Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  So here’s a new hypothesis: I needed a cathartic release for my worst impulses.

  SHE WAS THE PROFESSOR OF GREEK AT OXFORD

  The Warden’s Niece

  by Gillian Avery

  I have never identified with anyone in my life as much as I identified with the warden’s niece. Maria was me, I was Maria. Closer, far closer than Alice in Wonderland or through the looking glass. We were the same age, shared the same body and soul. I looked out through her eyes, took her steps, spoke her words.

  I saw Maria long before I read about her, and before I knew there was anything to read about her. I saw her take shape. She held my gaze from a portrait on an easel. She didn’t look much like me – she was dark, grave, intense, her clothes were strange. I like to think some spark was lit when we exchanged glances, but that’s probably hindsight.

  The artist who painted Maria was not her inventor but her interpreter. His name was Dick Hart. He lived in a studio apartment at the back of our house in St John’s Wood with his wife Mary and their two boys, Edmund and Oliver, who were a bit younger than me. We all met when my sister Julia and I played with Edmund and Oliver in the sandpit in our backyard. I used to wander into the studio (probably uninvited) and play with the boys’ Plasticine (they had an irresistible collection of smeary marbled multicoloured balls) and read the Harts’ books, including Pinocchio, which I remember as a dark and sinister tale, probably because of the creepy Arthur Rackham illustrations, very different from the sunny Walt Disney version.

  My impression of the studio was of a vast open space with a glass roof and a glass wall and no private rooms (I might be wrong about that). Certainly the Harts seemed to live, sleep, eat, talk, laugh, quarrel, work and play in the same space. They tolerated my intrusions, and didn’t seem to mind that I saw their whole lives on display, or so it seemed. It was very different from my house, where most of the time we kids kept to our bedrooms or the playroom or the backyard, and the studio and living rooms were our parents’ domain. At the Harts’ place, everything seemed to happen on top of everything else, and always at shouting volume. Dick Hart was thin, dark, bearded and intense, and he scared me a little, because sometimes he shouted very loudly at his wife and boys, and I wasn’t used to fathers who shouted. He worked on his easel down one end of the studio, where there was most light, drawing and painting book illustrations, and that was where I met Maria, without knowing who she was or what she was doing there.

  I suppose I got my copy of The Warden’s Niece when it came out as a gift from the Harts, who had seen me many a time with my nose in a book. I didn’t talk to them about it. I took it away and read it again and again. Out of the curiously public realm of the Harts came an intensely private experience, for to this day I have never met a single other person apart from Dick Hart who has read the book (and I can’t be sure he read it all), and I have never read or talked or written about it before. It still feels as if I have had Maria and the mysterious Gillian Avery to myself for all these decades.

  “It still feels as if I have had Maria and the mysterious Gillian Avery to myself for all these decades.”

  Why was I Maria? We came out of identical purgatories. We went to schools where we felt dirty, slovenly, stupid, hopeless. Teachers and other students scoffed at us and our pathetic ink-blotted work. We ran away (well, Maria ran away and I went with her) because we had reached such extremes of isolation and despair that nothing would suffice but to stand, exhausted and drenched in rain, at the door of our only relative, an uncle who is a warden at an Oxford college.

  “Why was I Maria? We came out of identical purgatories. We went to schools where we felt dirty, slovenly, stupid, hopeless.”

  The warden doesn’t really know what to do with Maria, but he takes her in and she is introduced to his three boys: Thomas, Edward and James, and their tutor, Mr Copplestone, an impossibly lanky bearded fellow who rides a penny-farthing bicycle (this is all happening, I would guess, in the early 1900s). The boys are a bit intimidating, but Maria takes to the eccentric Mr Copplestone. He sets the boys a task: each must write an essay about someone famous, and James’s essay must be about Machiavelli.

  James is the youngest boy, about twelve. He has freckles and red curls and he’s cheeky. He knows no more about Machiavelli than I did, but he improvises. He writes an essay that begins ‘What I know about Mackervelly: Nothing.’ He then records a huge list of famous things that ‘Mackervelly’ didn’t do, didn’t discover and didn’t invent.

  Mr Copplestone is unimpressed, but Maria is thrilled and I am laughing my head off. On the scale of brilliant wit, this is only just behind the absolute apex, Piglet’s encounter with the Heffalump. It’s also so daring! I would never do such a thing, but I know for sure now that Maria is in the right place.

  “At this point I had a lightbulb moment: I would grow up and do original research and discover all sorts of amazing secrets about art and other old things, and people would admire me, and I would show them all. If Maria could do it, so could I.”

  I’m a bit hazy about her further adventures: I know she mistakes a marsh for a green meadow and falls in, but what I remember best is that she discovers an old drawing labelled ‘Portrait of an Unknown Boy’. She becomes a detective in the library, tracking down the boy, and succeeds in identifying him. Wonder of wonders, the dirty, slovenly, stupid, hopeless girl has done something very intelligent and enterprising. I learn it’s called ‘original research’.

  At this point I had a lightbulb moment: I would grow up and do original research and discover all sorts of amazing secrets about art and other old things, and people would admire me, and I would show them all. If Maria could do it, so could I.

  I’m thinking now that it’s a rare privilege to fall so completely into a fictional character’s identity, and like falling in love, it can’t be willed: it’s all down to timing, chemistry and luck. In the decades since, I have been Jane Eyre and Emma Bovary and Anne Frank and Anne Elliot and Frodo Baggins and John Yossarian and a host of others, but never with the same ease, that feeling of pulling on a glove that fits. I haven’t thought about Maria that often, but when I do, it’s Maria’s deep dark eyes, as painted by Dick Hart, that I see; and that recognition that I was a lonely miserable nobody like Maria, and yet could still learn to be somebody and do something that might matter.

  “that it’s a rare privilege to fall so completely into a fictional character’s identity, and like falling in love, it can’t be willed: it’s all down to timing, chemistry and luck.”

  Noddy and ‘National Geographic’ are immediate in my memories, but the story that cries loudest from my youth is A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines. The novel came to me some time before 1970, I suspect via the library, but I remember seeing the film Kes in Year Nine. I’d struggled with the language in the book but the images and drama of the story were arrows to my young heart.

  The evocation of the weather, the landscape, society, its discrimination and bullying worked viscerally for me. I remember feeling empathy, an urge to help, and I no longer saw the ‘poor kids’ at my school as ‘other’. In my somewhat dramatic imagination, I imagined everyone had a tender heart and that they could soar if only they found a cause. The lesson on cruelty was the hardest to bear.

  Rosalie Ham

  My re-reading copy is a Lions paperback edition from 1975 (the book was originally published in 1957, so I was seven when I first read it). Lions was a Collins imprint that published children’s books by authors such as Alan Garner and Noel Streatfeild, and from their list of titles I discover that Gillian Avery wrote two other books I have never heard of, The Greatest Gresham and A Likely Lad. There are favourable quotes from three original reviews of The Warden’s Niece and a synopsis on the back cover, but no information about the author, and I am shocked to discover that her name is spelt wrong on the front cover (Gillan Avery). How could such a glaring mistake get into circulation?

  It’s not as smart as the hardback edition I remember and it
doesn’t have Maria’s portrait on the cover, or indeed anywhere inside. But I’m happy to find it still has Dick Hart’s black-and-white illustrations. The reproduction is somewhat smudgy, but that’s not a bad thing, because Dick Hart was into smudges. The drawings are stylised, a little surreal, very adult for a children’s book. Once more I enjoy Maria’s skinny legs and slightly claw-like arms and hands and the way everyone seems elongated, especially Mr Copplestone. The colour cover picture seems in a more conventional style and I’m not even sure it’s by Hart, though I suppose it must be. It shows two studious men working at a desk, and Maria stealthily crawling around underneath. A potent image, as it turns out.

  The Warden’s Niece, I soon discover, is a wholly delightful comedy, and if it isn’t a children’s classic, it jolly well should be. It’s also very sophisticated reading for a seven-year-old, so I give myself a pat on the back. I have remembered most of it very well, but some things completely wrong. The year is 1875. The three boys are the sons not of the Warden but of his neighbour, Professor Smith, and the name of the middle boy in the trio is Joshua, not Edward. The youngest, James, is eight, not twelve. He does not thrill Maria, he infuriates her; and she does not exactly take to Mr Copplestone. And some memories must have strayed in from other books: Maria doesn’t fall into a marsh and Mr Copplestone doesn’t ride a penny-farthing bicycle, though it is just the sort of ridiculous contraption he would own, if he could afford it.

  The discovery that has the most impact on me now is how wrong I’ve got Maria’s age. I had thought she was seven, the same age as me when I read about her; but she’s eleven. This fits in with the prevailing idea today, that children enjoy reading about other children who are a little older than they are; but it doesn’t quite explain that sense of complete identity. And now I think about it, there’s no way even a precocious seven-year-old would be capable of doing all the things Maria does. It occurs to me now that my initial assessment of falling into a character’s identity is inaccurate: up to a certain point, it can be willed. I didn’t just passively accept Maria as my alter ego in the story. I actually bent the facts to fit her more closely to me.

  “It occurs to me now that my initial assessment of falling into a character’s identity is inaccurate: up to a certain point, it can be willed.”

  But if I’ve got those things wrong, I have the first chapter so right in my head I am almost chanting along with the lines as I read. Maria is at boarding school, ‘new and silent’. ‘Isn’t that new girl slow!’ is a typical comment. She’s an orphan who has been living with her Great-Aunt Lucia, which was not much fun, but school is terrifying. Teachers and girls alike condemn her for her slowness, stupidity, messy hair, inky hands. She has been working on a map of Germany: ‘It had heavy blots and was smudged where Maria had wept, wondering where the coal and iron deposits were,’ and in her desperation she has scrubbed a hole in the paper with her india rubber.

  Miss Ferguson the geography teacher announces to the class that their preparation has gone badly, but one exercise is so bad as to deserve severe punishment. She keeps this one until last. It’s Maria’s map, of course. Never in the history of the school has such disgraceful work been handed in. The girl who produced it is dirty, ignorant, unbelievably sluttish, insolent… On goes the storm of words while Maria escapes into a dream where she is the Professor of Greek at Oxford and calling Miss Ferguson to order for lack of attention. She wakes up only when Miss Ferguson announces that she must now wear a label marked ‘Slut’.

  The puzzle at first is why I identified so completely with Maria’s isolation, panic and despair. My primary school was nothing like this Lowood, this Dothegirls Hall, with its horrible scolding and its hideous punishments. I was a day pupil who could go home to a happy family life. I was not constantly miserable, and I was not such a bad student, although it took me a long time to realise I was actually quite smart. But thinking about it, I can see the points of connection. I knew about isolation: I was friendless. I had come in a term late and all the little girls’ friendships were set in cement, there was no room for a threesome, and I had no idea how to break the moulds. That was why I came to need The Silent Three. I also knew about unfriendly teachers: I was moved up a class to a teacher who didn’t want me and made fun of me in front of the other children, to the point where I once peed on the seat in my terror. And I knew about the panic that comes when you can’t make something look neat and tidy, or get it to work. My fingers were inky too. There was always some impossible challenge. Long division was my biggest bugbear. Why could everyone else do it, but not me? What was it about these snaky columns of figures that even began to make sense? And the worst thing of all was the humiliation.

  “So just as I bent the facts of the story to get Maria and me at the same age, I also bent the facts of my own life to give me a school experience as hellish as Maria’s.”

  So just as I bent the facts of the story to get Maria and me at the same age, I also bent the facts of my own life to give me a school experience as hellish as Maria’s. We needed to meet in the middle. I must have wanted to find a girl who knew what I was going through, and then some. What would she do?

  All Maria knows is that she can’t wear this ‘Slut’ label. The word doesn’t have the sexual connotation it has since acquired, but it’s still a killer word for a young girl. ‘It was a disgrace she would never escape from for the rest of her life. However old she grew, even if she wrote books and became famous, she would still be remembered as the untidy, dirty girl who was called a slut.’ Not true, of course; yet how well I know about internalising these messages so they become inescapable.

  The logic is, she has to escape. She doesn’t even think about it: first chance she gets, she puts on her outdoor clothes and walks out the door, and once she’s down the drive, return will lead to undreamt-of punishments, so she has no choice: on to the railway station, back to her great-aunt’s home in Bath. But the Bath train has already gone, and so she decides to seek out her Uncle Hadden, the Warden of Canterbury College in nearby Oxford. And it’s just as I remember: the rain, the fear, the self-consciousness, the certainty that everyone she sees is laughing at her, gravely discussing her, or just about to stop her. By the time she gets to Oxford, she’s running through the streets in her panic. I know I’d be just the same, if I even had the gumption to run away in the first place.

  Uncle Hadden takes her in (her great-aunt has conveniently died) and the rest of the book is much lighter, funnier, more hopeful. But the black shadow of school hangs over everything for Maria: the fear that if she puts a foot wrong, she will be sent back there – or even worse, to a reform school, whatever that is. Even coming into a room with adults is an ordeal: suppose they don’t see you, or even worse, suppose they do see you? It is distressingly easy to do the wrong thing, and there are always adults waiting to pounce if you do it.

  There are three time frames operating here. I’m in the world of 1875, where the story takes place; the world of 1957, when the book was published and when I read it; and the world of 2015, when I’m re-reading it. Different ages, with very different rules about the upbringing of children. But what I see and feel constantly is the danger of a hole in a child’s self-esteem, a sense of something morally and intellectually lacking, like the hole worn by the india rubber in Maria’s map. It can be torn early and is hard to repair, however fortunate and full of achievement your life might turn out to be. I had such a hole, I don’t know from where, and even now it’s not quite as patched up as I sometimes think. There’s a label marked ‘Slut’ waiting for all of us, and I recognised myself in Maria’s constant apprehension.

  “There’s a label marked ‘Slut’ waiting for all of us, and I recognised myself in Maria’s constant apprehension.”

  But though Maria is easily frightened, she’s no wimp. She’s much braver than Joshua, a nice boy about her own age who is a bit too worried about what others think of him. And what sets her apart is her extraordinary desire to be the Professor of
Greek at Oxford, to write books and be famous. An almost unheard-of ambition for a girl in those days, much more spectacular and seemingly impossible than my youthful desire to write novels. Maybe at this stage it’s only a consolatory daydream – all she knows are the letters in the Greek alphabet–but she blurts it out to her uncle, and he’s surprisingly receptive. She has the family high forehead, and Oxford has begun to admit female students, and she should have a proper education in Latin and Greek and other manly subjects with the boys next door. ‘Young girls should never be sent to schools,’ he tells her, ‘incompetent teaching, ridiculous subjects, and all those shrill female voices – terrible.’

  One of the things I love this time round is that The Warden’s Niece is a very strong feminist book – not in a tub-thumping way, but sticking up for proper girls’ education and sending up the men who assume education is all for their own benefit; and despite her seeming lack of courage, Maria is a highly promising feminist heroine.

  “One of the things I love this time round is that The Warden’s Niece is a very strong feminist book”

  The Oxford she has landed in, we soon discover, is a paradise for a certain kind of man. He lives for his work, and his work is everything. Uncle Hadden is a more benevolent example of this type, but even he is remote with Maria, perfectly content to dine in silence with her or to read the newspaper in her presence. Professor Smith next door is much the same, and later she encounters more terrifying and more ludicrous examples of the scholarly beast, including a librarian with the dinosaur-like name of Protobibliotecarius Bodleianus. Avery has a lot of fun satirising these dusty otherworldly types who really can’t see anything as bizarre as a little girl right under their noses: I’m reminded of Alice and Humpty Dumpty, or the Caterpillar. Lewis Carroll, I remember, was an Oxford don.