by Linda Lear
Beatrix found rooms at a local inn, but Willie was so weak that after a time the innkeeper was uncomfortable keeping them. At that point Beatrix offered them Hill Top. She sent over a big spare bed which was set up in the back sitting room where Bertram’s landscapes kept watch. She cleaned out drawers and put away her fragile furniture and collections of china. Ulla understood what Hill Top meant to Beatrix, and went about making a temporary home for her family, while protecting Beatrix’s possessions as best she could. ‘The Parkers are in Tom Kittens “house”. They are dear little children, but I felt it would tire me out in this house… Richard, aged 3 is a pickle,’ Beatrix told Marian Perry. The Hyde Parkers’ residence at Hill Top at least temporarily put an end to Beatrix’s fear that it could be commandeered to house evacuees from one of the nearby towns. ‘If any more evacs arrive,’ Beatrix wrote, ‘they will have to sleep on the floor.’21
Beatrix wrote to Anne Carroll Moore in May with more optimism about the future than she had felt in a while. ‘The war has made little difference to living,’ Beatrix wrote; ‘there has been no scarcity yet — except paper, which we collect save, and there is a great demand for timber, but mainly fir trees which do not cause any regrettable gap in the landscape.’ But she acknowledged, ‘of course it would be idle to conceal that we are very anxious — personally in old age — it does not matter much to us, & we will “stick it out” what ever happens.’ But it was clear that Beatrix, like the rest of Britain, was bracing for the possibility of a German invasion. The British Expeditionary Force was being beaten back, Belgium had surrendered and France was on the brink of collapse. Relieved in an odd way that she had no ‘young ones’ herself, she told Moore that she was concerned about Rosemary and Jean Duke. She wanted Stephanie to send the girls to Canada or the United States.22
When Beatrix was especially anxious she wrote letters to her family and friends, often several on the same day. She confided to the Dukes, ‘It is the aliens I am afraid of. When I am worried I find relief in writing letters — sometimes I post them — sometimes not.’ Telling them about her American friends, all ‘genuine “New Englanders”, the old stock,’ Beatrix urged that if worst came to worst, ‘send your daughters to finish their education in the States or Canada.’ She had already alerted her friends in Philadelphia that they might expect the Duke sisters.23
Kenneth Duke was serving as an ordnance inspector in the northern district, and frequently stopped by to see the Heelises and his sister and brother-in-law at Hill Top. He appears to have been uncharacteristically anxious about his daughters’ future, and with the best of intentions Beatrix did what she could to help by involving her American friends, but she rather overdid it. She arranged for the girls’ lodging and even authorized Marian Perry to hold her American royalty payments during the war so that they would have access to funds. During the dark days of spring 1940 telegrams flew from Sawrey to Philadelphia. Beatrix went to a good deal of trouble and so did Mrs Perry on her behalf. It was Beatrix’s way of taking some action in the face of the total helplessness that she found nearly unendurable.24
By the middle of July, the most frightening days, after the fall of France and the retreat from Dunkirk, were past. The Royal Air Force with its squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes was preparing to defend the country. Beatrix wrote to Moore, ‘It is still difficult to realize that we are at war. We have had no raids here… As for invasion — we don’t know what to think.’ By the end of the month she was more hopeful, telling Marian Perry, ‘There is a great change of feeling — a complete recovery of confidence compared to that black ten days.’ But sadly, her optimism was premature.25
In August 1940 the German Luftwaffe began targeting coastal airfields in a critical phase of the Battle of Britain, and a month later daylight attacks switched to London. Beatrix’s letters to America were now censored, so she was careful about what she wrote, but she sometimes addressed a comment to the censor himself. There were occasional stray planes going over the fells at night, and sometimes a bomb was dropped in a field but did not explode. The sheep seemed not to mind the noise overhead or the inconvenience of metal shrapnel in the grass. More people were injured in automobile accidents in the blackouts at night than by bombing. The shipbuilding yards at Barrow were continual targets, and there was fear of raids from Ireland, but mainly Beatrix complained that ‘people will not take cover. I was in a cottage yesterday when a plane flew very low and every child ran out to watch it.’26
Once the British military had raised some resistance to Hitler’s plans for invasion, Beatrix was less frightened than curious. ‘I think I am sustained by a sort of stunned curiosity to see what happens?’ she told Mrs Perry. ‘I am very cripply, on a stick. Any dream of ending as a comfortable petted semi-invalide is vanished! But it never could have been in any case. I will hobble about till it is ended.’ She admitted she too went out hoping to see a ‘dog fight’, and admired the ‘wonderful flying by our own patrols’. ‘One thing is certain,’ she told Bertha Mahony Miller,
I shall not run far. I will retire into the nearest wood… If there is an invasion, I am afraid villages near the landings will be burnt. I look wistfully at my fine old furniture. I have a wonderful old bedstead too heavy to move in a hurry. Nevertheless I went to a sale at Coniston… & bought 3 chests and a coffin stool… [T]wo of my chests are plain & long, like deed boxes. They might come in convenient in the wood for holding things, dry and solid.27
Beatrix’s letters to Bertha Miller during the war are among the most revealing. Even though they had never met, their mutual respect and shared interests in children’s literature, books and old furniture, as well as the similarities of their domestic lives, had deepened their bond. Beatrix admired Mrs Miller’s efforts to raise the level of children’s literature. She thought The Horn Book, a ‘splendid publication; the articles and critiques are so alive; and real criticism, speaking out’. In England, Beatrix thought, ‘the review of the new crop of children’s books is either indiscriminate, exaggerated praise, or silence’. Beatrix also appreciated that Horn Book reviewers did not go in for the ‘Freudian school’ of criticism which she herself had no use for whatsoever.28
In January 1933 the English novelist Graham Greene had published a critical essay in the London Mercury describing Potter’s influence on his writing, commenting on what he described as her ‘selective realism, which takes emotion for granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle detachment…’ Among other comments, Greene speculated that ‘At some time between 1907 and 1909 Miss Potter [with the creation of the perfidious Mr Drake Puddle-duck in Tom Kitten and the sinister Mr Tod] must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius.’ Beatrix had been sufficiently aroused by what she considered Greene’s ridiculous foray into amateur psychoanalysis to respond to him. She explained she had been suffering from the flu when she wrote Mr. Tod and not from any emotional upset.29
Such intrusive personal speculation as Greene’s deepened her indebtedness to Bertha Mahony Miller, not only for her advice on publishing The Fairy Caravan, but also for what she considered the fair and impersonal critical appraisal she gave her work in the pages of The Horn Book. Writing to her friend in December 1934, Beatrix had reiterated her wish that ‘I could think of something worth while writing for it’. But nothing came of that good intention until Miller wrote in the summer of 1940 recounting her little granddaughter’s undiminished enthusiasm for The Fairy Caravan, and her desire for more stories about it. Nancy Dean wanted explicitly to know where the caravan was now, and where it was wandering to next.30
Beatrix was so moved by the child’s pleasure in tales she considered very personal that she took time out in the midst of worries about bombs and evacuees to respond to her.
When we grow old and wear spectacles, our eyes are not bright, like children’s eyes, nor our ears so quick, to see and hear the fairies… Where can the circus have wandered to? I believe I know! Right away amongst the fells — the gr
een & blue hills above my sheep farm in Troutbeck. Such a lonely place, miles along a lovely green road. That was where I first saw the mark of little horse shoes. There is an old barn there that we call High Buildings… and when I was younger and used to take long walks, I used to eat my bread & cheese at High Buildings, or shelter from the rain. That was where the Caravan sheltered in a very wild rainstorm, and Xarifa made acquaintance with the melancholy Mouse…31
A few months later Bertha Miller, who was planning to write an essay for The Horn Book on Beatrix Potter’s ‘nursery classics’, wrote to ask if she would consider adding to the biographical essay on the origins of Peter Rabbit that she had first written in 1929. At the same time, she told Beatrix she wanted to publish ‘Wag-by-Wall’, a story that originally had been part of the unused ‘Caravan’ tales. Beatrix read over her previous statement and decided that she had something to add as ‘one’s outlook alters a little as one grows old’. Candidly, she considered her previous response ‘a little petty and egoistical’.32
Nancy Dean’s genuine enthusiasm for her stories and Bertha’s requests prompted Beatrix to reflect again on the years when she had written the little books, something she rarely allowed herself to do. ‘I have been asked to tell again how Peter Rabbit came to be written. It seems a long time ago; and in another world. Though after all the world does not change much in the country, where the seasons follow their accustomed course — the green leaf and the sere — and where nature, though never consciously wicked, has always been ruthless.’ She had thought about her stories, but she still had no explanation for Peter’s continued popularity. ‘I have never quite understood the secret of Peter’s perennial charm,’ she wrote with perfect honesty. ‘Perhaps it is because he and his little friends keep on their way, busily absorbed with their own doings. They were always independant [sic]. Like Topsy — they just “grow’d”.’ She explained that the first books were drawn from picture letters to real children. But after those, ‘I confess that… I painted most of the little pictures to please myself. The more spontaneous the pleasure — the more happy the result.’ Drawing on her life experience and her many years as artiststoryteller, she confessed in a sort of valedictory summation: ‘I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside; that pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry, and the strength that comes from the hills.’33
‘Wag-by-Wall’ was a story that Beatrix had always liked, but could never quite finish. It was a country tale that dated from November 1909 when it was called ‘The Little Black Kettle’. Beatrix had left the story unfinished because the verses she had wanted the kettle to sing had never satisfied her. ‘I remember’, she explained later, ‘Sally’s story stuck because the kettle was obstinately dumb.’ Bertha Miller suggested that the setting be changed to Christmas Eve, and Beatrix liked the idea.34
When Beatrix first revised it for the Fairy Caravan collection in 1929, Sally Scales had become an old woman named Sally Benson and the story retitled as ‘Wag-by-the-Wa’.’ A wag was the term for the pendulum of an old wall clock, and ‘Wa’ ’ was an abbreviation of wall. Beatrix owned an antique wall clock like the one featured in the story and, like her old oak court cupboards, it had character. ‘Wag-by-Wall’ was similar in tone to ‘The Oakmen’, and, like those other country stories, it derived from her experience out in the countryside. These were simply stories Beatrix wrote to amuse herself on cold winter nights.35
The story tells of an old widow in her simple cottage with her garden, the bees, the kettle, the clock and the pair of beloved white owls who live in the shed and raise their owlets on the ridge of the roof. But ‘good times and hard times — all times go over’. Sally had given what little money she had to her errant daughter when a baby granddaughter was born. But when the money was gone, Sally never heard again from the daughter or knew what had become of the little ‘Goldie-locks’ child. One dark winter’s evening Sally reads a letter from a stranger who had taken in her orphaned grandchild and writes to ask for money to send her to her Grannie. Poor Sally, with only the prospect of the poorhouse for herself, sits long after the fire has died wondering what to do. She has dozed off when, ‘There came a rush of soot and stones… Several large heavy stones tumbled after; and the white owl on the top… Amongst the stones was a black thing which smoked. It was an old stocking tied round the ankle with a bit of string.’ Inside are gold pieces and the wag-by-the-wall suddenly changes its song from ‘Tic: toc: gold: toes’ to ‘Tick:er tocks:Goldie:locks’. Sally lives happily to old age with her little granddaughter, the singing kettle, the owls, and the wag-by-the-wall clock. Beatrix sent off her biographical revisions to Mrs Miller at the end of November and promised to write out ‘Nancy’s Christmas story before the scribbly fit passes’.36
But Beatrix had found it hard to steal time away from the demands of the farms to fiddle with the revisions she wanted to make. The Girl Guides had come to camp on her fields near Hawkshead in August 1940, but could not stay in the usual place because it was being used for military supply. Thinking quickly, Beatrix settled the Guides with their dyed green tents in a ‘little larch wood’ known as ‘the heights’ above Castle Cottage, where they were perfectly camouflaged. Haymaking was in full swing and although they were shorthanded at Hill Top and Tilberthwaite they managed. ‘Uncle Willie is busy inspecting farms for next year’s ploughing, not altogether a grateful task amongst neighbours, yet he is a very suitable person to do it because he knows everybody’s business, and the conditions of local farming,’ she explained to Nancy. Eggs and poultry were in the shortest supply, and hen feed was scarce and expensive. Beatrix and Miss Mills started keeping rabbits in order to make sure that the dogs had a adequate supply of food, and in case of more serious food shortages. ‘I don’t know whether Miss Mills will have much appetite for rabbit pie,’ she wrote to Marian Perry. ‘I am thinking about our little dogs; with potatoes & rabbits produced in the garden, our 2 pekes won’t encroach on public rationings.’ She never forgot about her sheepdogs either, worrying that they would not stand up to their work on such poor scraps. She had some oatmeal ground for them at the mill, whether it was lawful or not. Still anxious about the possibility of invasion from the coast, Beatrix hoped Hitler ‘had missed his chance’.37
She was particularly anxious about the number of working-class homes that had been destroyed in the bombing of the coastal cities, and now the country villages were ‘packed to overflowing’ with evacuees. In September a wandering German plane unloaded fifteen bombs on wasteland ten miles off, but, Beatrix wrote cheerfully, she never woke up. ‘Wm’s habit of snoring is very tiresome. I have put up with it for many years, but it drowns the noise of approaching planes!’ From London there came word that her family home at 2 Bolton Gardens in Kensington had been hit in the London bombing in October. Beatrix did not mourn its destruction, commenting once later, ‘It is immaterial to give the exact address of my unloved birthplace. It was hit by shrapnel… now I am rather pleased to hear it is no more!’38
At the end of 1940 Beatrix’s farming, especially her cattle-breeding programme, sustained a blow when George Walker, her Troutbeck Park manager, was rushed from the remote farm to hospital in Kendal with a perforated ulcer. Beatrix wrote to Moscrop, ‘I saw Mrs Walker & Mary at the hospital on Tuesday in a sad way, but she sounded cheerful last night when she phoned. The doctor is still anxious.’ Beatrix had just been to the Park where tupping was in full swing. ‘Poor George,’ she wrote, ‘its a mess — not only am I grieved for him and his family but the cows!! He has all written down in a book but I doubt if anyone but himself can understand the book or know one cow from another. I used to know the old original cows but I have lost track of late years.’ She told Moscrop about the autumn sales, which started off poorly, but ‘prices went up very high
at the finish when there was little left’. She had sold about six hundred sheep from Troutbeck alone.
The Tilberthwaite sheep suffered something cruel last spring. The poor things lived through the snow and had plenty of lambs and reared them; it is a dry fell — there never seemed to grow any grass in the droughty May & June, they just pined. Tommy Stoddart thinks we lost near a hundred, not so much in the storm, but never picked up in the summer. I have got salt for them. And we have made silage. I have an idea it might be very useful, fed carefully, in a dry spring. Summer & back end have been favourable. A small hay crop, but plenty straw & turnips. And all will be wanted [referring to the submarine blockade of Britain]… Sheep are the standby on the fells — and the herdwicks don’t need feeding stuffs.39
Christmas 1940 was a low one for Beatrix, the first in many years without a single greeting from America. ‘Perhaps they are being wasted upon the deep sea fishes!’ she complained. But she had been able to tell Joseph that Walker was out of immediate danger, although it would take months for him to recuperate to the point of actively managing the farm. ‘Now about the wage Joseph I think you should be satisfied with £20 — but if you ain’t — why you have us fast! for we cannot do without you, that’s a fact; more than ever.’40
Her farm hands knew that Mrs Heelis would have ‘everything possible done for a sick animal on any of her farms, so long as there was a chance of its recovery, but once that point was passed she was quite matter-of-fact and unsentimental’. Although Bruce Thompson remembered once seeing her in tears at a village funeral, her attitude towards human death was much the same. ‘Don’t worry about us!’ she told Ivy Steel. ‘In this house we are too old to matter.’ She lamented the loss of friends and neighbours, as well as local landmarks like the Ginger and Pickles shop and the village blacksmith. ‘All that were “old” when I was younger, are dead. To be dead is in the course of nature — and war,’ but she considered it more disagreeable to be left behind.41
