was the “lion with the green and yellow tie on”? And the “giraffe who made everybody laugh”? A few days after our expedition to Harwell we decided to abandon the Henley hotel and go up to London to the zoo. We took train and taxi to the zoo and found, when we arrived, that it is one of the most efficient enterprises in Britain. The British take zoos seriously. I, on the other hand, detest them, but I had happy memories of the London one since I had been taken there at the age of ten by two maiden aunts. That trip had somehow involved Hampton Court and a trip by boat, but this was Lucy’s day and I knew enough not to combine events with a two-year-old.

  Although Lucy had learned to walk miles and had developed a sturdy pair of legs I was delighted to find that someone (Christopher Robin’s denizen of “the Superintendent’s House”?) had thought to provide wheeled strollers for a small fee. There was also a nicely illustrated guide handed to us at the gate which mapped out a short tour, a long tour, and (rather touchingly, I thought) a tour for a rainy day. Unhesitatingly I chose a short tour for a muggy day. I was wilting before we started and it proved to be a wise decision. Lucy and I trudged (or, rather, Lucy lolled and I trudged) over a circumscribed fraction of the zoo territory and seemed to see a great many small animals whose names I did no
t know (a bidger, a badger, a bodger?) simply because those were the cages where no one else was standing.

  I was just as fascinated by the people as by the animals. London is still the center of a great empire, but why do people from Africa and India and such exotic places flock to see their native animals in a London zoo? Is it because they are homesick? Or because they can’t see “native” animals in their own countries? Or, as I suspect, is there a sort of identification with the beasts themselves, a kind of symbolized nationalism? I must admit that I felt a real surge of affection for the biffalo-buffalo-bison even though I rarely see one in the suburbs where I live.

  I noticed ladies in saris standing transfixed before the tigers’ cage and, for all I know, there were Russians gazing at the bears. But the most splendid was an African chieftain staring up at a giraffe. He was over six feet tall and dressed in full regalia. The orange, yellow, and black patterns on the chieftain’s full-flowing robes seemed to reflect the markings of the giraffe and to recall the heat and shimmer of Africa. For a long moment man and beast stood staring at each other, haughty and enigmatic, then the man turned and swept an amused glance toward where Lucy and I stood, open-mouthed. Next moment, with long unhurried strides, he set off towards the gate, head and shoulders towering above the rest of the crowd. Now, why had he come?

  But we were impatient for the chimpanzees’ tea party. By some miracle we were able to find John and Ian, buy our tickets, and file into the tiny circus surrounded by benches. All around us were families like ourselves, tired, hot, excited. A keeper led in a pair of chimpanzees and they sat down at a little table in the center of the ring. An assistant brought in the tea – an enormous pot very like the one in Johnny Crow’s New Garden.

  Till the Chimpanzee

  Said: “Shall I Make the Tea?”

  These particular chimpanzees began seriously enough. Tea time in Britain is as fraught with significance as any Zen ceremony, and a reverent hush fell over the audience as the first decorous cup was poured. There followed a second cup, but by this time enthusiasm began to overflow. There followed a third and fourth cup in rapid succession, with more and more tea being slopped over the little table.