In Search of Unicorns

Did you ever yearn to live in a magical world? One where a unicorn is glimpsed in a wood, monkeys do housework and a big black cat takes messages, and where there is also, reliably, steak and kidney pie for lunch, honey for tea and cocoa for supper?

That’s how my sister and I spent one summer, lost in the comforting world of Elizabeth Goudge’s children’s books. We were quite young – maybe 13 and 9. Our parents were fighting all the time, screaming and sulking. Most summers we trailed round European cities following my father’s lectures at medical conferences, being plunged into high culture while all we longed for was to repeat our one holiday on a British beach. It was far otherwise in Goudge territory, twinkling with exquisitely English landscapes, cosy as a quilted sampler. Whether she is describing a young child climbing slippery rock steps from a sea cave or uncovering the glories of a tangled garden in Devon, she is one of the only modern prose writers to capture the spirit of the seventeenth- century mystic Thomas Traherne:

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things . . .

Like Traherne Goudge was an ardent Anglican. But although religion can be an oppressive presence in her adult novels, in her children’s books it manifests itself merely as a sense of embracing safety. One of her obituaries quoted Jane Austen’s famous line from Mansfield Park, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ Her fictional world is devoid of malice, which is why it was such balm to our childish spirits. Loyalty, kindness, affection, the wonder of nature, the smells of good, plain English cooking, a hot bath and clean clothes, the appealing personalities of pets: these are the things she celebrates. In Goudge’s children’s books, to use Louis MacNeice’s phrase, there is ‘sunlight on the garden’ and the equation always comes out. The Little White Horse – winner of the 1946 Carnegie Medal and one of J. K. Rowling’s favourites – is set in the mid-nineteenth century. Recently orphaned young Maria Merryweather and her governess Miss Heliotrope arrive at Moonacre Manor, a paradisal demesne hidden behind a rocky wall somewhere in the West Country and home to her cousin and guardian Sir Benjamin. He welcomes her with beaming benevolence, and his huge dog Wrolf (or is he a lion?) gives his approval. The castle is idyllic: books on the shelves, the neatest little tower room and a bed with lavender-scented linen for Maria, daffodils blooming in the sheep pasture, and steak and kidney pudding for dinner provided by the irascible but affectionate Marmaduke, Sir Benjamin’s diminutive cook and housekeeper. The little white horse, the emblem on the family crest, is seen only when all is right. But all is not right. Maria senses sorrow and anger over ancient quarrels. Even Miss Heliotrope has a sad past. When sinister men from the dark woods threaten the pastoral peace of the estate and try to kidnap Maria, the great lion-dog Wrolf races to her rescue. But what is the terrible hidden secret? Riding Wrolf and helped by the huge black cat Zachariah and a charming shepherd boy called Robin, Maria embarks on a dangerous quest to find a missing talisman ring. It is then that the little white horse – or is it a unicorn? – is glimpsed in a wood, a blessing on the quest. When ancient enemies are finally reconciled, and the ring restored to its owner, courage and honesty are still needed to right past wrongs and reunite Robin’s mother, Loveday Minette, the thoughtful provider of that lavender- scented linen, with Sir Benjamin, to whom, it turns out, she had once been engaged. They had fallen out over horticulture, but as Loveday now says: ‘Don’t waste hate on pink geraniums.’ The ending is suffused with happiness. Goudge’s own life was to my mind a sad one, though she, in her autobiography The Joy of Snow (1974), does not characterize it as such. Born in 1900, the only child of loving parents, she spent an idyllic childhood in the then isolated Somerset countryside around Wells and later at Ely in the Fens. She was sent away to school and then to art college in Reading. When her father became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, her mother’s ill health thrust the shy young woman into acting as her father’s hostess, which she found unbearably painful. She started to write, drawing on her stays with her mother’s much-loved Guernsey family for her adult novel Island Magic (1934). Her father was surprised – ‘What a lot you have done with a little,’ he commented. Crippling depressions plagued her, though she also enjoyed growing success, creating a series of novels based on Ely (the Torminster books) and on Guernsey (the Island books). The family evolved a modus vivendi, whereby mother and daughter spent summers in a small Hampshire cottage and endured winters in Oxford. When her adored but somewhat remote father died in 1939, mother and daughter found a new cottage in Devon. Here Goudge’s writing flourished. She wrote more than fifteen novels, plays and books of short stories, made many friends and enjoyed travelling. However, after eleven years of increasing illness, her mother died and she suffered a breakdown. Friends rallied round, found her a cottage in Oxfordshire and a young companion-housekeeper and gardener, with whom she shared the fun of owning dogs. Her religious faith was a lifeline as was this platonic relationship, which lasted for thirty years, until Goudge’s own death in 1984. Linnets and Valerians (also called The Runaways, 1964) was written in this final phase. It is one of the most perfect of Goudge’s books. While their military father is off serving the Empire in Egypt, the four Linnet children escape from their grandmother’s gloomy custody and run wild on the moors with their dog Absalom. But as night falls, their adventure seems less enticing. They chance on a pony and trap full of provisions parked outside an inn, scramble in, stuff themselves, and let the pony take them home to its master. He, it turns out, is none other than their uncle Ambrose, a humorous vicar with a strong sense of justice and an owl on his shoulder, who takes them in. And luckily, there are still sausages for supper. The story mixes just the right amount of mundane detail with a magical conundrum. Lady Alicia lives nearby, in a house with an overgrown garden, a housekeeping monkey named Abednego and a black servant called Moses. The house is a fascinating warren of rooms and relics of Lady Alicia’s husband, lost on an exploration in Egypt, and her son, mysteriously abducted. But there are strange tensions in the village which, it turns out, is under a nasty spell. We meet the poisonously sweet and witchlike shopkeeper Emma with her evil cat Frederick who can swell to panther size, and her ally, Tom Biddle, the menacing landlord of The Bulldog pub. And who is the mysterious hermit on Lion Tor? The children decide to set things right, with the help of the manservant Ezra and a wondrous colony of bees (not to mention extra helpings of ham and ginger biscuits). They are vividly drawn: sensible Nan, practical and wilful Robert, sensitive Timothy and sturdy baby Betsy – perhaps the siblings Goudge wished she had had. They go where they are not meant to go, on to high moors and into hidden rooms. One of the most touching episodes in the book is one in which the monkey Abednego snatches Betsy’s doll, Gertrude. Lady Alicia tells him to return it and he weeps. Betsy demands it back, but then hesitates. She thinks of her father saying goodbye to her, Lady Alicia mourning her lost son, and now the monkey’s grief.

Three times now this strange thing had touched her. She was well aware that her feeling for Gertrude was not this thing, but something far less admirable, and looking up into Abednego’s face she fought a battle inside herself with the thing that it was, a sort of grabbing thing, and then she held Gertrude out to him. ‘You have her,’ she said.

However, Betsy does not become a saint. She is a normal ‘not outstandingly unselfish child’. Goudge’s compassion for her characters is always rooted in this everyday realism. A wonderful double dénouement features both a detailed undoing of the instruments of black magic and nail-biting chases over moorland, alive with weather and tense with emotion. I’ll let you guess who the hermit turns out to be and who returns from Egypt. The heart-warming reunions which end the book are marked with cloudless skies. This world, where even the baddies turn out to be ‘quite nice’ and Frederick reverts to normal cat size, where only children can unknot the bizarre tangles caused by adult scheming, entranced my sister and me. We only had an old cocker spaniel, but we loved to imagine ourselves riding the lion-dog Wrolf triumphantly through orchards and meadows, as Maria does in The Little White Horse. We never confronted a witch, but we felt the justice of throwing books of spells and wax effigies pierced with pins into a cleansing fire, as in Linnets and Valerians. ‘As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that makes an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself,’ wrote Goudge. This message still speaks to me. Let’s stop hating each other over pink geraniums and enjoy sharing sausages for supper.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 60 © Victoria Neumark 2018