Spellbound

When I was 7, I was given The Tree that Sat Down and The Stream that Stood Still, published as companion volumes in an abridged edition and written by Beverley Nichols. Apart from a strange dedication on the flyleaf, there were no clues about the author, no dust-jacket with photograph and potted biography. As a result, for years I assumed that Beverley Nichols, like Evelyn Waugh, was a lady novelist, having seen their names beside those of Marie Corelli, Mary Webb, Clemence Dane and Lady Fortescue on the bookshelves of my grandmother and her contemporaries. This entirely plausible belief lasted until A levels, when Evelyn’s true identity was unmasked in a set text. Beverley too, I now knew, was also male and the author of archly titled books on houses and gardens. But that was all.

Evelyn Waugh’s books are now classics, but Beverley Nichols has largely faded from the collective literary memory, mentioned en passant in the obituaries of his few remaining contemporaries. Yet he was an extraordinary man, both of his time and outside it, a man of unconventional beliefs and, oh, so opinionated about the world at large. He was, as it turns out, a very Bright Young Thing (he wrote his autobiography at the age of 25), a jobbing journalist, fervently pacifist and against capital punishment, whose grandmother died laughing. He worshipped his mother and loathed his father, claiming in later life to have attempted patricide three times, with poison, a garden roller, and by exposure. It must have been a terrible burden, that early promise, but it gained him an entrée into the highest echelons of 1920s London Society. The ladies who took him up treated him like an indulged pet, and he was clearly fond of them after a fashion: apart from the food and dazzling company, they provided him with prodigious amounts of copy. After the Second World War he settled in the country to live a life of cosy domesticity, writing mostly non-fiction and advice columns for women’s magazines, tending his flowers and being ruled by his beloved cats; a fitting end perhaps for one who had led such a rackety early life, hobnobbing in England and America with the likes of Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, Merle Oberon and Gertrude Lawrence. His perspicacity, gaiety and wit shine through in his writing for children. He gives no quarter to the sensibilities of his young audience, which is probably why his writing appealed so much to me. There are animals, there is magic, and, most exciting of all, there is a far from traditional witch. The narrative voice was a revelation, snippy and subversive, a vinegary antidote to everything I had read up till then. Enid Blyton had been the acme of my literary experience, but The Tree that Sat Down offered none of the usual anthropomorphizing of soft toys and domestic animals. While Enid Blyton’s characters retained playground characteristics in their shrill exchanges, spitefulness and petty quarrels, Nichols’s wilder animals possessed distinctly adult human characteristics – vanity, snobbishness and mendacity of a far more sophisticated kind. The Tree that Sat Down is set in a gentle, idealized world with its Magic Wood, inhabited by a girl named Judy and her grandmother Mrs Judy, a white witch. They run a small shop under an enormous tree, and serve the animals they love a mixture of groceries and beauty products. Into this arcadia come a gangsterish boy, Sam, and his ancient grandfather Old Sam, who set up a rival concern. Sam epitomizes everything that is bad about the human race – he revels in exploitation, ugliness and greed, and holds the animals in contempt for their innocence and ignorance about an outside world where a ‘war against men’ is raging. Nichols offers many life lessons, the chief of which is that modernity cannot compete with old-fashioned virtues. He muses on the follies of mankind and the futility of war, on the evils of advertising and the indisputable fact that glamour seldom equals niceness. In one of his frequent digressions, he even brings in a sub-plot featuring a fallen angel. The Tree that Sat Down was first published in 1945. Never having cared much for abridged versions of anything, I visited the British Library recently to read it in full and was amply rewarded. It contains some beautiful, lyrical writing, excised from my edition, and some even more outré stuff. Beverley urges his readers to try out the spells he describes. He was, of course, writing when the epithet ‘witch’ was used admiringly, and it is fitting that the anti-heroine of his first book to feature her is the gorgeous if wicked Miss Smith, surely an amalgam of those society and show-business ladies. ‘Human or animal?’ enquires one character. ‘A bit of both I guess. What about a witch?’ is the reply. Well, quite. And thus Miss Smith is introduced, a vampish figure, in the mould of such tough Hollywood stars as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. One of the funniest scenes in the book is that of Miss Smith’s transformation from 300-year-old hag to blonde babe, secretly observed by Sam. The detail is priceless – wig, teeth, clothes pegs to lift the wrinkles, powder and paint, such information clearly gleaned from Beverley’s personal experience of the toilettes of his female mentors. Unlike those ladies, the witch’s fellow conspirators are three extremely poisonous toads with inappropriate Biblical names, who double as an a capella trio – ‘made for Hollywood’ – and live for the most part in Miss Smith’s handbag. They are an antidote to the sometimes unbearable goodness of Judy and Mrs Judy, although the latter prevents things from becoming too mawkish with some excellent elderly-lady put-downs. Mrs Judy also writes a book of magic, with a list in the front of it of her other works. Who could not enjoy the following dialogue?

‘Have you really written all these books?’ cried Judy. ‘Not exactly,’ replied Mrs Judy. ‘But it looks well. All the best authors do it.’ ‘But supposing somebody asked to see them?’ ‘I should say they were out of print. All the best books are.’

Despite their ceaseless efforts to eliminate their rivals, Sam and Miss Smith (who turns out to be pretty incompetent) eventually fail, but they escape the wrath of the animals. Interestingly, they escape proper punishment too, after a fashion. And of course Judy finds her Prince, disguised until the dénouement as in all the best fairytales, and there is a happy ending – a wedding, and a palace full of the latest labour-saving devices. Miss Smith also appears in the sequel, The Stream that Stood Still, and two more books after that, though in the third, The Mountain of Magic, her inventor seemed to have tired of his creation, as he eventually tired of trying to kill his father. She returns to form, however, with an upgrade from Hampstead Garden Suburb to a residence in Mayfair, in The Wickedest Witch in the World, written in 1971, and this book I heartily recommend, if only for the marvellous double act of herself and a rival witch named Miss Jones. However, now that the contours of my face are starting to melt, it is the first book in the series that I return to most, to reacquaint myself with Miss Smith’s transformation and with some of those spells. Have I tried any of them out? You bet.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Sarah Crowden 2010