Over the Hills and Far Away Read online

  She loved riddles, rhymes and nonsense poems ; the taste stayed with her and influenced her own written style. As late as March 1900, aged twenty-three, she ‘went to the Reading Room at the British Museum… to see a delightful old book full of rhymes’ and was thrilled by her morning’s occupation.11 Riddles and rhymes play their part in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and the original, longer, privately printed version of The Tailor of Gloucester ; The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, first begun in 1883, offers a coda of sorts to Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, which Beatrix encountered as a child. In several tales, notably The Sly Old Cat, the boundary separating rhyme and prose is fluid. Elsewhere, Beatrix employed two-part sentences, broken by a semicolon. Psalm-like in rhythm and cadence, their effect is both humorous and sonorous.12 She insisted she ‘several times used piled up adjectives’, which further shapes the particular tip-tilt of her prose.13

  So wholehearted was Beatrix’s absorption, aged seven, in The Lady of the Lake that she remembered ‘crying bitterly because Ellen Douglas was an R.C. [Roman Catholic] and therefore must have gone to hell’.14 Alone in her nursery, like many imaginative children Beatrix experienced fiction as an alternative reality ; she retained the imprint of her early exposure to stories and poems.

  Her parents concerned themselves with her amusement intermittently. She learnt needlework and knitting ; later she painted designs for embroidered borders for cloths and herself embroidered a cotton brocade pelmet for her four-poster bed.15 We do not know if it was Helen Potter, Ann McKenzie or her governess Miss Hammond who taught her. Before her marriage, Helen had played her part in Stalybridge philanthropy, encouraged by her own mother : she taught millworkers’ daughters needlework and cookery. In London she transcribed books into braille for a blindness charity. Beatrix knitted as a child and included her knitting among her holiday packing ; she learned to darn too. Neither became a consuming pastime.

  Shortly before she died, Beatrix dismissed her choice of childhood reading matter as ‘silly stories about other little girls’ doings’ and ‘trash… goody-goody, powder-in-the-jam books’.16 It was only partly true. Beatrix taught herself to read on Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ novels, influenced by her enjoyment of The Lady of the Lake, the bookshelves at Bolton Gardens and Nurse McKenzie’s storytelling. Tales of stirring derring-do, with a marked sense of place and the lilt of local voices, Scott’s novels had reinvented the past for Beatrix’s grandparents’ generation. Her own writing came to share the ‘Waverley’ novels’ regional tang, rooted in a particular landscape. It, too, exploited distinctive speech patterns, although the dialogue of Beatrix’s twenty-one tales was more strongly influenced by her reading, especially her enjoyment of Jane Austen, than any local dialect. In The Fairy Caravan and North Country stories like ‘Pace Eggers’ she celebrated her later conviction that ‘no tongue can be as musical as Lancashire’.17

  Beatrix traced the breakthrough in her reading to her second attempt at Rob Roy. She admitted to missing out the long words. Her enjoyment was unimpaired and she went on to read Scott’s novels ‘over and over’ ; unsurprisingly she conceived a passionate desire to visit Edinburgh.18 As a child she could not have anticipated how nearly in outline Rob Roy would resemble the story of her own life. Scott’s hero, Frank Osbaldistone, is the child of a wealthy Londoner. He is banished to the north of England, but afterwards rewarded with the gift of the family home, Osbaldistone Hall. Beatrix, too, would turn her back on London’s comforts. In her case, her ‘banishment’ to the Lake District was voluntary, akin to a self-imposed exile, but no less a breach with the world she had known. As she saw it, like Osbaldistone’s it represented a return to ancestral acres.

  Subsequently Beatrix regarded the house in Bolton Gardens without affection : she excluded it from any summary of formative influences ; at the end of her life she did not lament its destruction in the Blitz. Yet it was there, through protracted years in the nursery, beginning as a small child, that she learned to view the world as a reader, an important step on her journey towards re-envisioning the world as a writer. In its layout – separate spaces for parents, children and servants – Bolton Gardens asserted the hierarchies of Victorian family life : a critique of social convention is a source of humour in a handful of Beatrix’s tales, including The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan and The Tale of Tom Kitten. For the young Beatrix, confinement on the third floor involved a measure of loneliness. Books, stories, drawing and painting barricaded her against the gulf. It was in Bolton Gardens that Beatrix viewed possibilities of life beyond those orderly purlieus, possibilities made real to her from infancy by the Potter habits of reading, sketching… and travel.

  *

  ‘When I was a child I used to go to the seaside for holidays,’ Beatrix Potter wrote in The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, which she set in the fictional town of Stymouth (an amalgam of Sidmouth, Teignmouth, Lyme Regis and Hastings). Those holidays mostly took place in April, when 2 Bolton Gardens was spring-cleaned, redecorated or newly carpeted and, like the unnamed family in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, Rupert, Helen, Beatrix and Bertram Potter repaired to a south coast watering place and hotels that frequently fell short of their exacting standards. (The ‘excellent’ but costly Imperial Burdon Hotel in Weymouth, for example, disappointed in April 1895 as there were ‘fan-lights over the doors which makes it awkward to change photographic slides’.19)

  For long weeks at the end of every summer, beginning when Beatrix was four, the Potters also stayed in the Highlands, continuing a tradition started by Edmund Potter : holidays of fishing, stalking and, for Beatrix and, in turn, Bertram, the chance of temporary misrule. For eleven years, from 1871, Rupert rented a severe-looking house on the banks of the River Tay in Perthshire : Dalguise House, with many windows and dense shrubberies. There, friends joined the family party : Millais, Gaskell and Bright ; so, too, Potter and Leech relations. The men enjoyed first-rate sport. Rupert photographed their catch : salmon laid out on the lawn like bloated offerings. He photographed Helen, Beatrix and Bertram, and Beatrix with her governess. He photographed dogs and, repeatedly, the same elegant stone column in the Dalguise garden, twined about with climbing roses and crowned with a unicorn. He set the camera so that he, too, could take his place alongside fish or statuary, heavily whiskered and invariably frowning.

  Beatrix and Bertram roamed through gardens ‘laden with the smell of roses’, noisy with bees and the whine of bluebottle flies, through expanses of heather, through ‘the dark glades of Craig Donald Wood’, where wind murmured in the fir trees and, on grey days, thunder growled thrillingly in the distance.20 The siblings caught rabbits, listened out for roe deer and the evening cry of the night-jar, collected birds’ eggs, animal skeletons and plums from an ancient tree ; Beatrix picked flowers for drawing or pressing ; ‘in the hollow between the two sleepers in the goods siding at Dalguise, where trucks were constantly shunted over the bird’s head’, she found a partridge nest ‘with an incredible number of eggs’.21 Brother and sister revelled in a natural paradise, as companionable as Timmy and Goody Tiptoes in the nut thicket in The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes. In a homemade sketchbook, Beatrix drew and painted the Dalguise grounds and surrounding sights, including ‘the Duchess of Athole’s [sic] model dairy’.22 In her memory she stowed away the images that would recall to her ‘that peaceful past time of childhood’ and buttress her against unhappiness later, her memories a shield and a screen.23 She stockpiled memories in the same way Mrs Tittlemouse hoards cherry stones and thistle-down seed. And often her memories were visual, snapshots like photographs : ‘a white cat basking in the sunset at a barn door high up in the wall’ ;24 ‘a rambling old house full of aviaries and pets, doves cooing, and beautiful Persian cats walking about under the rookery on the lawn’.25

  In the Highlands, Beatrix found herself ‘half believing’ Nurse McKenzie’s fairy stories and folk tales ; she would remember ‘seeing my own fancies so clearly [there] that they became true to me’.26 She devised stories
, she painted, including, in 1878, a picture of trees, ‘The Three Witches of Birnam Woods’.27 Scotland was a catalyst : her Scottish holidays allowed Beatrix to substantiate imaginative flights of fancy. Although she set most of her books in the Lake District, it was in Perthshire that such stories, with their necessary suspension of disbelief, acquired an aspect of possibility. There she ‘live[d] in fairyland’.28 Helen Potter took with her to Scotland her London servants and her carriage – coachman and groom in white breeches and top boots, their coats with brass buttons showing the Potter family crest : the festal mood could be tempered by sameness. On later holidays there would be a pony and phaeton for Beatrix.

  With holidays at the seaside and in Scotland and trips to stay with relatives, the Potters spent up to four months of the year absent from Bolton Gardens. Family visits took them over the old wooden bridge to Putney – where at Putney Park, within easy reach of central London, an elderly cousin kept cattle, ducks and ‘a splendid breed of black Berkshire pigs’ ; she had planted her garden with cabbage roses.29 Until 1884, they travelled north to Stalybridge. There, at Grandmother Leech’s house, Gorse Hall, even the doormat impressed itself on Beatrix’s memory ; as a small child, the bedroom passage ‘seem[ed] dark and mysterious’, shadowed by ‘the terror that flieth by night’.30 As she grew older, Beatrix would visit Helen’s sister, Harriet, who had married another cotton magnate, Fred Burton, and settled in Denbighshire ; she stayed with relatives of Rupert’s mother ‘on the edge of the Cotswolds, overlooking the vale of Severn’.31 Best of all, until the house was sold in 1891, were frequent sorties to the home of her Potter grandparents in Hertfordshire.

  Edmund Potter’s remarkable career had taken him from calico printing to Parliament, where he sat as Liberal MP for Carlisle. In the way of the newly rich, he bought a house in London and a country house at a comfortable remove from the source of his wealth. Camfield Place, near Essendon in Hertfordshire, was ‘a good-sized small-roomed old house of no particular pretensions, the outside, red brick, whitewashed’32 when Edmund Potter bought it, with 300 acres, from Lord Dimsdale in 1866. With typical Victorian confidence, he set about demolishing half the original house. He replaced it with ‘a large addition curiously joined to the old part with steps and stairs… six sitting rooms and a porch below, six bedrooms and two dressing rooms above, with a good deal of wasted space under the gables’, the whole glaringly faced with yellow brick.33

  It was a commonplace structure, the principal rooms, as Beatrix admitted, too large for comfort, the terrace on the north front windy, the most important, oak-panelled room of the old house destroyed in her grandfather’s remodelling. Nevertheless, glimpsed through the eyes of childhood it was ‘a palatial residence’.34 The room that engaged Beatrix longest, when she recorded her memories of Camfield, predated Potter ownership. A ‘little old room’ and ‘spotless’, it was lined with painted panelling and cupboards, with a whitewashed ceiling, pretty wallpaper and a view over flowerbeds.35 It sounds like rooms she made for herself much later at Hill Top and used in her stories of Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers ; a room like Ribby’s kitchen in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan or, like Mrs Tiggy-winkle’s, spick and span and cosy. She discovered this neat little service room as a child, wandering alone through passages and pantries. Its very distinctness from Bolton Gardens caught her imagination.

  Happily Edmund Potter’s ‘improvements’ to Camfield Place concentrated on the house. Aside from some overzealous planting of shrubs, and more successful horse chestnut plantings, he let the gardens alone – the work of Capability Brown, designed at the turn of the century. Brown’s velvety undulations of greensward softened the assertive bulk of Edmund’s new building : lawns spotted with trees, including ‘two great cedars’, their branches like ‘outstretched arms’, their green bark splashed with red, with ‘orange butterflies flitt[ing], and red-tailed velvety bees’.36 Fifteen gardeners tended the tranquil spaces. In Beatrix’s childhood, Capability Brown’s vision, combined with Edmund Potter’s deep pockets, sculpted a landscape of artificial loveliness maintained in an equally artificial state of near perfection – as sleek and pristine as Mrs Blackburn’s specimens of painted bird life or the flowers in Beatrix’s primers. And so Beatrix’s first experiences of country life – memories that stretched back even to her crib – contained significant elements of sham : a manmade idyll sustained by the spoils of invisible industry. It was at Camfield that she absorbed what she described as ‘a pictorial sense of trees arranged in landscape’.37 Decades later, the same sense would influence her efforts as a conservationist. It was based on a picturesque illusion.

  She would not be able to remember a time that she had not known and loved Camfield. It was her childish ideal of perfection and, afterwards, cherished as ‘the place I love best in the world’.38 It perfectly fitted a vision of the country belonging to the child of wealthy London parents, and Beatrix relished everything about it that spoke to her of distance from her third-floor life in Kensington : new-laid eggs ; fresh milk in unlimited supply ; Mrs Spriggins’s loaves, their crusts dusted with flour ; even the earthenware plates and lopsided candles in simple metal dishes used in the day and night nurseries. Beyond the wide lattice windows, visit after visit, the same tame robin occupied the same spot on a wall covered in yellow roses. Here the air was clean, free of London’s sooty tinct. Bats flew at night, weasels skirmished in the hedgerows. In late spring pink candles spiked Edmund’s new horse chestnuts ; on summer mornings cuckoos called at daybreak. Beatrix recorded the autumn flight of wild ducks and wild geese. The stable clock tolled passing hours.

  In the library, under a table, hidden by a cloth with yellow-green fringes, Beatrix played with the flannelette pig. Unseen, she listened to grown-up conversation, enthralled by her grandmother’s reminiscences. She consumed gossip and family history alongside ‘very hard gingersnap biscuits’, which Jessy Potter dispensed from a canister.39 On one occasion, she lost a tooth in the process. When she was older she explored the library bookshelves. At seventeen she was ‘very much impressed’ by editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey illustrated by neoclassicist John Flaxman. Devoured in happy hours at Camfield, Flaxman’s drawings – characterised by clarity and precise outlines – became another influence on Beatrix’s own work. She considered him ‘the greatest English draughtsman that has ever lived’.40

  At Camfield a tangible sense of plenty – in the distant farmyard as well as on the tea table – reassured Beatrix. In her response to her grandparents’ estate, she was discernibly her parents’ daughter. She applauded ‘the feeling of… well-assured, indolent wealth, honourably earned and wisely spent, charity without ostentation, opulence without pride’.41 With its subtext of just deserts and lack of swank, it was an attitude influenced by Unitarianism, which emphasised social responsibility and social conscience, and perhaps by the complacency of the newly rich. Whatever Rupert and Helen’s social pretensions, their mindset lacked profligacy or fecklessness, failings of an indolent aristocracy.

  A sense of honourable earnings and wise spending surfaces in Beatrix’s story of the Flopsy Bunnies. ‘Very improvident and cheerful’, Benjamin Bunny and his wife Flopsy are not always able to provide ‘quite enough to eat’ for their large family, with results that threaten to go badly for the Flopsy Bunnies. The author’s attitude to improvidence is mixed. Beatrix had a healthy regard for money and its sensible disposal. On a visit to Wales she referred to the ‘lavish prodigality’ by which a landowning family was ‘reduced to living in the kitchen’ : her tone is amused but scornful.42 And she had a taste for a bargain. She considered ‘it greatly detracts from the enjoyment of a purchase if you have paid an exorbitant price’, an echo of the shrewdness innate to both her grandfathers.43 Her views on credit are clear to readers of The Tale of Ginger and Pickles. Her eventual decision to write children’s stories about animals ought not to encourage us to consider her sentimental. Her family’s recent history of entrepreneurialism left its imprint on th
is impressionable Victorian daughter.

  Above all, Camfield’s chief recommendation was its chatelaine, Jessy Potter. ‘There is no one like grand-mamma,’ Beatrix wrote : she thought her ‘as near perfect as is possible’44 and their bond partly filled the void caused by Beatrix’s lack of intimacy with her mother. Jessy Potter was a yardstick against which Beatrix measured Helen Potter and found her wanting, a spirited old woman with a keen appreciation of her own charms, a taste for fast carriage driving and what seems like a well-honed ability to intimidate at will.45 She had a vigorous sense of family pride and the older generation’s habit of expansive discourse on her antecedents. She imbued Beatrix with a lifelong fascination for her own family, the Cromptons, and a conviction that Crompton characteristics, as enlarged by her grandmother, should surface in her own nature ; that Beatrix would later describe herself as a ‘believer in breed’ – heredity in all its forms – was Jessy’s doing. As outlined by ‘Grandmamma’, the Cromptons were mavericks : as keen as mustard in their Unitarianism and politically rebellious, with rumours of a romantic attachment to Jacobitism ; they were financially astute, appealingly pig-headed and, up to a point, self-­regarding – tenacious, obstinate and indomitable, according to Beatrix.46 In Grandmamma’s version, Beatrix inherited a legacy of enterprise, bloody-mindedness, philanthropy and pluck. Unsurprisingly, the young Beatrix longed to align herself within that vigorous continuum. Implicit in her choice was a rejection of her parents’ conventional compromises. In middle age, it was her Crompton forebears, not the Potters, who inspired Beatrix’s admiration. ‘I was very much attached to my grandmother Jessy Crompton and said to be very like her, “only not so good looking !!”,’ she wrote.47