The Tale of Hill Top Farm

by Susan Wittig Albert

  27

  Many a Little Makes a Mickle

  A great many interesting events were crowded into the next few days, so many and so interesting, in fact, that Beatrix was dazzled with the excitement. She was continually amazed by the difference between life in the little village of Sawrey, which was filled with such energetic and contradictory and vivid people, and life at Bolton Gardens, which seemed, in contrast, frigid and unchanging. It was the difference, she thought, between a scene viewed as a photograph, its black-and-gray subjects frozen forever in place and time, and the same scene in real life, with color and movement and smells and sounds all mixed together in a gloriously fluid muddle of changing images and blurred perceptions.

  Of course, the Sawrey events were all small ones, but they certainly added up to a great deal of interesting activity—or, as Mrs. Crook liked to say, many a little certainly made a mickle. The Constable miniature had come home, a happy event that was marked by a celebratory tea party at Anvil Cottage. Miss Barwick herself baked a sampling of the tea cakes, scones, and biscuits she planned to produce in her new business, and insisted, quite firmly, that everyone should call her Sarah. In turn, she called everyone, even the men, by their first names, which seemed a shocking display of familiarity. To the disappointment of some, she did not wear trousers for the occasion, although her skirt was short enough to cause comment. Most of the villagers, however, had already seen her in trousers, astride her bicycle (which, it turned out, she had purchased in Hawkshead and expected to use to deliver her baked goods), and had already expressed their various opinions to their friends and neighbors.

  As to the man who had stolen Miss Tolliver’s painting, it was reported that a certain Oscar Spry had been apprehended by the Kendal constabulary, and that a police raid on the Ambleside shop of Lawrence Ransom had turned up several other stolen items and that Ransom himself had been arrested. A ring of clever art thieves had obviously been operating in the area, and their activities seemed to have been brought to an abrupt halt.

  “So it was the other man you saw, climbing in the window,” Tabitha Twitchit said in an accusing tone to Crumpet, when this news reached the animals—Tabitha, Crumpet, Rascal, and Max—sunning themselves in Anvil Cottage’s back garden. “The thief was Spry, the house agent, and not the draper from Kendal.”

  Crumpet pretended to lick a grass burr from her paw. “It was an easy mistake to make,” she said defensively. “They looked enough alike to be twins. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Tabitha replied with a stern frown. “If you’re going to play at being Sherlock, you have an obligation to—”

  “Girls, girls,” Rascal said, in a soothing tone. “Let’s not mar our achievements with a petty quarrel. After all, we were the ones who got the Roof Fund away from those greedy rats. It’s thanks to us that Joseph Skead is mending the roof at this very moment.”

  Crumpet licked the other paw smugly. “And I was the one who put Max up to sitting on the stairs so that Miss Crabbe could trip over him.”

  “And I was the one who located the Parish Register,” Max said, with a note of pride in his voice. Since the events at Castle Cottage, he had lost some of his shyness and had come down the hill to join the gang.

  “But I am still the senior cat in this village,” Tabitha said firmly, becoming bored with this self-congratulatory back-patting. “I move that we all go round to Belle Green and see if Miss Potter’s animals are interested in taking an excursion.”

  There were no dissenting votes.

  Where the Parish Register had been discovered was a mystery that only Vicar Sackett might have resolved—although he refused to reveal to anyone where and in what circumstance he had found it. He discussed the matter only with Miss Viola Crabbe, who confirmed that her sister had been working on the Crabbe family genealogy and had gone to the church to consult the Register. It was Viola’s feeling that Myrtle had simply picked up the volume and taken it home with her; whether by design or by accident could not be determined, since her sisters were not anxious to ask her about it. As soon as her fracture was sufficiently mended, they were planning to take her for a few months to the south of England, away from the harsh Lake District winter.

  Beatrix had an opportunity to see the elusive Register for herself one misty afternoon, when she, Sarah, and Dimity went to the churchyard to put chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies in front of the new headstone on Miss Tolliver’s grave. After that simple ceremony, they went into the church, and Dimity showed them the Register, restored to its proper place beside the baptismal font.

  Beatrix idly turned the pages, glancing at the names of people who had been born and baptized and married and died over the years. She recognized some of the village families—the Crooks, the Leeches, the Skeads, the Suttons. And then she saw another name she recognized: Abigail Tolliver.

  “Look at this,” she said to Dimity and Sarah. Bemused, she read the entry aloud: “Abigail Tolliver, bride, Wesley Barwick, groom, baker, of Hawkshead, first reading of banns, September 6, 1867.”

  Sarah pulled in her breath. “Wesley Barwick,” she said wonderingly. “Why, that was my dad’s name!”

  Dimity’s eyes widened. “Sarah!” she exclaimed. “Miss Tolliver must have been married to your father!” And then, realizing that this could not possibly be true, she corrected herself. “But she was always Miss Tolliver. So the wedding didn’t take place.” She ran her finger down the column below the lines where the banns had been posted. “There’s no indication that the second and third readings of the banns ever occurred.”

  “Her father must have forbidden the marriage,” Beatrix said, half under her breath, remembering what Grace Lythecoe had told her. She bit her lip, thinking of her own father and mother and how hateful they had been about her engagement to Norman. She felt a kind of melancholy kinship with Abigail Tolliver, and a deep sadness fell over her.

  “Oh, dear,” Sarah said. “Oh, how awful for her—to be bullied by her father in that way! Why did she put up with it? How could she stand it?”

  “I think things were different back then,” Dimity said, as if in explanation. “Girls were expected to stay home and take care of their parents. It’s all different in these modern times, of course.”

  Beatrix was about to say that it wasn’t, necessarily, but Sarah spoke first. “I know that Dad was happy with Mum, over the many years they were married,” she said. She shook her head. “But poor Miss Tolliver never had anyone to love. It’s very sad, don’t you think?”

  Dimity did not hesitate. “She must have loved you. She gave you her home, the place she cared for more than anything else in the world. Perhaps she began to think of you as the daughter she never had.”

  “Not good enough,” Sarah said, in her hard, ringing voice. “I wasn’t her daughter, and I couldn’t have made up for all the years she missed with my dad. It’s a tragedy, if you ask me.”

  “Yes,” Beatrix agreed, very quietly, very sadly. “A tragedy.”

  But aside from these melancholy moments, the waning days of Beatrix’s visit were, for the most part, quite happy.

  For one thing, the cloud of suspicion that had settled over Jeremy Crosfield was lifted and he returned to Sawrey School. Miss Nash, who was now his teacher, saw to it that there was no more bullying, and that the boy’s drawings (which really were quite good) were given pride of place in the school room. Beatrix had several spinning lessons from Jane Crosfield, and she and Jeremy went often to Cunsey Beck, to draw frogs. Each time, Beatrix thought, her sketches became more interesting and more full of life. She would have some good work to take back to London, and for the first time in a very long time, she almost began to look forward to being indoors all winter, in her studio in the old nursery at Bolton Gardens, completing the watercolors for The Tale of Jeremy Fisher.

  For another thing, Beatrix received several letters from her publisher, a second parcel of books, and a very handsome check. “It will, I hope,” she wrote in
reply, with her tongue smartly in her cheek, “inspire the natives with rather more respect for me.” The check would, of course, do more than that—it would pay for the alterations to the dairy, the pigsty, and, best of all, to the farmhouse itself.

  For the thing that made Beatrix happier than anything else was the decision she had come to regarding the house at Hill Top Farm. She had been sitting in the garden at Hill Top one bright morning, dreamily sketching the old place, when she suddenly found that her pencil had drawn an addition onto the house, replacing the one-story kitchen on the farmyard end with a two-story wing, with a gable facing the garden. She had observed a great many Lake District buildings, some of which had been enlarged in just this way, and she must have known, unconsciously, that an addition could perfectly balance the old house without destroying its seventeenth-century lines.

  She stared down at what she had drawn. That’s the answer! she thought, with surprised delight. I’ll build a new wing onto the house for the Jenningses, and I will take the rest of the farmhouse for myself!

  The decision seemed to please Mrs. Jennings, who actually smiled when she boasted to Bertha Stubbs that she and Mr. J. were going to have a whole new house, all to themselves, as soon as Miss Potter could arrange to have it built—which might be quite a while, yet, with winter coming on. “It’ll be ever’ bit as good as a new house,” she told Bertha. “And big, too. Oh, not as big as t’ main part, but cert’nly newer.”

  And when Mrs. Jennings was contented, Mr. Jennings was contented, too, and he whistled as he went about the work of rebuilding the pigsty and carrying out the other changes upon which he and Beatrix had agreed.

  Beatrix herself was delighted with the plan, and she persuaded Mrs. Jennings to allow her to go through the house with a tape measure, making notes of the dimensions of rooms so she could have some of her own pieces sent up from London, and planning the furniture and draperies and treasures she wanted. She couldn’t actually live here—not, at least, for quite some time—but she could make Hill Top into her own domain, a house of her own, with everything in it just as she wanted it. The house would be the house of her dreams, the house where she belonged, where she could imagine herself leading the kind of life that would make her, at last, content. And all around her would lie her own land, fold and fallow, garden and green meadows and pretty patches of woods. And on it she would have her own animals: cows and pigs and chickens and sheep, yes, Herdwick sheep, those sheep who instinctively knew their own heaf.

  The more Beatrix thought about the arrangements she was making, the happier she became, and she had a lively discussion with George Crook and Charlie Hotchkiss about the best contractor for the job. George (who seemed to be slowly reconciling himself to the fact that Beatrix had snatched Hill Top Farm out from under the nose of Silas Tadcastle) suggested the name of a man in Hawkshead, and Mr. Jennings and Beatrix drove to see him one afternoon in the pony cart. He seemed to be the right choice, and Beatrix celebrated their bargain by stopping at the cobbler’s shop and ordering a pair of pattens for herself, those old-fashioned wooden-soled clogs that farm women wore to keep their feet out of the mud.

  It was the proper footwear, she thought to herself as the cobbler drew carefully around her foot, for a proper farmer.

  Historical Note

  Beatrix Potter is best known to the world through her “little books”—the nearly two dozen children’s books she wrote and illustrated between 1901 and 1913, beginning with the immortal The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But this intriguing Victorian woman lived many different lives, not only as a gifted artist and story-teller, but as an observant naturalist, a dedicated farmer, and an ardent conservationist who cared not only for the land but for the creatures who lived there. She was a late-bloomer who, at mid-life, began to insist on making her own place in the world.

  Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 into a wealthy, upper-middle-class London family. Much of what we know about her early life comes from her journal, which she kept in a kind of miniature cipher that was not decoded until some fifteen years after her death, when a dedicated scholar managed to decode the exercise books and loose papers that had been found in at Castle Cottage, the house where Beatrix lived from 1913 until her death in 1943. (See The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881-1897, transcribed by Leslie Linder.) From her journal, we learn that she lived a secluded but interesting life of books, art exhibitions, drawing and painting, and holiday travels with her family. She was educated at home by governesses until she was nineteen, and had no formal education, except for art lessons. She and her brother Bertram assembled their own miniature zoo in their third-floor nursery, and even on holidays, the children brought along their pet rabbits, mice, and birds. The Potters made annual three-month visits to Scotland and the Lake District, where Beatrix took great delight in learning all she could about the natural world and making notes of her observations in her journal. She was especially interested in fossils and fungi, and by the time she had reached her early twenties, she was well on the way to becoming a competent naturalist and botanical illustrator. The depth of her interest in natural science and the power and authority of her botanical work is clearly illustrated in A Victorian Naturalist: Beatrix Potter’s Drawings from the Armitt Collection, by Eileen Jay, Mary Noble, and Anne Stevenson Hobbs.

  But Beatrix sketched her pets, too, and it was her drawings of her favorite rabbit, Peter Piper, which led to The Tale of Peter Rabbit, composed in 1893 as a letter to the son of her favorite governess. (When Peter died in 1902, Beatrix wrote in her journal: “Whatever the limitations of his intellect or outward shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.”) In 1901, after several attempts to interest a publisher in her work, Beatrix paid to have The Tale of Peter Rabbit privately printed, and when the little book came to the notice of Frederick Warne Publishers, they offered to publish it. Her parents were opposed to the commercialization of their daughter’s art; they became even more opposed when the books became best sellers and it began to seem that their daughter’s earnings might make her independent of them.

  But Beatrix longed for the independence her mother and father resisted. In her first act of defiance against her parents, she agreed that Warne should publish her first book and quickly began to make plans for more. The books—Peter Rabbit (October, 1902) was followed by Squirrel Nutkin (1903), The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), Benjamin Bunny (1904), Two Bad Mice (1904), Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (September, 1905), and The Pie and the Patty-Pan (October, 1905)—turned out to be phenomenal best sellers. As the year 1905 began, there were a quarter of a million copies of Beatrix’s books in print, and she was well on the way to financial independence. (The story of Beatrix’s publications is told in Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman, by Judy Taylor, who frames her early work and life in the context of her development as an artist and naturalist.)

  Beatrix’s success did not change her life in any outward way, for she was by nature reserved and shy and by training a dutiful daughter. She continued to attend her mother, by all accounts an exacting and not very pleasant old lady. With rare exceptions, her only excursions outside of London were with her parents; and in London, she was not even allowed to visit her publishers’ office without a chaperone.

  But in mid-1905, Beatrix’s life took several unexpected and dramatic turns. In July, she received an offer of marriage from her editor, Norman Warne, on whose steady guidance she had come to rely. Like Beatrix, Norman was self-contained and modest, and their chaste love affair was restrained, even by Victorian standards. They were chaperoned at every meeting and were never once alone together. But their work brought them together regularly, and a real and deep affection began to grow between them. For three years they exchanged almost daily letters.

  Beatrix’s parents, however, were angrily opposed to their friendship, and when Beatrix told them of Norman’s offer, they made it clear that marriage was
out of the question. Despite the fact that both the Potter grandparents had been manufacturers, Mr. and Mrs. Potter looked down on the Warne family as being “in trade” and hence not of their class. Beatrix defied them to the extent that she agreed to marry Norman and accepted his ring, but no one except for Norman’s family was to know and their marriage was to be delayed indefinitely. It must have been a time of mixed happiness and sadness, for while she could not marry the man she loved now, Beatrix could at least glimpse the future the two of them would share.

  But tragedy struck with unexpected swiftness. Norman fell ill and by the end of August, 1905—just a month after their engagement—he was dead, the victim of lymphatic leucocythemia, a type of leukemia. Beatrix was bereft, devastated, alone. Now she knew that if she were to have any life of her own, separate from her parents, she would have to create it for herself.

  It was at this point that Hill Top Farm came into Beatrix’s already quite complicated life. About the time of her engagement to Norman, she had located a piece of property she wanted to purchase, a small farm in the Lakeland village of Sawrey, where she and her parents had gone on holiday in 1896, 1901, and 1902. She had visited Hill Top Farm during these periods, because her parents’ coachman and his family (like other wealthy Victorians, Mr. and Mrs. Potter traveled with a full contingent of servants) were boarded there. Her parents were not happy about her purchase, but perhaps their objections were tempered by the fact that their daughter’s marriage “into trade” was not to take place, and the farm, whatever it might represent to Beatrix, was a reasonably prudent investment of the income from her books and a small inheritance from an aunt.

  Much of what we know of Beatrix’s growing attachment to Hill Top Farm is recorded in her letters (Beatrix Potter’s Letters, selected and edited by Judy Taylor). In October, six weeks after Norman’s death, Beatrix traveled to Sawrey to inspect her new property. There, she threw herself into the Hill Top project with all the passion and dedication she gave to her books, planning what to do with her new acquisition, getting acquainted with the people in the village, and enjoying the release from her watchful parents. Perhaps the challenge of dealing with Hill Top Farm and making a place for herself in the village helped to divert her thoughts from her great loss: “My purchase seems to be regarded [by the villagers] as a huge joke; I have been going over my hill with a tape measure.” In a postscript, she added, “It is most lovely autumn weather, I shall try to stop till the end of month if I am not sent for” (Letters, October 10, 1905).