How the Heather Looks Read online

  A soft rain had begun to fall so we ran for shelter. The garden was conventionally lovely, but we were quite unprepared for what lay inside the house. Mrs. Milne opened her door to all the colors of spring. In some of the pictures in the Pooh books Christopher is shown as living inside the trunk of a tree. Perhaps a house in a tree trunk would look something like this. A subtle translucent effect was achieved by the use of all the spring-leaf shades – from pale yellow walls to palest greens, deeper greens, rich golds and the red of two Chinese-lacquer chests set in opposite corners of the room. An arrangement of fresh-picked branches of leaves brought in from the woods served to heighten the effect.

  “I am house proud,” Mrs. Milne announced happily, seeing my response, and I could believe it and be glad. The room was of a peculiar shape with little nooks and crannies. Perhaps it had been made from several rooms. The mantel ran the breadth of the huge chimney over the hearth, then unexpectedly turned a corner to run at right angles along the side of the chimney. The fireplace itself was a tiny, tiny little mousehole of an opening at the hearth, set with bits of kindling and miniature pine cones. Above it, in ever-widening radii, half circles of brick were set to repeat the half-moon shape at the base. Ian had walked around the bend of the chimney piece and was staring at a small oil portrait of Christopher Robin. The picture was propped against the chimney, and Christopher was propped among many pillows. “Done when he was sick in bed,” said Mrs. Milne. “Sneezles and wheezles?” asked Ian, and she seemed pleased.

  Next Mrs. Milne showed us some pillows she had made for her gold-colored couch. They were patchwork, but the patches were cut from velvets, silks, satins, and brocades, the shades ranging from rich amber to old malmsey. I wanted to ask if one of them was a remnant from James James Morrison Morrison’s mother’s golden gown, when Mrs. Milne interrupted my thought to say that Mr. Shepard had come to visit a few months before to make supplementary drawings for a new edition of Pooh. He had been so enchanted with her needlework that he had included the pillows in one of his new color sketches. She went into the next room and brought back a large fat volume, The World of Pooh. She showed us a picture of Pooh doing his Stoutness Exercises, the pillows on a chair beside him. She had a pen with her, and on the flyleaf of the book she wrote: “ To Ian Bodger from Christopher Robin’s mother, Daphne Milne.”

  The sun was making a watery reappearance outdoors and it was time to go. We stood out on the drive, discussing the best places for a picnic. The Enchanted Place at the Top of the Forest would have the best view, but Pooh-stick Bridge was nearer. “Besides,” said Mrs. Milne, “small boys like water.” We drove down the lane as she instructed and parked the car near the gates to a large poultry farm. We set off on foot across the fields, following a path through the wet grass. A pair of turkeys and a goose started toward us. Lucy clutched my hand a little tighter and I tried not to think of those formidable geese that had frightened us in Cornwall. Ian was braver. He waved his battered Pooh in the air and shouted, “Shoo!” Surely these must be the “silly old dragons” described in “Us Two” in Now We Are Six.

  “Let’s look for dragons,” I said to Pooh.

  “Yes, let’s,” said Pooh to Me.

  We crossed the river and found a few –

  “Yes, those are dragons all right,” said Pooh.

  “As soon as I saw their beaks I knew.

  That’s what they are,” said Pooh, said he.

  “That’s what they are,” said Pooh.

  “Let’s frighten the dragons,” I said to Pooh.

  “That’s right,” said Pooh to Me.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said to Pooh,

  And I held his paw and I shouted “Shoo!

  Silly old dragons!” – and off they flew.

  “I wasn’t afraid,” said Pooh, said he,

  “I’m never afraid with you.”

  The big birds ran off and a moment later our feet struck the boards of the fabled bridge. It was quite an ordinary bridge, really, but it gave us more of a thrill than any of the famous bridges that straddle the rivers of England. “Now we’re really living in a book,” said Ian, and even Lucy knew that we had “arrived.” Pooh and Piglet were propped up against the bridge rail and watched in what we interpreted as contented silence while the children threw twigs and branches into the muddy stream below. The sedgy waters were disappointing in that they did not afford a really rousing game of Pooh-sticks, but there is always satisfaction in knowing that one is doing the right thing at the right place at the right time. John and I unwrapped ham sandwiches we had had packed at the hotel and handed them around, then settled our backs against the bridge posts, the better to watch the scene before us. The sun had come out and steam was rising from the woods, the fields, and even the bridge. “This is the life,” said John, and lay down full length on the bridge. Soon he was gently snoring.

  But what goes up must come down. In no time at all the steam turned into mist, the mist into rain. John woke with a start and a snort and we all scrambled back into the car. Down the lane we went again, back onto the main road. Mrs. Milne had said that the Enchanted Place described in The House at Pooh Corner would be about two miles away and that we could recognize it by the pine trees. But we found ourselves in a forest of pine trees, obviously some sort of new plantation set out by the government to confuse us.

  As the road began to climb, however, the soil seemed to heave itself up in sandy embankments and the trees thinned out so that now and then we could glimpse the way ahead. And then, on the very top of the forest, we saw a hill which stood out all by itself. It was crowned with a circle of pine trees, quite different from the shaggy little fir trees we had seen below. These were old trees, bare and wind-swept and full of character, and it was strange how the very moment we saw them silhouetted against the skyline we knew that they were the ones in Shepard’s illustrations.

  The road seemed to lead straight to the foot of the hill, then turned off at such an alarming angle that we were afraid we would lose our bearings. We pulled to the side of the road and tried to decide what to do. Lucy was asleep, so John stayed behind in the car with her, and Ian and I proceeded straight ahead on foot. Straight ahead meant straight up. The air was stifling, the way steep. Ian and I clambered up the hillside, clinging to gorse and bracken as we went, then slid down into a little gully on the other side. We soon discovered that there was not one hillside, but a series of dunes. It was all right for Christopher to expound the glories of “upping and upping,” but I soon found myself short of breath.

  Even Ian was slowing down. I made a last desperate rush to catch up with him so that together we could crawl over the lip that jutted out from the top of the hillside. I lay there gasping for a moment, then found myself gazing into the pale blue eyes of a startled picnicker. He was sitting in the lap of civilized luxury. A primus stove hissed beneath a kettle, his family lay or lolled about in attitudes of ease and comfort, a radio blared from the dashboard of the Morris Minor parked on the roadside beside him. The road was wrapped around the brow of the hill. Above us was the tuft of pine trees to remind us where we were. The trees were guarded by a strand of barbed wire.

  I stole a glance at Ian and saw incredulity mixed with disappointment. Still panting, we tried to pretend we had clambered up the sandy precipice merely to look at the view. On another hill nearby were some steel signal towers. Far below us stretched green fields and hedgerows, the land tilting toward the distant sea. At our feet a geodetic marker had been sunk into the ground to give the compass points and the number of counties one could see from there. Months later I came across a paragraph in Christopher Trent’s The Changing Face of England:

  On the heights of Ashdown Forest I could find the faint marks of prehistoric entrenchments, one at least pinpointed by a circle of pine trees planted by romantic antiquaries of the last century. Nearby the skyline has been transformed by the tall masts of a wartime radar station.

  Perhaps it would have helped to know that early Sa
xons, fighting their way clear of the Weald, had found this spot to make their camp. We had come to seek the ghost of a little boy and his stuffed bear, but there were older ghosts abroad on that hillside.

  I felt a tug at my sleeve. “Aren’t we going to go in?” asked Ian. He pointed to where the barbed wire trailed toward the ground. I held down the wire with my foot while Ian clambered over, then he did the same for me. Together we walked toward the center of the little grove of trees. It was very quiet, like a church. All of a sudden we realized that we could no longer hear the blaring radio. “It is enchanted!” said Ian, and we sat down to rest. It was curiously comfortable, and I thought of the description in The House at Pooh Corner:

  Being enchanted, its floor was not like the floor of the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green. It was the only place in the Forest where you could sit down carelessly without getting up again almost at once and looking for somewhere else….

  The breeze stirred through the branches and fanned our hot cheeks. Ian turned over on his stomach and kicked his heels in the air. After a while he began to gather together a store of little pine cones which littered the soft sward beneath the trees. He filled the pockets of his mackintosh with them, then filled his trouser pockets. We rested a while longer, then, by mutual consent, rose and walked back toward the dip in the barbed wire, blinking in the strong light as we came out near the picnickers. We plunged off the side of the road and, slipping and sliding, made our way over the shoulders and slopes of the dunes, back to our car. We stopped then and looked back toward the hill, thinking about those last few paragraphs in the Pooh books when Christopher Robin bids farewell to childhood and the right to go Anywhere, do Nothing:

  So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

  Lucy was still asleep, but John yawned and stretched as we opened the car doors. Ian reached into his pocket and held out a pine cone towards him.

  “What? What’s that?” asked John.

  “It’s a pine cone,” said Ian. And then, rather shyly, “It’s a sort of seizin.” But whether it was to England or the Enchanted Place he did not say.

  From Tunbridge Wells we telephoned ahead and made reservations at the Northampton Hotel, partly because we had to be assured of rooms during the August Bank Holiday weekend, and partly because it seemed as good a place as any to use as headquarters while we explored the Midlands. But mostly we chose it because of what T. H. White had written of his heroine, in Mistress Masham’s Repose:

  She lived in an enormous house in the wilds of Northamptonshire, which was about four times longer than Buckingham Palace, but was falling down. It had been built by one of her ducal ancestors who had been a friend of the poet Pope’s, and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honor of General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia, and others of the same kidney.

  Northampton did not seem at all wild. Indeed, it was disappointingly civilized, and the hotel was the dullest and most modern in which we stayed during our entire trip. It occurred to us that the libraries would be closed over the holiday, and that if we intended to find out about Malplaquet (the name of the place in Mistress Masham’s Repose) we had better move fast. John set out almost at once to the library. He came back most disappointed. He had not been able to find anything in Northamptonshire that remotely resembled T. H. White’s description. Being a good reference librarian, he had checked in Who’s Who to find if White had ever lived anywhere in Northamptonshire, but found no clue. “The closest he ever came was when he taught school in Buckinghamshire, the next county over,” he said.

  It began to look as though we had come on a wild-goose chase and, what was worse, we were stuck. Until the Bank Holiday was over there was no place to move, since every hotel and inn in England would be filled to overflowing. Resignedly we decided to dig in and make the best of it. The next afternoon, since Lucy was sleeping, Ian and I decided to explore the city and to find the library in order to follow up any clues about the location of Malplaquet. John suggested that I try talking to the children’s librarian and to the young man in the reference department. The day before he had seemed interested if not particularly helpful.

  The Northampton children’s library had an extensive collection, high standards, several professional librarians and, most important, a copy of Mistress Masham’s Repose. When, however, I asked the librarian if she knew where I could find the place described in the book, she assumed a kind and patient air. The book, she explained, was pure fiction and read aloud to me several of T. H. White’s extravagances to prove her point. I began to feel a little foolish. Soon she would be explaining to me that there are no Lilliputians! I do not think she would have been in the least impressed if I had countered with The Geography and Chronology of Gulliver’s Travels by Arthur E. Case (Princeton University Press, 1927). Professor Case writes of an “old gentleman” who, soon after the First Book of Gulliver’s Travels had been published, reported that he had held conversation with a seafaring man who had told him exactly where lay the neighboring countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. The old gentleman planned to go home at once to consult his maps! Professor Case places the two little countries between New Holland and New Zealand – conveniently expunging Australia in order to do so. I should not have been abashed by that librarian!

  She was very kind, however, in allowing me to take a copy of Mistress Masham upstairs to the reference room. Leaving Ian behind in the children’s room, I went in search of the young man whom John had consulted the day before. I found him without difficulty and he immediately recalled John as an American searching for interesting ruins in Northamptonshire. This time I had something more tangible to offer him. The moment I opened my copy of Mistress Masham and read out the paragraphs describing Malplaquet, a great light seemed to dawn. He did know such a place, but it was not in Northamptonshire at all. It was Stowe House, the family seat of the Buckinghams – over in Buckinghamshire, of course. “It’s simply enormous. Drove the chaps broke, you know. Had to sell it off for a school….” It was then I remembered what John had found in Who’s Who: T. H. White had taught at Stowe School, Bucks.

  The young man fairly glowed with excitement and enthusiasm. Stowe, he explained, is one of the newest of the great public schools, having been founded in 1921. In order to reach its present state of eminence in such a short time, it makes a point of being unusually severe not only with the boys who go there as students, but with the public and parents as well. No one is ever allowed to visit, except (and here the young man fairly burst with excitement) on such occasions as when the school is empty of students: Easter, Christmas, and the August Bank Holiday. “And then only with special permission,” he hastened to add.

  “Do you think we could get it – the permission, I mean?”

  “Well, you do sound most frightfully American,” he said. “It’s worth a try. You could say you were doing research. Americans always are. Didn’t your husband say something about Pope or Swift? I know for a fact that Pope used to stay there. He wrote a couplet about it. I’m not so sure about Swift…. Anyway, you could telephone, there’s no time for a letter, and try to get permission.”

  He went off to fetch me a telephone book, but that was not all he brought back with him. In his arms was a huge, bound volume, almost two feet high. It was the list and description of articles for sale on occasion of the auction of the Duke of Buckingham’s estate. He opened the vast tome on a slanted lectern for me and left me to take notes. Fascinated, I turned the pages. Everything had been put up for sale, from the dining table (described by White as being “long as a cricket pitch”), to crested chamber pots. T. H. White must have consulted the list when he described the wonders of Malplaquet at the beginning of the book, and when he chronicled the bewildered Professor’s sea
rch for the lost Maria. The Professor had wandered through endless rooms filled with unused and useless objects. T. H. White all but quotes the bill of sale, using the same capitals and florid prose that the auctioneer adapted to describe the neoclassical magnificence. Here is the official description of the First Day’s Sale (there were twenty-one days in all):

  The Gardens and Grounds at Stowe included in this lot are of world renown, being 272 acres in extent, enclosed by a sunk fence nearly three miles in circumference. Hill, valley, streams and lakes with superb views, vistas and groves laid out by Great Architects and Landscape Gardeners of bygone days are in full maturity.

  Within the gardens, the water spreads out into a broad lake known as the OCTAGON LAKE which, dividing itself into branches, flows through the valley East and West, one end being concealed amidst a maze of woods where it falls over some artificial ruins and forms a second or lower lake known as THE LAKE. Upon the upper lake are three small islands on one of which, embosomed amidst evergreens, stands Congreve’s Monument.

  OTHER MAGNIFICENT BUILDINGS, TEMPLES AND MONUMENTS of Historical interest are beautifully situated in the grounds commanding wonderful views from one to another, or over surrounding parklands.

  They include the Boycott Pavillion at the SW corner of the gardens, the Temple of Venus, the Statue of Queen Caroline, the Bell Gate Pavillion, the Temple of Friendship, the Palladian Bridge, The Rotunda, The Temple of Bacchus, The Museum, The Temple of Ancient Virtue, Captain Grenville’s Monument, the Gothic Temple, The Doric Arch, The Temple of British Worthies, the Gothic Cross, the Cobham Monument, the Queen’s Building, the Temple of Concord and Victory, and the Vale of Pastoral Poetry, and others….

  In addition to the above, in the grounds are The Shepherd’s Cave, the Pebble Alcove, and Dido’s Cave. The Latter has been the Scene of Royal Hospitality on More than One Occasion; George the Second passed many Festive Hours at the Place….