A door to Green Knowe: Lucy Boston, Mrs Oldknow and the past in the present

“His memory he had about him like a scarf; his thoughts a flight of starlings.”

Lucy Boston quotes Rabelais on the title page of Memory in a House (1973)

“…already I had realized and accepted my destiny, which was to be the temporary vessel of the consciousness of the long, unremembered life of the house.”

Lucy Boston, Yew Hall

“It should go on the bookshelf alongside The Wind in the Willows.”

Contemporary review of The Children of Green Knowe, Times Literary Supplement

The Children of Green Knowe features a series of tableaux, three key points in the lives of the children of a 17^th century family: Toby, Alexander and Linnet. As the stories unfold, a lonely boy and elderly woman encounter their spirits in the present day, gentle ripples disturbing everyday life in the manner of an M R James story.

Lucy Boston in 1973, from Memory in a House

I was still very young when I discovered Green Knowe via the TV series from 1986, but it made a deep impression by bringing together things I loved: an ancient house full of stories, the 17^th century, an undefined gothic presence neither real or imagined, a fireplace shedding amber light, all set for making toast, drinking tea and hearing about was and what might have been.

Thinking about it again in the early 2000s, I read the entire Green Knowe series for the first time (there are five other books which all vary in tone). However, it was Lucy Boston herself that drew me in and the house she bought and restored, The Manor at Hemingford Grey. Both of her memoirs, Memory in a House and Perverse and Foolish had been reissued together in one volume, and I found her first novel Yew Hall (1954).

Green Knowe soon became a concept rather than just a story: a distillation of centuries, from which tapestry birds sip and needlework flowers grow and become flesh. Returning to Lucy’s book of memoirs and Yew Hall recently revealed it’s all an invitation to ‘Lucy’s world’, to enter a sacred space, invisibly shielded from the pressing discord and destruction of the outer world, but poised for uncertainty, idyllic but not anodyne.

The green man and the wise-woman

It’s not explicit but you can sense a pagan thread in The Children of Green Knowe: that nature is harsh as it is nurturing and that we walk the middle of it. There is loss in Mrs Oldknow’s stories as well as spiritual joy, through nature, birds and their song, or Alexander’s heavenward music.

A yew tree is central as Green Noah the cursed demon tree:

Snippet snappet

Shapen yew

Devil’s image

Take on you.

And we know the yew tree is famous for being found in churchyards, as a symbol of regeneration and protection, a continuation from druidic to Christian times. The Yuletide hymn is The Holly and the Ivy, when ‘the holly bears the crown’. Alexander sings for the restored monarch, King Charles II – who’s a potent symbol of the Green Man cut down and reborn.

We must remember that all these old traditions were part of folk memory in the 20^th century: handed down from generation to generation, a country’s folklore, myths, legend and superstition were a key source of inspiration everywhere, in street and pub names, municipal art, adult and children’s fiction, in the burgeoning TV and cinema.

A scene from the 1986 BBC adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe

It’s clear from Lucy’s memoirs that she played with the idea that the village might look on her in the tradition of the wise-woman in a lonely house, rather like tabloids once painting Kate Bush as a gothic recluse: ‘She’s a witch!’. The story for younger readers Guardians of the House addressed this:

“My hairdresser said she is thought to be a witch. She talks to the birds. I’ve heard her. But they say she talks to mice and hedgehogs as well.”

Far from charming the birds with magic, we read in The Children of Greene Knowe how Mrs Oldknow smears Tolly’s fingers with margarine to bring robins, chaffinches and hedge-sparrows to his hands. Birds are everywhere in Lucy’s writing, reflecting her love of music and her music room out into the natural world. Linnets, chaffinches, blackbirds – all are tipping or tapping to come in or fill the air.

If only it could speak…

‘Time, change, memory and continuity are her recurring themes’ writes Jill Paton Walsh in her introduction to the memoirs. Perhaps I’m a disciple, but her writing is quite anchoring, which is probably how we all feel when we come across a feeling of affinity, however misguided or extrapolated from few indications.

The house and garden she nurtured and cared for – which Jill Paton Walsh calls her ‘crucible for the imagination’ – forged those themes into a wholly unique sense of place as Lucy explored the nature of her home and how it was inspiring her. Certainly it is in the tradition of Alan Garner’s theme that the past is contained around us, with energies that replay over the years.

“It was not that I was living an escapist dream. The house was there. It was dominating. It was, and I hope still is, haunted and itself a haunter. It has a power felt by almost everybody who comes here. But what? And how? My psychic antennae are useless. Perhaps it is the unusual density of lives lived in it, superimposed and at length forming a sort of discernable sediment.”

Memory in a House (1973)

It’s worth pointing out that Lucy’s attachment to her home doesn’t belong to a tradition of feudal land ownership and inherited wealth. She does not write with a sense of personal tradition or with entitlement, even though the invented Oldknow family faces ‘return’ over the generations. Green Knowe was borne from a love of a building, a garden, and of histories. You might call her a custodian. I’m again reminded of Alan Garner, who moved a medieval building 20 miles to his home when it was threatened by a road-widening scheme in the 1970s. It’s all part of that fascinated lament, ‘If only it could speak, what stories would it tell!’.

Ancient wisdoms

What is it about these houses and their inhabitants, homes returned to life in fiction when the past breaks into the present? Is it a finding of empathy in the ancient wisdom of past generations, using time-travel to create a sense of idealised ‘belonging’?

We have reached such a level of complexity in the 21^st century that a book from the 19th or 20th century allows us to access time-old basics of human existence. Free from the contrivance and self-consciousness of our current place in time, we can consider life and death, love and loss, melancholy and content, strife and ease. There is for many a great comfort in knowing we share unchanging elements with generations before our time, further and further into the ancient past, the simplest needs of shelter, food and warmth.

In the strange way that synchronicity starts to link thought trails, I came across this, again in Yew Hall, first published in 1954:

“Every year that I live here it is as though another of my personalities is left behind, like a variation in a Passacaglia, leaving me nearer the first and last plain theme. It is not only as one grows older the passions and vanities fade, nor that the pressure of the present day obliges one to live an ever simpler life, to make and do with one’s hands whatever is necessary, to be forever saying goodbye to civilisation. It is rather that civilisation has turned to shoddy, plastic and sham, has become a cage with bars of cliché, so that one must get out.”

Jill Paton Walsh also speaks of Lucy’s “indignant sympathy for all subordinates, for all whose personality is assailed, for whom the world is pressurising into being other than what they are”. Which is perhaps part of Lucy’s thinking in Yew Hall in talking of escaping the ‘bars of cliché’.

‘One of the old ones’

Returning to Mrs Oldknow, it’s fair to say that Lucy Boston is quite frank in her memoirs, and dispels any notion a casual observer might have that Green Knowe’s fictional mistress is a reflection of anything woolly or lavender-scented. Just dipping in, I come across “I had a lonely lunch, and finally in tears a lonely supper under the suspicious eye of the landlady who obviously thought that if my man was dropping me I should not be able to pay the bill and so must not be allowed out of sight”.

Mrs Oldknow, however, is introduced thus:

“His great grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face look more like her. She was wearing a soft dress of folded velvet that was as black as a hole in darkness. The room was full of candles in glass candlesticks, and there was candlelight in her ring when she held her hand out to him.”

Mrs Oldknow looks far into the past to bring life to her house; and you can see Lucy in her, searching the present for those whose spirit empathises with its history and atmosphere. Her home is a sentient creature, breathing in the lives that pass through it and exhaling their presence over the centuries.

Daphne Oxenford as Mrs Oldknow in the 1986 BBC adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe

There is loss in The Children of Green Knowe, and there is melancholy. Tolly is grieving for a parental figure: his mother has died, he is ‘miserably shy’ of his stepmother, on the journey to Green Knowe he is ‘alone as usual’ and apprehensive of what he might find there. He is introduced gradually to the Oldknow family of the 1660s by his great-grandmother, and looks for connections in a century far distant.

But what of Mrs Oldknow? She talks as intimately and fondly of the 1660s Oldknows as she would her own family, but she mourns them at the same time: perhaps an allegory underlining a sense that ‘belonging’ among the spirits of Green Knowe is not satisfying. Their 17th century lives exist in memory (or invention that has become memory, thus ‘a presence’), if not as ghosts.

We have both the adult yearning for past bonds (perhaps childhood family and that formative sense of belonging), and the child seeking to establish them in order to become a contented, engaged adult. Tolly is not so much scared by the ghostliness but taunted and un-nerved by the Oldknow children and their elusive offer to ‘belong’.

But you might say also that Tolly is a conduit to facilitate Mrs Oldknow’s escape from a retreat into the past and entrapment there (Doris Lessing’s ‘poison ache’ of nostalgia, or parallels with Pamela Sykes’ Come Back, Lucy where a spirit offers a retreat to the comfort of her grandmother’s Victorian past, but with the intention of keeping the heroine there forever).

A ritual of understanding

At the conclusion of the story Mrs Oldknow has handed her history-memory of the Oldknows to Tolly, and with his acceptance of it, her great grandson represents her own sense of ‘belonging’ in the here and now. He understands these long-dead names as living people: Toby and his love for his horse Feste, Alexander and his music, the sadness of their grandmother. So too the building. It might be that Tolly is being tested by his great grandmother: can he see the house for what it is, can he read its atmosphere? Would Green Knowe be safe in his hands?

Mrs Oldknow and the Oldknows of the 1660s (1986 BBC adaptation)

Against the world’s pressing regard for only what is new and contemporary, these histories are alive in Tolly’s time, the house and its garden become a pocket of concentrated spots of time within the present day cycle of the year: continuity, and affinity with those who went before.

Again, from Yew Hall:

“Here on my island the years have opened like a rose in the sun, the fury of standardisation has missed one little by-way, and events have remained in their real dimension as reactions of the human heart, limitless, let dependent on its fleeting pulse.”

There is much evidence that Lucy wanted to protect not a personal paradise, but to share her love of place and help others to see and feel the magic she experienced; a legacy which continues through her writing, where everyone can access her ‘island’, and the house where the ghosts of the past can never be sealed with plastic windows and perfect render.

More information

All the Green Knowe books are available from the online shop for Green Knowe here. You can also find Memories, the two collected memoirs of Lucy Boston including Memory in a House which deals with the restoration and life at the house that became Green Knowe.

Yew Hall is not in print and barely available secondhand. It’s surely a prime contender for someone like Persephone Books to republish? First published in 1954, it was republished in the early 1970s.

Magic of the House is a short 15-minute BBC programme from 1983 which includes readings from The Children of Green Knowe and Yew Hall, and interviews Lucy Boston at her home, available here on YouTube.