A Past Relived

I first read Alison Uttley’s The Country Child over thirty years ago, when I was already in my twenties. I have always remembered it fondly, for it described a way of life that did not then seem so very far away. My grandmother was born in 1897 and I could still remember her stories of life on a remote Devon farm. When the book was reissued recently I read it again, this time with the eyes of a children’s librarian, wondering whether it would appeal to those brought up in very different times and from very different backgrounds.

Alison Uttley – author, too, of the much-loved Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig books – was born in 1884, at Castle Top Farm near Cromford in Derbyshire, and her novel evokes, in magical detail, a childhood in late Victorian rural England. It is a world where farm work is done by men and horses and seasonal Irish labourers, where the servants sit below the salt and the farmhand at the dresser; where the local squire may take over your land and house for a day while he and his guests go hunting. Here, water comes from clean-flowing streams, and larders are full of home-brewed, home-preserved, homebaked and home-bottled food. The story, which follows a year in the life of the farm, is told from the viewpoint of Susan Garland, an only child living at remote Windystone Hall, for which Alison Uttley’s own Castle Top Farm was the model. Having no other children to play with, Susan relies on the daily routines of the farm, the adults around her, the minute details of animal and plant-life in the fields and woods and hedges, for her amusement and education. The house and farm seem charged with life, and with the presence of those who have gone before, stretching right back to the Saxons and the Romans. But though the book is set in another age, the feelings it describes are timeless. How superficially unlike a modern child’s visit to the circus is the outing Susan’s family takes, all dressed in their very best in a pony trap hung with lanterns. The lions and elephants are like creatures from another planet to this audience, while to the modern child they are familiar almost to the point of ennui from endless television documentaries. Yet how well I recognized Susan’s reaction to the clowns, for it was exactly my own in 1955.

When the clowns came in with painted faces and baggy white trousers, she was much too surprised to laugh. She thought they were rude to the ring-master, and feared they would be sent away for impertinence. Her father laughed loudly at their sallies but she only stared, astonished.

On Christmas Day, Susan wakes in the early dark and opens her stocking. She is just as excited as any modern child – but her presents might now seem strange: a book, an apple, a tape-measure, an orange, nuts and a china doll. Hearing of the newfangled Christmas tree that someone in the village has, Susan’s father brings one in and hangs it with apples, oranges, biscuits and sweets. There is the usual turkey for dinner and cake for tea, but this Christmas day is dominated by flickering candlelight, lantern light and firelight rather than by television, computers and flashing synchronized tree-lights. It all feels different, yet familiar too, and that is part of the fun. Susan’s mother teaches her at home until she is 7, and when she does eventually go to school, she finds it hard to fit in. She is at once odd, old-fashioned and clever.

Susan looked forward to being someone of importance . . . but her hopes were soon dashed to the ground. Mrs Garland had found in an oak chest a dress which had belonged to a girl of a bygone age . . . a brown checked woollen frock with ruches of cut material trimming the tight bodice, and edging the high neck and the flounced skirt . . . So, a quaint little old-fashioned figure . . . she went for her first day at school.

She is of course mocked for her appearance (as if, today, she were wearing the wrong ‘labels’) and subjected to endless questions and comments. She is jeered at and her hair is pulled. Yet eventually one or two girls are kind to her, and she learns to adjust. Alison Uttley was herself an oddly educated child, old-fashioned even in her own time, brought up on the Bible and a few approved story-books, listening to the talk of adults who were born in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and it shows in her prose:

Then she walked down the tunnel of beech trees, for the oaks were left behind and the character of the wood had changed. The trees thinned and the beeches rose clear of undergrowth with massive smooth grey trunks from the carpet of golden leaves. Susan breathed naturally again, and walked rapidly forward, heeding neither rock nor tree, her eager eyes fixed on the light ahead. The evening sunshine streamed through the end of the path, a circle of radiance, where a stile and broken gate ended the wood.

The book is filled with similar passages where very little is happening – Susan is simply breathing and walking. So can it possibly appeal to contemporary children, who are represented in the media as creatures with poor reading skills, short attention spans and a desperate need for ‘relevance’, ‘action’ and ‘accessibility’. Has The Country Child passed through a transition unforeseeable to its author and become an adult’s book? I don’t think so. For children who like history, this is history relived. For those who like fantasy, The Country Child (like another of Alison Uttley’s books, A Traveller in Time) magically reveals the closeness of the past within ancient buildings where a traditional way of life has gone on unchanged for centuries. For those who love the feeling of being transported to somewhere different when they read, this book will carry them over many years as well as miles. And for those who like detail – the long list of picnic food in The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome’s minute descriptions of stores and ropes and sails – it will be a delight. A further joy of this reprint is its reproduction of Tunnicliffe’s original illustrations in which he renders the delicacy of a single flowering plant and the breadth of the landscape with equal skill. Timeless rather than old-fashioned is how I’d describe this quiet yet eventful book. So give it to a child – but be sure to ask if you can borrow it back when he or she has finished. Better still, read it aloud to a child – especially if you are a grandparent who can say ‘My grandparents told me about that.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Sue Bridgwater 2005