Joining the Grown-ups

I’ve been reading The Borrowers books with my daughter. I loved them when I was her age, and it’s been a joy to rediscover Mary Norton’s tales of these tiny people who live alongside humans. Their miniature world is described in glorious detail – they are small enough to take up residence in a boot, make a roaring fire from matchsticks, or feast for days on a single roasted chestnut. We’ve been thrilled as they are menaced by ferrets, scooped up into pockets or swept downstream in a tea kettle.

It’s strange, though, to revisit childhood favourites with one’s own child. Coming back to these books as an adult I see them quite differently: my daughter empathizes with young Arietty’s desire to venture out into the big wide world, but these days I’m in sympathy with Homily and Pod, Arietty’s worried parents, who see danger lurking around every corner. I’ve noticed, too, details that I was un- aware of as a child (and which pass my daughter by); for instance, I realize now that ‘the boy’ – through whose eyes we first come to know the Borrowers – dies just a few years later in the Great War. How poignant to imagine such a fate in store for the vibrant child who is so alive in the pages of The Borrowers. Mary Norton (1903–92) had a remarkable knack for conjuring an utterly believable fantasy world populated by quirky characters in perilous situations – all the elements that make for great children’s fiction. But in rereading The Borrowers, I’ve been struck by the distinct feeling that there is a thoughtful intelligence at work, a sort of grown-up seriousness, behind the jolly children’s story. I began to wonder whether Norton had ever written stories for adults and, after some research, I was delighted to discover that she had. She is, of course, best remembered for her children’s fiction: the Carnegie Medal-winning The Borrowers (1952) and its four sequels, as well as Bed-knob and Broomstick (1957) which inspired the 1971 Walt Disney film. But during the 1940s and ’50s she also wrote fiction and essays for women’s magazines. Her writing reached a significant reader- ship – the American magazine Woman’s Day, where many pieces appeared, had a circulation of 4 million at the time. In the 1980s, a box of these stories was discovered in an attic and eventually reissued as The Bread and Butter Stories (1998), the title a nod to the payments of up to $1,000 a story (the equivalent of between $12,000 and $20,000 today) that earned Norton her ‘bread and butter’ during otherwise lean times. Reading The Bread and Butter Stories often feels rather like listening to the anecdotes of a worldly and witty friend. Although presented as ‘stories’, many of them draw directly on Mary Norton’s own experiences, and she had even planned to use them as the basis for her autobiography. The autobiography was never written, but the stories do offer glimpses into her surprisingly diverse talents and colourful life. It’s fascinating to learn that she was a talented actress and had hoped to pursue a career in the theatre; she joined the Old Vic in the 1920s before she married, and she returned to occasional acting during and after the war. It’s a background that informs the story ‘Talking of Television’, where an actress is offered a part in a BBC play to be broadcast live – her first performance on the small screen. In this breezy, rollicking tale, we are swept up into a company of thespians, which includes two quite dissimilar women who have been cast to play identical twins, as well as a misanthropic parrot prone to disruptive ad-libbing. There’s a peek behind the scenes of Norton’s life as a children’s author in ‘Once Upon a Time’ (more a confessional essay than a short story). Here, a writer contends with an exasperating children’s publisher intent on commissioning only dry, educational books about ‘Real Children from Other Lands (or Other Climes or Other Periods)’. But, as the author wryly notes, these are seldom the true narrative that children love. ‘They resemble in some subtle way the London greengrocer who will only sell you oranges if you buy cabbages as well – “half a pound of what we’ve got for a quarter pound of what you want; besides,” he might add, “green stuff is good for you.”’ This is, I think, one of Mary Norton’s particular charms – her ability to make the reader feel like a valued confidante: ‘You understand how it is, don’t you?’ she seems to say, and we nod and laugh, recognizing those unappetizing narrative cabbages and flattered that she’s chosen to trust us with her insights. Mary Norton was born and grew up in Bedfordshire, but she also lived abroad for many years. After marrying her first husband, Robert Norton, in 1926, she moved to his family home in Portugal. It was there that they raised their four children, and where she became acquainted with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. She had also spent time in France as a child, went on to work in America during the war, and moved to Ireland following her second marriage. Not all of these locations are represented in The Bread and Butter Stories, but ‘A House in Portugal’, in which a young Englishwoman joins her husband in his opulent Portuguese home, seems to be largely autobiographical. It’s a strange new world for the young wife: she baulks at the unfamiliar cuisine (a plate of goose-neck barnacles, ‘a steaming triangle of black obscenity’ resembling ‘miniature goats’ hooves on rubber stalks’); she explores the sultry gardens with their ‘spicy and glutinous’ scent, full of exotic flora and fauna; and she marvels at the local folklore, such as the firmly held belief that sewing ‘furiously on an imaginary ball of string’ will heal a sprained ankle. It’s by turns funny and tragic – the story ends as the husband’s business fails in the Depression, plunging the family into penury. It’s also sobering to realize that this is a precise echo of events in Mary Norton’s own life. Portugal is also the setting for the darkly entertaining ‘Mr Sequeria’. Here we meet an English family’s ‘slightly diabolical-looking’ neighbour, Senhor Sequeria, who lives with his anxious wife, his tremulous daughter and his son, ‘a wizened child of eight named Luiz . . . subject to violent outbursts of hysterical rage’ although quite likeable ‘if one could prevent his becoming excited’. Throughout the story, Senhor Sequeria mostly sits brooding in his house in a black homburg, while rumours swirl about his past as an esteemed artist and his psychopathic tendencies – the latter confirmed when he embarks on a spree with a hatchet, intent on murder. This story was, apparently, based on real people: years later, Mary’s daughter Ann vividly recalled the volatile Luiz, although she had no memory of the homicidal Senhor Sequeria. Perhaps the dramatic turns were artistic licence on Mary Norton’s part, or perhaps there was a more disturbing history to which the young Ann remained happily oblivious, a tale not quite suitable for small ears. Many of the stories are more evidently fictional, and you can well imagine them gracing the pages of mid-twentieth-century women’s magazines. Several involve British women having significant encounters with dashing Mediterranean gentlemen. In ‘Pleasure Cruise’, Fanny leaves her husband aboard a cruise ship and sets out to explore Lisbon alone. In the space of a day, she develops a chaste but passion- ate connection (in the vein of Brief Encounter) with a Portuguese bullfighter called Salvador, who sees Fanny as more than just another lumpen, ill-dressed English tourist. The day grows hotter, and together they seek shelter from the afternoon sun in a shady farm- house where Fanny struggles to make sense of her feelings for a man she has only just met:

The silence was tense and rough, like words held back in the throat. Then Fanny said slowly, ‘I don’t know you.’ She heard him laugh. ‘Oh, Fanny, pateta [silly thing] . . . how will you know me? In a salon? No             woman knows a man . . . except like this.’

In preparing to reissue these pieces nearly half a century after they were written, Norton was anxious to point out that they were created at a particular time for a particular market. Many of the stories were, of course, meant to be romantic. But while they are sometimes shamelessly swoon-inducing (I for one am left aflutter by Salvador’s husky declaration), there’s a quiet elegance to them too – something tender and knowing – which marks them as much more than pulp. In other stories we meet sensitive, tentative women, like Fanny, whose lives are shaken by illuminating moments or who grapple with a desire to be found beautiful or remarkable. In ‘Pauline and Bertha’, married Bertha confides in a friend about a ‘fateful’ encounter with a Greek man, Andreas. Movingly, Bertha recalls how, after first meeting Andreas,

I caught a glimpse of my own face in the looking-glass on the landing – wildly beautiful, it looked, almost incandescent with beauty. For a startled second, I did not recognize myself and then I thought it must be something to do with the lighting of the passage . . . it frightened me: my kind of prettiness, I thought, was never meant to look like that.

Unsettled by this transformation, Bertha suddenly longs to be called ‘old girl’ by her husband and yearns for the familiar dullness of her marriage. And when Andreas is gone, we are left to wonder, along with Bertha, what this electric connection meant. Was it a glimpse of something real and profound, and if so, what does one do with such experiences when ordinary life resumes? Mature and perplexing questions, indeed. In the end, it’s both odd and pleasant to come to Mary Norton’s adult writing after being immersed in her children’s fiction. The Bread and Butter Stories are just as engaging as her tales of the Borrowers, told in the same frank and funny voice, but these are not tales for children; they are avowedly adult. I feel I’ve come to know Mary Norton quite well through her children’s books – as though she’s a fellow parent I’ve spent lots of time with. But now, for the first time, it’s just the two of us; the children are in bed and it’s getting late. Mary pours us both a glass of wine – a twinkle in her eye – and we begin to talk of more grown-up things.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Becky Tipper 2024