I wrote recently about the new Hesperus Press edition of Pollyanna,
but what I didn’t mention at the time was that it wasn’t the only children’s
classic they reissued in February. The other was one of my childhood favourites,
Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians, which they have republished
under its American title, The Runaways.
Regular readers of Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf will perhaps
have inferred something of my great love for the British countryside, and my resulting
enthusiasm for books which portray and celebrate it. And here we have a book
which glorifies a very special place, Dartmoor. Elizabeth Goudge lived within
sight of the moor for some twelve years, and her writing of Devon is redolent
of the rounded, wooded hills of the county, with its glowing sunsets, lush
green fields and rich red earth, and the looming tors of the moor ever-present
in the background (although they are often present only in the imagination,
since it rains pretty frequently).
The four Linnet children have been sent to live with their
grandmother in Devon, while their father is abroad with his regim
ent, and they are Not Happy about it:
They had no wish to live with her, for she was a very
autocratic old lady… She believed that children should be instantly obedient
and she did not like dogs. She said that Absolom had fleas and must be given
away, and if that was not enough, she had arranged for Robert and Nan to go to
boarding school while her companion Miss Bold taught Timothy and Betsy at home.
The children were in despair.
So they decide to escape. Over the garden wall, with Absolom, of
course, and off towards the sunset, and the moor – though they don’t know
that’s where they’re headed because they don’t really have any idea about where
they are or where they are going. After a long and tiring uphill walk, they
“borrow” a horse and cart from outside an inn, and the pony very obligingly
takes them straight home – his home, that is – where they are greeted by an
irascible elderly gentleman who announces that there is only one thing he
dislikes more than a child, and that’s a dog. Fortunately for the children,
this presages their move to High Barton and their discovery of a wondrous, and
sometimes frightening, new world.
It is also a world where the presence and absence of
boundaries is paramount. The children’s lives are bounded by the necessity to
learn – self-discipline and formal education are equally insisted upon by their
new-found uncle – but in observing the boundaries they are free to roam the
unbounded moor and to discover new experiences and people. This juxtaposition
of discipline and freedom is a common theme in
Goudge’s books and leads to beguiling imagery of portals and labyrinths,
reminiscent of Aslan’s “further up and further in”. In The Runaways, the
maze/labyrinth image of the early Christian mystics links to the theme of being
lost, both physically and psychically. Goudge’s Christianity verges on nature
mysticism (there’s an illuminating chapter in her autobiography, The Joy of the
Snow) and, as in Lewis’s work, animals often play an important, and sometimes
nearly omniscient, role, although less so in The Runaways than in The Little
White Horse – here, the “wise animal” role is allocated to the bees, who
guide the children in moments of extremis; there is a difference, too, in
that not all the animals in The Runaways are good (Monsieur Cocq du Noir’s rooster in The Little White Horse might be said to be bad, but to me it seems more neutral than actively wicked like its master).
Although Christian mysticism runs like a silver thread
through all Goudge’s books, I don’t think that in The Runaways it will
impinge on the enjoyment of the modern reader. It’s true that her books are very
popular with Christian readers – though I was intrigued to find one reader who’d
abandoned this one, considering the nature mysticism and magic a step too far – but here, the children's adventures will surely captivate the young reader. For the adult reader,
it’s only necessary to believe that spirituality of some kind is a fairly
fundamental part of the human condition, in order to share the hopes and fears
of Goudge’s characters and to wish for a fulfilling conclusion.
And the characters in Goudge’s novels are always memorable.
Her children are lovable, but rarely without faults. Robert is wilful, Timothy
is inclined to nerves, Betsy is complacent – only Nan is quiet and thoughtful,
and even she will have grown immeasurably as a person by the end of the story. The adults are equally striking:
wise Uncle Ambrose, wonderful one-legged Ezra Oake, the sad, withdrawn Lady
Alicia and her servant Moses, the oddly sinister Emma Cobley… even the
animals are unforgettable – Andromache the cat and Hector the owl, Rob Roy and sad, lonely Abednego.
And, at the heart of it all, the almost animate, glorious Dartmoor:
“...along the eastern horizon lay the range of blue hills called Dartmoor”
(E. Goudge, The Joy of the Snow, 1974)
She stood and looked abut her and she wondered if there
was any place more lovely and strange than this, poised here halfway between
the world of the trees and of the clouds. It was a miniature green valley,
almost like a garden, held in a cleft of the rock. The two spurs of rock that
contained it on each side were both the same shape, like the paws and forearms
of a huge beast, and viewed from this side they were not menacing but
protective, as though the beast held the garden in his arms. A small stream ran
down the centre of it and fell over the edge of the cliff down to the trees
below, and the banks of the stream were thick with water forget-me-nots and
green ferns. There were flowers everywhere in the grass and more ferns and
little rowan trees grew up the sides of the valley. Nan put her flowers into a
pool between two stones at the edge of the stream, to get a good drink, and she
had a drink herself, lifting the water in her cupped hands. Then she sat down
to rest and for the first time looked up at the rock at the head of the valley
and saw it shaped like the chest of the beast and up above it, against the sky,
was the huge shaggy lion’s head. Now she knew where she was, between the paws
of the lion who kept guard beneath the tor.
What Nan finds below Lion Tor is at the heart of this
enchanting book.
