How the Heather Looks Page 21

  To Louis, Colinton was another life – as different as Jekyll is to Hyde. In his poems it seems such a different clime that we expected it to be miles from Edinburgh, but to our surprise we found that it was in the nearby Pentland Hills, actually within the city limits. Even in Louis’s time it was comparatively easy to reach. Colinton is a tiny little mill village in a steep vale. Louis’s maternal grandfather was minister there. We had to ask directions to the manse and were directed up the hill to the kirk. We felt rather foolish – of course the manse would be next to the church.

  We walked down the steep street and around the curve of the churchyard wall to where a gate opened to a sweep of lawn (“a well of sunshine,” sun-starved Louis had called it). We clicked the gate and walked up the drive, past a huge, old yew tree to the house. A pleasant white-haired woman came to the door to greet us. The house itself, she explained, had been remodeled since Louis’s day, so there was not much reason for going inside, but we were welcome to explore the grounds as much as we pleased. She thought she had some pamphlets relating the R.L.S. writing to their sites – now dear me, where had she put them? She bustled away while we turned to carry out her suggestion.

  The children had already found a swing under the yew tree, but it was steeped in dark shadows, hanging in a veritable cave, and did not seem to answer to the description in the poems:

  Up in the air and over the wall,

  Till I can see so wide,

  Rivers and trees and cattle and all

  Over the countryside –

  We saw some other trees behind the house and walked around to a little orchard. This must have been where the cherry tree grew, we agreed, which Louis had climbed “to look abroad on foreign lands.” Ian was all for doing the same thing, but his father warned him off: hospitality can be pressed too far.

  We went back to the front of the house and wandered about the lawn. A little wind was blowing. “Like ladies’ skirts upon the grass,” I quoted involuntarily. Perhaps a few ghosts lingered. I thought of that pleasant life when grandparents, aunts, and uncles came out of the house to sit about the lawn and to watch Louis and his sturdy Balfour cousins roll and tumble like kittens in the sunshine. Louis’s mother was the youngest of thirteen children. Oddly enough, so was his father. Louis did not lack for cousins.

  The lawn was ringed by shrubbery and already my children were finding it an exciting unadult world to explore. Our hostess came out from the house bearing a small pamphlet and a warning. “Mind the water gate,” she said. “I wouldn’t like the baby to tumble in.” I glanced at the pamphlet and read:

  Over the borders, a sin without pardon,

  Breaking the branches and crawling below,

  Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,

  Down by the banks of the river, we go.

  The lawn dipped sharply at its far end, and we followed our guide through the shrubbery to where another gate led to some steep steps. We peered down in astonishment. The Water of Leith foamed and swirled in the narrow vale between two hillsides. We opened the gate and went down the steps. The most amazing thing about the water was its color:

  Dark brown is the river,

  Golden is the sand.

  I had never understood those lines before. The water was not muddy. It looked like good, fresh coffee – brown and sparkling. We learned later that the color of the water is caused by an infusion of peat.

  A tiny golden beach was caught in the crook of the river’s bend. It was a perfect place to play.

  The river, on from mill to mill,

  Flows past our childhood’s garden still;

  But ah! we children nevermore

  Shall watch it from the water-door!

  Below the yew – it still is there –

  Our phantom voices haunt the air

  As we were still at play,

  And I can hear them call and say:

  “How far is it to Babylon?”

  Ian was already down on his hands and knees, launching forth a fleet of ships – chips of wood and green leaves set forth to swirl around the bend, over the weir, and out to sea at Port of Leith on the other side of Edinburgh. He and Lucy chattered happily, their voices almost lost in the babble of the water. The Opies, in their scholarly Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, point out that in English folklore “Babylon” often refers to Baby Land – “childhood’s garden.” Did Robert Louis Stevenson know that? Or did he choose the word because it contains within itself the sound of waters? Almost, I could hear those “phantom voices” and I was reminded of another time when Ian had seemed to play with Louis’s ghost.

  He was three years old at the time and we were living in the cowboy and cotton country of the San Joaquin Valley in California. I had forbidden him to play with anyone because he had a cold, but he so stubbornly insisted that he was going to play with “that boy who likes blocks” that I restricted him to his room. I expected loud rebellion, but there followed a whole morning of silence. It was so complete that I was guilty of the thought that Ian might have disobeyed me and gone out to play. At length, so little was my faith that I opened the door to his room. There was Ian, with all his blocks spread out on the floor. Roads, harbors, castles, and cities had been constructed so that they all led up to a sort of platform on which stood an open copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses. It was the Golden Press edition, illustrated by the Provensens. There, on the open page, dressed in Victorian sailor suit, was another little boy, perhaps a bit older than Ian. He, too, was playing with blocks. His pictured edifice somehow had been conjoined and incorporated within the pattern made by the three-dimensional blocks strewn about Ian’s bedroom floor.

  It was with a faint prickle at the back of my neck that I was reminded of Stevenson’s poem to the reader:

  As from the house your mother sees

  You playing round the garden trees,

  So you may see, if you will look

  Through the windows of this book,

  Another child, far, far away,

  And in another garden, play.

  But do not think you can at all,

  By knocking on the window, call

  That child to hear you. He intent Is all on his play-business bent.

  He does not hear; he will not look,

  Nor yet be lured out of this book.

  For, long ago, the truth to say,

  He has grown up and gone away,

  And it is but a child of air

  That lingers in the garden there.

  Be that as it may, I am convinced that Ian had somehow summoned “that child” and had been playing with him all the long morning.

  CHAPTER 11

  Beyond the Door

  As we drove south and westward into the Lake District the mountains fell away on either hand, as though moved by an enchantment. There was a feeling of breaking and entering. Rosemary Sutcliffe, in her novel of Viking resistance, The Shield Ring, explains that even the Domesday Book stopped short of the Cumberland Fells. For thirty years, for a whole generation, the Norman conquerors could not penetrate into this remote mountain fastness. To this day the map is sprinkled with Viking names and terms – Eskdale and Buttermere (after Jarl Buthar) and Aiken’s Row.

  We stopped for lunch somewhere near Thirlmere. Far above us a white plumed stream dropped silently to a hidden ledge, then leaped again into the valley below. I said that it reminded me of the falls at Yosemite, but Ian had a far better feeling for the literary. Perhaps, he said, it was Swallowdale, that wonderful camping place described in Arthur Ransome’s book of the same name. The Ransome books had held him in thrall all the previous winter and I, reading them aloud to him, had found them just as exciting as in my own childhood. I had had secret adult doubts, however, as to whether any limited stretch of countryside could have so many perfect lakes and waterfalls and hidden caves and lost mines. Now, gazing about me at lakes and mountains, I was willing to capitulate.

  Just above Grasmere we came to a crossroads. To our left lay W
ordsworth’s cottage, a place I had absolutely promised myself to see. To the right, around the other side of the lake, curved a secondary road posted with a Notice to Motorists:

  THIS ROAD CLOSED IN WINTER. THROUGH PASSAGE IS POSSIBLE BUT HIGHLY IMPROBABLE IN WET OR INCLEMENT WEATHER.

  How could we resist such a challenge – and such nicety of language? Bumping along over the ruts we were reminded of a story of the Irish hero, Oisin, and how he had come to a crossroad where three roads converged. The road to the right, rocky and steep, led up to Heaven. The broad road straight ahead led straight to Hell. But a third road, almost hidden by trees and flowers, was the “tangled, twisty path to fairyland.” This was the road that Oisin chose – and we did too.

  We came out on the main road near Clappersgate, crossed a bridge, and went on to Hawkshead. Hawkshead was a close-huddled little town, its shops connected by archways. It seemed hardly a bustling metropolis but it had served to impress the country cousin in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse. I wonder if Johnny Town-Mouse pointed out the house where William Wordsworth went to school. It would seem in character for him to be a namedropper.

  We were looking for the village of Near Sawrey. We skirted around Esthwaite Water and almost drove through the village before we knew we had arrived. John actually had to stop the car and to put it in reverse so that we would not by pass the village. It was while we were creeping backward that we saw a National Trust marker, half hidden in the hedge, that told us that the entire village was under the guardianship of the Trust and that Beatrix Potter’s cottage at Hill Top Farm was open to visitors.

  We parked our car and went through a familiar-looking gate in the hedge. The path to the farmhouse was surely the very one from whence Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit fetched her kittens indoors to wash and dress them. The same view, with a policeman walking toward the house, can be seen in The Tale of Pigling Bland. We came to the large front door and peered into the dark, cool interior. A short, pleasing little person clad in brown tweed came to greet us. For a moment I thought of Mrs. Heelis (Miss Potter’s married name) but it was no ghost. Mrs. Susan Ludbrooke, the caretaker at Hill Top, proved to be a unique and interesting person in her own right. Unlike some caretakers I have known, she proved much better versed than the visitor about the subject of her trust. Not that she was gushing or sentimental. She had copies of the Tales spread out on a table in the center of the old kitchen in order to help us refresh our memories, but she expected her guests to be intelligent, not sloppy, in their interest. Beatrix Potter would have approved.

  We had told Lucy that we were going to Tom Kitten’s house, but we were unprepared for her total acceptance of the fact. Just as in Caldecott country, at the beginning of our trip, Lucy took it for granted that one could step into the pages of a book. She had never doubted the veracity of Miss Potter’s world, so lovingly depicted in all its detail. Why should she? She knew that it would be this way. She had been here before.

  The door, half ajar, was the one through which Cousin Ribby came with basket and umbrella. The oak dresser, directly opposite, was the very one past which Anna Maria scurried when she was on the way to the kitchen to steal some dough to make a roly-poly pudding. Only the grate and chimney piece seemed unfamiliar. Mrs. Ludbrooke was swift to step in and explain that Miss Potter had considered the range too modern and had replaced it with an older and much simpler grate. After all, she had left the house to the National Trust not as a memorial to herself, but to show future visitors the interior of a typical Lakeland farmhouse. Ian and Lucy peered up into the chimney, even as Tom Kitten had, and discussed whether or not one could actually climb it to the roof or wriggle from it into a secret passage.

  Instead, Mrs. Ludbrooke offered to accompany us upstairs. We paused a moment on the first landing, enjoying the prickly sensation that we had been there before. Surely our hands had rubbed over that very post and banister? The work was simple and unpretentious – no knobs, no scrolls, no ornate carvings – but the craftsmanship had dignity. No wonder Beatrix Potter loved the Lakeland cottages. There is a feeling for material and, always, a sense of proportion. The same could be said for the artist who immortalized them.

  The upstairs bedrooms proved rather disappointing. They were crowded and “museumy” and set about with glass cases. We had had enough of museums. Ian agitated to press on farther, up to the attic, so that we might find the piece of skirting-board with an painted on it. In The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or the Roly-Poly Pudding Beatrix Potter had used such a mark to indicate where Samuel Whiskers had kept poor Tom Kitten a prisoner while Anna Maria set about to roll him into a roly-poly pudding. However, Mrs. Ludbrooke was quite firm about not allowing visitors beyond the second floor.

  When Miss Potter was forty-seven years old she married her solicitor, Mr. William Heelis, against her parents’ wishes. After that she kept the little cottage behind Tower Arms only for her own enjoyment and amusement and, as Mrs. Heelis, moved to Castle Cottage in the fields across the road. At the time, she claimed that it was because the new house was larger and more comfortable for her husband. All of this was quite true, but one suspects that also she could not bear to disturb the complete and perfect little world into which she had escaped during the unhappy years when she gave allegiance to her cold and unsympathetic parents. She seems to have had a premonition that others would want to seek out that world, too. Margaret Lane, her biographer, writes that even on her deathbed she left minute and sometimes impractical instructions that nothing was to be changed. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Ian is quite right – that one day she took paint and brush and carefully painted an asterisk on the skirting-board in the attic. Perhaps it is there now, only waiting for some child to come and find it.

  We lingered for a few moments longer to look at the wax dolls (so ghastly pale in their glass cases) and at a doll house complete with the immortal plaster doll’s food that Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb stole in The Tale of Two Bad Mice. The dolls’ house is not the original one, however. Miss Potter had given that one away to Winifred Warne many years before in that “other” life when she was engaged to Norman Warne, the publisher. If Norman Warne had not died quite suddenly during the engagement she would have become Winifred’s aunt and – who knows? – the mother of Winifred’s cousins. There was a photograph of Winifred and another one of Little Lucie of Newlands, the little girl to whom The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle is dedicated.

  This interested us especially since there has always been an identification of red-haired Lucie of Newlands with our own Lucy. The day before Lucy was born I bought a copy of The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to give to Ian as a present. By mistake (I was somewhat excited) I packed the book in my suitcase and took it off to the hospital with me. I had never read the book before, but desperate for reading material during the long hours of waiting I turned to the works of Miss Potter. I decided forthwith that the book was meant for a little girl and a few hours later I was able to present it to my daughter as my first gift to her. That day at Near Sawrey we learned that the original Lucie had been Lucie Carr and that she was one of the small daughters of the Vicar of Newlands.

  Mrs. Ludbrooke thought we had been rash not to make reservations in the Lake District during August, but she suggested we try our luck at the little inn at Far Sawrey. The proprietress there listened to our plight and kindly allowed us to use a room vacated for one night by some regular guests, but only on condition that we set about at once looking for lodgings elsewhere. Tired as we were, we drove back toward Ambleside and spent the evening in search. We finally found a beautiful old house near the northern end of Lake Windermere. We were shown an enormous room that had once been the nursery. The only catch was that the room was on the top floor of the house, a long climb to up under the carved eaves. When we walked over to the bow window, however, the whole of Windermere stretched before us. Lights winked from the shore, and far down the lake the dusk closed in over cardboard silhouettes of mountains. Directly at our feet, it see
med, were terraced gardens, an old boathouse, and the mouths of two little rivers emptying into the lake. What a perfect place to play! I fumbled for my purse to make a deposit. We’d take it! The next morning we moved all our belongings to the new hotel, then we decided to drive back to Sawrey. Margaret Lane, in The Tale of Beatrix Potter, has written:

  If Beatrix Potter had been a poet, the eight years following the purchase of Hill Top, when she came and went and experienced her solitary happiness in Sawrey, would have been her lyric years. As it was, being an artist of a different sort, she produced no fewer than thirteen books for children – each of them having in its way the shapeliness and quality of a poem … no fewer than six are intimately concerned with Hill Top Farm and Sawrey…. Jemima Puddle-Duck is her poem about the farm itself….

  Hill Top garden is, of course, Jemima Puddle-Duck’s. When I said something to Lucy about its being the scene of Peter Rabbit’s adventures, too, Mrs. Ludbrooke corrected me in shocked tones. To see Mr. MacGregor’s garden one must journey to Tenby, in Wales, where Beatrix’s uncle used to live. The house is called “Gwynanog” and has been turned into a girls’ school. Mrs. Ludbrooke had heard that the garden, the potting shed, and the gold-fish pool are still in existence.

  We went out the gate of Hill Top and found ourselves admiring a flamboyant garden next to the Tower Arms, the very same in which Duchess was standing when she received the invitation in The Pie and the Patty-Pan. Diagonally across the main road was a cottage with an arched doorway with stone seats built in under the arch. We decided it must be the porch to Ribby’s house, the entryway where the Duchess stood so expectantly, armed with a bouquet of flowers. Across the village street we recognized the Ginger and Pickles shop. A faded sign, barely discernible, leaned against one wall: It said something about “… Taylor … Joiner.” There is a John Joiner in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers and the dedicatee of The Tale of Ginger and Pickles is “Old Mr. John Taylor who ‘thinks he might pass as a Dormouse!’ (Three years in bed and never a grumble!)”