by Dennis Butts
Even Beatrix Potter was far from isolated from the international world. She may have rejected any psychological interpretations of her books, but they became progressively darker and more threatening as the war approached – culminating in the breathless escape in The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913).
The same pattern seems to prevail between the wars. It is sometimes argued that the British idea of chivalry and the glory of war ‘perished in the mud of Flanders’, but this is not quite true of popular literature. F.S. Brereton’s war stories remained in print into the 1940s; from 1933 the Oxford University Press reprinted Herbert Strang’s war stories, for example, With Haig on the Somme in 1936. These became common as school prizes. New books which dealt with contemporary events remained few and far between, however; Percy F. Westerman, arguably the most popular of children’s writers between the wars, and whose First World War novels included A Lively Bit of the Front (1918), produced Under Fire in Spain, about the Spanish Civil War, in 1937. Peter Dawlish, who went on to write a distinguished series of sailing novels, set Captain Pegleg’s War (1939) in a lightly-fictionalised Spain. And, of course, W.E. Johns maintained a withering fire of propaganda for RAF re-armament throughout the 1930s in Popular Flying and the ‘Biggles’ books.
There were other small signs of awareness of the world – perhaps scaled down to a concept of what children could deal with, but visible nonetheless. Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street, for all that it may seem patronising to the modern eye, was a genuine attempt to widen the subject-matter of the children’s book by writing one about a working-class family. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936) can be seen as the first ‘career novel’; and Geoffrey Trease attempted a pioneering left-wing children’s novel in Bows Against the Barons in 1934. (Admittedly it had a rather mixed reception.) Even Richmal Crompton’s William was politically aware: in the story ‘What’s in a Name’ in William: the Dictator (1938) he takes a characteristically misguided and literalist (and, despite the story’s clear satirical intent, to the modern reader now rather tasteless) approach to Fascism when his outlaws become the Greenshirts (at least, they have green armbands) against Hubert Lane’s Blueshirts. William’s adventures continued in a wartime setting in four collections of stories. Crompton was far from the only popular novelist to take a swing at the Fascists – P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938) features an extended satire on a character with fascist ambitions and a gang of ‘Blackshorts’.
Even Ransome can be seen as a radical in his Swallows and Amazons books; indeed it would be improbable if he had not been. After all, here was a man who had supported the Russian revolution, played chess with Lenin, and married Trotsky’s secretary. He was a dyed-in-the-wool democrat: in his Lake District there were ‘no lower orders’ and he gives his female characters as much status and autonomy as possible, given the context. Nor is it too difficult, given the fact that he was, as a literary critic, an early proponent of what would now be called structuralism, to read his novels of the 1930s as metaphors for what is going on in the wider world. Pigeon Post (1936) for example, ends with a fire that is only put out with the help of an unlikely group of allies summoned at the last minute – perhaps a foreshadowing of the 1940s conflagration in Europe.
Similarly, John Masefield was a man with extensive European connections and strong political views, and so The Midnight Folk, with its invasion plot, can be seen not as escapist fantasy, but as highly-engaged allegory.
The Second World War was a turning-point for mainstream children’s literature. From then on, children would be given books that, in whatever form, were aware of the world; whatever the protective or self-protective impulses of their authors, the world and its uncomfortable realities was now acknowledged. In a sense, children’s books had grown up.
17. How Old Was the Great Aunt?
Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale (1931) and The Picts and the Martyrs (1943)
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons sequence (1930-1947) is often described as pioneering the ‘holiday’ adventure novel for children – reasonably realistic stories that liberated the fictional children from adult control. Equally, the books can be seen as part of the ‘camping and tramping’ fashion of the inter-war years, as country books harking back to Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, and as stories with echoes of the sea/island/empire genres of the nineteenth century. All of these theories have some truth, but they tend to disguise just how subtle a novelist, in the modernist-realist tradition, Ransome could have been had he followed his inclination to be a novelist for adults. The fragment of The River Comes First, written immediately after The Picts and the Martyrs but published only in 1988 demonstrates his human sympathy as well as his remarkable technical skills.
But these aspects of his writing had already been demonstrated in his portrayal of an apparently minor character: Great Aunt Maria Turner. She first appears in Swallowdale, as the lynchpin of the plot: because of her presence, the wild Amazon pirates, Nancy and Peggy Blackett, have to be on their best behaviour and are not allowed to camp with their friends, John, Susan, Titty and Roger, the Swallows:
On the road below them there was the noise of a horse’s hoofs . . . A black horse was moving at a solemn trot, pulling an open carriage. Two grown-up people and two girls were sitting in the carriage.
‘One of them’s Mrs Blackett,’ said Susan.
‘The other must be the great-aunt,’ said Titty, ‘but those can’t be the Amazon pirates.’
A very prim elderly lady holding a small black parasol over her head was sitting stiffly beside Mrs Blackett. In front of them on the little narrow seat beside the driver, facing the grown-ups, were two girls in flounced frocks, with summer hats, their hands in gloves, clasped on their knees. It was a dreadful sight. As the carriage disappeared, the explorers looked at each other with shocked eyes.
‘That’s much worse than being shipwrecked,’ said Titty at last.
At first it seems as though the great-aunt might be a kind of pantomime figure, and as a friend of Ransome’s, Margaret Renold, observed when The Picts and the Martyrs was published in 1942, ‘Great Aunts of that kind must have died out about 40 years ago’. But almost immediately, the great-aunt becomes a device for allowing children an insight into the ambiguies of the adult world: all is not black and white The Swallows’ mother is quietly sympathetic to the girls, but very aware that even Great Aunts are human:
‘Poor dears,’ said mother, ‘from what I hear they’ve been having rather a poor time.’
‘Horrible,’ said John. ‘We saw them out driving.’
‘With gloves on,’ said Titty.
‘What’s the great-aunt really like?’ asked Susan.
‘Didn’t she come to tea to make friends the day after we sailed away to Wild Cat Island?’ said Titty.
‘I wouldn’t say she came to make friends,’ said mother. ‘It was a curiosity call. She made Mrs Blackett bring her because she wanted to know what we were like.’
‘But didn’t she make friends when she saw how nice you are?’
Mother laughed.
‘Perhaps she didn’t think so.’ She would say no more about the Great Aunt . . .
Similarly Nancy and Peggy’s Uncle Jim (aka Captain Flint):
‘It really is a bit difficult for them to get away.’
‘I think the great-aunt must be horrid,’ said Titty.
Captain Flint said neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No’ to that . . .
This is matched by casual insights into the Blackett’s family life which lead into an emotional depth that goes beyond the usual unspoken codes of behaviour: Nancy says,
‘It isn’t as if it was only us. We can stand it. But she will go for mother. There was an awful row again just because we ran into a calm the day we helped you to move camp. And anyway, who can help being late in summer? But the moment she looks at her watch and thinks there ought to be a meal she doesn’t wai
t decently until the gong’s been banged once or twice in the house and then taken out in the garden and banged good and proper in case we’re up on the fell. She just goes into the sitting room and waits. And ten to one cook isn’t ready. And the old gong doesn’t go until she is. And mother doesn’t know what to do between the great-aunt and cook . . . Last night she made mother cry.’
Titty stared at her and her mouth stayed open. She tried to think what she would do if anyone ever tried to make the best of all natives cry.
‘It was about us, of course. She dragged father in. We knew because after we’d gone to bed we couldn’t help but hear Uncle Jim talking to mother just outside our window, and he said, “Bob would have liked them as they are.” And he called mother “Mops”, which he only does sometimes. Then we made a noise and mother said “go to sleep, you donkeys.” And pretended to laugh. But she couldn’t.’
Nancy walked suddenly away, but she came back in a moment with her face very red.
These passages demonstrate that Ransome was not just a writer of ‘holiday adventure’ novels. They are emotionally complex and a long way from hearty and superficial ‘idyllic childhood’ writing!
When the great-aunt reappears in The Picts and the Martyrs, Ransome, who in this book explores the adult characters of his Lake District landscape in far more detail than he does elsewhere, brings in the Cook as witness:
‘Is she very awful?’ asked Dorothea.
‘She jolly well is,’ said Nancy. ‘You ask the Swallows. They know what it’s like when she’s here. She spoilt everything for all of us. We had to be in for meals and learn poetry and wear best frocks and be seen and not heard and all that sort of rot. Ask Cook. She knows her too. She fairly danced when she went away. Yes, you did.’
‘I wasn’t sorry to see the back of her,’ said Cook. ‘Sitting down to meals before I had ’em ready. Looking at her tumbler and wiping it with her napkin. She’s one of them that can’t keep their eyes off the clock when other folk are a bit behind. If she hadn’t gone when she did she’d have your mother in bed with all her worriting.’
More nuanced perspectives are provided, as from Mary Swainson, the daughter of one of the local farms:
Mary Swainson knew her at once. As a child she had been very much in awe of her. She reminded herself that she was now grown up and was going to marry Jack, the woodman, as soon as she thought fit, while Miss Turner, poor old thing, had never married at all. Crossing the road, to go down through the coppice to her boat, she smiled at Miss Turner with a queer mixture of kindness, pity and fear.
And when the Great Aunt arrives:
‘Aye, she’s come,’ said Cook grimly. ‘She’s come, and trouble with her. Girt auld hen ‘at wants to be cock o’ t’ midden. She’s begun by clearing Miss Nancy off from the head of the table and taking the mistress’s place to herself.’
But Aunt Maria, for all her draconian behaviour, turns out to be human too. Having suspected (incorrectly) that her great-nieces have been meeting the Swallows, she goes to see for herself – and steps onto the stage in person, rather than by report. As Dorothea sees her:
. . . Her anger showed in a queer way. She opened her parasol with a jerk, held it over her head, sat up even straighter and looked about her as if she were a visitor being taken for a turn on the lake. She lifted her chin. Her lips were tight together. And Dorothea suddenly knew that the Great Aunt was herself afraid of something. Not exactly afraid. Defiant was the word, thought Dorothea, and remembered the picture of the stag at bay on the bedroom wall at Dixon’s farm . . .
‘But those horns,’ she said. ‘They don’t belong to the police.’
‘That’s the firefighters,’ said Dorothea. ‘Colonel Jolys’s firefighters.’
‘Tommy Jolys!’ exclaimed the Great Aunt. ‘Hunting me with horns. I shall have something to say to him. He was always a noisy and ill-behaved little boy.’
Dorothea remembered the stout, white-moustached, bald-headed Colonel, standing in his car and talking to his men, and found it hard to put the two pictures together. Suddenly she found herself wondering what the Great Aunt had been like as a little girl. She gave it up. The Great Aunt was one of those people who could never have been young at all. She must have been a Great Aunt, and her sort of Great Aunt, from the beginning of time.
Which brings us to Colonel Jolys.
The Colonel loudly cleared his throat.
‘Bless my soul,’ murmured Timothy. ‘He’s going to make a speech.’
The colonel was handing the Great Aunt out of the boat. He began his speech, but did not get very far with it.
‘Tommy Jolys,’ the Great Aunt interrupted him. ‘Am I right in supposing that you are the leading spirit in this foolery?’
With the first words she spoke as she came ashore, the Great Aunt set the tone for all that followed.
Colonel Jolys, D.S.O., organiser of the district firefighters, leader of men, hero of many wars, became in a moment, Tommy, the little boy of fifty years ago. His dignity was gone. It was as if someone had pricked a toy balloon. The speech that he had meant to deliver died on his lips. He shifted from one foot to the other without a word to say. The Great Aunt had no mercy.
‘No, Tommy,’ she went on slowly. ‘You have really changed very little. You always liked toy trumpets . . . I remember seeing you, and hearing you, lying on the nursery floor howling with temper because you sister had trodden on the tin trumpet you had then. You lay there, howling and howling until your mother picked you up and properly chastised you.’
One of the firefighting young men laughed, a laugh that broke off short as the Colonel turned to see who it was.
‘But, Miss Turner,’ he stammered.
‘Tin trumpets, Tommy’, said the Great Aunt, and Peggy, staring at her, suddenly though it was very like hearing Nancy call somebody a galoot.
As Timothy says a little later: ‘If you ask me, I think your Great Aunt is remarkably like her Great Niece.’ The Great Aunt, vulnerable as a result of her impulses, and realistically empathetic to her eldest niece is a much more rounded character than one might expect – but how plausible is she? Was Margaret Renold right to say that the Great Aunt was an anachronism? The Great Aunt has to leave at the end of the book to rejoin her ‘dear old friend, Miss Huskisson, who, in accordance with her usual summer routine, is to take the waters at Harrogate . . . ’ Taking the waters at the Harrogate chalybeate springs was in decline after the First World War, but in 1933, when The Picts and the Martyrs is set, many elderly ladies would have continued to do so. But just how elderly was she?
There are two lines of enquiry. The Great Aunt brought up Mrs Blackett and Captain Flint, which is why, as Nancy says, ‘They’re much more afraid of her than we are’; and we know from the evidence of the box the children find under the cairn on the top of the Old Man of Coniston, that ‘Molly Turner, J. Turner, and Bob Blackett’ ‘climbed the Matterhorn on August 2nd, 1901.’
‘I wonder how mother and Uncle Jim escaped from the great-aunt to come up here’ said Peggy. ‘She was looking after them, you know.’
‘Probably father rescued them,’ said Nancy.
Assuming that Molly and Jim and Bob were much the same ages as the elder Swallows and Amazons, say twelve and thirteen, they would have been born around 1889. Let us assume that, to bring them up, the Great Aunt had to be around thirty years old when they were born, then she was born around 1860. Which would make her sixty-three or sixty-four in 1933 – quite an elderly person for the day.
On the other hand, she remembers Tommy Jolys as a child, ‘fifty years ago’ – which makes Tommy around fifty-five, at best, which seems a little young for the image that Ransome gives of him. But as the Great Aunt could have been ten years old while watching him scream for his tin trumpet, then that makes the Great Aunt around sixty-five. With our modern perspectives on age that might not seem very old – and we might
want to push the age up a little, especially to make the Colonel a little older, and to maintain a certain edge for the Great Aunt. And so an image of a slightly tragic seventy-year old lady, dressed in Victorian black, taking on the world that she cannot join in with, may be what Ransome had in mind.
Outside, in the garden, the huntsmen were licking their wounds.
‘My word. She’s a tartar, that old lady,’ said the sergeant of police.
‘Flattened us out one after another,’ said Colonel Jolys. ‘Down with one and ready for the next.’
But if the Great Aunt was an anachronism in the fictional world of 1933 (and more so in the year of publication), so also Ransome’s Lake District is a lost world: cars and telephones and garages were extremely rare, and Ransome was writing on the cusp of social and educational change:
Mrs Blackett, chattering happily to Mrs Walker (‘Mother’s fairly letting herself go again’ said Nancy), did say something about the way in which children used to be brought up and how much better it was now that children could be the friends of their elders instead of their terrified subjects.
This was too much for Nancy. ‘What she really means,’ she broke in, ‘is that it’s lucky we are bringing ourselves up instead of being brought up by the G.A.’
The Great Aunt, like the Swallows and the Amazons, has become a creature of myth – and is therefore ageless.
