Over the Hills and Far Away

by Dennison, Matthew;

  Beatrix took pains to fit up the house to her liking : she consulted her own taste and her comfort. Above the farmhouse kitchen she built a library for writing and painting ; its tall window offered one of Hill Top’s best views, up winding Stoney Lane towards Moss Eccles Tarn. Mistress of her own environment for the first time in her life, she may not, like Mrs Tittlemouse, have ‘swept, and scrubbed, and dusted’ for herself, or ‘rubbed up the furniture with beeswax, and polished… little tin spoons’ . Like Mrs Tittlemouse, she took pride in possession.

  She revelled in Hill Top’s irregularities. ‘When I lie in bed,’ she wrote to Norman’s niece Louie Warne, in July 1907, ‘I can see a hill of green grass opposite the window about as high as Primrose Hill, and when the sheep walk across there is a crooked pane of glass that makes them look like this [drawings of blurred sheep outlines] and the hens are all wrong too ; it is a very funny house.’38 Her painting of Ribby framed in the hall door with the garden behind her, in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, and of Aunt Petittoes feeding her piglets in the field next to Hill Top, in The Tale of Pigling Bland, record the picturesqueness of Beatrix’s new Lakeland home. Her parents had furnished their house in London with cumbrous gentility ; Beatrix was sincere in her desire to reclaim aspects of her North Country heritage, but her restoration of Hill Top was as much the product of her artist’s eye as any of the ‘little books’. Sturdy in its landscape, surrounded by its carefully contrived cottage garden, Hill Top became a metaphor for Beatrix’s independence : part stage set, part doll’s house. She delighted in ‘improving’ it. She described going ‘after dinner to “Tom Kitten’s” house [to hang] pictures’ in a letter written as late as 1939.39 The process continued until her death and beyond : in her will she left detailed instructions concerning the furnishing of the house she had never really lived in.

  It was the farm that occupied many of her thoughts. In December 1908, from John and Thomas Rigg she bought twenty-two acres of mixed pastureland and woodland close to Far Sawrey. She acquired a further twenty acres the following May, when, for £1,573, she bought Castle Farm. The diminutive farmhouse – scarcely more than a cottage – was visible from the garden of Hill Top. There were outbuildings and another cottage. All were sadly run down. Two years later, in February 1911, she bought an additional small parcel of land adjoining Hill Top, for twenty pounds. A purchase made on 30 December 1913 included a manmade lake or tarn among the sixty-six acres ; later Beatrix stocked it with trout and planted water lilies.40 Her land-buying would continue. In each transaction Beatrix took advice from a local firm of solicitors : W. H. Heelis and Son, of Hawkshead and Ambleside, founded in 1836.

  *

  ‘What a gratifying thing it is in these days to meet with a female devoted to family life!’ Beatrix wrote in 1907 in a draft version of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.41 She herself was among the objects of her irony. Parental expectation had compelled her to devote herself to family life : attentive to filial duty, she acknowledged the ambivalence of that ‘devotion’ and (at times) the reluctance of her sacrifice. ‘I never knew a night go faster,’ she had written of an all-night vigil at her mother’s bedside in October 1895. In the early hours of the morning, she watched lamplighters and sweeps in the lane outside, ‘workmen going to town on bicycles with lights, in the dusk’, she was overwhelmed by hunger, but her thoughts did not cling to her mother, despite the latter’s serious vomiting and signs of haemorrhage.42 Ten years later, in the face of parental opposition to her marriage to Norman Warne, she fought doggedly for the chance to devote herself to a family life of her own.

  Beatrix in her forties was described as ‘quite out of the common… short, blue-eyed, fresh-coloured face, frizzy hair brushed tightly back, dresses in a tweed skirt pinned at the back with a safety pin’.43 Photographs taken at that time depict a pleasant, rounded face, heavy in repose, with suggestions even in black and white of the ‘brilliant colour’ that, as a little girl, Millais ‘used to provoke on purpose’, and an unguarded expression, dullness in her eyes, each socket darkly shadowed.44 Her hair inclined to unruliness ; she dressed as simply as prevailing fashions allowed, mostly without jewellery bar a brooch, in clothes that were practical to the point of shapelessness. Once Millais had described her as ‘a little like his daughter, at that time a fine handsome girl’ ; Rupert had likened her to the portrait of Nina Lehmann, but she had not been brought up to consider herself a beauty and she paid little attention to her appearance. With age she had grown heavier. To an American visitor, who took her photograph in May 1913, Beatrix wrote in some surprise, ‘I am wondering if I really am quite so fat as the stout female with my very small ducklings appears to be.’45 She did not change her ways. In time, her lack of interest in dress would appear an eccentricity. In the eyes of North Country gentry, Beatrix’s simple tweeds and the wooden-soled leather clogs she seldom removed were better suited to village slatterns than a woman of property and independent fortune.

  The man who became Beatrix Potter’s husband in October 1913 was not concerned by her dress. He was a quiet man like Norman Warne and, like Norman, disinclined to dominate. ‘There was an ambience about him,’ noted one observer, ‘of an eighteenth-century quiet gentleman.’46 Beatrix described him as ‘dreadfully shy’. Tall, slightly stooping, he had a kindly face. ‘When I want to put William in a book – it will have to be as some very tall thin animal,’ she wrote.47

  William Heelis was the youngest of eleven children of the late Reverend John Heelis of Kirkby Thore near Appleby and his wife Esther Martin ; his grandfather and great-grandfather had also been Anglican priests. Since 1900, he had been a partner in the Hawkshead office of W. H. Heelis and Son. He worked alongside his cousin, William Dickinson Heelis ; to avoid confusion, William Heelis was known as ‘Appleby Billy’, William Dickinson Heelis as ‘Hawkshead Willie’. Their relationship may not have been straightforward : the men exchanged few visits outside office hours. ‘Appleby Billy’ was a keen sportsman : he played bowls and golf, the latter, Beatrix reported afterwards, sometimes late into Saturday evenings ; he enjoyed folk dancing and rode a motorcycle. When opportunity allowed he shot ; a gun dog for William would be added to the tally of Beatrix’s animals. The Westmorland Gazette described him as ‘one of the best all-round sportsmen in the Lake District’.

  William Heelis proposed to Beatrix four years after she became his client, a period in which they had spent more time apart than together. Together they had discussed Beatrix’s farm plans ; William had explained the esoterica of land law. In driving rain, in snow, in summer sun, they had walked Beatrix’s pastures and new fields. Companionship came before love : shared interests bred familiarity. As Beatrix had associated Norman with her ‘little books’, William was associated with Near Sawrey : she did not require his participation in her ‘other’ life as ‘Beatrix Potter’. As a cousin noted later, ‘they shared each other’s interest in sheep and farming and the love of the beautiful Lake District’.48 And there are signs that Beatrix had not abandoned thoughts of marriage entirely, despite the lingering sorrow of Norman’s loss. In the winter of 1909, a boy called Andrew Fayle wrote to her about a wife for Jeremy Fisher. Beatrix replied with a series of witty miniature letters. ‘I live alone ; I am not married. When I bought my sprigged waistcoat & my maroon tail-coat, I had hopes… But I am alone.’ She signed her letter ‘Jeremiah Fisher’. With characteristic wryness, she added, ‘If there were a “Mrs Jeremy Fisher” she might object to snails. It is some satisfaction to be able to have as much water & mud in the house as a person likes.’49 In a subsequent letter, written from ‘Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise’, Beatrix suggests, ‘I am of opinion that [Jeremy Fisher’s] dinner parties would be much more agreeable if there were a lady to preside at the table.’50

  Through the rain-sodden family holiday of 1912, in a rented house on Windermere that kept her too often from Hill Top, the idea of William’s proposal sustained Beatrix ; she was frustrated at her enforced absence from the farm. ‘It is such hard
work toiling backwards and forwards to Sawrey, especially in this terrible weather – that I seem to have little time or energy to go anywhere else,’ she wrote ; to Millie, she confessed ‘the going backwards and forwards takes it out of me’.51 From a distance she bickered with Harold Warne over the text of The Tale of Mr Tod, particularly her opening paragraph with its reference to ‘disagreeable people’ ; afterwards she was irritated by the book’s endpapers : ‘perfectly horrible – too big, and rather commonplace’.52 Neither the story’s undoubted quality nor the success of its predecessors offered any solace. It was a difficult summer, characterised for Beatrix by an all-enveloping sense of fatigue ; she made no new sketches. Inevitably, there was worse to come.

  The Potters had disapproved of Norman Warne ; they disapproved of William Heelis. Again, self-interest sharpened snobbery : without Beatrix in constant attendance they could no longer manage Bolton Gardens. This time the Heelises returned their disapprobation. Beatrix’s Unitarianism was a stumbling block ; so, too, her disdain for social convention and her dislike of everyday social life. ‘I eschew tea parties,’ she told her cousin Caroline ; witheringly she described the social life of Hawkshead as ‘nothing but gossip and cards’.53 Eventually a silver cream jug was proffered as a wedding present. Beatrix’s response lacked emollience : ‘If you give me a cream jug, I’ll throw it out of the window, I can’t abide them!’54 It was not an attitude to inspire affection.

  Back at Bolton Gardens, Christmas was more than usually sombre. Rupert had a severe cold. ‘When old people are ill they do grumble, even more than necessary,’ Beatrix reported feelingly.55 Weeks later it was her own turn to fall ill. Her sickness became acute. By the first week of March, she could hardly hold a pen and her letters to Harold Warne were written for her. ‘I have been resting on my back for a week as my heart has been rather disturbed by the Influenza,’ she explained to him. She was incapable of work on the latest ‘little book’, which would become The Tale of Pigling Bland. Six weeks later her recovery remained only partial : ‘I seem to take such a long time to get strong again.’56 Welcome distraction came in the form of proofs of Victorine Ballon’s French translation of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Beatrix approved. At Hill Top at the end of April she was stopped in her tracks by breathlessness while trying to walk up ‘a short hill’.

  But Beatrix’s mind was made up. With an effort she finished Pigling Bland and dispatched her manuscript to Harold Warne. She insisted later that there was nothing autobiographical in Pigling and Pigwig escaping their pursuers ‘over the hills and far away’. Lacking vanity and feminine wiles, it is impossible that Beatrix should choose to depict herself in the guise of ‘a perfectly lovely little black Berkshire pig’, one of the most incorrigible coquettes in children’s literature, or stoop to the coyness of likening herself to ‘a little round ball, fast asleep on the hearth-rug’. But her insistence on a happy ending for her story – and the pigs’ escape from conventional expectation – surely reflects her resolution and something of the optimism this resolution inspired in her. After a rush to finish the illustrations, the book was published days ahead of Beatrix’s wedding.

  Beatrix Potter and William Heelis were married on 15 October 1913 at the church of St Mary Abbots, Kensington Church Street. The only guests bar Rupert and Helen were Beatrix’s friend Gertrude Woodward, daughter of the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum, and Willie’s best man, a cousin based in Oxford ; the Westmorland Gazette described the ceremony as conducted in ‘the quietest of quiet manners’. Bertram remained in Scotland. In May he had come to Beatrix’s aid in dramatic fashion, countering his parents’ protests against Willie’s unsuitability with the revelation of his own secret marriage, now of eleven years’ duration, to Mary Scott. Even though he stalled at disclosing full details of Mary’s background as a wine merchant’s daughter and former textile mill worker, Bertram’s intervention went some way to unravelling the family impasse.

  The previous day Beatrix and William had sat for photographs by Rupert in the garden at 2 Bolton Gardens. Both wore country tweeds, William with bulging pockets, Beatrix every bit as stout as she had feared back in May. Neither possessed in any measure Jeremy Fisher’s sartorial élan, his ‘sprigged waistcoat &… maroon tail-coat’. Beatrix was pictured with – and without – an elaborate flowered hat. She was forty-seven years old ; William was forty-two. Her expression is one of contentment rather than euphoria. Her fondness for William, she wrote, had increased with parental opposition : his feelings likewise. To Millie Warne, in a letter that cannot have been easy to write, she had explained in July that it was ‘the miserable feeling of loneliness that decided me at last’.57 She did not mention love ; her chances of motherhood were past. If Beatrix’s marriage contained an element of compromise, she did not betray it. Her letters do not suggest misgivings.

  To a little girl who shortly wrote to offer her congratulations, Beatrix replied enclosing a piece of wedding cake and a copy of her newest book. She was at pains to point out that ‘the portrait of two pigs arm in arm – looking at the sun-rise – is not a portrait of me & Mr Heelis’. It was, she conceded, ‘a view of where we used to walk on Sunday afternoons!’58 On 25 October, Country Life published ‘The Fairy Clogs’, one of four unillustrated short stories Beatrix had written in 1911 ; it appeared under the banner headline ‘Tales of Country Life’. The name ‘Beatrix Potter’ did not appear. Instead the author was identified using Beatrix’s new initials : H. B. H. In public as well as in private she had embarked on her life as Mrs Heelis.

  • 8 •

  ‘A large interesting farm’

  On 14 October 1913, the day before her wedding, Rupert Potter photographed Beatrix and Willie Heelis in the garden at Bolton Gardens.

  ‘When the sun comes out again, you should see my garden and the flowers… no noise except the birds and bees, and the lambs in the meadows’

  The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, 1918

  ‘AFTER I MARRIED I just locked the door and left,’ Beatrix claimed of Hill Top in 1913 – like Pigling Bland and Pigwig stealing quietly away from Mr Piperson’s kitchen.1 She chose not to live with William at Hill Top, cheek by jowl with the Cannons, in the rooms she had fitted up to suit herself. Instead, in the second half of 1913, she set in train building work and extensive renovations at Castle Cottage : ‘new rooms… the staircase is altered, & we are going to have a bathroom’.2

  As at Hill Top Beatrix’s wholesale alterations transformed the small Lakeland homestead. The house more than doubled in size. Beatrix moved the front door ; she built a large first-floor room with views across the sloping garden. Mrs Cannon became ‘dairywoman farm housekeeper’, with responsibility for the rooms Beatrix left behind her. Hill Top is clearly visible from Castle Cottage and Beatrix walked easily between the two ; in the library at Hill Top, called the New Room, she still wrote and painted at the old bureau bookcase. Beatrix’s image of locking the door and leaving is misleading. In October 1913, she did not exchange one way of life for another, nor did a chapter of her life abruptly close : she was accustomed to multiple existences. In her first years as Mrs Heelis of Castle Cottage, as at Hill Top as Miss Potter, Beatrix continued to balance the various claims of family life, the ‘little books’ and her farm.

  In 1891, at Putney Park, she had come face to face with Jemima Blackburn, author of Birds Drawn from Nature. Beatrix had judged her ‘a broad, intelligent observer with a keen eye for the beautiful in nature, particularly in plant-world life, as well as for the humorous.’3 The description applies as securely to Beatrix herself. Her ‘keen eye for the beautiful in nature’ had shaped her restoration of Hill Top and the garden she made there ; sharpened by humour, it inspired all the ‘little books’. She did not embark on marriage intent on closing behind her the door onto her work as a children’s author, any more than she meant to settle for the tea-and-cards routine of the country solicitor’s wife or absorb herself exclusively in farm concerns.

  She had bought Hill Top at
a moment of overwhelming sadness. ‘Planting cuttings of rock plants on the top of the garden wall’, driving the trap to Hawkshead to watch ‘the black sea-ducks swimming & diving’ on a lake ‘as smooth as glass’, lighting for the first time the new library fire and imagining children’s games of hide-and-seek in ‘funny cupboards & closets’ had soothed her in the empty aftermath of Norman’s death.4 For the first time, she had laid out and planted a garden of her own ; she had watched the milking of the cows, with their foolish names – Kitchen, White Stockings, Garnett, Rose, Norah and Blossom ; despite her ineligibility as a woman to vote, she had interested herself for the first time in local elections, at Kendal and Windermere. Hill Top had moulded Beatrix’s writing and her painting. It had allowed her to develop fully a personal vision, untrammelled by outside pressures, and it became for Beatrix a reflection and an extension of herself : ‘the deepest me, the part one has to be alone with’.5 In all weathers she painted the Hill Top views – the hills and fields and trees ; she painted harvest times of corn stooks, and the roofs and chimneystacks that surrounded her, continually adding to the kaleidoscopic portfolios of ‘very scribble-some’ background sketches she had assembled since Miss Hammond’s sway in the schoolroom ; she squirrelled them out of sight behind the geyser in the bathroom.6 A clutch of ‘little books’ celebrated the completeness of Beatrix’s engagement with house, farm and village community. This imaginative absorption, which never dwindled, was itself akin to a marriage : every bit as binding as Beatrix’s union with William Heelis.

  In turn the ‘little books’ had enabled Beatrix to improve and extend her landholdings. Her life had grown like the plants in her garden, nurtured by so ‘perfect a little place’ and ‘lovely spring[s] of blossoms, [when] the hawthorn bushes were like snow, and the bluebells like a bit of sky come down’.7 Piecemeal, like a patchwork quilt, she had added to her farm. In spite of her role at her parents’ side, her skills as author-illustrator had matured through the ‘Sawrey’ and ‘Hill Top’ books, guaranteeing substantial royalty payments from Warne’s. Her neighbours recognised and appreciated Beatrix’s renown ; her letters indicate their competitiveness to be included in her stories. At the time of her marriage to William Heelis, Beatrix could look proudly on the life she had made for herself in the Lake District. She had even partly emerged from domestic attrition with her parents. That the remainder of her life was chiefly occupied in farming and conservation was not an inevitable consequence of her marriage in 1913. Beatrix’s self-identity – which once her parents had persuaded her was self-will – was strong enough to embrace varied personae simultaneously. She was proud of her married status and insisted on being addressed as ‘Mrs Heelis’. That she maintained Hill Top as a private preserve, an expression of ‘the deepest me’ – in the words of one visitor in 1927 ‘a little museum unchanged forever from the time of the books’ – and described it in letters to children and admirers of her books as ‘Tom Kitten’s house’, is proof of a different sort of pride : in the achievements of ‘Beatrix Potter’.8