Katherine Langrish's Blog

My husband's Uncle Bill Dilger was a watch and clockmaker-cum-repairer, and his workshop, a small back room in his Victorian Manchester home, was a fairy palace dedicated to Time. You walked through the door and found yourself immersed in a sussuration of soft ticking from walls crowded with clocks - mahogany-cased wall clocks with sober cream faces and slow-swinging brass pendulums; elaborately carved grandfathers looming up to the ceiling with their painted moons and suns and ships; busy gilt carriage clocks tick-tick-ticking away; great dark rustic cuckoo clocks with pine-cone weights and little half-open doors (family history proudly states that the Dilgers were one of the two Black Forest families which claim the invention of the cuckoo-clock); a Mickey Mouse clock with eyes that flicked from side to side; a clock with a ballerina who spun around on her pointed toe to the tune of the Blue Danube; an antique novelty clock shaped like a clockmaker holding a timepiece under his arm: big clocks, little clocks, old clocks and new clocks, clocks in the process of being mended, and clocks which would never work again, clocks ready to be claimed and clocks whose very owners, it seemed, had left them here long ago and vanished into time themselves.

In the middle of the small room, under a low-hanging, glass-shaded light, was Uncle Bill's wooden worktable, covered in small, intricate, shining parts - cogs and springs and watch-cases.  Those he wasn't currently working on would be protected from the dust by a collection of upturned crystal sherry-glasses whose stems had snapped. Everything gleamed.

We always tried to arrive just before noon.  Bill would welcome us and we would all crowd into his workshop, adults and children alike, and wait, breathless and smiling. There would be a strange whirring. Then the first shy chime. And then one after another every working clock in the room would clear its throat and strike.  Ding, ding, ding - dong, dong - bing, bing, bing - cuckoo, cuckoo - interrupting one another in a delightful, clashing crescendo and diminuendo of shrill and rapid and slow and mellow, till finally the last cuckoo ducked back in as the little doors whipped shut, and all that would be left was the constant tick-tick-ticking. It was something that could never fail to give pleasure.


Isaac Peabody - illustration by A.R. Whitear

Uncle Bill's clock room often used to remind me of Isaac Peabody's workshop in Elizabeth Goudge's novel 'The Dean's Watch' which is set in the 1870s in an unnamed fictional cathedral city which combines elements of both Wells and Ely.  Isaac is described as 'a round-shouldered little man with large feet and a great domed and wrinkled forehead. ...His eyes were very blue beneath their shaggy eyebrows and chronic indigestion had reddened the tip of his button nose.  His hands were red, shiny and knobbly, but steady and deft.'  As for his workshop:

The shop was so small and its bow window so crowded with clocks, all of them ticking, that the noise was almost deafening. It sounded like thousands of crickets chirping or bees buzzing, and was to Isaac the most satisfying sound in the world.

But old Isaac has a secret.  Brought up by a stern father in the fear of an angry God, he is terrified of the great cathedral, and even though he is fascinated by the Jaccomarchiadus (the mechanically-operated figure that strikes a bell on the outside of a clock) which adorns its tower, he is too afraid ever to go inside the cathedral and see the clock for himself:

The Jaccomarchiardus stood high in an alcove on the tower, not like most Jacks an anonymous figure, but Michael the Archangel himself.  He was lifesize and stood upright with spread wings... Below him, let into the wall, was a simple large dial with an hour hand only. Within the Cathedral, Isaac had been told there was a second clock with above it a platform where Michael on horseback fought with the dragon at each hour and conquered him. But not even his longing to see this smaller Michael could drag Isaac inside the terrible Cathedral. No one could understand his fear.  He could not entirely understand it himself.



Perhaps not.  But here is the dial on the outside north wall of Wells cathedral, and here - below - is the west entrance, and I think you can see that there is, or could be, something awe-inspiring, even terrible, about its beauty.  You might well feel a bit of an ant, approaching it as Isaac does through the small streets of his anonymous city: 'Like a fly crawling up a wall Isaac crawled up Angel Lane, scuttled across Worship Street, cowered beneath the Porta, got himself somehow across the moonlit expanse of the Cathedral green and then slowly mounted the flight of worn steps that led to the west door...'



Eventually, right at the end of the book, Isaac does manage to conquer his fear and enter the cathedral. And there it is, the other clock.

It was just as it had been described to him. Above the beautiful gilded clock face, with winged angels in the spandrels, was a canopied platform. To one side of it, Michael in gold armour sat his white horse, his lance in rest and his visor down. On the other side the dragon's head, blue and green with a crimson forked tongue, rose wickedly from a heap of scaly coils. They waited only for the striking of the bell to have at one another. It was a wonderful bit of work. ...And to think he had lived in the city all these years and had not seen it!

Here is the one at Wells.  It dates to the late 14th century. Around the dial you may just be able to make out the four angels in the corners, who hold the four cardinal winds.

On the hour, every hour, armoured knights ride around the platform you can see at the top, jousting with one another, while higher up the wall to one side, the Jack perches in his alcove, striking his bell.



After I had taken these pictures, one of the cathedral clergy came out and spoke to the gathered onlookers. He didn't preach, not in a specifically Christian way, but he did ask us to consider the value of time in our lives, and to make good use of it. It was a suitable message.  In Goudge's book, old Isaac makes friends with the great Dean of the cathedral, whose clocks he comes to wind. The Dean is a sick man, who knows he has not long to live.  He pays a visit to the clock-shop and listens to Isaac talking about horology:

He delighted in Isaac's lucid explanations and he delighted too in this experience of being shut in with all these ticking clocks. The sheltered lamplit shop was like the inside of a hive full of amiable bees. ... [The clocks] spoke to him with their honeyed tongues of this mystery of time, that they had a little tamed for men with their hands and voices and the the beat of their constant hearts and yet could never make less mysterious or dreadful for all their friendliness. How strange it was, thought the Dean, as one after another he took their busy little bodies into his hands, that soon he would know more about the mystery than they did themselves. 


Dear Uncle Bill was nothing like poor frightened Isaac, but a truly happy man and faithful Catholic who willed his best and favourite clock, the massive black grandfather which stood in his living room, to the Catholic Bishop of Salford. It was a typical gesture which I hope the Bishop appreciated, but I expect he did, as - just as Isaac does for the Dean - Bill used to go regularly to wind the Bishop's clocks.  Bill used to joke sometimes, that he didn't know what he'd do in heaven.  "I don't know what I'll do in heaven," he'd say in his soft Manchester accent, with a twinkle in his eye. "There's no clocks there!" He died at the age of ninety-plus, contented to the last, and would have both enjoyed and deserved the genuine epitaph that Elizabeth Goudge quotes at the beginning of 'The Dean's Watch':


Epitaph from Lydford Churchyard
Here lies in a horizontalpositionThe outside case ofGeorge Routleigh, Watchmaker,Whose abilities in that linewere an honourTo his profession:Integrity was the main-spring,And prudence the regulatorOf all the actions of hislife:Humane, generous and liberal,His hand never stoppedTill he had relieved distress;So nicely regulated wereall his movementsThat he never went wrongExcept when set-a-goingBy peopleWho did not know his key;Even then, he was easilySet right again:He had the art of disposing ofhis timeSo wellThat his hours glidedawayIn one continual roundOf pleasure and delight,Till an unlucky minute put a periodtoHis existence;He departed this lifeNovember 14, 1802,aged 57, Wound up, in hopes of being taken in handBy his Maker,And of beingThoroughly cleaned, repairedand set-a-goingIn the World to come.

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen.  I’m not sure he was right.

Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ – hobbits, for example; and Lewis’s own Pevensie children, and Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’.  There’s a pleasure in seeing an ordinary person rise to the occasion, as when Bilbo Baggins turns out to be a very good burglar indeed, or when Frodo self-sacrificingly takes on the burden of the Ring. Tolkien must have seen many instances of ‘ordinary’ heroism in the trenches of World War I. 
And I’d agree that one does need to able to identify with characters in fantasy. For me, one of the difficulties of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is that apart from Titus and Fuschia there are too few characters for whom one can feel any empathy.  Although I love the setting and the descriptions of the immense castle and its strange ritual life, I become emotionally exhausted by Peake’s cast of grotesques.  Peake had, it’s fair to say, a line on the darker side of life.  And not coincidentally for this post, he illustrated the two Alice books.  Just look at his picture of Alice emerging out of the mirror into Looking-Glass Land, and compare it with Tenniel’s.
Tenniel’s Alice is barely halfway through the mirror.  She looks not at us, but around and down at the room with an expression of calm interest.   She is a little excited, perhaps, but not alarmed.  We don’t feel there in the room waiting for her: instead, we are looking through the window of the picture.  We can glimpse part of the room.  The grinning clock is strange but not threatening.  The room itself appears to be well lit.  In Tenniel’s drawing, Alice is firmly planted on the mantelshelf.  She has a chance to look around, and will jump down when she chooses.
 Peake’s Alice appears through the misty glass like an apparition.  She looks straight into our eyes, as if we are the first thing she sees. Her face is very white, and so are her hands, outspread as if pressing through the glass, but also gesturing an ambiguous mixture of alarm and conjuration.  She is coming out of darkness, and there are no reflections to suggest what the looking glass room may contain – except us, for we are already there, waiting for her.  (We may not be friendly).  With one leg waving over the drop, she is about to fall off the mantelshelf into the room – for her position is precarious.
Even the 1951 Disney cartoon recognised the tough element in Alice’s character, and the latent terror in Wonderland.  They made her into a prim little cutie, but she still managed to stand up to the frightening Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.  
So how ordinary is Alice, after all – is she really just an innocent and rather pedestrian Every-little-girl in a mad, mad world?  Or does she have her own brand of illogical weirdness with which to combat the weirdness she finds?  I think she does, and I think modern readers often miss it.  We look at the blonde hair, the hairband, the blue dress and the white pinafore, and forget her speculative, inventive mind, her impatience – and passages like this:
And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse!  Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” 

Compare that with George MacDonald’s heroine in ‘The Princess and The Goblin’. Can you imagine Princess Irene doing anything so bizarre? Irene is truthful and brave, but always a little lady – the Victorian gentleman’s ideal child. The adventures that happen to Irene are not of her own creation. But it’s Alice’s weird imaginings about what might be happening on the other side of the glass – that take her into Looking Glass Land at all. Alice is both a credibly strong-minded little girl – capable of losing her temper, of defending herself in the White Rabbit’s house by kicking Bill the lizard up the chimney – and a surreal philosopher, as some children are. She is the maker of her own imaginary worlds and when they get too chaotic, she ends them – amid considerable violence. 
“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”                At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

            “And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen… “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!” 

(Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)
Tenniel’s illustrations catch the vivid threat and drama of the situation.  In Peake's, lit by three tall sinister candles, it looks as if Alice and the two Queens are being sucked into a black hole.  
Some books with dream endings can feel like a cheat. ‘And she woke up, and it was only a dream’ seems to negate all that has happened. But in the case of Alice, the dream settings are absolutely necessary. She has not strayed into a pre-existing Narnia like Lucy Pevensie.  She is the Alpha and Omega of her own fantasylands. She is, like dreaming Brahma, the creator and destroyer of worlds: and when she awakens from her dreams, it is utterly logical that Wonderland and Looking Glass Land will cease to be.   

This is a post I wrote a few months before my mother died, nine years ago now. It was (and is) a heartfelt one.
It's Mothering Sunday in England this weekend, and here is a drawing I made for my junior school teacher a very long time ago. We'd been asked to draw a picture of our kitchens. I don't remember if a portrait of one's mother was also required, but she was there (of course) and so I included her. I was ten and very proud of the likeness, although I remember her saying to me, 'Hmm, do you really think I look like that?'




Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 70's will recognise this kitchen. There's the speckled red lino on the floor, with the rubbery seal stuck down over the join. There are the painted wooden cupboards, the wire rack over the oven, the aluminium pans, the wall-hooks from which to hang sieves and scissors and fish-slices, above all the state-of-the-art glass disc in the window, with cords you pulled to line up the ventilation holes. There's my mother's curled hair (she used rollers), the fact that she's wearing a dress, her heeled court shoes.

Truth to tell, perhaps this isn't such a good likeness of my mother, who was slim and attractive... but it's a pretty good record of our kitchen. If you opened the back door to the right, six stone steps would lead you down into a slanting asphalt yard and the back gate. If you rubbed the steam from the kitchen window, you could look right over the valley to the moors on the other side of Wharfedale.

As I write this, my mother is 91 and has been in hospital for weeks, having fallen and broken her hip. She isn't very well. What you can't see in this drawing I made - but perhaps it's implicit - is the love in that room. It was a happy, happy home, and she made it so. No amount of trouble I go to now can be too much to repay her for what she gave us.

Last autumn around the time of my birthday, my sister and I were poking around in one of those fascinating antiques arcades where you can find anything and everything from Lalique glass so expensive it isn't even priced (if you have to ask, you can't afford it) to chipped jugs and odd sherry glasses at 50 pence apiece. My sister had asked me to choose a birthday present. I looked at this and that, and then I found this anonymous watercolour.






I had to have it. This is my ten-year old picture, grown-up and made better. This is or might as well be, my mother in one or any of the places we lived during my childhood.  All that's wanting is some sign of the menagerie of cats, dogs, ducks, white mice etc, which went with us everywhere.

There is and was a lot more to my mother than housework (which she didn't much like). She sang in a wonderful, trained contralto voice, she wrote poetry, created wonderful gardens, had and has wit, spirit, a sense of humour and the most beautiful smile.  She was practical, too. I remember her with a blowtorch and scraper, stripping brown varnish off the bannisters. Once she rehung a sash window. But the housework was always there, part of life, part of every home. These old-fashioned kitchens are part of my memories. There she is, the woman in the kitchen, washing the dishes, peeling the potatoes.

I want her to come home. 

 

 

RIVER VOICES

 

As I walked down by the river

Close by the sounding sea,

Up rose three water maidens

Who stretched white arms to me,

            ‘Comehere, you lilting stranger

            Whowhistles as sharp as tin,

            We’llgive you a bed, a crown for your head,

            Andour hair to wrap you in.’

‘No thanks, my jacket’s good enough,

And my old black tarpaulin.’

 

Then ups the old green river-man,

‘Come Jerry my boy,’ says he,

‘There’s room for a bold young chaplike you

Under the water free.

            I’llmake you lord of the river,

            Walkingon silver sand,

            Fineliquor you’ll sup from a golden cup,

            Andthe fishes will kiss your hand.’

Says I, ‘Your advice is mightynice,

But I reckon I’ll stay on land.’

 

The last of all to surface

Was my lost love Nancy Gray,

She was wearing the ring I gave to her

A year last quarter day.

            Hersmile was bright as sunshine

            Inspite of the tears she wept,

            Withan infant pressed against her breast

            Thatlooked as though it slept –

‘Leap in my lad, be no more sad...’

So I looked at her, and leapt.

      

© Katherine Langrish 2025

Picture credit:

Young Man on a Riverbank, Umberto Bocciano 1902, public domain: 

'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas.

 

This post first appeared on The History Girls blog
 

Scotland, 1749: just four years after the failed Jacobite rising and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden. Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds and by no means necessarily still over. Messages (and money) flew between the Prince in exile and his loyal supporter Cluny MacPherson, in hiding on Ben Alder.

Into this volatile, still smouldering arena marched, in the summer of 1749, the newly married – and it has to be said, utterly and foolishlynaïve – Sergeant Arthur Davies of ‘Guise’s Regiment’, heading over the mountains from Aberdeen to Dunrach in Braemar in charge of a patrol of eight private soldiers, for no more interesting purpose than to keep a general eye on the countryside.

This kind of countryside...

Sergeant Davies was a fine figure of a man, expensively but not at all sensibly dressed, considering what he was about. He carried on him a green silk purse containing his savings of fifteen and a half guineas; he wore a silver watch and two gold rings. There were silver buckles on his brogues, two dozen silver buttons on his striped ‘lute string’ waistcoat; he had a silk ribbon to tie his hair, and he wore a silver-laced hat. Thus attired he said goodbye to his wife – who never saw him again – and set off, encountering on the way one John Growar in Glenclunie, whom he told off for carrying a tartan coat. Shortly after this, the over-confident Sergeant left his men and went off over the hill, alone –to try and shoot a stag...

And he ‘vanished as if the fairies had taken him’. His men and his captain searched for four days, while rumours ran wild about the countryside that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But no body was found…

Until the following year, in June 1750, a shepherd called Alexander MacPherson came to visit Donald Farquharson, the son of the man with whom Sergeant Davies had been lodging before his death. MacPherson, who was living in a shepherd’s hut or shieling up on the hills, complained that he ‘was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies’ who had appeared to him as a man dressed in blue and shown MacPherson where his bones lay. The ghost had also named and denounced his murderers – in fluent Gaelic, of which, in life, Sergeant Davies had of course not spoken a word… Farquharson accompanied MacPherson, and the bones were duly found in a peat-moss, about half a mile from the road the patrol had used, minus silver buckles and articles of value. The two men buried the bones on the spot where they lay, and kept quiet about it.

Of course, the story spread. Nevertheless it was not till three years later, in 1753, that Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald were arrested for the Sergeant’s murder on the testimony of his ghost. At the trial Isobel MacHardie who had shared shepherd MacPherson’s shieling during the summer of the ghost, swore that ‘she saw something naked come in at the door which frighted her so much she drew the clothes over her head. That when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked MacPherson what it was, and he replied not to be afeared, it would not trouble them any more.’

Apart from the ghostly testimony, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict the murderers. Clerk’s wife had been seen wearing Davies’ ring; after the murder Clerk had become suddenly rich. And a number of the Camerons later claimed to have witnessed the murder itself, at sunset, from a hollow on top of the hill: they never volunteered an explanation of what they themselves had been doing up there – doubtless engaged in the illicit business of smuggling gold from Cluny to the Prince.

Things looked black for the accused murderers. Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by the sarcastic jokes of the defence, acquitted the prisoners. They could not take the ghost story seriously - not necessarily because it was a ghost: scepticism was on the rise, but ordinary people were still superstitious and the last Scottish prosecution for witchcraft had been only in 1727. But they could not believe in a ghost which had managed to learn Gaelic. 

Andrew Lang, in whose ‘Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ I cameacross this tale, adds a postscript sent to him by a friend: the words of anold lady, ‘a native of Braemar’, who ‘left the district when about twenty yearsold and who has never been back’. Lang’s friend had asked her whether she hadever heard anything about the Sergeant’s murder, and when she denied it, hetold her the story as it was known to him. When he had finished she broke out:

“That isn’t the way of it at all,for… a forebear of my own saw it. He had gone out to try and get a stag, andhad his gun and a deerhound with him. He saw the men on the hill doingsomething, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them. When he gotnear them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he sawwhat it was they had. He called to the dog, and turned to run away, butsaw at once he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention tohimself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ranhome as fast as he could…”

But at this point, the old lady ‘became conscious she wastelling the story,’ and clammed up. No more could be got out of her.

What a tangled skein of loyalties and hatreds, of secret activities in the heather, of rebellion and politics, of a murder where the whole countryside knew straight away who’d done it, but wouldn’t or dared not say  – of a ghost’s evidence, and of poor, foolish Sergeant Davies in the middle of the Highlands, only four years after the ’45, behaving as though it was an adventure playground through which he could strut in his finery and shoot stags... 

And how ironic that the very ghost story which brought the murder to light – almost certainly devised by Alexander MacPherson in order to denounce the murderers without bringing unwelcome attention upon himself – seemed so incredible to a Lowlands jury that they would not convict.

 

 
Photo credit: 
Glen Clunie & Clunie Water, the road from Braemar
© Copyright

 
On 26th December 1662, twenty-nine year old Samuel Pepys met his friend Mr Battersby, who recommended ‘a new book of Drollery in verse called Hudibras.’ Eager to keep up with the newest thing, Pepys dashed out and bought the first volume for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence. But he was disappointed. ‘When I came to read it, it is so silly an abuse of the Presbyter-Knight going to the wars, that I am ashamed of it; and by and by meeting at Mr Townsend’s at dinner, I sold it to him for 18d’. And that was the loss of a whole shilling!
 
'Hudibras' is a mock epic by Samuel Butler which makes satirical fun of the Puritans and Presbyterians who had so lately held power in England. It tells of Sir Hudibras, a stupid and arrogant knight-errant on whom the poet lavishes absurd amounts of praise. The book was a huge success, with pirated copies and spurious continuations springing up even before the author could bring out the second and third parts. With Pepys, however, it completely misfired. He failed to see what was so funny about it. 
By February 1663 though, Pepys was having second thoughts and rather regretted his decision. Since everyone else praised the book so highly, perhaps he had been too hasty in getting rid of it? Off he went, ‘To a bookseller’s on the Strand and bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so set against that which all the world cries up to be an example of wit – for which I am resolved once again to read him and see whether I can find it out or no.’
Perhaps buying the book for a second time made him determined to persist, but it didn’t make the task of wading through it any less of a chore. And now he became more cautious.  Nine months later, on 28 November, he walked through St Paul’s Churchyard, famous for its bookstalls, ‘and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras; which I buy not, but borrow to read, to see if it be as good as the first, which the world cries so mightily up, though I have tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty…’
 Bookstalls (on the left) within Old St Pauls
 But borrowing it made no difference either to his opinion of the book or to his obvious desire that – somehow, anyhow – he might learn to like what everyone else liked.   
For on December 10th, having decided to spend the immense sum of three pounds upon books, he went back to the booksellers ‘and found myself at a great loss what to choose.’ His real temptation was to buy plays, but he could never quite rid himself of the feeling that plays were somehow rather sinful, so at last… ‘I chose Dr Fuller’s Worthys, the Cabbala or collection of Letters of State – and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure, and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest Fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.’
So by now, Pepys has bought Hudibras three times – even though he simply cannot get on with it. This goes to show how success breeds success, of course. Hands up who bought the latest block-busting thriller just to discover what all the fuss was about? 
It would be nice to record that Pepys finally managed to enjoy his purchase, but I fear he never did. At any rate, the last reference he makes to Hudibras is in his diary entry for January 27th, 1664. ‘At noon to the Coffee-house, where I sat with Sir William Petty, who is methinks one of the most rational men that I ever heard speak, having all his notions the most distinct and clear; among other things saying that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici, Osbourne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras.’
And there we are left: Pepys makes no further comment. But can’t you just sense him scratching his head? If, like me, you have ever bought a best-selling novel that everyone seems to praise but which you found impossible to finish – perhaps you will spare him a thought.


 

 

 

A book called ‘The Remains of Nithsdale andGalloway Song’ edited by R.H. Cromek and published 1810,contains this “Account of Billy Blin'" with some entertaining stories. 

"This is another name for the Scotch Brownies, a class of solitary beings,living in the hollows of trees, and recesses of old ruinous castles. They aredescribed as being small of stature, covered with short curly hair, with brownmatted locks, and a brown mantle which reached to the knee, with a hood of thesame colour. They were particularly attached to families eminent for theirancestry and virtue; and have lived, according to tradition’s ‘undoubted mouth’,for several hundreds of years in the same family, doing the drudgery of amenial servant.

"But though very trustworthy servants, theywere somewhat coy in their manner of doing their work:– when the threaves of corn [this is 25 sheaves gathered in ‘shocks’] were counted out they remained unthrashen[unthreshed];at other times, however great the quantity, it was finished by thecrowing of the first cock. Mellers of corn [grainready to be sent to the mill] would be dried, ground and sifted, with suchexquisite nicety, that the finest flour of the meal could not be found strewedor lost.

"The Brownie would then come into thefarm-hall and stretch itself out by the chimney, sweaty, dusty and fatigued. Itwould take up the pluff – a piece ofbored boar-tree [elder] for blowingup the fire and, stirring out the red embers, turn itself till it was restedand dried. A choice bowl of sweet cream, with combs of honey, was set in anaccessible place:– this was given as its hire; and it was willing to be bribed,though none durst avow the intention of the gift. When offered meat or drink,the Brownie instantly departed, bewailing and lamenting itself, as  if unwilling to leave a place so long itshabitation, from which nothing but the superior power of fate could sever it.

"A thrifty good wife, having made a web oflinsey-woolsey, sewed a well-lined mantle and a comfortable hood for her trustyBrownie. She laid it down in one of his favourite haunts and cried to him toarray himself. Being commissioned by the gods to relieve mankind under thedrudgery of original sin, he was forbidden to accept of wages or bribes. Heinstantly departed, bemoaning himself in a rhyme, which tradition hasfaithfully preserved:

Anew mantle and a new hood! –

PoorBrownie! ye’ll ne’er do mair gude.

"The prosperity of the family seemed to dependon them, and was at their disposal. A place called Liethin Hall, inDumfies-shire, was the herefitary dwelling of a noted Brownie. He had livedthere, as he once communicated in confidence to an old woman, for three hundredyears. He appeared only once to each new master, and indeeed seldom shewed morethan his hand to anyone. On the decease of a beloved master, he was heard tomake moan, and would not partake of his wonted delicacies for many days. Theheir of the land arrived from foreign parts and took possession of his father’sinheritance. The faithful Brownie shewed himself and proffered homage. Thespruce Laird was offended to see such a famine-faced, wrinkled domestic, andordered him meat and drink, with a new suit of clean livery. The Browniedeparted, repeating loud and frequently these ruin-boding lines:

Ca’,cuttie, ca!

A’the luck of Liethin Ha’

Gangs wi’ meto Bodsbeck Ha’.

"Liethin Ha’ was, in a few years, in ruins,and ‘bonnie Bodsbeck’ flourished under the luck-bringing patronage of theBrownie.

"They possessed all the adventurous andchivalrous gallantry of crusading knighthood, but in devotion to their ladiesthey left Errantry itself far behind. Their services were really useful. In theaccidental encounters of their fair mistresses with noble outlaws in woods, andprinces in disguise, – when the kindladies had nothing to show for their courtsey but a comb of gold or afillet of hair, – the faithful Brownie restored the noble wooer; laid thelovers on their bridal bed, declared their lineage, and reconciled all parties.He followed his dear mistress through life with the same kindly solicitude;for, when the ‘mother’s trying hour was nigh’, with the most laudablepromptitude he environed her with the ‘cannie dames’ ere the wish for theirassistance was half-formed in her mind.

"One of them, in the olden times, lived withMaxwell, Laird of Dalswinton, doing ten men’s work and keeping the servantsawake at nights with the noisy dirling [clatter]of its elfin flail. The Laird’s daughter, says tradition, was the comeliestdame in all the holms of Nithsdale. To her the Brownie was much attached: heassisted her in love-intrigue, conveying her from her high tower-chamber to thetrysting-thorn in the woods, and back again with such light-heeled celeritythat neither bird, dog nor servant awoke.

"He undressed her for the matrimonial bed, andserved her so handmaiden-like that her female attendant had nothing to do, notdaring even to finger her mistress’s apparel, lest she should provoke theBrownie’s resentment. When the pangs of the mother seized his beloved lady, aservant was ordered to fetch the ‘cannie wife’ who lived across the Nith. Thenight was dark as a December night could be; and the wind was heavy among thegroves of oak. The Brownie, enraged at the loitering serving-man, wrappedhimself in his lady’s fur cloak and, though the Nith was foaming high-flood,his steed, impelled by supernatural spur and whip, passed it like an arrow. Seating the dame behind him, he took the deep water back again to  the amazement of the worthy woman, who beheldthe red waves tumbling around her, yet the steed’s foot-locks were dry.  – ‘Ride nae by the auld pool,’ quo’ she,‘lest we should meet wi’ Brownie.’ – He replied, ‘Fear nae, dame, ye’ve met a’the Brownies ye will meet.’ – Placing her down at the hall gate, he hastened tothe stable, where the servant lad was just pulling on his boots; he unbuckledthe bridle from his steed and gave him a most afflicting drubbing.

"This was about the new-modelling times of theReformation; and a priest, more zealous than wise, exhorted the Laird to havethis Imp of Heathendom baptised; to which he, in an evil hour, consented, andthe worthy reforming saint concealed himself in the barn, to surprise theBrownie at his work. He appeared like a little wrinkled, ancient man and beganhis nightly moil. The priest leapt from his ambush and dashed the baptismalwater in his face, solemnly repeating the set form of the Christian rite. Thepoor Brownie set up a frightful and agonising yell and instantly vanished,never to return.

"The Brownie, though of a docile disposition, wasnot without its pranks and merriment. The Abbey-lands, in the parish of NewAbbey, were the residence of a very sportive one. He loved to be, betimes,somewhat mischievous. – Two lassies, having made a fine bowlful of buttered brose[oatmeal gruel], had taken it into the byre to sup, while it was yetdark. In the haste of concealment they had brought but one spoon, so theyplaced the bowl between them and took a spoonful by turns. ‘I hae got but threesups,’ cried the one, ‘an’ it’s done!’ ‘It’s a’ done, indeed,’ cried the other.‘Ha, ha!’ laughed a third voice, ‘Brownie has gotten the maist o’t.’ He hadjudiciously placed himself between them and got the spoon twice for their once.

"The Brownie does not seem to have loved thegay and gaudy attire in which his twin-brothers, the fairies, arrayedthemselves: his chief delight was in the tender delicacies of food. Knuckled [kneaded] cakes made of meal, warm fromthe mill, haurned [roasted] on thedecayed embers of the fire, and smeared with honey, were his favourite hire;and they were carefully laid so that he might accidentally find them.  – It is still a common phrase, when a childgets a little eatable present, ‘there’s a piece wad please a Brownie.’ "

[ Read my previous post on the Billy Blin':   ]

Picture Credits

Lob Lie By the Fire, by Dorothy P Lathrop: illustration to 'Down-a-down-derry,' Fairy Poems by Walter de la Mare 1922

Nis or Tomten Laughing at a Cat, by Theodor Kittelsen 1892

 

Iam extremely fond of house-spirits, two of which appeared in my first  books for children. The three books of my Troll trilogy all feature one of the Scandinaviannisses I first met in Thomas Keightley’s 1828 compendium ‘The Fairy Mythology’. I was charmed by their mischief, vanity, naïvety, essential goodwill and occasionalbursts of temper. My Nis has all these characteristics and I love him. The secondhouse spirit arrived in my fourth book ‘Dark Angels’: he’s a hob (a ‘bwbach’ in Welsh) who lives under thehearthstone of a 12th century motte and bailey castle on the WelshMarches, loves food and does his gruff best to help the young daughter andheiress of Hugo de la Motte Rouge, the lord of the place. (I wrote a shortstory involving this hob, ) 

Thereare hobs or brownies in all parts of the British Isles, but some have names oftheir own, though these names themselves are often generic: if the English havePuck, the Irish have the pooka or phooka and the Welsh have the pwca... In Scotland though, the brownieis often named the Billy Blin’, with variants such as Billy Blynde or BellyBlin – and he is found in a number of ballads in which he usually takes on anadvisory role. I should  issue a warning that the ballads 'Gil Brenton' and 'Earl Lithgow', examined in this post, include sexual violence.

But ‘Young Bekie’ (Child Ballad 53c) does not! A Scottish knight named YoungBekie takes service with the King of France. He falls in love with the king’sdaughter, Burd Isbel, and is ‘thrown into prison strong’ where the mice and the‘bold rattons’ gnaw his yellow hair, a scene Arthur Rackham obviously could not resist illustrating. Burd Isbel simply steals the keys andrescues him: this practical young woman then provides a razor for his chin, acomb for his hair, five hundred pounds ‘for his pocket’, a fast horse and (a little oddly) a numberof hounds all from one litter, one of which is called Hector. The two young people then part, solemnly promisingto marry within three years. Off goes Young Bekie to Scotland and his ownlands, but within the year he is ‘forced to marry a duke’s daughter’ or loseall his land. The young man laments his ill fortune, since – he says – 

‘I know not what to dee,

For I canno win to Burd Isbel

And she kens nae [doesn’t know] to come to me.’ 

Enterthe Billy Blin’:

O it fell once upon a day

                                    Burd Isbelfell asleep

                                    An up itstarts the Belly Blin

                                    An stood ather bed feet.

 

                                    ‘Oh waken,waken, Burd Isbel,

                                    How can yesleep so soun’

                                    When this isBekie’s wedding day,

                                    An’ themarriage gaein on?’ 

TheBilly Blin’ tells her what to do. She must take two of the ‘Marys’ (servingwomen) from her mother’s bower, dress them in green and herself in ‘the redscarlet’, with rich girdles about their waists, and go down to the sea strandwhere a ‘Hollans boat’ will come rowing in for them. Burd Isbel takes hisadvice and when the boat arrives, ‘the Belly Blin was the steerer o’t/To rowher o’er the sea.’ As Burd Isbel and her maids arrive at the castle gate, shehears music playing for the wedding, and gives the porter ‘guineas three’ tocall the bridegroom down to her. When the porter describes the ladies’ richclothing to the company the bride comments sarcastically that if these ladiesare ‘braw without’, she herself is ‘braw within’: but Young Bekie jumps up.‘I’ll lay my life it’s Burd Isbel/Come o’er the sea to me.’ Running downstairs hetakes her in his arms: she reminds him of all she’s done for him, the weddingis cancelled and the other bride sent home: ‘For I maun marry my BurdIsbel/That’s come o’er the sea to me.’ 

Isbel is not a bit surprised by the Billy Blin’s warning: he seems aknown and respected household inhabitant. I should like to point out that thisballad is another instance of the many ‘fairy’ tales, whether prose or verse,in which the girl does nearly everything: Burd Isbel gets all the action. Sherescues Young Bekie in the first place – and with help from the Billy Blin’ shecrosses the sea and ejects the bride he doesn’t want. 

In‘Willie’s Lady’ (Child Ballad 6), a wicked mother – ‘a vile rank witch ofvilest kind’ – prevents her son’s wife from giving birth, so ‘in her bower shesits wi’ pain/And Willie mourns o’er her in vain.’ Willie tries bribing hismother to undo the spell she has cast on his wife: 

                                    He says; ‘Myladie has a cup

                                    Wi’ gowd andsilver set about.

                                    This goodliegift shall be your ain

                                    And let herbe lighter o’ her young bairn.’

Hismother replies:

                                    ‘Of heryoung bairn she’ll ne’er be lighter

                                    Nor in herbower to shine the brighter:

                                    But sheshall die and turn to clay

                                    And youshall wed another may.’ 

Whilehis wife lies in agony wishing she could die, Willie tries again to bribe his mother,offering her a horse shod with gold, with golden bells hanging from every lockof its mane. Again his mother refuses. Trying for the third time, Willie offersher his wife’s girdle of red gold, ringing with golden bells that hang from asilver hem, but this too is refused – and in steps the Billy Blin’.

                                    Then out andspake the Billy Blind;

                                    He spake ayein good time.

                                    ‘Ye doe yeto the market place

                                    And there yebuy a loaf o’ wax. 

Hetells Willie to mould the wax into the shape of a new-born baby, place two glasseyes in its head, invite his mother to its christening – and listen carefullyto her words. And fooled into believing the baby has been born, she exclaims: 

                                    ‘Oh wha hasloosed the nine witch knots

                                    That wasamong that ladie’s locks?

                                    And wha has taenout the kaims of care

                                    That hangsamong that ladie’s hair?

                                    And wha’staen down the bush o’ woodbine

                                    That hangsatween her bower and mine?

                                    And wha haskilld the master kid

                                    That ranbeneath that ladie’s bed?

                                    And wha hasloosed her left-foot shee

                                    And lettenthat ladie lighter be?’

Hearingthis, Willie looses the nine witch knots, removes the ‘combs of care’, pullsdown the bush of woodbine, kills the ‘master kid’ – it really is a young goat! –and takes off his wife’s left shoe. The lady then promptly gives birth to ‘abonny young son’. We don’t find out what, if anything, happens to the wickedmother; it’s simply to be hoped she doesn’t try this again – but the BillyBlin’ has clearly saved the day. 

In‘Gil Brenton’ (Child Ballad 5c), the young hero – a title he hardly meritsgiven his behaviour – meets a young woman, the seventh of seven sisters, who comesto the wood to pick lilies and roses for her sisters’ bowers. She tells what happened next: 

                                    ‘And was Iweel or was I wae

                                    He keepit mea’ the simmer’s day.

                                    ‘And tho Ifor my hame-gaun sicht [sighed for myhome]

                                    He keepit mea’ the simmer nicht.’ 

Hegives her tokens –  a gold ring, a shortknife and ‘three locks of his yellow hair’ – and then departs. The result ofcourse is that she becomes pregnant, and seeks to find him across the sea. Sendingher dowry ahead of her, she arrives at his dwelling, only to be warned that‘Childe Brenton’ has already ‘wedded’ seven king’s daughters, but never beddedthem: they have all proved not to be maidens, so he has ‘cut the breasts fraetheir breast-bane’ and sent them back to to their fathers. Mysteriously shestill wants to marry him, and is warned also not to sit in a particular goldenchair until she is bidden to do so. But she does. At this point the Billy Blin’pops up and defends the girl by suggesting that she only sat in the chairbecause ‘the bonnie may is tired wi’ riding’ – which sounds reasonable in anotherwise unreasonable milieu. Presumably anxious about the chance of having herbreasts carved off by an ‘unco’ lord’ (‘unco’means strange, uncanny, weird, a description we can agree seems apt) she begs her virginal maid to take her place inthe bridal bed. For her lady’s sake the girl agrees, and when they are lyingdown together Gil Brenton asks the Billy Blin’ to tell him ‘if this fair damebe a leal [true] maiden’. The BillyBlin’ replies: 

                                    I wat [know] she is as leal a wight

                                    As the moonshines on in a simmer night.

                                    I wat she isas leal a may

                                    As the sunshines on in a simmer day.

                                    But yourbonnie bride is in her bower

                                    Dreeing themither’s trying hour.’

[Enduringthe birth of her child: becoming a mother] 

Leapingout of bed, Gil Brenton runs to his mother’s bower and tells her that ‘themaiden I took to my bride/Has a bairn atween her sides’ and is currently givingbirth. You’d assume this might have been noticed before, but this is a ballad:so no. Rushing to the lady’s chamber, his mother flings the door wide,demanding to know who is the father of the child? The lady tells her story, producesthe tokens, and the pair are united. This particular version was taken andslightly abridged, from R.H. Cromek’s ‘Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song’(1810) in which the introduction states it to have been ‘copied from therecital of a peasant-woman of Galloway, upwards of ninety years of age’, whichmay well put it back at least to the mid-1700s. Cromek gives the title as ‘WeWere Sisters, We Were Seven’, and he comments: 

The singularcharacter of the Billy Blin’ (the Scotch Brownie, and the lubbar fiend ofMilton*) gives the whole an air of the marvellous, independently of the mysticchair, on which the principal catastrophe [denouement,reveal] of the story turns. 

Strangely, the ‘Child 5c’ version misses out a long versepassage from Cromek’s. In it, following the rape and ignorant of the victim’sidentity, Brenton arrives at the seven sisters’ gate and shouts that he’s a‘lord o’ lands wide’ and wants one of them to be his bride, preferably theyoungest. The youngest, speaking for herself, remarks: ‘Little ken’d he, whenaff he rode,/I was his token’d luve in the wood’ – but at least the passageexplains how she knows where to find him, and where to send the dowry. Unembarrassedby Brenton’s dubious character, the ballad ends on a tender note as Brentonkneels at his lady’s bedside: 

                                    O tauk [take] ye up my son,’ said he,

                                    And mither,tent [look after] my fair ladie;

                                    O wash himpurely in the milk,

                                    And lay himsaftly in the silk;

                                    An’ ye maun [you must] bed her very soft,

                                    For I maunkiss her wondrous oft.

                                    It was wellwritten on his breast bane,

                                    ChildeBranton was the father’s name;

                                    It was wellwritten on his right hand,

                                    He was theheir o’ his daddie’s land. 

Ballads in which the girl ends up married to the man who raped her seem deeplyproblematic today. Back in those days though, how likely was it that girls insuch circumstances got any redress whatever? I think such ballads offer a fantasyending: the girl gets married to the rich lord and her child becomes legitimate, and heir to a fine estate. The Billy Blin did his best, Isuppose. 

A ballad with a similar theme is ‘Earl Lithgow’, variant F of ChildBallad 110 generally known as ‘The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter’. The Billy Blin’once more appears in it; this ballad toobegins with a rape; but the young woman gets as good a revenge as she can andis more than a match for Earl Lithgow. He tries to hide his identity, but sheknows his real name and races after him when he rides away. When they come tothe River Dee his horse swims it, but she swims faster, fast as an otter and reachesthe ‘queen’s high court’ well ahead of him, where she gains an audience withthe queen. Announcing proudly that she can neither ‘card nor spin’, but knowshow to ‘sit in a lady’s bower and lay gold on a seam’, she accuses Lithgow, whois the queen’s brother, of stealing her maidenhead. Brought before her, Lithgowattempts to pay her off with one – two – three purses of gold, but the youngwoman will have none of it: 

                                    ‘I’ll haenane o’ your purses o’ gold

                                    That ye tell[count] on your knee:

                                    But I willhae yoursell,’ said she,

                                    ‘The queenhas granted it me.’ 

Thefurious Earl is forced to marry her, and she taunts him with her supposed lowbirth (he wasn’t there when she told the queen about being able to sew withgold thread). As the pair pass by a watermill, she tells him how her ‘auldmither, the carlin’ (a carlin is an old woman) would have pricked and stung himlike the nettles that grow by the dyke.                                   

                                    ‘Sae well’sshe would you pyke,’ she says,

                                    ‘She wouldyou pyke and pou [prick and pull],

                                      And wi’ the dust lies in the mill

                                    Sae wouldshe mingle you.’ 

Ifthat wasn’t sufficiently crushing, she further informs him that her ‘mither’would sup till she was full, lay her head on a sod and snore like a sow. This is her heritage: THIS is who he’smarried! He can throw his china plates away: she’s happy eating from a ‘humble gockie’ – a wooden dish. She doesn’twant to sleep in ‘holland sheets’, not she: she prefers ‘canvas clouts’. She iswreaking sweet revenge on him by shaming him socially as deeply as he’d shamedher. And it’s working: 

                                    He’s drawnhis hat out ower his face,

                                    Muckle shamethought he;

                                    She’s drivenher cap out ower her locks,

                                    And a lightlaugh gae she. 

Ilove that! At long last he begins to wonder about her. ‘If ye be a carlin’sget,’ he begins slowly, still unsure – ‘As I trust well ye be/Where got ye allthe gay claithing/Ye brought to the greenwood with thee?’ The quick-thinkingyoung woman instantly replies that her mother was an old nurse, whose mistresswould sometimes give her cast-off clothes which she kept for her daughter. Thencomes the sting in the tail: 

                        And I put them on ingood greenwood,

                        To beguile fause [false] squires like thee.   

Atthis point the Billy Blin’ decides that enough is probably enough, and intervenes. 

                        It’s out then spake thebilly-blin,

                        Says, I speak nane outof time [not before time]

                        If ye make her lady o’ nine cities,

                        She’ll make you lord o’ten.

 

                        Out it spake thebilly-blin,

                        Says, The one may servethe other;

                        The king of Gosford’s aedaughter,

                        And the queen ofScotland’s brother.

 

Revealedas a princess, the girl is distinctly displeased and turns on him: 

                        Wae but worth you,billy-blin.

                        An ill death may ye die!

                        My bed-fellow he’d beenfor seven years

                        Or he’d ken’d sae mucklefrae me.

[He’dhave been my bedfellow for seven years

Beforehe’d learned so much from me!]

 

She’sclearly enjoyed humiliating her new husband, who equally clearly deserved it. Henow at least tries to make peace, saying: 

                        Fair fa’ ye, ye billy-blin

                        And well may ye aye be!

                        In my stable is theninth horse I’ve kill’d

                        Seeking this fair ladie.

                        Now we’re married andnow we’re bedded

                        And in each other’s armsshall lie.

Here’sto the girl who got her own back! More colourful stuff about theBilly Blin’ in my next post.  

* The lubber fiend is described by Milton as a 'drudging goblin' in his 1631 poem L' Allegro. After spending a night threshing a quantity of corn that 'ten day-labourers could not end': "Then lies him down, the lubber fiend/And stretch'd out all the chimney's length/Basks at the fire his hairy strength...' He sounds rather large for a brownie, but who knows? 

Picture credits

Brownie sweeping -  by Alice B Woodward,

Young Bekie in prison - by Arthur Rackham - Some British Ballads, 1919

The Billy Blin' wakes Burd Isbel - by Arthur Rackham - Some British Ballads, 1919

Willie's Lady - by Vernon Hill - Ballads Weird and Wonderful, 1911

The Knight and the Shepherdess - by Byam Shaw - Ballads and Lyrics of Love, 1908

 

For more than a decade from the mid 1970s the artist JoanHassall was a neighbour of my family in the Yorkshire Dales village of Malham. I wastwenty in 1976 when she inherited Priory Cottage in the village, and she livedthere until her death in 1988 at the age of 82. Joan was a skilled woodengraver who illustrated many, many books (). I was a bit too young to be a friend, but I knew her as a much-loved villagefigure, with her thick pebble glasses, beautiful smile and layers offlower-patterned skirts. She played a number of musical instruments and forsome time was organist at the parish church of St Michael the Archangel. She attendedour wedding there in 1987 – not to play the organ on that occasion, just to bethere – and we can never forget how she came up to us after the ceremony, andwith the sweetest smile said simply: 'Be happy!' It was a genuine blessingif ever there was one, and a command we've done our best to obey.

I have two or three books illustrated by Joan, and for meas a lover of fairy tales this one is special. She was commissioned to designand produce a series of chapbooks for the Saltire Society which was set up in1936 to ‘promote and celebrate the uniqueness of Scottish culture andheritage’. The books are tiny – approximately 13 x 9cm – but the work isexquisite. This is number 12, published 1951. It is the old Scottish fairytale of ‘Rashie Coat’ and I guess, though I cannot be sure, that the elegant signatureon the flyleaf is Joan’s own writing. She was a fine artist and a lovely person. I hope you'll enjoy her work. 

Picture credit

Portrait of Joan Hassall see wikipedia: 

A very long time ago inmy late teens, I wrote a book with the rather unimaginative title ‘The MagicForest’ which was (quite rightly) never published. Although derivative (I was inspiredby Walter de la Mare’s strange and wonderful novel ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’)it was nevertheless the closest I’d yet got to finding my own voice; and I’dbeen writing lengthy narratives ever since nine or ten years old. It was adream-quest story in which a girl goes through a picture into a magical world:the picture in question was a reproduction of Henri Rousseau’s ‘The Snake-Charmer’ which hung on my bedroom wall (see above). Myheroine, Kay, looks at it and sees

...the ripples of a lake reflecting the quick luminousafterglow of a sun’s sinking. There were night-flowering reeds and a tall,heron-like bird, and standing in the darkness of the trees, partly insilhouette against the night sky, was a human figure. It was wearing a darkcloak and piping on a flute. Answering the flute came snakes, great forest pythonspouring scarcely distinguishable from the branches and from the lake. Kay’s feetsank into shallow mud. She heard the low, hollow-sweet notes, saw the snakestwist about the charmer’s legs. A heavy, scaly body dragged over her foot.Midges stung and bit her, but a little coolness came breathing over the water. 

And so begins an adventure which I won’t bore you with, it's enough to say that Kay goes on aquest with a yellow water-bird and a monkey, to find a sorcerer who has infestedthe forest with poisonous butterflies.

          I knew that ‘going into a picture’ was not an original ideabut one which had appeared in several of my favourite children’s books. In C.S.Lewis’s ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ (1952) Lucy and Edmond Pevensie, andtheir cousin Eustace Scrubb, tumble into a painting of what looks like aNarnian ship at sea. When Eustace asks Lucy why she likes it, she replies, ‘because the ship looks as if it was really moving. And the water looks as ifit was really wet. And the waves look as if they were really going up and down.’She’s right, they are doing thesethings. The ship rises and falls over the waves, a wind blows into the roombringing a ‘wild, briny smell’, and ‘Ow!’ they all cry, for ‘a great, cold,salt splash had broken right out of the frame and they were breathless from thesmack of it, besides being wet through.’ As Eustace rushes to smash the paintingthe other two try to pull him back. Next moment all three are struggling on theedge of the picture frame, and a wave sweeps them into the sea.

          Lewis didn’t invent the ‘picture as portal’ trope, either.It’s quite likely he found it in a Japanese tale, ‘The Story of Kwashin Koji’ from‘Yasō-Kidan’ (‘Night-Window Demon Talk’), a book of legends collected byIshikawa Kosai (1833-1918) and retold by Lafcadio Hearn in his 1901 book ‘AJapanese Miscellany’. It is the sort of thing Lewis would have read. It tellsof Kwashin Koji, a rather disreputable old fellow and a heavy drinker, who madea living ‘by exhibiting Buddhist pictures and by preaching Buddhist doctrine.’On fine days he would hang a large picture – ‘a kakemono on which were depictedthe punishments of the various hells’ – on a tree in the temple gardens andpreach about it. The painting was so wonderfully vivid that onlookers wereamazed.

Hearingthis, the ruler of Kyōto, Lord Nobunaga, commanded Kwashin Koji to bring it tothe palace where he could view it. The old man obliged and Nobunaga was deeply impressedby the painting. Noticing this, his servant suggested that Kwashin should offerit as a gift to the great lord. Since his livelihood depended upon the picture,Kwashin asked instead for payment in gold, which was refused. So he rolled up thepicture and left. But the servant followed him, killed him, and took the picturefor his lord. When the scroll was unrolled, however, it was found to be completelyblank – while Kwashin had mysteriously returned to life and was showing hispicture in the temple grounds as before. Some time later Nobunaga was himself murderedby Mitsuhidé, one of his captains, who invited Kwashin Koji to the palace, feastedhim and gave him plenty to drink. The old man then pointed to a large foldingscreen which depicted ‘Eight Beautiful Views of the Lake of Omi’, and said, ‘Inreturn for your august kindness, I shall display a little of my art’. Far off inthe background, the artist had painted a man rowing a boat, ‘occupying, uponthe surface of the screen, a space of less than an inch in length.’ As KwashinKoji waved his hand, everyone in the room saw the boat turn and begin to approachthem. It grew rapidly larger...

And all of a sudden, the water of the lake seemed tooverflow out of the picture into the room, and the room was flooded; and thespectators girded up their robes in haste as the water rose above their knees.In the same moment the boat appeared to glide out of the screen, and thecreaking of the single oar could be heard. Then the boat came close up toKwashin Koji, and Kwashin Koji climbed into it; and the boatman turned about, andbegan to row away very swiftly. And as the boat receded, the water in the roombegan to lower rapidly, seeming to ebb back into the screen... But still thepainted vessel appeared to glide over the painted water, retreating furtherinto the distance and ever growing smaller, till ... it disappeared altogether,and Kwashin Koji disappeared with it. He was never again seen in Japan. 

The lakewater floodingout of the painted screen corresponds to the ‘great salt splash’ of the wave burstinginto the children’s bedroom in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, while thecreaking oar finds an echo in Lewis’s description of ‘the swishing of waves andthe slap of water against the ship’s sides and the creaking and the overallhigh steady roar of air and water’.

          John Masefield’s ‘The Midnight Folk’ (1927), and its sequel‘The Box of Delights’ (1935) contain some delightful ‘pictures as portals’. In‘The Midnight Folk’ little Kay Harker, left by his governess to learn the verb‘pouvoir’, looks up as the portrait of his great-grandpapa comes to life: 

As Kay looked, great-grandpapa Harker distinctly took astep forward, and as he did so, the wind ruffled the skirt of his coat andshook the shrubs behind him. A couple of blue butterflies which had been uponthe shrubs for seventy odd years, flew out into the room. ... Great-grandpapaHarker held out his hand and smiled... “Well, great-grandson Kay,” he said, “nepouvez vous pas come into the jardin avec moi?” [....]

Kay jumped on to the table; from there,with a step of run, he leaped on to the top of the fender and caught themantelpiece. Great-grandpapa Harker caught him and helped him up into thepicture. Instantly the schoolroom disappeared. Kay was out of doors standingbeside his great-grandfather, looking at the house as it was in the pencildrawing in the study, with cows in the field close to the house on what was nowthe lawn, the church, unchanged, beyond, and, near by some standard yellowroses, long since vanished, but now seemingly in full bloom. 

His great-grandfathertakes him into the house, where ‘A black cat, with white throat and paws, whichhad been ashes for forty years, rubbed up against great-grandpapa’s legs andthen, springing on the arm of his chair, watched the long-dead sparrows in theplum tree which had been firewood a quarter of a century ago’. This beautifullygentle transition into the past aswell as into a painting is something I’ve always loved: it depicts time past withyearning but without melancholy, and we see little orphaned Kay receive careand support from kind ancestors who watch over him. Exciting as it is, ‘TheMidnight Folk’ is a book a child can read and never feel unsafe. Later in the story,Kay realises that his governess is really a witch, and his grandmother’sportrait addresses him.

“Don’t let a witch take charge at Seekings. This is a housewhere upright people have lived. Bell her, Kay; Book her, boy; Candle her,grandson; and lose no time: for time lost’s done with, but must be paid for.”

          He looked upat her portrait, which was that of a very shrewd old lady in a black silkdress. She was nodding her head at him so that her ringlets and earrings shook.“Search the wicked creature’s room,” she said, “and if she is, send word to the Bishop at once.”

          “All right,”Kay said, “I’ll go. I will search.” 

This time Kay doesn’tenter the picture, but his grandmother’s words give him strength, confidenceand purpose.

          In ‘The Box of Delights’ theold Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings, who has given a magical show to Kay andhis friends, escapes the villains pursuing him (‘the wolves are running!’) by bringingto life the picture of a Swiss mountain on the study wall. As he and Kay gaze,the picture seems to ‘glow and open’ and become the mountain itself. ‘Theyheard the rush of the torrent. They saw how tumbled and smashed the scarredpine-trees were among the rolled boulders... High up above... in the uppermountain, were the blinding bright snows, and the teeth of the crags black andgleaming. “Ah,” the old man said, “and yonder down the path come the mules.” ’

Astring of pack mules descend the mountain path, and near the end of the line trotsa white mule with a red saddle.

The first mules turned off at a corner. When it came to theturn of the white mule to turn, he baulked, tossed his head, swung out of theline, and trotted into the room, so that Kay had to move out of the way. Therethe mule stood in the study, twitching his ears, tail and skin against thegadflies and putting down his head so that he might scratch it with his hindfoot. “Steady there,” the old man whispered to him. “And to you, Master Kay, Ithank you. I wish you a most happy Christmas.”

At that, he swung himself onto the mule,picked up his theatre with one hand, gathered the reins with the other, said,“Come, Toby,” and at once rode off with Toby trotting under the mule, out ofthe room, up the mountain path, up, up, up, till the path was nothing more thana line in the faded painting, that was so dark upon the wall. 

One of the many reasonsthis passage works so well is its detailed physicality, the realistic animalbehaviour of the mule quivering its skin and scratching its head and taking upso much room in the study. And as magic, it’s such a satisfactory way to foil the baddies.      

Towardsthe end of the book, Kay has ‘gone small’ via the magic of the Box of Delightsbut having temporarily lost the Box he cannot restore himself to his propersize. Finding Cole Hawlings chained and caged in the underground caverns whichAbner Brown is about to flood, he creeps into Cole’s pocket for a bit of leadpencil and a scrap of paper on which to draw, at Cole’s request, ‘two horsescoming to bite these chains in two’. Though plagued by the snapping jaws oflittle magical motor-cars and aeroplanes, he manages to draw the horses ratherwell.

The drawings did stand out from the paper rather strangely.The light was concentrated on them; as he looked at them the horses seemed tobe coming towards him out of the light; and no, it was not seeming, they weremoving; he saw the hoof casts flying and heard the rhythmical beat of hoofs. Thehorses wer coming out of the picture, galloping fast, and becoming brighter andbrighter. Then he saw that the light was partly fire from their eyes and manes,partly sparks from their hoofs. “They are real horses,” he cried. “Look.”

          It was asthough he had been watching the finish of a race with two horses neck and neckcoming straight at him... They were two terrible white horses with flamingmouths. He saw them strike great jags of rock from the floor and cast them,flaming, from their hoofs. Then, in an instant, there they were, one on eachside of Cole Hawlings, champing the chains as though they were grass, crushingthe shackles, biting through the manacles and plucking the iron bars as thoughthey were shoots from a plant.

“Steady there, boys,” said Cole... 

Cole places thediminutive Kay on one of the horses and leads them along the rocky corridor,but the water is coming in fast. ‘Draw me,’ says Cole, ‘a long roomy boat witha man in her, sculling her’ and ‘put a man in the boat’s bows and draw him witha bunch of keys in his hand.’ Kay does his best, although the man’s nose is ‘ratherlike a stick’, and Cole places the drawing on the water. It drifts away whilethe stream becomes angrier and more powerful.

“The sluice-mouth has given way,” Kay said.

          “That isso,” Cole Hawlings answered. “But the boat is coming too, you see.”

          Indeed, downthe stream in the darkness of the corridor, a boat was coming. She had a lightin her bows; somebody far aft in her was heaving at a scull which ground in therowlocks. Kay could see and hear the water slapping and chopping against heradvance; the paint of her bows glistened above the water. A man stood above thelantern. He had something gleaming in his hand: it looked like a bunch of keys.As he drew nearer, Kay saw that this man was a very queer-looking fellow with anose like a piece of bent stick. 

With its boatman, boat,creaking oar and rush of oncoming water, this too is very reminiscent of thetale of Kwashin Koji, which I suspect Masefield as well as Lewis may have read.Whether it’s so or not, both the concept and the writing are wonderful.

A novelwhich owes nothing to the Japanese story is Meriol Trevor’s ‘The King of theCastle’ (1966). A decade on from C. S. Lewis but largely forgotten today,Trevor’s books for children were well-written and sometimes powerful fantasieswith allegorical Christian themes; I would borrow them from the local library and enjoyed them.. They were less popular among children thanLewis’s books, probably because Trevor’s ‘Christ’ figures were human adults, whereLewis had a glorious golden lion. They follow in general the pattern of‘contemporary children find a way into magical worlds and go on quests’; herbest book is (I think) ‘The Midsummer Maze’, but ‘The King of the Castle’ is good too. It openswith a boy, Thomas, sick in bed (see mysteriousillnesses that keep children marooned in bed for weeks). Slowly recovering fromwhatever it was, he grows bored, so one day his mother gives him a gilt-framed pictureshe bought in a junk shop, so that he will ‘have something to look at insteadof the wallpaper’. This feels a bit forced; would a young boy really appreciate‘an old engraving in the romantic style’? But perhaps the castle swings it:

It showed a wild rocky landscape with twisted thorn treeson the horizon, bent by years of gales, and a few sheep prowling on the thingrass near a torrent which rushed turbulently out of a deep and shadowy ravine.Beside the river a road ran, white in the darkness, till it too disappearedbehind the steep shoulder of the gorge. Perhaps it led on to the castle whichbacked against a wild and stormy sky of clouds that rolled like smoke over thesombre hills. 

Thomas thinks it ‘verymysterious’ and once it’s on the wall he lies looking at it.

He wondered where the road went after it turned the corner.He imagined himself walking along the road, rutted and dusty, stony as it was.The huge cliffs loomed above him.

“But I amwalking along the road,” Thomas thought suddenly. He looked down and saw hisfeet walking. They wore brown leather rubber-soled shoes. He was not wearingpyjamas but jeans and his thick sweater, but the wind seemed to cut through thewool. It was cold. 

Following the road upbeside the rushing river, he turns to look back, wondering if he will see hisbedroom with himself lying in bed. But ‘what he saw was the wild country of thepicture extended backwards, the river running away and away towardsthick-forested hills. It was almost more unnerving to find himself totally inthe world of the picture.’ I like this acknowledgment of the unsettling side of suddenly entering an unknown world. Soon after, a young shepherd and his dog rescue Thomas from a wolf. The shepherd turns out to be this book’s Christ figure,and at the end of the story Thomas returns through the picture to find himselfback in bed.

Comparedwith with the other ‘paintings as portals’ discussed here, this is perhaps theweakest, since Thomas’s interaction with the engraving is entirely passive. It’s given to him and he doesn’t even need to leave his bed: just looking at it does the job. Characters in the other stories all have some degreeof agency in passing through the portals. Kwashin Koji is in full control of what happens: he can enter a painting at will. Lucy and Edmund topple into the Eastern Sea while actively trying to prevent Eustace breaking thepicture. Accepting his great-grandfather’s invitation, Kay Harkerclambers on to the mantelpiece to reach him. Like Kwashin Koji, Cole Hawlings chooses a painting to enter and escape through, while the rather older Kay Harker of ‘The Box of Delights’  draws the pictureswhich come to life and rescue them. (Do these drawings count as portals? Whileit’s true that Kay and Cole don’t pass through them, the horses, boats and boatmen emerge from the paper into this world, so I think they do.)

Kay’sdrawings of horses and boatmen bring me to the drawings in Catherine Storr’swonderfully sinister ‘Marianne Dreams’ (1958). Marianne is another child struckdown by an unnamed illness that keeps her in bed. Weeks on, bored and convalescent,she finds a stub of pencil in an old work-box and uses it to draw a house withfour windows, a door and a smoking chimney – to which she adds a fence, a gateand a path, a few flowers, ‘long scribbly grass’ and some rocks. Then she fallsasleep and dreams she’s alone in a vast grassland dotted with rocks. Walking towardsa faint line of smoke she arrives at a blank-eyed house with ‘a bare frontdoor’ ringed with an uneven fence and pale flowers. A cold wind springs up andshe’s frightened. ‘I’ve got to get away from the grass and the stones and thewind. I’ve got to get inside.’

Marianne’sdreams take her into the inimical ‘world’ of her drawing: what she finds theredepends on whatever she has recently drawn, plus the mood in which she drew it. The experience is uneasy from the start and becomes scarier at every visit. It’sarguable that the drawings (to which she keeps adding) are not portals at all, onlythe catalyst for dreams which express Marianne’s anger, fear and stress. Neverthelessthe strange ‘country’ in which she finds herself – and to a certain extent manipulates– feels psychologically serious and real; portals may work in more than oneway. She draws a boy looking out of the window, someone who can let her intothe house. Next night he is there. She discovers that his name is Mark: he isreal, very ill and unable to walk, and shares with her the same nice hometutor. In the dream world he is dependent on her: as the wielder of the pencilshe can draw things for his comfort – or not. In a fit of temper one day she scribblesthick black lines, like bars, all over the window where he sits – raises thefence, adds more stones in a ring around the house and gives to each one asingle eye. All these horrifying things become real in her next dream.

Marianne looked round the side of the window. From whereshe stood she could see five – six – seven of the great stones standingimmovable outside. As she looked there was a movement in all of them. The greateyelids dropped; there was a moment when each figure was nothing but a hunk ofstone, motionless and harmless. Then, together, the pale eyelids lifted andseven great eyeballs swivelled in their stone sockets and fixed themselves onthe house.

          Mariannescreamed. She felt she was screaming with the full power of her lungs,screaming like a siren: but no sound came out at all. She wanted to warn Mark,but she could not utter a word. In her struggle she woke. 

As the terrifying stoneWatchers crowd ever closer to the house, Marianne and Mark must escape.Marianne draws hills in the distance behind the house, with a lighthousestanding on them, for she knows the sea there, just out of sight. Eventuallythe children make it to the lighthouse on bicycles she has drawn. Here they aresafe, but Mark points out that they can’t stay forever. They must reach thesea, inaccessible below high cliffs. A helicopter is needed, but Mariannecannot draw helicopters. After struggling with herself to relinquish power (‘it’smy pencil!’) she draws the pencilinto the dream so that Mark can have it. He draws a helicopter which arrivesbefore Marianne can dream again, but leaves a message promising to make it comeback for her: in the end trust prevails.

Everything seemed to be resting; content; waiting. Markwould come: he would take her to the sea. Marianne lay down on the short,sweet-smelling turf. She would wait, too.

‘Marianne Dreams’ canbe genuinely frightening, nightmarish even; but the children’s bickering yetsupportive friendship enlivens the story and makes it accessible to youngreaders.

          Lastly, I cannot resist mentioning James Mayhew’s much-lovedand utterly charming series of picture-books which introduce younger childrento art. ‘Katie’s Picture Show’ was the first, published in 2004 and followed byseveral others in which little Katie jumps into various famous paintings, meetsthe characters and has age-appropriate adventures.

Pictures,especially representative pictures, are like windows. We simultaneously look at them and through them. John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’ lures the viewer in,past the young boy drinking from the brook, past the panting sheepdog and thedonkeys under the bushes, past the reapers busy in the yellow corn, and ontowards the far horizon. In imagination we enter not only the picture but also thelong-departed past of 1820s Suffolk – in much the same way as little Kay Harkerclambers into his great grandfather’s portrait and sees his home as it used tobe, generations before.

Who knowswhen the first person looked at a picture and imagined being inside it? Wecannot know, but it’s a natural thought and I would guess a very old one. Inhis remarkable analysis of prehistoric cave art, ‘The Mind in the Cave’ (2002),David Lewis-Williams suggests that ‘oneof the uses of [Paleolithic] caves was for some sort of vision questing’ andthat ‘the images people made there related to that chthonic [subterranean] realm.’Adding that sensory deprivation in such remote, dark and silent chambers mayhave induced altered states of mind, he continues:

In their various stages of altered states, questers sought,by sight and touch, in the folds and cracks of the rock face, visions ofpowerful animals. It is as if the rock were a living membrane between those whoventured in and one of the lowest levels of the tiered cosmos; behind the membranelay a realm inhabited by spirit animals and spirits themselves, and thepassages and chambers of the cave penetrated deep into that realm.

                   The Cave inthe Mind, David Lewis-Williams, p214

 

Locating lines, shapesand holes in cave walls reminiscent of animals or bits of animals, these earlypeople painted in eyes, nostrils, identity – making them emerge out of therock.

Here is a ‘mask’ from the deepest passage of Altamira Cave in Spain. It could be a horse, but it remains ambiguous. Lewis-Williams quotes anAmerican archeologist, Thor Conway, who visited a Californian rock art sitecalled Saliman Cave:

Red and black paintings surround two small holes bored intothe side of the walls by natural forces. As you stare at these entrance ways toanother realm, suddenly – and without voluntary control – the pictographs breakthe artificial visual reality that we assume.... Suddenly, the paintingsencompassing the recessed pockets began to pulse, beckoning us inward.

          Painted Dreams, Native Americal Rock Art,T.Conway, p109-10

 

Lewis-Williams comments that certain South African rock paintings by the San, that 'seem tothread in and out of the the walls of rock shelters' may 'similarly came to life anddrew shamans through the ‘veil’ into the spirit realm.’ So is it possible that the notion of paintingsas portals may go back all the way to the Paleolithic? That’s quite a thought.

 

Picture credits:

The Snake-Charmer by Henri Rousseau, 1907, Musee D'Orsay, 

The Voyage of The Dawn Treader: illustration by Pauline Baynes

Marianne Dreams: illustration by Marjorie Ann Watts

Katie's Picture Show: illustration by James Mayhew

The Cornfield by John Constable, 1826, National Gallery

Photo from Altamira Cave: David Lewis-Williams, 'The Mind in the Cave'