A Mind for Magick – part 2

Midwinter reading and children’s classics: four homes that house the veil between the past and the present

Four books and four houses: all involve travel into past centuries and immersion in history. They do so from a setting which represents ‘home’, albeit a temporary one: the protagonists are all visitors, but the issue of belonging is key.

Before exploring the themes in later posts I’m going to summarise the houses which are featured, and how they might affect the authors’ treatment of ‘time that has passed’. The illustrations are from the TV adaptations from 1978-1989, except for Green Knowe, which is from Lucy Boston’s book Memories.

All the books feature yule celebrations or midwinter scenes.

Come Back, Lucy by Pamela Sykes (1973)

There are two houses: one belonging to Lucy’s grandmother, which is called The Shrubbery, and then the home in the large town where Lucy is sent to live with distant relations, the focus of events. Both are Victorian, one firmly placed in the gentle past of the owner’s Edwardian youth. The other, while a grand, oppressively imposing house – the sort of suburban villa with elements impersonating a castle rendered in red brick – is embracing change.

This 1973 title emerged at a key moment in time for our aesthetic relationship to the past. On TV, Upstairs Downstairs was in full swing. A fashionable side of the 60s had eschewed what we now call mid-century modern and taken to restoring Victorian homes and the more understated, democratic furniture and folky Victoriana: at first blending it with 60s reinvention before the 80s ushered in a more Merchant Ivory-esque attention to period detail and restoration.

In Lucy’s new home, there is no such empathy with the past. She is faced with modernisation and eradication in favour of light, modification, modular shapes and stylised pattern of the 1970s. Both approaches, however, were cultural forces.

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston (1954)

Probably the most romantic and evocative of all houses in children’s literature. Lucy Boston restored the ‘oldest home in England’, which dated from Norman times, in the 1940s. She later set about bringing its history to life with a series of novels in which the house is the main character.

The charm also comes from the building’s relative simplicity: this is not an elaborate, grand monument to wealth but a solid stone building much added to and taken away from over the centuries. It is a real home, not a fiction.

Within it live many original artefacts, talismans whose stories unlock the secrets of its past. The garden is equally important, cultivated with ancient topiary, as is the riverside setting in the flat Cambridgeshire landscape.

A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley (1939)

“A stone-built farm, with gables and doorways in unexpected places, with barns and cowhouses across the green grassplat and old ivy-covered buildings where fowls roosted and calves sheltered.”

Alison Uttley grew up immersed in the Derbyshire countryside, on a farm across the hill from the small manor house she here calls Thackers. Like Green Knowe, it has been added to and taken from over time, but was once the home of the Babington family, key figures in plots to rescue Mary Queen of Scots from captivity during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Penelope is drawn to the ancient past which almost speaks to her through the carved wood that has travelled through time in the furniture and handed-down belongings from Thackers. Aunt Tissie even carries a folk memory of the plot to rescue Mary Queen of Scots (just like Uttley’s father), which suggests something even more ancient and deeply-rooted than Lucy Boston’s reconstructions of history at Green Knowe.

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)

Tom’s Midnight Garden reflects Philippa Pearce’s fear of what was most likely to happen to her childhood home in Cambridgeshire. It’s a most poignant house because, in the book, its idyllic landscape and walled garden has been ignored by town planners and built over.

“A big house now converted into flats… crowded round with newer, smaller houses that beat up to its very confines in a broken sea of bay-windows and gable-ends and pinnacles… it was the only big house among them, oblong, plain, grave… a pillared front door.”

Ironically, it is a real house that still exists with the garden, and the façade at least, still intact, and which sold for millions a few years ago.

The unnamed house has parallels with Come Back, Lucy as a building updated and altered so that the contrast with the past is a stark sense of modernity and the passage of time. The urban setting of these titles is much more a product of the changed landscape of the later twentieth century, in that the authors are engaging with contemporary reality versus the escapism from modern life offered by Green Knowe and Thackers.