Barbara Newhall Follett
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THE HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS
Introduced and illustrated by Jackie Morris
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: A Wild of One’s Own by Jackie Morris
I The Meadow
II The Sea
III The Mountains
Further Reading
About the Authors
Barbara Newhall Follett was an American child prodigy. Born in 1914, she published her first novel, The House Without Windows, aged twelve. A year later she published another, The Voyage of the Norman D., based on her own experiences as a cabin ‘boy’ sailing round Nova Scotia. Several years later, shortly before Christmas 1939, Barbara Newhall Follett walked out of her home one evening with $30 in her pocket and was never seen again. The mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved.
Jackie Morris is the creator of over forty children’s books, including the bestselling and critically acclaimed modern classic The Lost Words. She has collaborated with writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Ted Hughes. She lives in Pembrokeshire and is now working on a new project, to capture the wonder of flight in pigment, with The Book of Birds.
WORKS BY BARBARA NEWHALL FOLLETT
The House Without Windows
The Voyage of the Norman D.
Lost Island
Travels Without a Donkey
SELECTED WORKS BY JACKIE MORRIS
The Snow Leopard
Tell Me a Dragon
The Lost Words (with Robert Macfarlane)
For my two playmates, F. H. and S. W. F.
(BARBARA NEWHALL FOLLETT)
and
For Hannah, a wild child, and for all who wander and are not lost.
(JACKIE MORRIS)
List of Illustrations
‘The house without windows’
‘For all who wander and are not lost’
‘And from the skies each summer, an echo’
‘The ghost of a twenty-five-year-old’
‘The chanting of the eternal sea’
‘Eepersip was delighted with her flowers, and the butterflies and birds pleased her even more’
‘A doe and her daisied fawn’
‘Swallows with their snowy breasts were circling’
‘She slept on a soft bed of moss in a hollow down near the pool’
‘The piece of cracker looked very tempting’
‘She sang like a nightingale for joy of her discovery’
‘The deer were all lying down’
‘Chippy recognized her and sprang at her in great delight’
‘Snowflake washing herself and playing with the dry oak leaves that swirled about in the breeze’
‘Iris purple and gold’
‘Eepersip played little happy games with all the creatures of the field’
‘The grasshopper would whirr out of the grass and alight on her hand’
‘Goodbye, O deer! for probably I shall never see you again’
‘The sun trails bright jewels in the water, and laughs because I cannot touch them’
‘The sand was glistening with shells of all colours and bordered with seaweeds washed up’
‘The sea was absolutely calm’
‘Gnome-like toadstools of red and yellow’
‘A flock of gulls with their long, narrow wings … winging their way towards the sea’
‘She landed on a beach of white sand, so fine that it was impossible to hold’
‘Far off, the snow-topped mountains were sea waves capped with foam’
‘Eepersip showed her little sister how to dance, and they danced together’
‘Hummingbirds, bright emerald and ruby with moonlight wings’
‘All day she followed the winding rabbit trails amid the feathery firs’
‘They were flying northward’
‘A sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods’
A Wild of One’s Own
Over time,
Across an ocean,
A voice speaks
And from the skies each summer, an echo.
(JM)
This is a tale of presence and absence. A mystery, a fantasy. It begins over a century ago, on 4 March 1914, in a small house in Hanover, New Hampshire, when a child called Barbara Newhall Follett was born. Or perhaps it begins in 1918, when she was four?
Imagine then. See in your mind’s eye a small girl standing silent outside the door of her father’s study. She can hear music. Curious taps and clicks and whirrs and tings of a small bell! And she knows what she is hearing is the music of writing. And even at the age of four she understands how this music translates to words, how words gather to become stories, and she wants this. She wants it with the clear sharp focus of a fierce four-year-old. So she waits, and later, when she hears her parents talking downstairs, their voices muffled by distance, she creeps back to her father’s study, wraps her arms around the object of her desire and carries the typewriter back to her room. Four years old. And now she is a writer.
Barbara had always loved stories. From the earliest age she would pick out the shapes of letters in the environment around her. Family photographs, now kept in the archive at Columbia University, show her nestled in her father’s arms, following along as he reads to her, tiny and delighted. She learned to read in the way that most children learn to walk, a natural process, not a taught one. And as much as she loved reading (and writing), she also loved spending time outside, in wild places. The two passions grew side by side and frequently intertwined, as she often composed poems and stories about the natural world.
It was Barbara’s custom, on her own birthday, to give her mother a gift. At the age of eight she decided that on her ninth birthday this gift would take the form of a book. And so, on Barbara’s door there appeared a note:
She had the tale in mind for some time before she sat down to write. Eventually she was ready to begin. Day after day, alone in her room, with the door shut tight, Barbara worked at her typewriter, shaping her tale until it was almost perfect. She was educated at home so she had plenty of time to follow her heart and write. Day after day, week after week, she wrote.
She missed the deadline, her birthday, because she was ill, but a few days and 40,000 words later, she completed her task. Barbara hoped to make a handful of copies, to share with friends, but this original copy, this one, this was for her mother. It was a story about a small child in the wilderness. It was called The House Without Windows.
Just a few days after she finished writing, while the family were sleeping, a fire broke out in the kitchen. The Folletts were lucky to escape with their lives. Most of their belongings were destroyed, along with the fresh manuscript so lovingly typed. Every word Barbara had written – gone.
At this point many children would have given up. Not Barbara. The family found themselves temporary lodgings, and Barbara requested, and was given, a new typewriter. Immediately she began the long task of reconstructing her story, word by carefully chosen word, from memory.
What followed was months of reshaping, rewriting, trying in torment to recreate what had gone before. She worked so hard. Between periods of writing she took trips away, usually with her father, swimming in wild places, camping in the woods, canoeing and climbing mountains and daydreaming. And reading. Always reading. Three years she spent, sometimes leaving her text for months at a time, but always returning to it, frustrated and determined in equal measure. Eventually, she stopped trying to remember the original and began to imagine anew, letting her mind run wild once again.
Imagine now. See Barbara again in your mind’s eye. Ten years old or more by now, she
is sitting at a child-sized desk in her bedroom, and she is writing. She writes of a little girl called Eepersip, who loves the outdoors as much as she does, who doesn’t want to be confined inside a house with walls and windows, binding her life. The world of brick and glass is too restrictive for the wild child, and Eepersip longs to shed the trappings of civilization. So she runs away from home. She runs first to the meadow, then to the sea, and last to the mountains, and she gives her heart in equal measure to all of them. She lives in these wild places without fear, learning how to be free, and she sees joy and glory everywhere. Writing from the confines of her room, Barbara is released, following Eepersip out into the wild world and beyond.
In 1926, Barbara was twelve and the book was finally complete (again). Her father was so impressed that he took the manuscript to work with him. He was, at this time, working for Alfred Knopf. Imagine the excitement when a blue letter arrived, a Borzoi hound embossed on the envelope, and within it the offer to publish Barbara’s story. Two thousand five hundred copies of The House Without Windows were printed, an ambitious quantity for an unknown author – and all 2,500 sold out two weeks before the date of publication. Barbara’s story of Eepersip and her life in the house without windows went on to become a bestseller, and Barbara herself was hailed as a child genius.
I first came across The House Without Windows through a review by the award-winning author Eleanor Farjeon, who described it as ‘bathed in a magical light’. Musing on what this little girl might produce as a mature author, Farjeon looked forward to future works from Barbara, for she felt certain that ‘she will always have to write’. So I tracked down a copy of The House Without Windows – scuffed and well read, with wonderful paper and deckled edges – and I fell immediately in love.
This is a book that demands to be read outside, in the open air. This is its natural habitat. Clearly the work of a vibrant, untamed mind, it is filled with colour and movement, fearlessness and beauty. I was particularly struck by how Eepersip is equal to, and inseparable from, the natural world in which she lives. The birds and butterflies are her friends – she doesn’t need to give them voices or names, to ‘humanize’ them. Looking around at the human-dominated world our own children will inherit, it’s a powerfully utopian vision of how things might otherwise be.
The House Without Windows sings to my soul across an ocean, across a century. It is filled with wild joy, with light, with air. It is a celebration of freedom and ‘aloneness’, which is so different from loneliness. In her own way, Barbara created a female Peter Pan: an icon of adventuring spirit and youthful imagination. But Eepersip is stronger than Peter in so many ways. She is happy to sing and dance her way through the days but she has no fear of being quiet, of being alone. She isn’t obsessed with her own cleverness and, above all, she does not fear growing up. On the contrary, Eepersip is already an old soul, wise beyond her years.
Success with a first novel is an unusual thing. Success at the age of twelve is almost unheard of. For a child who had led a solitary life, Barbara took this success in her stride. She met her literary heroes and was photographed smiling beside them. She was interviewed on the radio and found herself being asked to review books like Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne. But, like all good writers, by the time The House Without Windows was published Barbara had already fallen in love again. This time, it was with the sea. She had begun work on a book about pirates.
She threw herself into learning the names and shapes of sailing ships, sails, ropes and knots, all from her favourite Webster’s Dictionary. She studied the points of the compass, hoping they would point a new direction for her restless imagination. But the dictionary and her imagination weren’t enough. Barbara knew from writing her first book that real-life experience informed the best passages of her stories. She had walked into the mountains, danced with butterflies and seen the frost flowers. And she knew, deep in her salty blood, that she had to experience life on the water. She had to feel the salt wind in her face, the ropes against her hands, the sway of the hull. She had to sleep on the sea-rolled deck beneath a sky of stars. And so she set sail, without her parents and aged just thirteen, signing on as the cabin ‘boy’ with a ship bound for Nova Scotia. A few months later she returned from the distant north and handed in her manuscript for her second book: The Voyage of the Norman D.
Two books published to critical acclaim, and Barbara’s flag was flying high. But then her beloved father, who had also been her trusted editor, declared that he was leaving the family. He had fallen in love with a younger woman. Barbara’s world was shaken to its roots yet she continued to write and to travel, at first by sea, then later on foot. She and her mother survived through the years of the Great Depression, selling articles here and there – articles they often worked on together. During this time, Barbara also worked as a secretary to earn money for the family. And when life in the city became too much, she would seek escape.
By eighteen, Barbara was hiking the Appalachian Trail in the company of a young man called Nickerson Rogers, each night sharing his small tent or lying together beneath the ceiling of stars. Later she and Nickerson travelled to Europe, living as husband and wife, wandering through Spain, France, Germany, sometimes working, always writing, keeping notes for future manuscripts. And what things they must have seen, as they worked and walked their way through this turbulent time between the wars.
On their return to America they settled into an apartment, marrying in 1934 and taking jobs. And Barbara began to feel her dreams slipping away to the familiar tune of work and domesticity. For a while her newfound interest in modern dance released some of the energy that began to writhe inside her, but it was an imperfect fix. She still wrote, but her work was no longer in favour with publishers and the rejections always hurt.
And then, in 1939, on 7 December, Barbara Rogers, née Newhall Follett, walked out of the apartment she shared with her husband, Nick. She left no note, took only a few dollars and some shorthand notes. And she was never seen again.
It took Nickerson two weeks to report his wife missing. Finally notifying the police, he gave her married name, meaning the press hardly realized this famous and celebrated novelist had vanished. When questioned, he said there had been an argument. They had not been happy. In fact, he had recently asked for a divorce, but together they were trying to work things through, and she had been hopeful. Then she left.
Why? Where did she go? To the meadow, the sea or the mountains? Barbara once joked with a friend that if life became too much she could always disappear, changing the colour of her hair, the shape of her eyebrows, and living a disguised life. She could always make a new story to live in. We will never know what that story turned out to be.
This curious mystery, running uncannily parallel to the prophetic story she wrote as a child, has fascinated many people over the years. But it is not Barbara’s absence that fascinates me. It is her presence. From the earliest age, she shaped her own life: from the theft of the typewriter to her running away from college aged fifteen to walking a wild path with a handsome young man at the age of nineteen. Reading about her life, she seems a child entirely out of time with the world, an untamed spirit, defiant in the face of the usual constrictions of her gender, her ‘place’. And all of her stories speak of escape. If she wanted something, she found a way to make it happen. And who among us hasn’t wished at some point to walk away from everything, leave it all behind, rewrite our lives?
After Barbara disappeared, what she wrote began to vanish too. The House Without Windows was reprinted by Ballantine in the 1970s but, as I write this, it has been long out of print and copies are hard to find and fearsomely expensive. I own one copy of The Voyage of the Norman D. but have never seen another offered for sale.
Barbara’s words and her spirit have haunted me for so long now. She lived in an age when clouds of butterflies would rise from the fields of flowers, when it could take fifteen minutes for a flock of birds to pass across the sky. To see the world through her yo
ung bright eyes is a wonderful thing. To meet her soul, in Eepersip, and walk with her in the meadow, swim in the sea, sleep beneath a blanket of snow, across a century and a wide ocean, is the purest magic. It is a magic she herself would have understood – the kind made by stories.
Is it possible to be haunted by two ghosts of the same person? This is what it feels like to me. I am haunted by the ghost of a twelve-year-old, publishing her first book, brimming with hope, her eyes wide open to the world, and the ghost of a twenty-five-year-old, desperate and determined to hang on to her dreams. If Virginia Woolfe desired ‘A Room of One’s Own’, then Barbara Newhall Follett’s desire was for nothing less than ‘A Wild of One’s Own’.
Whenever I read her words, they paint the most extraordinary pictures in my mind. Back in 1927, it was suggested that The House Without Windows might be republished in an illustrated edition, if it proved to be a success. I have thought about that for a long time, and about all the things Barbara left behind her. I hope she would be pleased with what I have done here, trying to catch the ghosts of her wild creatures in ink and in water.
People search for Barbara in her archives, looking for the answer to the mystery of her absence. Some search for murder clues, others for signs of escape. Reader, do not look for Barbara there. Search instead in the pages of her stories. Hear her voice, and listen. On summer days you can hear swallows call the name of Eepersip, threading it through the sky. Look, if you have eyes to see and a heart to believe, between the wings of butterflies, and you will find her.
Jackie Morris, April 2019
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