Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  She began her married life with experiments in cooking, guided by Mrs Beeton, Millie Warne’s wedding present ; William helped her. She darned his socks and spent her first married Christmas with a gaggle of Heelises at Battlebarrow House, Appleby ; she forged particular friendships with William’s nieces. And she planned a new story, rich in mischief and humour.

  It revisited the theme of pursuer and pursued, which Beatrix had first treated in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She borrowed elements of fairy tale, notably the story of Puss-in-Boots ; again she satirised self-importance and snobbery. Among her illustrations would be scenes of rough shooting : she asked Willie to pose, gun in hand, to prevent problems that had marred illustrations in The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit. To Harold Warne, whose response was unexpectedly muted, Beatrix explained, ‘It is about a well-behaved prim black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life, and goes out hunting with a little gun on moonlight nights, dressed up like puss in boots.’ She added that, ‘as the gun is only a pop gun (which continually goes off), the bag is neither large nor painful’.9

  In March 1914, despite laggardly builders and the ‘awful mess’ at Castle Cottage, and with a semblance of her old enjoyment, Beatrix made a start on her drawings. Four months later, however, she had made no progress. ‘I am interested in the drawings again – in the sense of getting my mind on it, and feeling I could make something of it – if only I had time & opportunity,’ she lamented.10 Ever since the purchase of Hill Top, time and opportunity had conspired to thwart her. Now, for the first time, Beatrix’s difficulties proved insurmountable.

  She was a wealthy woman, preeminent in her field, her reputation assured, the most successful author Warne’s published, in her own words ‘well off independently! so long as the books continue to sell’.11 Even Rupert had described himself in 1910 as ‘proud of my daughter’s freshness of humour which has never yet become dull’ – albeit not to Beatrix herself.12 Yet she remained wife and daughter as well as author. When Rupert’s health declined sharply at the end of 1913, it was Beatrix’s clear duty to support both her parents.

  Rupert Potter was suffering from stomach cancer. He died, at the age of eighty-two, on 8 May 1914. For five months Beatrix had moved between Castle Cottage and Bolton Gardens. Although the Potters employed professional nurses, limiting the amount of time Beatrix was confined to her father’s bedside, she was understandably relieved when ‘he went suddenly at the end’.13 She had not left him for the final week. She inherited £35,000, the bulk of the executor’s task of overseeing her father’s estate, and the problem of what to do with her mother. She also inherited Rupert’s cameras and photographic equipment, surely a belated testamentary compliment.

  It was impossible to leave Helen on her own. Beatrix arranged a companion in the form of an elderly aunt. She rented houses in Sawrey for both women, evidently to William’s alarm, as well as for Helen’s coachman. A year later, Lindeth Howe, a solid, gabled Victorian villa on a hill above Windermere, with glasshouses including a cool greenhouse for cacti, came onto the market. The Potters had rented the house in the summer of 1911 and again in 1913 ; with Beatrix’s encouragement, Helen bought it. A caretaker was installed in Bolton Gardens, Harrods employed for removals, and the Potters’ London servants – in addition to Beckett the coachman, four maids and a ’tween maid – resettled by Beatrix at Lindeth Howe ; she went on to hire two gardeners. ‘It took me two months to move Mother’s possessions from No. 2 Bolton Gardens,’ she wrote.14 Gently, in words mostly unspoken, Beatrix negotiated the terms of her continuing responsibility to her seventy-six-year-old mother – initially, near-constant errands that kept her ‘on the trot’, afterwards a pattern of regular, more-than-weekly visits. Helen adapted to her new existence of needlework and pet canaries ; ruefully Beatrix pointed to her ‘good lungs, no rheumatism and good eyesight’.15 With William busy in the office in Hawkshead, and a farm to oversee, it was not surprising that Beatrix made no headway with the story she had provisionally entitled The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. ‘I do wish I had got more done last winter before interruptions began,’ she lamented to Harold Warne. Unusually, this stubborn and self-contained woman asked for sympathy : ‘It is very difficult to keep up to a fixed level of success.’16

  Since publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, Beatrix had completed nineteen ‘little books’, often at a rate of two a year. She had steeped herself in writing after Norman’s death as part of the ‘fresh beginning’ she had promised herself – just as long ago she had banished sleeplessness by committing to memory whole plays by Shakespeare. That unrelenting schedule represented an act of will : on 11 August 1908, she wrote, ‘I have been trying dreadfully hard to think about another story about “Peter”. I thinked and thinked and thinked last year ; but I didn’t think enough to fill a book!’17 Her ‘little books’ had offered an emotional outlet in an arid private life : they counterbalanced her parents’ ‘fidgetting’ and querulousness. Now, at another moment of personal strain, her confidence in her ability to maintain freshness and inspiration faltered. In ‘The Fairy Clogs’ and in other unpublished writing for an older audience – stories called ‘Carrier’s Bob’, ‘Pace Eggers’ and ‘The Mole Catcher’s Burying’ – she had made first attempts at writing fiction without illustrations. In 1914 the urgency of her involvement with her writing was correspondingly less. Beatrix had William ; she had Hill Top and Castle Cottage ; she had her farms, ‘the ideal beauty’ of the Lake District.18 The ‘silent air on the hills’ sustained her.19

  *

  In a letter written in March 1916, Beatrix described herself as ‘very active and cheerful’.20 By then, her farm accounted for much of her activity ; aside from her marriage, it was also her principal source of cheer. With ironic asperity she had written to The Times following the founding earlier that year of the Women’s National Land Service to provide female farm labour during the First World War. She signed her letter ‘A Woman Farmer’. ‘I have worked on [my farm] for years and love it,’ she wrote. To her old friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, she described herself simply as ‘a farmer’.

  At first Beatrix’s personal disappointment at her inability to complete more than a single illustration for The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots bit hard. She blamed failing eyesight, which was troubling her more and more – ‘my eyes are gone so long sighted & not clear nearby’ ;21 uncharacteristically she blamed Harold and Fruing Warne and their lack of interest in the story. Once war broke out, in August 1914, she blamed short-handedness on the farm, which forced her to take on more physical work herself. Increasing short-­sightedness was undoubtedly a factor : from this point on her sketches and paintings lack the precision and sharp focus of her earlier work and the quality declines. She used the war as an excuse for not visiting a London optician. And in August 1916, having abandoned Kitty-in-Boots, she admitted that her plan to revive a story she had first illustrated in rough as a present for Harold’s youngest daughter Nellie in March 1906 was beyond her. She requested that her sketches for The Sly Old Cat be worked up by another illustrator, and suggested Ernest Aris, who had recently published Mrs Beak-Duck, modelled closely on Jemima Puddle-duck ; his recommendations in Beatrix’s eyes were ‘considerable technical facility and no originality’.22 The subtext of Beatrix’s letters is clear : she had come to view the ‘little books’ as a chore. ‘I painted most of the little pictures to please myself. The more spontaneous the pleasure – the more happy the result,’ she wrote in 1940.23 But the experience of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots had denied spontaneous pleasure ; the results were unhappy.

  Beatrix’s disaffection was more than frustration at ‘eyes that… are beginning to feel anno domini’.24 For several years her dealings with Frederick Warne & Co. had become less satisfactory. Harold was dilatory about royalty statements and erratic in making Beatrix’s payments ; he failed to capitalise on potentially lucrative merchandising opportunities, the ‘side shows’ that Beatrix had always treated seriously, including, in the spring of 1914, suggest
ions for notepaper and almanacs featuring Potter characters. Beatrix’s own accounts were disordered : ‘I am completely at large about the position, & I filled in income tax at random’.25 Given her customary astuteness and a financial sharpness to match that of Tabitha Twitchit’s shopkeeping in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, it was not a position she relished. By the middle of 1915, she was four years behind in her records. In an emphatic letter to Fruing, she labelled the muddle ‘a trial of patience’.26 Later she claimed that Harold had been ‘a trial’ to her ‘for many years’ and refused to allow him any opportunity for ‘meddling’ in dealings connected with the ‘little books’.27

  Correctly she suspected malpractice on Harold’s part. She had no idea that what she imagined a lack of organisation amounted to forgery on a criminal scale. Despite possessing what The Times described as ‘the highest reputation’, Harold was arrested in London on 2 April 1917. Three weeks later, the paper reported, he was sentenced ‘to 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour on a charge, to which he pleaded “Guilty”, of forging and uttering an acceptance to a bill of exchange for £985 14s. and the acceptance to another bill.’28 Harold’s lawyer stressed that Fruing had known nothing of Harold’s attempts to divert money from Frederick Warne & Co. to William Fruing & Co., an ailing fishing business based on Jersey, which the elder brother had inherited on his mother’s death in 1908.

  Fruing’s ignorance notwithstanding, Harold’s forgeries, totalling £20,000, had brought the publishing house to the brink of bankruptcy. To prevent foreclosure Fruing sold his house and the bulk of his possessions ; he sold his watch and his signet ring ; to neighbours he sold the doll’s house that Norman had made for his daughter Winifred, the setting for Beatrix’s story of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca. He set about restructuring the company and promptly dispatched to Beatrix the errant royalty statements that had originally spiked her concern. Six months later, he published Beatrix’s first ‘little book’ for four years : Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes. A revised version of Peter Rabbit’s Painting Book, first devised by Beatrix in 1911, appeared the same month. By late November, following a second imprint, Warne’s had issued 35,000 copies of Appley Dapply. Truthfully Beatrix told him, ‘I am very glad to hear the new book has caught on.’29

  It was not her best book, not even the book she had intended when, a lifetime ago, at the time of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she had suggested to Norman a rhyme book. Quoting the proverb ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’ by way of apologia, Beatrix had ransacked her portfolios to offer Fruing a mixed assortment of illustrations, some of them dating as far back as 1891. ‘The old drawings are some of them better than any I could do now,’ she explained. To another correspondent, she wrote, ‘The pictures were done a long time ago – I have little time for painting now, & I have to wear spectacles.’30 She worried there was a ‘shabby’ quality to the enterprise, which was prompted mostly by attachment to Norman’s family firm. Certainly there is something familiar about Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes, like a roundup of Beatrix’s schoolroom favourites : pictures of mice, rabbits, a guinea pig and a hedgehog. Presciently the narrator of the rhyme of Cottontail and the black rabbit asks, ‘She’s heard it before?’ The book’s frontispiece was one of the designs for Christmas cards Beatrix had sold to Hildesheimer & Faulkner in 1894.

  Beatrix attributed Appley Dapply’s success to people wanting ‘a cheerful present for children’ as the war dragged on and, on 17 October 1917, offered Fruing ‘another book of rhymes for next year’.31 When Fruing demurred, she came up with an alternative, a ‘mouse story’ inspired by Aesop, reimagined in Hawkshead. It became The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, published in 1918, the best of her later stories. The extent of Warne’s exigency is revealed by the speed of publication. The book was produced in time for Christmas, despite Beatrix only delivering final illustrations in late August.

  As with Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes, the success of The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse spurred Beatrix on. In February 1919, she told Fruing Warne, ‘I have been thinking out a new book… I will send you a rough plan soon.’32 It was a second Aesop-inspired story, The Tale of Jenny Crow. Fruing baulked. He suggested returning to The Tale of the Faithful Dove. Beatrix took offence. She changed the story’s title to The Tale of the Birds & Mr Tod, but Fruing remained unenthusiastic. Too late he understood his mistake : in May 1920 Beatrix gave up the idea entirely. Ambitiously she suggested a collaboration with Archibald Thorburn, the Scottish watercolourist who annually designed Christmas cards for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds : nothing else could tempt her back to The Faithful Dove.33 Her final offer was a reiteration of her earlier suggestion of ‘a companion volume to Applely [sic] Dapply’. In November 1919, correspondence between author and publisher included an ominous threat on Beatrix’s part : ‘you don’t suppose I shall be able to continue these d…d little books when I am dead and buried!! I am utterly tired of doing them, and my eyes are wearing out. I will try to do one or two more for the good of the old firm ; but it is quite time I had a rest from them.’34 To a niece of William’s she wrote, ‘I can assure you of one thing, I should be only too delighted to see a successor.’35

  Beatrix kept her promise to Fruing. In 1922, the restructured Frederick Warne & Company Limited published Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes ; in 1930, after a lengthy interval, The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, conceived in Ilfracombe in 1883, became Beatrix’s twenty-third and last ‘little book’. Poor eyesight and the excessive workload of the upland fell farmer prompted Beatrix’s virtual withdrawal from publishing. Dwindling confidence in her abilities also played its part, mishandled by publishers who failed to recognise that, despite occasional brusqueness, as well as international acclaim, Beatrix still required reassurance.

  ‘It is much easier for me to attend to real live pigs & rabbits ; after all I have done about 30 books, so I have earned a holiday,’ Beatrix wrote to an overseas acquaintance in November 1920.36 It was partly a face-saving statement and, despite the satisfaction of her farming life, included its measure of wistfulness. As she wrote later, her philosophy was ‘to make the best of the present’ ; she dismissed slights and disappointments as ‘raindrops on the sand’.37

  *

  Aged seventeen, Beatrix had referred in her journal to ‘those grumblers the farmers’.38 Thirty years later and a farmer herself, she too was inclined to grumble – provoked by labour shortages, increased red tape and wide-ranging deprivations brought about by the Great War. ‘I have a big farm and a very great deal to do, since the war, for my men left me, and now I have an old shepherd, 2 boy & 2 girls, which requires more looking after,’ she wrote in December 1917. She inventoried her livestock as a sheepdog called Fleet, Dolly the pony, ‘3 horses… 14 cows, a lot of calves & young cattle, and 80 ewes & 40 young sheep & some pigs & 25 hens & 5 ducks, & there were 13 turkeys.’39 To a niece of William’s she offered the blander, but to Beatrix truthful, description of ‘a large interesting farm’.40 Of its 120 acres at the start of the war, less than a tenth was given over to arable ; the rest consisted of hill pastures and meadow hay.

  Beatrix became farm owner first, farmer second. Until his retirement in 1919, John Cannon managed the farm at Hill Top ; his sons’ wartime call-up prompted Beatrix’s greater involvement with day-to-day tasks. She ‘look[ed] after the poultry & rabbits and pony and [her] own particular pet pig’ ; time permitting, she weeded the turnips.41 She acquired her knowledge of farming piecemeal, partly through her correspondence with Bertram, to whom she remained deeply attached despite their physical separation. As in her earlier wide-ranging study of natural history, she was largely self-taught. ‘I flatter myself that I have learnt to make hay,’ she told a sister-in-law in August 1916, much as she had taught herself fungus identification or the distinctive way in which, in different species of trees, ‘the branches grow from a trunk’.42 She was also similarly thorough. Faced by fluke infestation in her flocks in the 1920s, she took to examining sheep dung under the mi
croscope for parasites.

  Beatrix explained once to a prospective farm worker, ‘I don’t depend on the farm for a living.’43 Throughout her farming life, royalties from her ‘little books’ and from ‘side shows’ as varied as Peter Rabbit slippers and handkerchiefs, subsidised farm incomes, a makeweight against the unpredictability of poor harvests and fluctuating cattle and wool prices. The extent of those royalties afforded her considerable scope. In the last two decades of her life, ‘“written out” for story books’, her eyes ‘tired for painting’,44 Beatrix exploited that scope to celebrate her love of landscape in a manner every bit as enduring as the vision of the ‘little books’.