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A Boy in a Tattered Coat

The little book didn’t belong to me. I was made aware of this every day by the tight crimson boards, the gold letters clumsily punched on the spine, and above all by the label glued inside, which pro­claimed it the property of Kingston-upon-Thames Public Libraries, Surbiton Branch. The two stags rampant that held the borough arms had a sly but threatening, possibly telltale, look. A long succession of dates of around 1961–2 was stamped on the facing label. They were all my renewals, for I had taken possession of this book, and couldn’t let it go until it had surrendered all the magic I knew it contained.

The name of the author, Henry Williamson, had drawn my 11-year-old eyes to it at first. I already knew his work, for my parents’ two-shelf library – containing The English Counties, Gardening and Home Production, their pharmaceutical textbooks and Three Men in a Boat – also had India-paper wartime editions of three of his ‘Flax of Dream’ novels, The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days and The Pathway. I had not bothered with the last, because I sensed it was about love and grown-ups; then, as now, I would always rather see the world through the eyes of a child. The other volumes, achingly light and thin in their green covers, I adored with a passion. Willie Maddison, the young hero, was exactly me, suffering through impris­onment in school while longing to roam the North Devon woods and fields. The intensity of the writing, with its loving details of birds, flowers, scenes and weather, was all the more thrilling because I was beginning to understand that I could try to do this myself. Every page added to my store of shining, tactile images and words.

I was very far from North Devon in Surbiton, with its streets of 1930s semis and numbing suburban ways, but I was an inveterate tomboy, my spare time spent much as Willie’s was: wandering alone for hours over the Green Belt, blackberrying, fishing for minnows, climbing trees and trying to ride any bicycle I found abandoned, since I was barred from having one of my own. The heavy inevitabil­ity of being a girl was something I tried to forget. I emerged once from Dandelion Days, which I’d been reading surreptitiously in an upstairs classroom thick with the smell of polished linoleum, to find Susan Pinsent and Paula Ogden excitedly discussing bras and breasts. I was desperate never to have either, and clung to Willie Maddison as my alter ego until, a few years later, I became defiant, dangerous Stephen Daedalus, in my mind at least.

The little crimson-swaddled book I had discovered was not obviously part of the series I knew. It seemed to be a curious offshoot of the same time and place, in the same language and landscape but not in the same mood: a book of puzzlement and disquiet. I learned from the introduction that Williamson did consider it a ‘pendant’ (then a puzzling word) to the other books, and

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The little book didn’t belong to me. I was made aware of this every day by the tight crimson boards, the gold letters clumsily punched on the spine, and above all by the label glued inside, which pro­claimed it the property of Kingston-upon-Thames Public Libraries, Surbiton Branch. The two stags rampant that held the borough arms had a sly but threatening, possibly telltale, look. A long succession of dates of around 1961–2 was stamped on the facing label. They were all my renewals, for I had taken possession of this book, and couldn’t let it go until it had surrendered all the magic I knew it contained.

The name of the author, Henry Williamson, had drawn my 11-year-old eyes to it at first. I already knew his work, for my parents’ two-shelf library – containing The English Counties, Gardening and Home Production, their pharmaceutical textbooks and Three Men in a Boat – also had India-paper wartime editions of three of his ‘Flax of Dream’ novels, The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days and The Pathway. I had not bothered with the last, because I sensed it was about love and grown-ups; then, as now, I would always rather see the world through the eyes of a child. The other volumes, achingly light and thin in their green covers, I adored with a passion. Willie Maddison, the young hero, was exactly me, suffering through impris­onment in school while longing to roam the North Devon woods and fields. The intensity of the writing, with its loving details of birds, flowers, scenes and weather, was all the more thrilling because I was beginning to understand that I could try to do this myself. Every page added to my store of shining, tactile images and words. I was very far from North Devon in Surbiton, with its streets of 1930s semis and numbing suburban ways, but I was an inveterate tomboy, my spare time spent much as Willie’s was: wandering alone for hours over the Green Belt, blackberrying, fishing for minnows, climbing trees and trying to ride any bicycle I found abandoned, since I was barred from having one of my own. The heavy inevitabil­ity of being a girl was something I tried to forget. I emerged once from Dandelion Days, which I’d been reading surreptitiously in an upstairs classroom thick with the smell of polished linoleum, to find Susan Pinsent and Paula Ogden excitedly discussing bras and breasts. I was desperate never to have either, and clung to Willie Maddison as my alter ego until, a few years later, I became defiant, dangerous Stephen Daedalus, in my mind at least. The little crimson-swaddled book I had discovered was not obviously part of the series I knew. It seemed to be a curious offshoot of the same time and place, in the same language and landscape but not in the same mood: a book of puzzlement and disquiet. I learned from the introduction that Williamson did consider it a ‘pendant’ (then a puzzling word) to the other books, and had put it together from memories of a lost manuscript read aloud one evening in his cottage in Devon. Faber first published it (I learned long afterwards) in 1933, and then again, in a revised version with new illustrations by Mildred Eldridge, in 1948. The 1948 edition was the one I had – or, rather, the one the library used to have. That first reading by Williamson to his friends, gathered close round an open fire, the wind no doubt keening across the moors beyond the walls, would have suited the story well, for the whole book was suffused with night. The sketchy line drawings, which I examined first, were mostly of blasted moorland, wind-riven trees and the skulls of birds. Excitement lay there, but not without a touch of dread. The book was called The Star-Born. Its first chapters were about owls, especially one called Eldrich, which sounded to me like the shriek of doom heard before a death. The owls were frightening: hunting, nipping on the neck, tearing open and gobbling down a succession of soft small rodents whose long tails dangled from their beaks, and whose tiny bones made an ossuary of the ruins where they nested. The next chapters were filled with creatures who were nebu­lous and filmy: Leaf Spirit, Air Spirit, Water Spirit and Quill Spirit, who lived among the dripping ferns and sunbows of the gorge of the River Lyd. Unable to visualize them, I could only hear their high pattering voices, addressing each other with churchy Thees and Thous to debate creation, life, past ages and their own importance. Not caring much for the owls or the spirits, I skipped a fair amount at this stage. But I kept going, because what had seized and held me as I first looked through was a full-page picture of a ragged figure, a thin young man with dishevelled hair and dark eyes, who held a dead robin in his hand and was swirled about with mist, or light. This was the Star-born. His mother, the spirits had mentioned, was the Morning Star; he had been sent as a human baby, but had been snatched away to be brought up by owls. Now he had been sent again to instruct the earth in the way it should live. The picture already suggested, somehow, that he was going to fail. No other image from my childhood so affected me. I looked at it again and again: the tattered coat, the bare feet, the beseeching eyes and the overpowering sense of sadness. He had fallen naked from the stars in a storm (narrowly missing a passing car), and had stolen his clothes from a scarecrow. He was clearly asking about the robin, but could speak no words beyond those others spoke to him, cleverly re-ordered and returned. At this point I was savouring every word about him, and especially the clash between this extraordinary figure and the ordinary country folk of North Devon. They, of course, could not make him out; he was mazed, an idiot, even a danger. In short order he liberated children from their classrooms, let goldfinches out of cages, saved hares from the huntsmen and tried to eat bread and butter with a knife and fork. (I was always being rebuked for my table man­ners; his were much, much worse!) Out in the wilds he was an uncontrolled child, heaving rocks into streams with cries of joy, and riding wildly on bicycles (again, like me) until he was unseated. He was, I suppose, the first in a long line of disruptive outsider-heroes: Daedalus, Hamlet, Raskolnikov, Mishkin, Mersault. Yet he was odder than any of those. When I read the book again, four decades later, he still seemed every bit as magical and bizarre. For I did read it again, curious to revisit the spell it had cast over me. Having searched high and low for it in bookshops, I found it on Abebooks in two minutes, in its original jacket and, to preserve the mystery, an old tissue cover that misted the lettering. I took it on holiday to Glynde in East Sussex, the only book I packed for a week – which was peculiar, because I was in that febrile, anxious dip between writ­ing projects when normally I read voraciously, cramming for the next idea. I must have had a feeling that it would be enough for me: a sense that it would unlock so many thoughts and associations, long buried away, that I would need nothing else. One day I sat with it out in the courtyard, under the apple trees in the sun. After much the same half-creepy, half-perplexing journey, I was enjoying it now that ‘the Boy’, as everyone called him, had shown up. I was almost at the end, having forgotten the end, at the point where the Boy’s earth-sister, Mamis, pulls a volume of poetry from the shelf and opens it. The lines she sees are from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! . . . A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
The parallel was meant to be with the Star-born, but for me it was as if I had never read the lines before. They struck me with such force that I seemed to be picked up and hurled through the air myself, and I immediately realized that I had to write the life of this poet – a poet who could live and move with spirits of water, leaves and air. Within the hour I had driven to Brighton to buy Shelley’s collected verse; within two years I had produced Being Shelley. I’ve often told the story of this wild moment, without ever men­tioning which book I was reading at the time. My childhood treasure became a filter for inspiration in a way I could never have imagined. And when I turned back later to the picture I had so loved, the one of the Star-born standing in his tattered coat, I realized at once that the face I was looking at, near enough, was Shelley’s.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Ann Wroe 2018


About the contributor

Ann Wroe is the Obituaries writer of The Economist and the author of seven books, including Pilate, Being Shelley and, most recently, Six Facets of Light.

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