Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Having established herself as a believer, an adult in conspiracy with her young readers, the Nesbit persona can slip in more dry asides: ‘Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible companion will not need to be told how awkward the whole business is.’ There are some pleasing metaphors. As Gerald goes through the castle gardens at night, he has ‘the feeling that he was in another world, that had covered up and hidden the old world as a carpet covers a floor.’ And the curtain between the real and the magic world is ‘thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron’.

  The wonder of magic is certainly apparent in passages where the children explore the castle gardens by moonlight. When someone is wearing the ring, he or she can see the statues come to life, moving through the foliage and diving into the lake. There is also a huge statue of a ‘dinosaurus’ that comes down to wallow in the waters. ‘It was one of those great lizards you see at the Crystal Palace,’ says Nesbit, and this one line was the reason why I misremembered the story as set in London in a park near Crystal Palace.

  Later, Nesbit attempts to make the magic far more wondrous. The children turn into living statues and join the statues of Greek gods feasting on an island in the middle of the lake, where a central pool reflects seven invisible moons. The celestial picnic has its moments; when Phoebus plucks his lyre and sings, ‘it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful.’ But again, the effect is dissipated by banal descriptions, particularly of my old friend Pisk: ‘Psyche, who was a darling, as anyone could see.’

  “It’s a tough juggling act, balancing the lyrical and wonderful with the everyday, and I think Nesbit pulls it off only intermittently, without the skill of Kenneth Grahame and his fantastically creepy but benevolent piper at the gates of dawn. ”

  It’s a tough juggling act, balancing the lyrical and wonderful with the everyday, and I think Nesbit pulls it off only intermittently, without the skill of Kenneth Grahame and his fantastically creepy but benevolent piper at the gates of dawn. It’s not for want of trying, though. The darling Psyche has an underground temple that is ‘the most beautiful place in the world’ with arch-ways giving glimpses of ‘some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower’. And things get more and more mystical. At the climax, humans and statues are drawn together at moonrise to a stone temple, where something happens that transcends time and space. Within ‘the circle of the real magic’ they gaze upwards and cry ‘The light! The light!’ I’m reminded irresistibly of a Steven Spielberg film. What is it all about? I have no idea.

  So on re-re-reading, I find it a most uneven book. Should I have picked another one from the Nesbit canon? But this was the one that resonated with me, and I see that the parts of The Enchanted Castle that I like best now are also the very same parts that I remember best: the princess who may or may not be real; the magic ring; the statues that come to life when you walk through the garden at night; and the Ugly-Wuglies.

  This makes me think in turn about the difference between myself as an adult and myself as a child, reading about magic. As a child, I wanted to believe like Gerald, as hard as I could, like the way I went on willing myself to believe in the fairy palace, which is at least halfway to believing. And magic for me meant a huge range of things. It was fun and exciting, like real conjuring tricks. It could mean something mysterious and very wonderful. It could also mean something very horrible. As an adult, I don’t believe, and yet the implications of the magic strike me with horror, and the ring seems as dangerous as Tolkien’s. Why, anything can happen. In theory the children control the ring, but in practice it often seems the other way round. If it was up to me, I’d throw it into the nearest thing to a crack of doom.

  “magic for me meant a huge range of things. It was fun and exciting, like real conjuring tricks. It could mean something mysterious and very wonderful. It could also mean something very horrible”

  Such adult concerns make me critical, but I remember that when I first read the book, I had no such qualms: I was content to savour the range of magic, I enjoyed the picnicking with the gods, I was happy to wonder at the mystery of the moonlight in the stone temple, and everything pleased me. And one thing I particularly enjoyed was the ambiguity of magic. Was the princess real, or not? Was the castle really enchanted, or just a very beautiful stately home?

  But there was one moment of pure horror, and it’s still potent now. The scene where the Ugly-Wuglies come alive, which comes about halfway through the story, is a tour de force, both the best and the most frightening passage in the book. The children are preparing to put on a play, Beauty and the Beast, for Mademoiselle and the maid, Eliza. It reminds me of the girls’ plays in Little Women. All the preparations, props and clothes are described in great detail, including the seven extra members of the audience, and how they are made. Nesbit has the perfect description of the performance: ‘You know pretty well what Beauty and the Beast would be like acted by four children who had spent the afternoon in arranging their costumes and so had left no time for rehearsing what they had to say. Yet it delighted them, and it charmed their audience. And what more can any play do, even Shakespeare’s?’

  All the time, tension is building. You know something bad is going to happen, because everything is going so well. I almost cried out at the moment where Mabel, annoyed at the small applause from two pairs of hands, delivers her throwaway remark: ‘I wish those creatures we made were alive.’ The curtains open on a new scene of a garden, with the hearthrug-coated Beast. ‘Mademoiselle began it: she applauded the garden scene – with hurried little clappings of her quick French hands. Eliza’s fat red palms followed heavily, and then – someone else was clapping, six or seven people, and their clapping made a dull padded sound.’ It’s that ‘dull padded sound’ I have always remembered.

  What follows is a fiendishly effective combination of Nesbit’s gift for humour and an unleashed grotes-querie that doesn’t occur anywhere else in her fiction. Mademoiselle and Eliza flee in terror. The Ugly-Wuglies, thinking the show is over, move out too, heading for the town. The children can’t take them apart, can’t wish them away. As Gerald moves into the grisly crowd, a garish painted face accosts him and keeps asking him a consonant-free question that the boy finally deciphers as ‘Can you recommend me to a good hotel?’

  Here is what I’ve remembered so well: the Uglies are impossible and unbearable not because they are malevolent, but precisely because they are nice, respectable gents and ladies, behaving in a totally reasonable manner, and they like Gerald because he’s a well-mannered boy. But they are empty inside. They remind me of the feeling I get sometimes in a plane: here I sit in comfort, eating my meal and watching a film, while beneath me yawn icy kilometres of nothing.

  “the Uglies are impossible and unbearable not because they are malevolent, but precisely because they are nice”

  Improvising with wild lies, Gerald lures the Uglies to a place in the castle gardens where he can lock them away. But at the last minute, they smell a rat, start fighting back, and he can only just get them in. In the way of nightmares, the story goes on: the Uglies are supposed to fall apart but they escape, continue their weird existence, and inflict some violence. One becomes human, a companion to Jimmy turned into a rich man. But gradually the Ugly-Wugly story tails off, and I am sorry when we lose them, because their impact is so powerful that the rest of the story – the celestial picnic, the most beautiful place in the world, ‘The light! The light!’ – is an anticlimax.

  “What sort of writer could invent creatures so brilliantly hideous, and then abandon them not much more than halfway through the story?”

  What sort of writer could invent creatures so brilliantly hideous, and then abandon them not much more than halfway through the story? Did she lose her nerve? Was she worried about frightening her readers too much? Did she want to get back to the more positive side of magic? Or did she not quite realise what she had done? I turn to the biogr
aphies to find out.

  There are two versions of the short E. Nesbit biography: the official and the unexpurgated. The official one is much the same as in my Puffin Classic, and I find a more detailed version on the website of the E. Nesbit Society. But the unexpurgated version is on Wikipedia. Here I learn of some very painful episodes in Nesbit’s personal life. Let’s call her Edith for this. When she married Hubert Bland in 1880, she was eighteen years old and seven months pregnant. She discovered that another woman had had a child by Hubert, and had believed she was his fiancée. When her friend Alice Hoatson became pregnant, Edith agreed to adopt the child and have Alice live in as their housekeeper. Then she discovered that her husband was the father of this child too. She quarrelled with Alice and wanted her to leave, but her husband threatened to leave Edith if she disowned the baby and its mother. Astonishingly, Alice remained in the family as housekeeper and secretary and had another child with Hubert thirteen years later. Again, Edith agreed to adopt the child.

  Even if they came to an arrangement, a kind of open marriage, it’s clear that Hubert was a serial cad. But that wasn’t the end to Edith’s troubles. The children’s writer Noel Streatfeild, who wrote a 1958 biography of her early life, Magic and the Magician, doesn’t go into any of these shenanigans, saying only that Edith ‘felt it incumbent on her’ to adopt two children in addition to five of her own. The trouble as Streatfeild saw it was that Edith lived ‘an incredibly hard life’ and was ‘deadly poor’ until her children were almost grown up.

  Once again it seems Hubert was the problem, though maybe it wasn’t all his fault. According to Streatfeild, he was ill with smallpox soon after the marriage and his business partner ran off with all their capital, so it was only Edith’s work as a writer for women’s papers that kept them afloat. Pretty amazing for a woman who came to be the mother of seven children, though of course there was also Alice to take care of them. When Hubert recovered he too became a journalist, but was less successful than his wife. The children’s books, which she began when she was almost forty, brought in serious money, and she must have been extraordinarily industrious: she wrote about forty of them, and twenty more in collaboration with other writers. She also wrote eleven novels and short stories for adults. The family bought a house, Well Hall, at Eltham. But then Hubert developed heart trouble and went blind, and the last four years of his life were very difficult, and again money was scarce. Hubert died in 1914 and I was relieved to see that Edith married again, to Thomas ‘The Skipper’ Tucker. She died in 1924.

  “The children’s books, which she began when she was almost forty, brought in serious money, and she must have been extraordinarily industrious: she wrote about forty of them, and twenty more in collaboration with other writers.”

  There was also tragedy with her children. As well as the five who grew up and the two who were adopted, she gave birth to three babies who did not survive. And when her son Fabian was fifteen, he had a tonsil operation that must have gone very wrong, because he died.

  A tough life, then. And yet there must have been wonderful moments. A few years ago, I read A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a vast, sprawling novel loosely based on the life of Edith Nesbit and her family and friends. I was mesmerised. What struck me most was not so much the tragedy – and there was plenty of that, including a child suicide – as the presence of Olive Wellwood, the Nesbit-like character. She was a queen, she was worshipped, both by young fans and by grown-up admirers. There was a constant bohemian atmosphere of theatre, of dressing up, with Olive as the mistress of ceremonies. If she was perhaps too self-absorbed, too taken up with her fantasies, that was readily forgiven. I don’t know how close Olive was to Edith, but I could see that in many ways Olive was serene and triumphant, and I felt a twinge of envy, just as the budding writer in me once envied Jo March.

  But all this doesn’t explain The Enchanted Castle and the Ugly-Wuglies. For that I must go back to Streatfeild’s biography, which concentrates on Edith’s early years.

  Streatfeild draws on the author’s childhood reminiscences, which were published in serial form and later in a book, Long Ago When I Was Young. There are memories of good times, the ‘happy and relaxed atmosphere she had known as a girl’, as the Puffin introduction has it; or ‘the hot summer days in the English countryside’ as her fan Noel Coward has it. But there were also dark memories. This was a child who lost her father before she turned five, who was unhappy at school, and whose early life was marked by many unsettling moves to many different homes in different countries.

  ‘When I was a little child I used to pray fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then,’ Nesbit wrote. Gore Vidal has an interesting comment on those prayers in his essay on Nesbit in 1964 in The New York Review of Books. ‘With extraordinary perceptiveness, she realised that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live. Nesbit’s vow to survive somehow in the enemy’s consciousness became, finally, her art—when this you see remember me—and the child within continued to the end of the adult’s life.’

  But how did that child continue? The key word in the little girl’s prayer is suffered, and what she suffered most of all was terror. Her first fearful memory was of her father, playing wild beasts with her older brothers; like the hearthrug-covered Gerald as the Beast in the play, her father ‘wore his great fur travelling coat inside out, and his roars were completely convincing.’

  “Her first fearful memory was of her father, playing wild beasts with her older brothers”

  Then another memory, of a children’s play, where she had to lie in a cradle and be carried away by a gypsy, her sister. There was no dress rehearsal, and when on the night she found herself close to an old woman with a big black bonnet and a hideous mask, she screamed herself into a fainting fit. The old woman kept coming back in dreams.

  We all have such terrors in our early years, but do we really remember them? I have a faint uneasy recall of my witch. She rose at the end of my bed, green and black and shimmering, staring at me with her evil smile. She looked like one of the grotesque batik figures my father had brought back on a printed cloth from Borneo, where he served in the war before I was born. They are common souvenirs now, but I’d only seen that one cloth then. I can recreate the witch, but I can’t recreate the utter paralysis she inspired. Even when I squeezed my eyes shut, she was still there.

  Many more terrors haunted poor Edith. The worst took place in Bordeaux, where she pestered her mother to be allowed to visit an exhibit of mummies, without any idea of what mummies were. Off she skipped with her sisters, in her best blue silk frock and happy anticipation. Their guide led them to a dank underground chamber where they were surrounded by about 200 cadavers: ‘Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me… On the wall near the door I saw the dried body of a little child hung up by its hair.’

  This time little Edith was so traumatised she could make no sound. And the fear stayed with her: ‘For many years I could not bring myself to go about any house in the dark, and long after I was a grown woman I was tortured, in the dark watches, by imagination and memory, who rose strong and united, overpowering my will and my reason as utterly as in my baby days.

  ‘It was not till I had two little children of my own that I was able to conquer this mortal terror of darkness, and teach imagination her place, under the foot of reason and will.

  ‘My children, I resolved, should never know such fear. And to guard them from it, I must banish it from my own soul.’

  Edith Nesbit’s books for children were part of that exorcism. She banished that fear from her soul, she forced her imagination under the foot of reason and will. Or did she? Here is the ambiguity of magic, and its dark side. The hearthrug beast, the children’s play, the old woman in the hideous mask, the mummies with their stick limbs and empty shreds of shrouds. Now I know where
the Ugly-Wuglies came from, and I agree with Noel Streatfeild: ‘Nowhere else does she set out to terrify children. The truth was the Ugly-Wuglies had got hold of her pen and refused to let go of it.’

  Now I have a hypothesis that cannot possibly be overthrown. I needed my magic to be scary. Not too scary, but scary enough.

  A SOCKDOLAGER ON THE MUZZLE

  The Magic Pudding

  by Norman Lindsay

  I was a London girl, born and bred, but much of my childhood reading came from the fabulous land Down Under. Both my parents were Australian, and our relatives used to send us girls books at birthdays and Christmas. I suspect my father’s brother Frank and his wife Pat sent most of them; as I found out later, they were quite evan-gelistic about Australian literature.

  So when I was very young, alongside Enid Blyton I had two great series of books by Australian author-illustrators. The jolly Blinky Bill books by Dorothy Wall were about a naughty koala, but I remember them mainly for an incongruously horrific description of the death of Blinky’s dad, shot by a rifle, that made me cry. I adored May Gibbs’s Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the gumnut babies, and the way their world was made out of leaves and knobbly twigs and scribbly writing. They looked like very tiny babies, though they behaved like much older children, and they wore gumnuts and flowers for hats, and gum leaves instead of fig leaves, and they had little protuberances like pig’s ears coming out of their shoulder-blades (maybe rudimentary wings?) which seemed to me like deformities and made me very uncomfortable. But the real terrors were the Banksia Men, dark hairy beasts with fat-lidded eyes all over their bodies who kidnapped gumnut babies. What transgressive creatures they seem today, a cross between feral vaginas and caricatures of indigenous people. (According to an Australian radio poll, 92 per cent of listeners once named the Banksia Men as the most fearsome things in literature.) And then there was a wistful story of a finger-sized boy with an improbable name in Leslie Rees’s Digit Dick and the Tasmanian Devil, who explored a snowy forest with a little girl ghost called Truganini, the last of the Aborigines.