Dreamwork

When my sister was 10 she bought a rather battered copy of a book called Marianne Dreams at our school summer fair. A few years later, when she decided it was too young for her, she handed it on to me. I love puzzles – not particularly the kind that have to be solved, like crosswords, but ones that intrigue in the same way as a complex painting or a spider’s web. Marianne Dreams, published in 1958, is that kind of novel. Its plot is driven by mysterious connections – invisible threads that join together people and things in worlds both real and imaginary – and while the story may be resolved at the end of the book, the puzzle remains.

Although its author Catherine Storr (1913–2001) did write fiction for adults, it is for Marianne Dreams that she is best known, and for Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, written for younger children. Her most successful stories were based on those she told her own children when they were growing up, or stories devised with her children or their friends as characters. Marianne Dreams tells the story of a girl who is able to manipulate her dreams through the pictures she draws. The events in her dreams, dramatic and fraught with difficulties, become as real and as important to her as the world she inhabits when awake. I was 9 when I first read the novel. By that age I was a voracious reader and took a book to bed with me each night. I would read a chapter – or two if I could get away with it – before my mother insisted on lights out. This worked well until I read Marianne Dreams. Though it is aimed at children of around 8, I can’t imagine children of 11 or 12 not being at least a little disconcerted by it. I was scared but completely hooked, and went to sleep each night with disturbing images in my head, inevitably followed by nightmares. The Marianne of the title is a girl convalescing after a serious illness, which keeps her bored and bedridden for many weeks. When she finds a good drawing pencil she uses it to draw a house with a front path and a fence, and long grass as far as the eye can see. She also draws large rocks beyond the fence. Soon afterwards she falls asleep and dreams of the house. But in this dreamland of wind running through the open prairie, she feels compelled to enter the house to get away from something outside. There are no birds or animals or people on the prairie, just the wind and the grass and a niggling feeling that something is very wrong. This sense of aloneness is compelling. In most children’s stories, even in moments of danger and fear there is usually some comfort to be drawn from friends or surroundings, to make the journey easier. The world that Marianne dreams of is bleak. The landscape is empty and forbidding, and the house is old, empty and unfurnished, as if it might be haunted. When she is awake, Marianne adds things to her picture. She draws a boy sitting in one of the upstairs windows, and when she dreams again she meets Mark, who is also an invalid. Indeed, the two children realize that in the waking world they have the same peripatetic governess to help them with their schoolwork. This connection between them, a tenuous one in the real world, a solid one in the dream world, remains a mysterious piece of magic in the story that is deliciously never explained. The two children do not immediately become friends. Their fears and insecurities make them at first despondent and grumpy with one another. In a moment of malice Marianne blackens out Mark’s window, raises the height of the fence to make it prison-like, adds more rocks, and on each rock draws a single eye. The unease that pervades the novel becomes more tangible when the children discover that the rocks are watching them. Then slowly, imperceptibly, the rocks start to move inside the fence and approach the house. The children must find a way to escape from the house and garden and the oppressive nightmare that Marianne’s picture has created. It is this escape that takes up the remainder of the novel and ultimately provides a resolution. Catherine Storr was well aware that her book was frightening. ‘We should show [children] that evil is something they already know about or half know,’ she once wrote. The novel was written during a period in the Fifties and early Sixties when she was practising as a psychiatrist in London, having qualified as a doctor in the 1940s. She had always wanted to be a writer, having studied English at Cambridge with this in mind. By retraining in medicine she hoped, among other things, that she ‘would get that experience of life which was wanted in my writing’, and one can see in the psychological nuances of the book her clinical knowledge being put to use. She did go on to write a sequel, Marianne and Mark, which was published in 1960. However, it is a fairly straightforward story in which Marianne finally meets Mark in the real world when they are both teenagers, and it contains little of the atmosphere and intensity of its predecessor. Marianne Dreams also spawned several spin-offs. It was made into a children’s television series in 1972 and into a film called Paperhouse in 1988, and Catherine herself wrote the libretto for the operatic adaptation which was first performed in 2004. Rereading Marianne Dreams now I can see that it foreshadows much that I have gone on to read and write as an adult: stories that play with the threads that connect people, that shift between worlds and question what is real. Catherine loved writing for children for this very reason, because she believed that children ‘make this move between the practical and the imaginative with no difficulty at all . . . because they can hold both concepts in their minds at once, without the one spoiling the other’. My copy of Marianne Dreams is now very battered indeed. It no longer has the power to give me nightmares, but I still hold it in great affection, and have never quite outgrown it. Catherine Storr once wrote that it is difficult to specify a body of work that can be called ‘children’s literature’. Instead, she said, we should ‘consider the books themselves which, whether written for children or not, children want to read.’ The same could be said of fiction for adults, depending, I suppose, on how much we can still see the child within us, whose world view we may not have quite given up.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 33 © Kathryn Peak 2012