Where Past and Present Meet

Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) is one of the most enchanting children’s books ever written, set in the perfect time and place. The time is unspecified, but it would seem to be after the war, when trains still stopped at little stations like the one called Penny Soaky. It’s not long before Christmas and there will be snow. It is also a time when a little boy like Tolly, who is 7, can travel on a train to his unknown great-grandmother all by himself.

The place: who knows, but there are floods all around and when Tolly arrives, the taxi driver can only go so far before the waters cover the road, and an old man called Boggis comes to fetch Tolly in a rowing boat with a lantern on the end because it’s dark. Eventually they reach Green Knowe, a house now surrounded by water and which is the most wonderful house imaginable. It is where Tolly’s family have lived for generations and where he fits like a nut inside its shell. There is magic in the place; when he enters, he sees little wooden cherubs in the hall holding branches that miraculously sprout scented blossoms at the ends, even in winter. So we have the ideal scenario: an almost orphan boy (Tolly’s mother is dead and his father has remarried and lives in Burma) and a great-grandmother in a black velvet frock who recognizes him as one of the family and who is so bent by age that her face is almost on a level with his own. The story, then, meets the essential needs of a child: independence, security and a place of safety, home. Tolly’s right to be there is established at the start:

[He] hesitated, then asked in a very little voice because he hardly dared, ‘Is it my house – I mean, partly?’ ‘Of course it is – partly, as you say.’

She is the perfect grandmother (she doesn’t bother with the ‘great’, for what does one generation or so matter?), and in the tea on the tray in front of the fire ‘there were egg sandwiches and chicken sandwiches and iced orange cake and jelly and chocolate finger biscuits’. As for his room, it is at the very top of the house, its ceiling the shape of the roof, like a tent, with all the beams showing. (When it comes to perfect bedrooms in children’s literature, the nearest competitor is Maria’s in Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, which is also at the top of the house.) There is a rocking-horse here with a real horse-hair mane – not a safety one where your rocking is limited but one where you can rock as high as you please. There’s a mysterious locked painted chest and an empty birdcage and a doll’s house. And what a doll’s house:

‘Why, it’s this house!’ he said. ‘Look, here’s the Knight’s Hall and here’s the stairs, and here’s my room! Here’s the rocking- horse and here’s the red box, and here’s the tiny birdcage! But it’s got four beds in it. Are there sometimes other children here?’ Mrs Oldknow looked at him as if she would like to know everything about him before she answered. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘sometimes.’

And there we have the mystery and the promise of Green Knowe: that there are other children there. So the one longing of an only child, for someone to play with, will be satisfied. It’s only gradually that Tolly finds out about the children. There’s a portrait of them with their pretty mother. There are his grandmother’s stories about each of them in turn: how Toby, the eldest, went on a stormy night to fetch a doctor for his sick little sister, Linnet, and how he was saved from the floods by his beautiful horse, Feste; how Alexander sang in an empty church and was overheard by the King’s master of music who made him sing for the King; how Linnet saw the great figure of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child stride on Christmas Eve towards the church. And then there is a dark story, of how a gypsy, Black Ferdie, was caught in the act of stealing a horse: in revenge his mother, Old Petronella, put a curse on the family. Somehow the curse is linked to the other name of the house, Green Noah, and to the strange bush-figure in the garden that has no eyes. But it’s not just in the stories that Tolly encounters the children. Things come to life in the house: the little wooden mouse in his room squeaks and grows warm. The set of dominoes stand up in a row and then fall over, as if they’ve been pushed. When he opens Aesop’s Fables at Linnet’s favourite story of the lion in the ass’s skin, he feels a small pair of hands over his eyes. After the floods go down, he finds that Toby’s pet carp, a giant of a fish, is left gasping, and he and Boggis put it back in the lake. Then there is the sound of a children’s choir at the door, singing ‘Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day’. Once, he hears a lady’s voice in the next room singing to an unseen baby the old carol for Holy Innocents’ Day, ‘Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child’. And then, gradually, he does see the children, quite simply and easily, in the garden. They warn him about Green Noah. ‘He can’t hurt me,’ says Linnet. ‘I’m dead.’ No, but he can hurt Tolly. He is never sure when he will see the children. They are present but they cannot be pinned down. Tolly’s great hero is Toby, who has a sword, but his real obsession is Feste, Toby’s horse. He is much more elusive, though the sugar lumps Tolly leaves on his manger disappear. But the story is also about present things. The birds that come when he stands on the steps with his hands covered in margarine. The chaffinch that flies into Linnet’s cage and which finds a key in the floorboards. The birds that flock into Tolly’s room at night to take refuge from the freezing cold outside. The owls that come to the window but can’t get in. And the snow, which covers and transforms everything. The dark stories of the house will play out too. Tolly in his hubris taunts Green Noah. In a storm he goes outside and there is the sound of ‘dragging, of brushing and snapping twigs’. And he sees ‘in the middle of the lawn, where no tree should be – a tree shaped roughly like a stooping man’ from whom he cannot escape. In his terror he calls on little Linnet and she in turn calls on St Christopher. Past and present come together in that terrible moment. Past and present come together again when Tolly and his great- grandmother go to church at Christmas. There is no magic there, but when Tolly looks again, he finds a very different church and a very different congregation. He has a wonderful present for the children. And his own best present – well, one of two – is his heart’s desire. The charm of this book is enormously enhanced by the eight large illustrations by Peter Boston, Lucy Boston’s son. Done in pen and ink on white board, those dark, whole-page illustrations were drawn in negative, photographed and the negative then used for printing. Illustrations for later books in the series were done in scraperboard, but these first ones are haunting: that of St Christopher wading through the ford while the Christ Child sings on his shoulder magically gives the story substance. The Children of Green Knowe is a perfect pairing of author and illustrator, mother and son. If it resembles another children’s book it is perhaps John Masefield’s The Box of Delights which also begins with a boy on a train at the start of the Christmas holidays who finds himself a player in a great adventure. But the ending here is more satisfying. To mark its seventieth anniversary Faber, the original publisher, have recently issued a lovely new edition of the book in hardback, its green cover bearing an image in gold of Tolly and Boggis making for Green Knowe in the boat. If you haven’t yet read it, this is the edition to have.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Melanie McDonagh 2025