by Dennis Butts
Buckeridge’s second book, Jennings Follows a Clue (1951), takes Jennings into the Easter term of the same school year. Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories, Jennings sets up a detective agency in the school and then, after various comical incidents, actually discovers the thief of the school’s Sports Cup. Jennings is described as ’a friendly looking boy of ten.’ In Jennings’ Little Hut (1951) Jennings is in his third term at Linbury Court. It is now the summer term, and the story begins with a comic cricket match which Darbishire accidentally helps to win. We learn that Jennings is now ‘nearly eleven.’ Jennings and Derbyshire (1952) is the fourth book in the series, and opens with Jennings celebrating his eleventh birthday.
But from now on Buckeridge’s fairly careful delineation of Jennings’ career not only falters but becomes virtually static. There are, of course, numerous comical and farcical episodes, which are usually based upon accidents and misunderstandings. The boys get lost; the school’s fire-drill goes wrong; there is panic over the escape of a supposedly poisonous spider; innocent people are wrongly believed to be criminals; a camping expedition is blown off course; the school concert creates havoc; and so on. But in terms of the character and ethos of the books, very little changes.
Of course, over the years the books were published – between 1950-1994 – British society changed, and various books touch on some of these changes. Interest in space travel, which became intense during the 1950s and 1960s, crops up in the early books, while concern about the environment and conservation feature in the later books. In Jennings Again! of 1991, the boys are so obsessed with the computer game Space Invaders that the Headmaster tries to interest them in ecological problems by helping to organise the collection of litter around the village.
The essential features, however, do not change. Jennings and Darbishire remain fixed in the same class, Form Three, where the same teachers, Mr Carter and Mr Wilkins, remain in control under the eye of the unchanging Archbeak, Mr Pemberton-Oakes. The boys never reach the higher forms or age apparently, and the school remains blissfully free of bullying and racism or worries about sex.
One particularly notable feature of the Jennings books is the unchanging nature of the schoolboy slang. Many readers have found part of the humorous appeal of the series lies in the boys’ use of such abusive terms as ‘you bat-witted clodpoll’ and such exclamations as ‘fossilised fishooks!’ They are present from the earliest books to the last, and the reason for this is not accidental. Anthony Buckeridge himself explained that when he wrote his first radio play he made the mistake of using current slang, such as ‘wizard prang.’ But when he returned to this work a few years later he found that it had dated so much that it was embarrassing. And so he decided to make up his own slang – with its ‘addled-pated eyewash’ and ‘crystallised cheesecakes’ – so that it could not date.
Jennings, of course, like Peter Pan, remains unchanged – ‘a lively eleven-year-old’ a few months older than Darbishire. (One minor inconsistency that readers have noticed is that Jennings’s form-mate Venables is said to be twelve in Our Friend Jennings of 1955, but only eleven in Especially Jennings of 1965.)
There is, however, one minor but not insignificant change which readers may not have noticed about Jennings, and it relates to that one great topic not usually mentioned in school stories: education. If we try to investigate what subjects Jennings actually studied at Linbury Court School, we find a pretty mixed bag. There are a few references to Geometry, Latin and Geography. We learn that Jennings seems to be about half way down the class academically, although in Especially Jennings (1965) we are told that he manages to come top in French. On another memorable occasion, he distinguishes himself in History by delivering a brilliant and fluent account of the reign of Edward I to a visiting Inspector of Schools, who does not know, of course, that Mr Wilkins had set Jennings to learn off by heart six pages of his History textbook on that particular topic as a punishment! But generally there are only fleeting references to his academic progress.
The one great change noticeable in Jennings’s education through the twenty-five books published between 1950 and 1994 is in the art of letter-writing.
When he first arrives at Linbury Court School, as a new boy Jennings is required to send a postcard home to let his parents know how he is getting on. His seventh and final attempt reads as follows:
Dear Mother,
I gave mine in to Mr cater Darbishire has spend 4 ½ of his my healthser ticket was in my pocket he said I had got Bubonic plag It was a jok he is called Benny Dick toe I think it is. We had ozard of wiz for tea Atkion says wiz is good and oz is garstly so do I.
Love John
P.S. Temple is a brain, he is short for dogs boody.
In Our Friend Jennings (1955), Jennings and Darbishire decide to take up stamp-collecting. Although still in Form Three and apparently no older, Jennings writes to request free stamps from a philatelist firm in the following terms:
Dear Mr S. and S. Boddington,
I hope you are quite well. We are having good weather. Are you?
I shall be obliged if you will send me some of those stamps which you are giving away free without obligation. And if you could let us have them soon, so much the better, as we are in rather a hurry to get started. Last week the Second XI played Bracebridge School at Football. We won 3-2.
I beg to remain your obedient customer.
J.C.T. Jennings
Despite the unnecessary details about the weather and the football, this is not bad for an eleven-year-old. The punctuation and the spelling here (‘obligation’, ‘obedient’) are unusually good.
The letter Jennings writes to Mr Laxton, the nature-journalist, asking for advice about a hibernating hedgehog is even more remarkable:
I hope it is all right writing to you, but it is because you are a professional expert on a certain subject i.e. viz – hibernation.
We have got a hedgehog who is doing this and would like your advice. We are looking after him secretly for certain reasons which are known to us, but it is all right telling you about this provided you do not spread it. Please will you write back in the enclosed stamped-addressed envelope which I shall put in giving us confidential advice and correct answers to these questions, i.e. – viz – 1. We think he is nearly awake sometimes only not properly because of the weather and will not eat and is getting thinner, so what should we do? 2. If we put him out to eat and he goes off somewhere, will he get eaten by a fox if he goes to sleep again because it is not warm enough to stay awake? 3. If you are hibernating is it all right to wake up for a bit and then go off again, or do you do it all in one go because you are only sleeping and are not properly hibernating any more? 4. If you did this, i.e. viz see Question 3 would you eat in the times when you were awake?
I hope you are quite well and having decent weather.
(The Jennings Report, 1970)
Despite the comic lacunae, is this not a good letter for an eleven-year-old to write, with its systematic, if slightly clumsy, attempt to explain the problems, and its thoughtful courtesy? Even if Jennings never grows up, we can surely say that he is learning to write letters.
23. Skating on Thin Ice
The Problems of Time in Tom’s Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce, 1958)
Time-slip stories, in which characters from the present are able to re-enter the past, have been a popular sub-genre of children’s fiction since Rudyard Kipling and E. Nesbit more or less invented them in the Edwardian period. H.G. Wells had explored the notion of time-travel in The Time Machine of 1895, of course, but Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies depicted modern children having encounters with characters from many periods of British history. E. Nesbit’s The House of Arden (1909) and Harding’s Luck (1910) had shown twentieth-century children returning to the Jacobean age; Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1934) continued that tradition, and the genre became particularly popul
ar after the Second World War with such stories as Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) and Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time (1976).
It has been suggested that one of the reasons for the resurgence of the form after the Second World War was that the books’ celebration of old houses and great gardens, where the action of such stories often took place, reflected the sense of loss felt by many writers at the end of the war as land was built over and many houses converted into flats. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), with its extended flash-back to the old houses of pre-war England, is a classic example of this type of nostalgia.
These children’s stories are usually given a contemporary setting, and the young hero or heroine, either apparently accidentally or through the operation of some mechanism such as an amulet, is given the power to return to the past where many of the adventures take place. In this way the author is able to examine such themes as time and memory, loss and permanence, and to reflect on the connectedness of human experience.
The great classic of the genre is undoubtedly Philippa Pearce’s wonderful novel, Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), winner of the Carnegie Medal for that year. It has been the subject of universal praise, most recently in an outstanding tribute by Philip Pullman in the Philippa Pearce Memorial Lecture in 2011: ‘The book is a wonderfully wrought story, but it’s more than that, though a good story is quite enough for anything to be; it’s a lens through which we can see something more clearly, and the something in this case is that mysterious thing called time.’
The story it tells is relatively simple. When his brother Peter develops measles, Tom Long is sent by his parents to stay with his rather dull uncle and aunt, Alan and Gwen Kitson, who live in a flat converted from an old house not far from Ely. Unable to sleep at night, Tom hears the great grandfather clock in the hall downstairs strike thirteen at midnight. But when he goes down to investigate and opens the back door, instead of the dingy back-yard he had been expecting to see, he receives a great surprise:
Tom opened the door wide and let the moonlight in. It flooded in, as bright as daylight – the white daylight that comes before the full rising of the sun. The illumination was perfect, but Tom did not at once turn to see what it showed him of the clock-face. Instead he took a step forward on to the door step. He was staring, at first in surprise, then with indignation, at what he saw outside. That they should have deceived him – lied to him like this! They had said, ‘It’s not worth your while going out at the back, Tom.’ So carelessly they had described it: ‘A sort of back-yard, very poky, with rubbish bins. Really, there’s nothing to see.’
Nothing! only this: a great lawn where flower-beds bloomed; a towering fir-tree, and thick, beetle-browed yews that humped their shapes down two sides of the lawn; on the third side, to the right, a greenhouse almost the size of a real house; from each corner of the garden, a path that twisted away to some other depths of the garden, with other trees.
Tom resolves to explore the garden the next day, but in the morning it is no longer there! It only returns at night, and each night Tom revisits it. There he meets Hatty, a young orphan girl, who has evidently been adopted by her rather cold aunt, and they become great friends. Tom realises that Hatty is a figure from Victorian times, and that he is some kind of ghost whom nobody but Hatty can actually see. Together they enjoy a series of adventures which culminate in a great skating expedition along the frozen river all the way to Ely:
They left the Castleford reaches altogether. They came to a lock, with its gates frozen fast, and its weir frozen too: they hobbled ashore and round the lock and on to the ice again. They skated under a bridge, and, even in the shelter of it, the ice bore strongly. All the ferry ways were frozen as they went, with the ferrymen standing sourly by their ice-locked boats.
Hatty and Tom skated on and on. The skaters they met now were mostly men. There were few girls, that Tom could see, and none without escort. They came to a lonely river-side alehouse: its signboard said: ‘The Five Miles from Anywhere – No Hurry.’ Here there were skaters, labourers from the Fen farms, resting on the bank. They called out jovially to Hatty, asking if she would like any of them to skate with her for company. They went on calling, until she called back that she had a companion with her, even if they could not see him. The skaters thought this a good hoax and laughed, taking no offence; and Hatty laughed; and Tom laughed too, but no one except Hatty heard him.
They skated on, and the thin, brilliant sun was beginning to set, and Hatty’s black shadow flitted along at their right hand, across the dazzle of the ice. Sometimes they skated on the main river; sometimes they skated along the flooded washes. Only the willows along the bank watched them; and the ice hissed with their passage.
Time is passing. Hatty is gradually growing older each time Tom visits, and when he creeps out one night both she and the garden have disappeared. Tom cries out for Hatty when he realises that the garden is lost, and his calls disturb all the other tenants. But when he goes to apologise to old Mrs Bartholomew, the owner of the house who lives upstairs in the attic flat, she reveals that she is the Hatty he has been visiting, and the story ends with Tom embracing her as if she were a little girl.
The novel is deservedly a classic. It is a poignant account of loneliness and friendship, and a wonderful contrast between the past and present, but with a haunting narrative that links the two. There are beautifully understated accounts of minor characters, such as Tom’s downtrodden aunt, Gwen, and the sympathetic gardener, Abel; and there are wonderful set-pieces, such as the description of Tom’s dawn entry into the garden in chapter 5, and of the skating expedition to Ely.
However, although one of the major themes of the story is Philippa Pearce’s proper insistence on the mystery, or rather mysteries, of time, some readers have found that there is still something unsatisfying about the way Tom’s experiences are depicted.
There is, first of all, the question of the skates: so ingenious has Pearce’s manipulation of time become that as Tom and Hattie skate down to Ely – they are both wearing the same pair of skates! This is either a mystic moment or one that produces a logical head-ache. The reader is, I think, quite prepared to accept that, except for Hatty and the gardener Abel, no one else is able to see Tom. One does not worry too much either about what happens to the long-case clock in the hall after it strikes thirteen. But for some readers the business with the skates is a lasting irritant. In chapter 21 Tom sees Hatty skating on the frozen meadow but can’t join her because he does not have any skates. He persuades Hatty to leave him her skates in a secret place under the floor-boards in the room where he is sleeping. In the following chapter, now in the present time, Tom finds the skates hidden under the floor-boards where the Victorian orphan Hatty left them. The next night, he takes them with him down to the Victorian garden, and is able to enjoy the memorable skating expedition with Hatty along the river to Ely. For some, this produces an irritation; that an actual object is being transferred from Victorian times to the present, and then back again for skating on the river, is an implausibility too far; and then there is the additional puzzle of establishing where Hatty’s own skates now come from. If Hatty did hide the
skates for Tom to find later, where did her skates come from on the
trip to Ely? Did she pop out and buy a new pair, or are they the old
pair mysteriously duplicated in some way?
There is also the problem of the book’s conclusion, which leaves many readers unsatisfied. On the night before Tom prepares to leave his uncle’s flat to go back home, he goes searching for Hatty, and, failing to find her, wakes up all the members of the household – including old Mrs Bartholomew who lives in the attic flat – with his loud cries of distress. His uncle insists that next morning he must make his apologies to Mrs Bartholomew; ‘old and small and wrinkled, with white hair.’ When he does so, he discovers that the old lady is the young Hatty of all his adventures in the Midnight Garden.
What has taken place has happened because of what old Mrs Bartholomew remembered in her dreams. Mrs Bartholomew has gone back to the times when she was a young girl playing in the garden, and Tom has been able to go back with her, to that same Victorian garden. Tom’s visits began to end because Mrs Bartholomew began to dream of her later life; of her marriage and of moving away from the old house. It’s a poignant ending, as Tom learns that the young grow old, and that friendships and memories fade.
Here we have to envisage that the old lady, at the end of a long life full of rich memories, perhaps gets a glimpse of Tom somewhere about the house, and in her dreams mixes him up with memories of her own childhood, growing up in the house, playing in the garden, skating to Ely in the great winter of 1895. But Tom is actually a real boy of 1958, living in the twentieth century, not merely a figure in her dreams; and the question of how such a real boy penetrates into Mrs Bartholomew’s dream-world is never satisfactorily explained.
In his excellent appreciation of Tom’s Midnight Garden in The Promise of Happiness; Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction (1981), Fred Inglis comments that, ‘There is a fudging at the very heart of the novel’, but his comment is surely too harsh. The glory of Tom’s Midnight Garden lies in its sensitive account of two lonely people finding each other, rejoicing in their friendship and the beauties of the natural world, and experiencing the mysteries of time and of memory. The magic is in Philippa Pearce’s wonderful evocation of human experience, but her rationale for what happens is for some readers a bridge too far.
