Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  • 7 •

  ‘A nest right away’

  Beatrix in the porch of the restored Hill Top, 1913.

  ‘They came to the river, they came to the bridge – they crossed it hand in hand – then over the hills and far away she danced with Pigling Bland!’

  The Tale of Pigling Bland, 1913

  THREATENED WITH no escape from the muddle of his own making – caught in a gooseberry net in Mr McGregor’s garden by the large buttons of his jacket – Peter Rabbit ‘[gives] himself up for lost, and shed[s] big tears’. In the summer of 1905 it was not to be Beatrix’s response. She chose instead to draw succour from what she called ‘the strength that comes from the hills’.1 She bought a house and a farm.

  Nine years earlier, Rupert Potter had rented a country house called Lakefield. It was a mid-eighteenth-century house on a hill, with large windows, a covered veranda and a walled garden steeply terraced, as well as attics full of lumber, including ‘ancient pistols and an ancient case and velvet hunting-cap… and a portfolio of chalk drawings, figures and heads, in the style of Fuseli, such as young ladies drew at school sixty years hence’ : a treasure trove for Beatrix.2 Broad views stretched across Esthwaite Water to Langdale Pikes and Grizedale Forest ; in good weather and bad, cloud banks dominated the horizon. Beatrix had busied herself with fungi. In an oak coppice, she found ‘poor specimens of the poisonous Agaricus phal-loides’ ; under a beech tree ‘the dark hairy stalks and tiny balls of one of the Mycetozoa’ ; ‘up the steep road towards Grizedale’ she sought out inaccessible copses armed with a basket for gathering specimens ; she painted the parasol mushroom, Lepiota procera.3 With Bertram she took ‘a long dragging walk’, relishing the fresh air and the luxuriance of ‘wild herbage’. Together the siblings killed a viper with a stick ; they cut off its head and noted the tail still twisting and twitching an hour later.4 Beatrix and her father went out with their cameras ; on her own Beatrix drove the carriage about the lanes and through the woods. She emerged unscathed from a collision on a hill that left her ‘convulsed with laughter’.5 In 1900, the Potters returned to Lakefield. On that occasion Beatrix painted a view of the garden, framed by its dramatic landscape setting. Two years later, Beatrix sketched the interior of one of the Lakefield cottages ; it became Ribby’s cottage in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan. It was at Lakefield that she encountered black Pomeranians too, models for Duchess in the same story.

  Subsequently renamed Ees Wyke, Lakefield lies outside the village of Near Sawrey, which Beatrix first saw in the summer of 1882, during the Potters’ tenancy of Wray Castle. In 1896 she renewed her acquaintance with this unspoiled Lancashire hamlet ; she noted its ‘flowery little gardens’ and ‘nice old-fashioned people’ who lived their lives among the lanes and fields.6 She concluded that it was ‘as nearly perfect a little place as ever I lived in’ and never altered her assessment ; it joined the lost Edens of Dalguise and Camfield in her imagination.7 Now, after an interval, she bought a house there – where ‘sunshine crept down the slopes into the peaceful green valleys, [and] little white cottages nestled in gardens and orchards’.8

  Hill Top Farm – an extended seventeenth-century cottage – crouches on a rise of Near Sawrey above the southern stretch of Esthwaite Water, with its distant swathe of mountains and the woods where, afterwards, Beatrix watched charcoal burning. Previously the Potters had lodged their coachman, David Beckett, there, with his wife and children. Beatrix’s purchase of Hill Top in the autumn of 1905 represents her final act as a Londoner.

  For the house, its ‘very overgrown and untidy’ garden and thirty-four acres she paid significantly in excess of the market value ;9 she soon learned that, among the villagers, her purchase ‘seem[ed] to be regarded as a huge joke’.10 She was unrepentant. The sale was completed on 25 November, exactly three months after Norman’s death. Rupert’s solicitors, Braikenridge & Edwards, acted for Beatrix ; later she would employ a local firm for property work and conveyancing.11 Her parents approved the purchase as an investment, as two years earlier they had approved Bertram’s acquisition of a farm in Roxburghshire. Glimpsing only a shabby, unadorned North Country farmhouse, with its slate porch, its walls criss-crossed by spindly roses and windowsills crowded with terracotta plant pots like broken teeth, they had no idea that Beatrix meant to live there, alongside Hill Top’s resident farm manager, John Cannon and his family – much as they had been unaware that Ashyburn was intended for Bertram’s marital home with Mary Scott, the wife he had married in secret on 20 November 1902 ; Helen never approved of Beatrix living in ‘a simple farm house’.12 A legacy from Helen’s sister Harriet Burton supplemented royalties from Beatrix’s books to fund the purchase price of £2,805. Although Norman Warne was prevented from seeing its fulfilment, Beatrix’s acquisition was surely part of a plan she had discussed with him. A month later, at the more competitive price of £250, she bought an additional field, Buckle Yeat Croft.

  In The Fairy Caravan, Beatrix describes Tuppenny the guinea pig leaving the town of Marmalade : ‘For the first time he smelt the air of the hills. What matter if the wind were chilly ; it blew from the mountains.’ Lonely in her grief, Beatrix shrugged off London in much the same way. She absorbed herself with self-conscious wholeheartedness in Hill Top and its business : the state of the farm buildings ; John Cannon’s pig keeping ; even the accuracy of the scales used for weighing the Hill Top butter. ‘The far end of the orchard is a neglected pretty wilderness, with mossy old trees… and long grass,’ she wrote of Codlin Croft Farm in The Fairy Caravan. Beatrix doused the Hill Top apple trees with liquid manure, ‘a most interesting performance with a long scoop’ ; she was rewarded when ‘the old trees prove[d] to be very good cookers’.13 ‘I have been going over my hill with a tape measure,’ she told Harold Warne : every aspect of landownership thrilled her.14 The success of The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, lately reprinted, scarcely touched her. She had taken lodgings with the village blacksmith while she formulated her plans. The blacksmith’s wife had a new kitten called Tabitha Twitchit.

  Beatrix’s scheme for Hill Top eventually took the form of a two-storey extension to the house, linked internally by a connecting door. It was her means of providing living quarters for herself – and avoiding ‘be[ing] woken up too early by the clank of milk churns’15 – while retaining John Cannon as farm manager, or ‘cowman-foreman-shepherd’ in Beatrix’s description.16 (Given Beatrix’s inevitable absenteeism while she continued to look after her parents in London, this was an essential measure.) Her extension significantly increased the size of the house and altered its appearance. The legacy of Potter prosperity could not be jettisoned in an instant ; in letters written to the Moore children from Sidmouth in 1898 and Winchelsea in 1900, Beatrix had proved her unsuitedness to cottage living. In those instances she described typical country cottages as ‘meant for cats and dogs’ or resembling ‘the little mouse-houses I have often drawn in pictures’.17 Alongside a new upstairs window, set into the grey pebbledash, Beatrix placed a stone plaque : it is decorated with the date of building work and her initials.

  Her plaque was in keeping with vernacular custom ; it was also a statement of intent : Beatrix meant to make Hill Top her home. ‘For my part I prefer to live in the country,’ she wrote in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse in 1918 ; the decision was of long standing. Time would increase her conviction that, in the Lake District, she was reconnecting with the ‘generations of Lancashire yeomen and weavers ; obstinate, hard headed, matter of fact folk’ from whom, under Jessy Potter’s continuing influence, she chose to claim descent.18

  Beatrix approached her task of improvement and restoration with the minute relish that had characterised her study of insects, fungi and fossils, the same instinct for order she had exhibited as a child cataloguing the habitats and foodstuffs of moth caterpillars. Closely she supervised the layout of new garden paths, the building of garden walls and sturdy oak trellising with acorn finials inspired by fences at Gwaenynog ; for the vegetable garden she o
rdered a wrought-iron gate of art nouveau design. When her instructions for an area of lawn miscarried, Beatrix requested that the tennis-court-size patch be dug up for potatoes ; Satterthwaite the village blacksmith fixed up a box hive for bees ; she transplanted ferns from a demolished stone bridge into crevices in new garden walls.19 No matter that she had never gardened before. Gate, vegetable garden and beehive would all shortly feature in Beatrix’s ‘farmyard tale’ of Jemima Puddle-duck ; stone walls sprouting ferns play their part in her pictures of Tom Kitten.

  To Harold Warne, who had taken Norman’s place as her editor, Beatrix outlined a schedule of work on new books. In the spring of 1906 she would complete her story of Jeremy Fisher, before turning her attention to two shorter books for younger children, The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit and The Story of Miss Moppet. Once Beatrix had written to Norman, ‘It is pleasant to feel I could earn my own living.’20 Grief notwithstanding, she remained level-headed. Norman’s death had prevented her own story ‘com[ing] right… like Anne Elliot’s’ ; she acknowledged an ongoing obligation to her parents, but she did not intend to forfeit the measure of independence represented by her own income, for which she had fought hard. Her letters to Harold were confident and business-like ; they illustrate her working practice, as well as her attitude towards her stories. Commending The Tale of the Faithful Dove in November 1908, Beatrix explained that it ‘ha[d] been lying about a long time, & so have several others’. Unfinished stories exercised a hold on her imagination : ‘I should like to get rid of some one of them. When a thing is once printed I dismiss it from my dreams!… But an accumulation of half finished ideas is bothersome.’21 Long habits of ‘thoroughness’ balked at incompleteness.

  *

  Posterity’s version of ‘Beatrix Potter’ focuses on the eight years Beatrix spent at Hill Top : a sustained burst of intense creativity balanced by her growing knowledge and love of the farmer’s life in the North Country. Between 1905 and 1913, she wrote a clutch of her best-known stories : the tales of Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-duck, Samuel Whiskers, Ginger and Pickles, the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs Tittlemouse, Timmy Tiptoes, Mr Tod and Pigling Bland. Hill Top, Near Sawrey and its surrounds provided the setting for most of those stories. Caroline Hutton – married despite earlier protestations and with a small son – remembered accompanying Beatrix ‘to find a suitable spot for [Jemima Puddle-duck’s] nest’ ; Beatrix wrote to a little girl in New Zealand that The Tale of Ginger and Pickles ‘was all drawn in the village near my farm house, and the village shop is there’.22

  Beatrix herself appears in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, ‘going to the post office in the afternoon’ ; in The Tale of Pigling Bland, wearing clogs and a shapeless hat, she pins pig licences ‘for safety in [the] waistcoat pockets’ of Pigling and his brother Alexander. As previously, she avoided ‘imagination in the vulgar sense’ by setting her tales in recognisable locales ; by ‘peopling’ her house, garden and farm with her own characters, she blurred the line between fact and fiction. Her inspiration was concrete – like the rat infestation at Hill Top she described to Millie Warne that suggested her story of Samuel Whiskers, or her later need to unburden herself of piglets eating five meals a day, played out in Pigling Bland’s story. Her position as omniscient narrator defies the reader to question fictions so studiedly rooted in truth.

  At the same time, and threatening to distract her attention from new ‘little books’, Beatrix’s focus on Hill Top resulted in an overhaul of the farm’s stock. John Cannon acquired cows, pigs, ducks, chickens and local Herdwick sheep – fourteen pigs, ten cows and thirty-one sheep by Christmas 1908.23 Partly encouraged by Hardwicke Rawnsley, who in 1899 had founded the Herdwick Sheep Association (the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association after 1916), Beatrix would become a leading advocate of this tough local breed, noted for their hardiness and coarse, durable wool. She acquired a small black pig, Sarah, which she treated as a pet : it lived both inside and out, Beatrix ‘always afraid [she would] get upstairs one day’.24 She delighted, too, in her chickens. To Millie Warne, she wrote on 17 November 1909, ‘One of the two hens I brought from Sidmouth is the best layer we have ever had, she has had two holidays of ten days ; she had laid month after month since February last.’25 Farm news increasingly dominated Beatrix’s letters : a cart house suffering from toothache ; an ailing calf treated with chalk mixture, arrowroot and brandy ; a sow ‘so tame I have to kick her when she wants to nibble my galoshes’.26 It was a reflection of her shifting priorities.

  For much of the year she remained with her parents ; she would never occupy Hill Top full time. Her purchases of ‘delightful bushes’ for the garden – ‘lilac, syringa, rhodondendrons [sic], and… a red fuchsia’ – and fruit trees to supplement the cooking apples ; her plantings in the ‘very light drying soil’ of phlox, saxifrage, lavender, Japanese anemones and sweet williams given to her by neighbours ;27 and her dealings with plumber, plasterer, joiner and the Cannons all occupied interstices in her life, snatched from the Potters’ sedate annual roundelay of seaside and North Country holidays and changeless months in Bolton Gardens. Although she continued to struggle with her parents’ exactions, the Beatrix of her forties had ceased to rebel with much vigour. With something closer to equanimity, she wrote, ‘It is awkward with old people, especially in winter – it is not very fit to leave them.’28 For the meantime, escaping to Near Sawrey when she could, she managed to the best of her ability to satisfy conflicting claims. For Christmas 1912, she asked for ‘a book about pruning roses’.29 In her absences, her thoughts were of her garden, an antidote to the ‘trying’ life she still led with Rupert and Helen. Her love for Hill Top balanced the emotional sterility of home life ; it helped bury the agony of bereavement.

  For the farm, she built a new barn with ‘a large loft above & a stable for calves & bullocks below’.30 As soon as feasible she moved the Cannons into the new extension. For herself, she began work on the interior of the original cottage : ‘a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry and a larder’, as in Mrs Tittlemouse’s house, and a large square hall from which she removed a later partition wall. Although she did not cook – Beatrix described her culinary skills as restricted to making jam, frying bacon and boiling plain potatoes31 – she fitted out a new kitchen, with running water laid on ; she estimated the costs of her waterworks at fifty pounds. She had walls replastered. As a precaution against rats, zinc panels were fitted to the bottoms of doors and new skirtings made of cement. Against a background of a flower-pattern wallpaper, which even covered the ceiling, she furnished the hall with ‘a pretty dresser with plates on it & some old fashioned chairs; & a warming pan that belonged to my grandmother’, as well as a set of bellows given to her by Norman. She left in place for now the old-fashioned fireplace range : she had decided to use it in the story she called The Roly-Poly Pudding (later renamed The Tale of Samuel Whiskers).32 Throughout the house she hung landscape paintings, adding to her collection over time : a mid-Victorian view of Loch Katrine, the setting for Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, by Charlotte Nasmyth ; a view of Falmouth Harbour, destination for the Potters’ spring holiday in 1892, by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Brett ; and Langdale Pikes from Low Wood, an atmospheric local view painted a century earlier by James Francis Williams. Like her own work, these paintings fictionalised reality : nature transformed and perfected by art.

  ‘If ever I had a house I would have old furniture, oak in the dining room, and Chippendale in the drawing room,’ Beatrix had written in her journal in 1884.33 At Hill Top she was as good as her word. In the hall she placed an eighteenth-century oak longcase clock and, in 1925, her favourite seventeenth-century oak cupboard, bought expensively at auction : ‘very plain, except the middle, fixed panel, which has good carving’ ;34 she worried she had ‘a-fool-of-myself-at-a-sale-made’.35 She chose mahogany pieces for the panelled parlour and installed an elaborate marble chimneypiece. In 1929, she reimagined the same room as Matilda and Louisa Pussycat’s tiny attic parlour in The Fairy Caravan, ‘containin
g a polished mahogany table and three chairs with horse-hair seats’ ; ‘silhouette portraits of… ancestors hung on the wall’.36

  Thanks to the tales of Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers, Beatrix’s ‘cottage’ interiors are instantly recognisable. Hers was a vision of its time as much as a rebellion against the ponderous respectability of Bolton Gardens. All her life Beatrix had sketched houses and furniture : the bentwood chair in her bedroom at Camfield Place ; an oak dresser at Gwaenynog ; the staircase at Lingholm densely hung with pictures ; a Gothic table in the library at Wray Castle ; back splats and cabriole legs of wooden chairs at Fawe Park, which the Potters rented in 1903. She had a passion for old china, too, showcased in illustrations to The Tailor of Gloucester. At Hill Top, both inside and out, Beatrix gave rein to her enjoyment of the past.

  It was an outlook influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement so dear to Hardwicke Rawnsley, a romantic view of pre-industrial England celebrated in illustrations by Caldecott, Greenaway and Crane ; Edward Hudson’s Country Life – begun in 1897 and read by Beatrix intermittently ; the watercolours of Helen Allingham and Myles Birket Foster ; new attitudes to ‘natural’ and ‘wild’ gardening championed by William Robinson and Beatrix’s near-contemporary Gertrude Jekyll. In her own words, Beatrix ‘appreciate[d] the memories of old times, the simple country pleasures, – the homely beauty of the old farm house, the sublime beauty of the silent lonely hills’.37 Later she joined the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, founded by William Morris. She never agreed to the installation of electric lighting at Hill Top or her subsequent home, Castle Cottage.