On the Hungarian Plain

As a child I was always reassured by books which contained maps. The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Prince Caspian – their neatly drawn coastlines, mountains and compass points were promises of worlds imagined so fully that the reader could, should he wish, leave the story behind and strike out across country on his own.

The endpapers of The Good Master (1935) contain such a map, realized by its author Kate Seredy. To the west is the Home of the Good Master with its well-kept fences and expansive farm buildings; to the north are the corrals of the Horse Herds; to the north-east lie the little church and houses of the Village; to the east are the old Mill and an outpost mysteriously labelled ‘Toepincher’. Only the motifs of the map’s border – doves and hearts in the style of Eastern European embroidery – give a clue to the wider setting: the great plain of Hungary. In my copy, a second edition of 1938, my mother’s name and address claim it as her passport to an idyllic, far-off land which would beguile me in my turn thirty years later. How self-contained Seredy’s world is becomes clear in the opening pages. The year is 1911, and 10-year-old Jancsi – son of the district’s principal landowner, Márton Nagy – is eagerly awaiting his cousin Kate’s arrival from Budapest. Collecting her from the railway station involves his first visit to a town and his first sight of a train; he imagines Budapest as a city of golden houses with diamond windows. The news that Kate is ‘delicate’ adds to her glamour. The reality proves very different: Kate is a tearaway whose widowed father can no longer cope with her. As ignorant of the countryside as Jancsi is of the city, she turns up her nose at rural life and causes mayhem by making off in a four-horse wagon. Jancsi is at first appalled, then impressed: ‘She’s almost as good as a real boy.’ As Jancsi introduces Kate to his favourite pursuits – teaching her to ride, fishing for crayfish in the ‘Toepincher’ brook – the two become friends. They have their share of adventures, including a stampede and a near-drowning, but The Good Master is principally a chronicle of the farmer’s year with its seasonal tasks and festivals: the children help round up horses, decorate the house for Easter, take corn to the windmill. The story is enhanced by Seredy’s beautiful wash drawings and delightful decorative vignettes. The effect is that of an early twentieth-century book of hours, celebrating man’s relationship with nature. What The Good Master offers a young reader above all is reassurance. This is a world in which everyone, high and low, has their place and function, their responsibilities and rewards. The book’s title is the epithet conferred on Jancsi’s father by his herdsmen, and Márton Nagy – an ideal of manhood, strong and honest, strict but kind – is determined to instil in Jancsi a sense of his duty to others. In the same way, the uneducated shepherd Pista is an ideal of the contented countryman:

The sky gives me sunshine and rain. The ground gives me food. The spring gives me water. The sheep give me shelter and clothes . . . Can money and schools give me better things?

When evil intrudes, it is chiefly in the vivid folk tales which are scattered through the narrative, and it always reaps an appropriate reward. (Pista tells of a band of soldiers undone by their lust for ‘things men follow blindly – wealth, power, pleasure’, seeking a village rich in gold which proves to be a mirage.) The only trespassers on the Nagys’ goodwill are the charlatans at a fairground and a band of rascally gypsies – but to the Good Master these are occupational hazards, comparable to ‘sparrows in the wheat’. A hymn to simplicity, self-sufficiency and the beneficent power of the land, The Good Master ends – like the farmer’s year – with Christmas. In a snowbound house that is the quintessence of cosiness, Kate is reunited with her father; and as the family – never idle – settles down to spin flax and carve chairs, he realizes that the time has come for him too to turn his back on the city. Seredy herself was born in Budapest, and discovered the countryside at a similar age to Kate. By the time she wrote The Good Master she had moved to the United States (her use of Americanisms such as ‘candy’ is something that grates now, though I don’t think I minded them as a child), and no doubt an element of nostalgia informed it. But Seredy – who had served as a nurse in the First World War – recognized the darker realities of life, and was not afraid to show her readers injustice and suffering. If The Good Master is a vision of pastoral life, its sequel The Singing Tree (1940) explores the forces which threaten that vision. The book opens with a new character: the Jewish shopkeeper Moses Mandelbaum. Old, frail and cerebral, ‘Uncle Moses’ is in many respects the antithesis of the virile, practical Good Master, but he shares his benevolence and sense of responsibility, using his business acumen to smooth the lives of those around him. The two men hold each other in respect and affection: they are, Márton Nagy tells his son, ‘brother Hungarians, first and foremost’. But we are now in 1914, and even this remote community feels a sense of foreboding. A herdsman back from national service tells of the contempt shown by an Austrian officer for his Hungarian and Serbian men; at a wedding a girl disparages the Jews, and on the way home Kate overhears the news that Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated. The first men march away to war, and the day comes when the Good Master too must set off for the front. Left in charge, Jancsi runs the farm as best he can. But the time is out of joint:

Days took on wings and flew away, and he had no time to watch their flight . . . people seemed to say to each new day: ‘Hurry’, for then tomorrow would come and tomorrow might bring the end of the war. But as the seasons rolled by and the sun rose on a brand-new day every dawn, it was never the tomorrow they were all praying for.

Life improves when six Russian prisoners-of-war arrive to work on the farm, becoming part of the family. But then Márton Nagy’s letters home cease to arrive. Six months pass; Jancsi’s grandparents write asking for refuge, and he and Kate undertake the 50-kilometre journey to collect them. The story of how the children’s kindness to a stray cat leads to the discovery of Jancsi’s father – an amnesiac patient in a military hospital – is calculated to bring a tear to the sternest eye. Invalided home, the Good Master resumes his former role. Six young German refugees join the disparate community at the farm, and celebrate Christmas with them. But the suffering is not over.

After the candles had burned down and it was time to go to bed, Hans reached up to the shelf and took down his father’s picture. ‘Gute Nacht, lieber Papa, schlaf wohl. Good night, dear Father, sleep well,’ he whispered.

He didn’t know then, and wouldn’t know for many weeks, that his father was sleeping under a white blanket of snow somewhere in France.

Márton Nagy never speaks of the war, except occasionally to tell ‘small, poignant stories’. In one he describes his regiment stumbling at dawn upon a single tree, alive with singing birds, in the middle of a devastated landscape:

Against the trunk, owls huddled sleepily; there were jackdaws, and even a crow or two had taken shelter there. Friends and foes of the bird world, side by side, all from different nests . . .

Not until the end of the book does Jancsi make the connection between the singing tree and the haven that the farm has become. I cannot think of another children’s writer who paints as memorable a picture of the home front or handles political themes as deftly as Kate Seredy. Only on reading The Singing Tree as an adult does one become aware of its complexity. Published in 1940, it recounted the horrors of one World War just as another was beginning, and showed them from the perspective of those destined to be – for its American and British readers – ‘the enemy’. Though strongly pacifist in its sensibility, it vehemently defended the Jews who would be the new war’s most helpless victims. And it foreshadowed, in a young deserter’s outburst against the landowning class, an era in Hungarian history when the very notion of a ‘good master’ would constitute a thought crime. The fact that Seredy considered herself primarily an illustrator, and was writing in an adopted language, makes her achievement all the more remarkable. The Good Master portrays the world at its most harmonious; The Singing Tree, the world at its most bitter. But both tell us that so long as we share the Nagys’ principles and humanity, we are equipped to weather the darkest of storms.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Anthony Gardner 2011