How the Heather Looks Read online

  Back in our room at the Old Vic, I stood at the window and looked down at the street. An estate agent’s office was almost directly across from us and it occurred to me that this was a place that might have in its files the facts of who lived where when. John was still game, so out we went again. Two extremely young men (not much older than a certain bank apprentice must have been) came to the counter to wait on us. Glancing about, I seemed to recognize the establishment of Mrs. Mary Blaize, the lady pawnbroker satirically described in Oliver Goldsmith’s rhymes and further brought to life by Caldecott’s illustrations in The Great Panjandrum Picture Book. It seemed not unlikely that she would have dabbled in real estate on the side, her sense of business being unerring. The two young men explained that their employer was away “on assessments,” but they would do their best for us. Yes, they had heard of Caldecott, but surely we were not interested in so minor and uninteresting a person? Everyone else who came to town inquired about Edward German, the composer, a truly famous person who had owned a very grand house besides.

  The two young men could hardly hide their disdain at my ignorance, but wishing to be polite they turned the conversation to sports. Once again they had me at a disadvantage, and once again my husband stepped in to rescue the tattered remnants of American reputation. The talk switched back and forth from Newport to Henley, from Wimbledon to the World Series. It occurred to me that Whitchurch clerks have changed very little from Caldecott’s day. Evidently the young men of the town have always lived and breathed the air of the sporting world, although I was willing to wager that neither of these two gentlemen had ever ridden forth to hounds on a lumbering farm horse, or tramped miles over the snowy fields to hunt rabbits. They looked as though they gleaned their knowledge from the “telly.”

  Finally we were able to extricate from them (after some checking in the files) that Caldecott had lived at Wirswell: “Under the railroad bridge, sharp to the left, up the bank.” We would have to inquire among the houses when we got there. But were we absolutely sure that we did not want to take a run out to see Edward German’s place? When they auctioned off Mr. German’s estate (“the most splendid auction ever held in these parts, sir!”) there had been a cardboard box full of sketches by Caldecott. (“Just scraps of paper, you know.”) No one had wanted them particularly, and the young men remembered that the estate agent had been quite annoyed, because he had hoped for some bidding. Finally the whole box was sold off to someone who rather fancied the hunting scenes.

  “Pity you weren’t there,” said the young man pleasantly. “I think he paid only a couple of guineas for the lot!” John claims he had to support me, pale and tottering, from the office.

  Getting to sleep that night was difficult. The crowds continued to mill about directly below our windows, and although it seemed at least two hundred years since we had left our ship that morning our beds seemed to pitch and toss as though we were still on the Atlantic.

  The next morning we woke to the sound of a pony clopping by. Lucy nearly fell out of the window in her excitement. The little cart below us, bright and shiny in the morning sun, was filled with bottles of fresh milk. How different the High Street looked! The town was absolutely deserted. We learned that during the night all the cattle had been driven out of town and, after the pubs closed, the crowds had left too. There was a rap at our door, and Ian came bouncing in. Why weren’t we up? He had already had his breakfast, but he would have a second one with us. He evidently felt that he had really seen Life. The noise at the bar had kept him awake until after ten o’clock, but as soon as closing time was called the motherly proprietress had gone up to tuck him in.

  I left the family at the breakfast table and sallied forth to do a little shopping. Coming out of the hotel, I looked up the street toward the square-towered church at the top. Now that the narrow sidewalks were no longer so thronged that one had to fight for foothold, I could appreciate that we had walked into The Great Panjandrum Picture Book the day before, and had not been able to realize it. Whitchurch had scarcely changed since the Great She Bear had come walking down the High Street. The church was the same, and surely the little shops were equally untouched by time.

  This was the morning that I was to be initiated into the mysteries of British shopping. The little basket over the She Bear’s arm, I was soon to find, was almost a necessity. Nothing comes ready-wrapped in English villages, and it cost threepence for a flimsy paper bag to carry one’s purchases in. I went in and out of the little shops, learning as I went. Fruit is bought at the florist’s. (Of course! He owns a greenhouse.) Canned and frozen food one buys at Woolworth’s. I had to go back up the hill to the butcher in order to buy butter. Outside and in, the butcher shop was decorated with blue and white tiled pictures of sheep and cattle. The meat was set out on great slabs of marble without benefit of refrigeration. Although everything was scrupulously clean, I seemed to be much more aware that life’s blood must be spilled, oozed, and dripped about unless we all turn vegetarian. The butter was set out in great tubs. Which did I want? New Zealand … Guernsey … Shropshire? I chose the local product and watched while the butcher weighed out a quarter of a pound, then asked him where I could buy bread. That all depended, he said. Did I just want bread, or did I want Hovis? The shop down the street was licensed to sell Hovis and (glancing at the clock) it should be just coming out of the oven now.

  Down the street I went again and into a dusky little shop marked by a green and gold “Hovis” sign. I knew at once where I was. Bunches of millet hung from the ceiling, and the walls behind the counter were lined with small drawers. With difficulty I restrained myself from shouting out “What! No Soap!” and glancing over my shoulder to see if the Great She Bear would “pop her head into the shop.” Nothing so exciting happened – yet. The rosy-faced girl behind the counter explained that the bread was not out of the oven, but if I would care to wait…. She swept an indignant tortoise-shell cat off the chair and I sat down, wondering idly if this cat was a descendant of the one “who killed the rat who ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.” Almost at the same instant the door opened, a woman came into the shop with a dog on a short thick chain, and the cat sprang up to the counter arching its back. No wonder! For here was the very dog who had worried the cat (and who was later “tossed by the cow with a crumpled horn”). All my life I had believed that the excruciatingly ugly brindle bulldog in the Caldecott illustrations was a product of the artist’s imagination or, at best, a unique specimen of dogdom. Before the day was out I was to see two or three more of the same breed and to learn that this is the famous Whitchurch brindle, born and bred to a life of herding cattle and noted, despite the unfortunate mishap depicted in The House that Jack Built, as being an excellent work dog.

  I had hardly recovered from the start of recognition before the dog was dragged back out of the shop by its owner. The cat, its back still arched, took several minutes before it would risk climbing down from its perch. The little shopgirl excused herself to run back behind the shop to look at the ovens. A moment later she was back again, skipping into the shop, tossing and juggling a loaf of bread before her. Her sleeves were rolled above the elbow, the revelation of round, firm arms making her more than ever “pure Caldecott.”

  “That be jolly hot, that!” she said, and wrapped the loaf in a piece of newspaper for me to carry. Oh, how good it smelled! And it was better than a fur tippet to carry against the chill. I bought a wedge of cheese (cut carefully with a string that dangled from the ceiling) and some hundreds-and-thousands out of a big glass jar with a beautifully japanned lid. It was not so much that I thought the children would enjoy the candy that prompted me to do so, but the fun of seeing the delightfully unself-conscious way the girl moved about among ancient shop fixtures and modern advertisements. Some of the containers had probably been on the counter when Randolph Caldecott came to town.

  John and the children were waiting impatiently by the time I got back to the inn. What on earth had kept me? Th
e car was all packed and we wedged ourselves in among the suitcases and started out for Wirswell. Too small to be a village, it was not even marked on our map. There could not have been more than half a dozen houses in the district. But where to begin? There was a large Tudor manor house with “Tarrick Hall” marked over the mailbox. It might have belonged to the Master of the Farmer’s Boy. It seemed the most likely repository of local lore. I walked to the house and rang the bell. A little parlormaid answered, complete in uniform and ribbons, and said she would consult “the master.” An imposing gentleman came to the door and informed me that no Mr. Caldecott lived in the house. I tried to explain that Mr. Caldecott had been dead these many years, that he had been a famous illustrator, but that when he was a young bank clerk in Whitchurch he had boarded with farmers in Wirswell. “I knocked at the door merely to inquire….” I thought the gentleman was about to have apoplexy.

  “Madam,” he said, “we do not take boarders. You have been misinformed. This has always been a very important house. The present Earl of Harlech was born here. I was assured of that when I bought the place. But we do not show the room to visitors….” I beat a hasty retreat down the drive to where John and the children were waiting in the car.

  This left only three or four other houses to be accounted for in Wirswell. They all seemed vaguely familiar and the largest (now an old people’s home) seemed to us very like the one from which the “maiden all forlorn” issued forth to do her milking. Later inquiry brought us a letter from the Clerk of Whitchurch Urban District Council in which he informed us that Caldecott had lived “at Hinton Old Hall which is on the outskirts of the town and quite close to Wirswell….” No doubt we saw it even if we could not immediately identify it. If only we could have had a complete set of the Picture Books in hand!

  We were not the only ones who have set out to explore Caldecott country. In his biographical memoir Henry Blackburn quotes a letter from an unnamed pilgrim who preceded us:

  During occasional rambles in this and the neighboring country of Chester, more especially in the neighborhood of Whitchurch, I have been interested in the identification of some of the original scenes pictured by Mr. Caldecott in his several published drawings. Thus: –

  Malpas Church, which occupies the summit of a gentle hill some six miles from Whitchurch, occurs frequently – as in a full page drawing in the Graphic newspaper for Christmas, 1883; in Babes in the Wood, p. 19; in Baby Bunting, p. 20; and in The Fox Jumps Over the Parson’s Gate, p. 5.

  The main street of Whitchurch is fairly pictured in The Great Panjandrum, p. 6, whilst the old porch of the Blue Bell portrayed on p. 28 of Old Christmas is identical with that of the Bell Inn at Lushingham, situated some two miles from Whitchurch on the way to Malpas….

  It seems strange that Caldecott did not consider himself a good landscape artist and refused several commissions to do such work. During his trips to the Continent it was the people who captured his fancy and set his pencil going; châteaux and cathedrals he left to others. Occasionally, as in the sketches of Parliamentary scenes for Pictorial, he would have another artist “fill in” the architecture. I cannot think why. The world he created in his children’s books certainly does not lack veracity. Although he was gifted, ambitious, and experimental, he seems to have set certain limits for himself. His Breton folk bear little resemblance to the tortured peasants of van Gogh and Gauguin; his eye for the foibles of high society is as keen as Lautrec’s, but he lacks the savagery. One would wonder if he had ever heard of the Impressionists, yet when he died Vincent van Gogh was among those who paid him tribute in a letter of condolence written to his widow.

  Caldecott left Whitchurch in 1867, when he was twenty years old, to go to Manchester where he clerked in a bank and joined an artists’ club. From Manchester he went on to success in London and made several continental sketching tours with his friend Blackburn. In 1886 he and his wife sailed for the United States, hoping that the Florida climate would alleviate his tubercular condition. He continued to send off cheerful notes and sketches to the Graphic. The people he saw during a stopover in Washington fascinated him, especially American Negroes and the pioneer types he saw in the rotunda of the Capitol. He even managed to take part in a fox hunt in Maryland, his caustic pencil recording a countryside already beset with outdoor advertising. A few weeks later he died in Florida. He was barely forty.

  If ever a man truly loved a place, that man was Caldecott and that place was Whitchurch. One might almost say he was in love with it and that his Picture Books represent some of the most delightful love letters in the world. The green triangle made by Whitchurch, Malpas, and Wirswell is almost unbearably dear and familiar to anyone who knows his Caldecott. The fields and lanes gave us the feeling of homecoming that John and I were to discuss many times. Each of us had one English-born parent, and we were brought up on more or less the same books. Now we found ourselves in a countryside we had shared unknowingly. Those enormous pigs! Those fawn-colored cows! The broad-faced farmer striding across his fields! We knew them all. The feeling went beyond our childhoods into the ghostly past.

  Now, as John drove our car through the very countryside made known to us along with our nursery rhymes, I glanced at the children, covertly watching their reactions. Ian, even as John and I, seemed to be struggling with a half-remembered dream, but to Lucy the line between shadow and substance offered no problems. Although she had been born only thirty months before, she had spent a great deal of that time in Caldecott country. How many times she had sat on my knee (as she was doing now) so that we could open wide the book and let her enter in. So many people had argued against our taking her on this trip to England that we had become dubious ourselves. Lucy’s whole life, ran the argument, was taken up with eating and sleeping and diapers. She would not care where she was, nor would she remember where she had been. Now, studying her bright little face, I was made humble. Lucy could accept absolutely that she had entered a world where she was already at home. She was the only one among us who did not need a guidebook.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Open Road

  From Whitchurch we drove south. We hoped to reach Chepstow by nightfall so were determined not to stop more often than we could possibly help. We ate our lunch of bread and cheese in the car, but by afternoon everyone was hungry again so we stopped at a “tea chalet.” For the first time I began to realize the difficulties of traveling with American children in England. Ian and Lucy seemed to grow before my very eyes. They were noisy, brash, ill-mannered, strangely dressed, and enormous! There were other children present, but one would scarcely know it. They ate their bread and cake and drank their tea – silently. Their round blue eyes gazed at us in astonishment, but no one pointed or asked questions. They spoke when they were spoken to. Heavens! Our children talked all the time! But far worse than the collective gaze of the children was the attitude of their parents. The noisier and messier my children were, the more determined they were not to notice us. Before the trip was done I was to develop a much tougher skin, but now I could hardly wait until John had paid the bill and we could beat a retreat.

  The stop for food had done us good, but the children were still cramped and crowded in the back seat. We decided that we would have to jettison cargo somewhere or we would never make it to Cornwall. We drove through lovely vales and came to Shrewsbury, thronged with Saturday shoppers. We drove on, up into the hills that led to the Welsh Marches, then down again into Ludlow Town. We threaded our way through streets so narrow that shoppers had to crowd into doorways to let our tiny car go by. The road makes a sharp Z in the middle of the town and Ian, glancing back, caught a glimpse of his first real castle. I wish we had been able to stop, but a policeman waved us on, and in another moment or two we had shot out of the bottleneck into open country again.

  It was late afternoon when we drove into Monmouth. Lucy and I headed for a sign marked Public Convenience, but John and Ian strolled over to look at the statue of Charles Stuart Rolls who stood with
airplane in hand. Suddenly, above them, in the portico of the town hall, they spied another statue – Harry of Monmouth. The king’s nose was chipped, his garments were worn, and the pigeons had given him a collar of dirty ermine. But he was not entirely forgotten. Ladders and scaffolding stood about, and it was evident that not only was he destined for a good cleaning, but someone had been regilding his crown. By the time Lucy and I returned from our excursion, Ian was gazing up at him as at an old friend.

  Just a few months before our trip we had taken him to see Sir Laurence Olivier’s magnificent and classic film, Henry V. How he had loved it! But of course this was not his first introduction to that particular king for we owned a copy of Marcia Brown’s Dick Whittington and His Cat. On our return from the theater Ian had rushed upstairs to find the book and brought it down in triumph. There, on the last page, was Richard Whittington, “thrice Lord Mayor of London,” and, to do him honor, his most distinguished visitors, Henry V and his little French queen. Studying the spare black and mustard block prints that make the illustrations, Ian noticed and pointed out to us something that had hitherto escaped us. In some of the pictures we could see what was going on inside the houses at the same time we saw what was happening in the street. It was as though the wall had been sheared away. Of course Ian, like most children, had drawn that way for years, but recently he had become much more conventional. And like most recent converts, he tended to be critical. I tried to show Ian that this X-ray technique of Marcia Brown’s was not lack or oversight, but an attempt to get the “feel” of the fifteenth century by using the techniques of contemporary illustrators. Hastily rummaging through our shelves, I was able to find Life’s Picture History of Western Man, containing a reproduction of the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours. Studying those jewel-like pages, we suddenly realized that whoever designed the unforgettable sets for the motion picture had turned to this same source. Why, here in “February” was where the Welsh captain had argued with his allies….