by Linda Lear
Hill Top was a working farm of 34 acres, 36 perches, with a late-seventeenth-century farmhouse, outbuildings, orchard and enclosures. It had been part of a much larger property that had come onto the market in the early spring and was purchased in May by a local timber merchant. He immediately sold all but the farm lots on to Frederic Fowkes, an enterprising landowner who lived at Waterside, on Esthwaite Water, and who owned most of the land between Colthouse and Sawrey. Almost certainly John Cannon, the interim tenant at Hill Top, alerted Beatrix to the farm’s availability, but it was well known in Sawrey that Beatrix wanted to buy a farm. Beatrix began negotiations with Fowkes, and, once it was clear that her London solicitors would approve her contract, Fowkes bought the remaining farm on 25 September for £1,375 and sold it to Beatrix on 15 November for £2,805.3
Beatrix arrived in Sawrey just as the air took on an edge of autumn crispness in the morning and the hillsides gleamed gold in the twilight. She wanted to copy out her deeds and check their accuracy, fully educated as to the minutest details of boundary fence and property line. It was also a task, like so many others, that appealed to her sense of realism, as well as to her nascent understanding of the proper stewardship of the land. With the terms of the sale approved, Beatrix began negotiating with Fowkes for an additional field known as Buckle Yeat Croft on the north side of the Kendal road which would connect her two fields on that side, thereby making her holdings nearly contiguous. This field was conveyed to Potter on 11 December 1905 for a discounted price of £250, renegotiated by her father’s solicitors after she discovered the handsome profit Fowkes had made on the sale of Hill Top.4
The farmhouse was occupied by John Cannon, his wife, and their two children, Ralph and Betsy. Beatrix took lodgings with the village blacksmith, Satterthwaite, and his wife, who lived at the top of Market Street in a cottage called Belle Green, intending to stay until the end of the month. Cannon was not from the Sawrey area, and while he had handled things adequately Beatrix was uncertain whether or not to keep him on.5
Up at dawn, she studied her property inside and out, sorry when she was driven inside at last by the early dusk. After assessing the necessary repairs to the farmhouse and outbuildings, Beatrix asked Cannon and his wife to stay on. That decided, the first order of business was to appraise the condition of the farm animals and the land. Cannon took her out in the trap to look at the various fields and pastures. Beatrix was amazed to discover that pigs, which Cannon bought only with verifiable pedigree, were an important part of farm income. ‘The pigs are mostly sold — at what the drapers call a “sacrifice”; they seem to me to have devoured most of my potatoes before their departure,’ she explained to Millie Warne about two weeks after arriving in Sawrey. It seems ‘the whole district is planted out with my pigs; but we still take an interest in them because if they grow well we shall “get a name for pigs.” Such is fame!’ She went along with Cannon to the police station, a requirement of any farmer who ‘traded’, so that the accuracy of the farm scales could be certified. She discovered that the Hill Top scales were out of register and the farm had been undercharging for butter.6
Beatrix was anxious to begin physical improvements to the farmhouse and to improve the areas of the farm that had been neglected since Henry Preston’s death. The only garden left at Hill Top was a small walled kitchen garden opposite the front door. Beatrix had the track moved away from the house, creating a large area for the new garden, and laid out an access path to the front door along the line of the old drive, ending at a small wicket gate in the wall beside the Kendal road. She hired a quarryman to lay out new walks and bedding areas for flowers and vegetables. They put down a Brathay flagstone path, which matched the four slabs of local slate that made up the front entrance porch, and used smaller flags set on edge to mark out the beds. But before she could do much more to improve the gardens, she had to solve the problem of proper living quarters for herself and the Cannon family, as the farmhouse was too small for them both.7
Travelling about the neighbourhood, Beatrix studied the old farmhouses, noting those that had been successfully expanded. She decided to enlarge the house to make two separate living spaces. A new two-storey wing would replace the former one-storey kitchen. The roof line would be altered by adding a gable. The former kitchen would move into a detached building where it would be supplied with a water pump. The Cannons would live in the new wing, and Beatrix would have the old farmhouse to herself. Before she left Sawrey she had decided on the design and hired various craftsmen.8
When Beatrix bought Hill Top, a staircase wing and adjoining larder had already been added at the rear of the house, as well as the kitchen on the farmyard side. Her design sketches show how closely she had observed Lake District architecture and how sensitively she altered her old structure, wanting to make only minimal changes. When it was finished in 1906 the new wing had a pentice roof across the front, sheltering the door. The exterior was finished in a grey pebbledash to unify the new with the old. Observing Lakeland custom and tradition, Beatrix had a plaque made and placed on the front of the addition with her initials and the date.9
Beatrix did not return to Sawrey again until April 1906. In the interim she had supervised the sale of her aunt Clara Potter’s estate at Queen’s Gate, and her dear hedgehog Mrs Tiggy had died. The years of keeping Tiggy in an unnatural environment had taken a toll on the little animal, and Beatrix would not allow her to suffer. ‘She has got so dirty & miserable I think it is better not to keep her any longer,’ she told Millie Warne in February. ‘I am going away for a few days so it is best to chloroform her first. She is not fit to be anybody else’s hearthrug… she has always been such a scrupulously clean little animal.’ She finished her picture of Tiggy, then probably buried her in the back garden of 2 Bolton Gardens.10
When she arrived in Sawrey on 4 April, again lodging at Belle Green, Beatrix was disappointed with the lack of progress on the addition, and the bare and unfinished look of her farm. ‘I thought my property was looking extremely ugly when I arrived I was quite glad you weren’t there!’ she told Millie, with whom she was now regularly exchanging letters. ‘The new works though doubtless an improvement are painfully new. Instead of the old winding road — with a tumble down wall covered with polypody [creeping fern] — there is a straight wide road & a very bare wall. Also heaps of soil everywhere & new railings, they would show less if they were tarred.’ She knew that the moss would grow up fast and that things would look better in time, but she was ‘vexed’ to discover that some of the work had been done incorrectly. She hired a man to make a flat bit of lawn, but somehow ‘the word “tennis” had been mentioned’ and Beatrix returned to find a much larger, flatter garden lawn than she ever dreamed of. Rather than pay the man more to correct his work, she asked Cannon to plant it all in potatoes until she had time to design new beds. But she was pleased that the little fruit trees she had planted would soon be in flower.11
Beatrix took the opportunity to explore her new farmhouse from top to bottom. There were some surprising discoveries. The worst was a serious infestation of rats. The best was discovering one four-foot-thick wall with a staircase inside it. ‘I never saw such a place for hide & seek, & funny cupboards & closets,’ she told Millie, with stories already forming in her mind. ‘It really is delightful if the rats could be stopped out!’ She had Mrs Cannon pull the mattresses out into the yard for airing and sew them up before the rats could nest inside. ‘We must try & keep them out next autumn, they got in before I had had the holes cemented. It is indeed a funny old house, it would amuse children very much, especially the farm yard part of it.’12
Beatrix left Hill Top after barely a week, not in the best of tempers. She took a crowded train from Windermere to Brighton on the south coast and joined her parents at Worthing for the rest of the spring holiday. She did some sketching at Chichester, finding it ‘very quaint & pretty’, and wrote to Winifred Warne about a dog she had met at the greengrocer’s shop. He was called Nip and knew how
to beg for coins and buy chocolate for himself. ‘I think Nip spends most of the day buying and eating chocolate, he is most dreadfully fat!’ Beatrix wrote. She hand-coloured the illustration of Nip and sent the letter, signed ‘Aunt B’, along to Millie to give to Winifred. But it was impossible to do any proper sketching and she was anxious about her work. ‘I shall be very glad to get home, I feel as if I were getting so behind hand with the second book [The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit], & there is no room to work here — I am writing this on the wash stand!’13
Although Beatrix had hoped to get back to Sawrey in May, she did not return until July. She finished The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, the last of the books she had planned out with Norman. The story began life as a picture letter to Eric Moore, written from Eastwood, Dunkeld, on 5 September 1893, sent the day after the letter to Noel about Peter Rabbit. Jeremy Fisher was based upon several pet frogs that Beatrix had kept and whose habits she had observed. The natural behaviour of frogs, toads and newts was easy to adapt to fantasy. Her letter to Eric provided a story line that was sure to amuse a child and give opportunity for both artistic and literary embellishment.
Jeremy’s home was originally a little house on the beautiful River Tay in Scotland, where he passed the time fishing. Beatrix had sold some of her early frog drawings to Ernest Nister as illustrations for ‘A Frog he would a-fishing go’. With foresight, she bought back the frog drawings and blocks from Nister after Peter Rabbit was published in 1902, so that when she revised the frog story for Warne’s, there was no question who owned copyright.14
Beatrix had wanted to do a frog story for some time, because it was amusing and offered the opportunity for the naturalist illustrations she delighted in. She changed the setting from Dunkeld to Sawrey and, recalling her love of Randolph Caldecott’s style, made Jeremy a Regency-period dandy with fine jacket, galoshes and pumps, who sailed elegantly on a water-lily leaf. Beatrix indulged her sense of humour as well as her thorough knowledge of amphibians and insects. Jeremy’s friends are perfectly outfitted gentlemen: Sir Isaac Newton, the newt, wears a black-and-gold waistcoat beneath his long tailcoat and cravat. Mr Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise is regal in his chain and gold medal of office, his ponderous shell resembling a heavy macintosh, although as a vegetarian he brings his string bag of salad along to Jeremy’s ‘nasty’ feast of roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce. The story of a fisherman down on his luck reminded Beatrix of the ‘fish stories’ her father’s friends had told in Scotland, as well as her brother’s travails with rod and reel. She also recreated the gentlemen’s club atmosphere absorbed from her father’s reports of evenings spent at the Reform and the Athenaeum.15
Beatrix’s letters in the spring of 1906 contain very few references to the progress she was making on the book, but she knew she had found the perfect venue for her elaboration of Eric’s picture letter. Her delight in sketching the natural beauty of both Esthwaite Water behind Hill Top and Moss Heckle Tarn, a small manmade lake high above the village of Near Sawrey, later called Moss Eccles Tarn, is obvious from her many watercolours of both places. Moss Eccles Tarn was already noted for its colonies of water lilies, and even the name ‘Sawrey’ is said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon word for shore reeds, jagged and saw-toothed, just like the ones that grow so abundantly around Esthwaite. The text and illustrations for this story are some of the most balanced and compatible of all her writing. Nature is described and illustrated truthfully: beautifully tranquil as well as unpredictably aggressive.16
Whether Beatrix was amused or annoyed by Fruing Warne’s suggestion that the frog’s coloration was inaccurate, she settled the question by bringing the live frog to Bedford Street in a jam jar. The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher appeared in July 1906 and was, as she had convinced Norman that it would be, a ‘very pretty book’. Its carefully coloured botanical backgrounds of water plants, a frog with anatomically correct turned-out feet, a trout that any self-respecting fisherman would enjoy snagging, and a rather frighteningly rendered water-beetle who tweaks Jeremy’s dainty toes, all made it a delight to look at as well as to read. It was dedicated ‘For Stephanie from Cousin B’, since Ethel’s daughter had been passed over previously. For the next book in the series, Beatrix was planning a story featuring Tom, a kitten who lived at Belle Green, but first there were three stories for very young children to finish.17
For these stories Beatrix experimented with a panorama format of fourteen pictures on one long strip of paper which folded into a wallet tied with a ribbon. The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit, about two rabbits and a hunter, had been written especially for Harold Warne’s daughter Louie, who thought that Peter had been too well behaved and wanted a story about a truly naughty rabbit. The Story of Miss Moppet, about a mouse and a cat, proved more of a challenge, owing to the feisty kitten Beatrix borrowed from one of the masons who was working at Hill Top when she was there in July. It had turned out to be a difficult model, being ‘very young & pretty and a most fearful pickle’. The panorama books, although popular with readers, were ultimately unsuccessful, because shopkeepers found them difficult to keep folded.18
Anticipating another long summer holiday with her parents at Lingholm, Beatrix found comfort in Millie Warne’s frequent letters and in several visitors. ‘I should be glad if you can find time to write occasionally — even if there isn’t much news to write about, it is cheering!’ Beatrix told her. She enjoyed a visit from Gertrude Woodward, her good friend from the Natural History Museum. While Gertrude was there, Beatrix captured a swarm of bees that had been blown out of a tree near the quarry on her property. Delighted with the prospect of raising bees, she bought a box hive which Mr Satterthwaite fixed up. ‘No one in the village has lost them,’ Beatrix reported, ‘& I don’t mean to inquire further afield!’ The old Ees bridge, a local landmark at the bottom of Graythwaite Lane, had to be pulled down. Beatrix wrote to Millie a few weeks later to say that she had obtained an order for stone from her quarry to rebuild the old bridge. ‘I don’t think I shall make much profit, not being there to look after things, but I shall like to see my stone in the bridge. I have hired a very good quarry man & insured him in case of accidents; but it is an easy one to work.’ It was her first venture in local preservation.19
After the usual struggle moving the household from London for the summer, Beatrix reported that her parents were well settled and she expected a visit from Bertram. She tried to work on a much neglected book about Tom Kitten, her first about Sawrey, but the attic at Lingholm was stuffy, and she missed ‘the sheltered open air & the gardening’ at Hill Top. ‘I am wishing most heartily that I was back at Sawrey,’ she told Millie. It was over twenty miles, as the crow flies, between Lingholm and Hill Top Farm. Since there was no direct public transport, it was not easy to get from one place to the other. Still, Beatrix found it hard to stay away. ‘I think I must go over again before the mason finishes to make sure the work is all right,’ she told Millie, adding, ‘also I don’t want to be at home at the end of this month’ — the first anniversary of Norman’s death. Millie reported in mid-August that Mary Warne had produced a son — named after Norman. Beatrix knew Norman’s mother would be pleased that ‘there is a little son & heir at last for the business’, adding sadly, ‘I wish we could have kept our own dear old boy but one must take things as they come.’ She sent Millie some white heather to take up to Norman’s grave. The following year she sent some southernwood, an artemisia known as ‘lad’s love’, which she hoped Millie would plant at Highgate. Beatrix never forgot the anniversary of Norman’s death, and was faithful in tending his grave. If she was in London around the end of August, she went herself, often taking a plant from the countryside.20
Back in London, Beatrix spent three nights with Millie and her mother at the end of August. She planned her trip in part so that she would not return to London with the family at the end of September, but instead would spend as much time at Sawrey in October as possible. ‘If I come back with them to London,’ she explained, ‘either I
will begin a cold — or the cook will give notice or something will prevent me going back to Sawrey, & I want so much to have a good month there, to garden & get extra fat before winter.’21
She reported on the progress and setbacks she had found at Hill Top in August, especially delighted with her new garden. ‘I have been planting hard all day — thanks to a very well meant but slightly ill-timed present of saxifrage from Mrs Taylor at the corner cottage. She brought out a large newspaper full! It is not all planted yet.’ Beatrix was also learning the protocols of dealing with the local tradesmen. ‘I had rather a row with the plumber — or perhaps I ought to say I lost my temper! — the men have been very good so far, if he won’t take orders from a lady I may pack him off & get one from Kendal.’ She was provoked that in her absence the same plumber had ‘put up a pipe at the opposite end of the kitchen to where I wanted it’. There were more heated exchanges and Beatrix despaired that it might never be made right. She was learning that her gender was frequently a disadvantage in negotiations with local artisans, who were unaccustomed to taking direction from a London lady, but if she showed herself knowledgeable as well as resolute, she usually got their cooperation. A bit later Beatrix wrote to Millie, ‘there are several rows going on! but I am not in any of them at present — though much inclined! I think I shall attack the county council about manure, I am entitled to all the road sweepings along my piece, & their old man is using it to fill up holes, which is both illegal and nasty.’22
Beatrix’s letters to Millie chronicle her rising spirits as she worked on her farmhouse, especially enjoying laying out a large flowerbed. She had discovered a ‘rather good pink rose on the farmhouse, very scraggy and neglected but making new shoots’.
Although she went to a nursery at Windermere for some bushes — syringa, rhododendron and ‘a red fuchsia’, reputed to be perennial — she did not have to go far to find plants that pleased her. ‘I am being inundated with offers of plants!’ she told Millie. ‘It is very kind of people; and as it really is the right time to thin & replant, I don’t feel such a robber of the village gardens.’ She got some splendid phloxes from the quarryman, planted them between the laurels, and put the lilies between the azaleas. She planted out a saxifrage that had taken over several pots and she put cuttings of rock plants on top of the garden wall — ‘I have got cuttings of “white” rock which have crimson & purple flowers,’ she wrote with pleasure. From an old lady at Windermere who had an overgrown garden, Beatrix got a bundle of lavender slips: ‘if they “strike” they will be enough for a lavender hedge.’ Edith Gaddum sent over a hamper of plants, including Japanese anemones and sweet williams. ‘It is nice to have plants from places one knows of or with some associations,’ she had written to Millie from Wales. ‘I am going to get some of the wild daffodil bulbs which grow in thousands here.’ Admiring the Satterthwaites’ garden, Beatrix took some of their discarded honesty (Lunaria annua) from the garbage heap, reassured by Mrs Satterthwaite’s opinion that ‘stolen plants always grow’. Delighted with her horticultural treasures, Beatrix told Millie, ‘I have had something out of nearly every garden in the village.’23
