Journeying to Green Knowe

A little boy was sitting in the corner of a railway carriage looking out at the rain, which was splashing against the windows and blotching downward in an ugly, dirty way.  He was not the only person in the carriage, but the others were strangers to him.  He was alone, as usual.

-Lucy M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe

Lucy M. Boston's magical Children of Green Knowe is one of my life treasures I owe to my mother.  She had selected it from the collection of books on tape (yes, cassette tape) from the children's section of our library one year, for our annual Christmas drive to Dallas, and I was thoroughly unimpressed with the blurb on the back.  I wanted to listen to something else.  But, as ever, as we started our drive, I fell almost immediately asleep. I assume she snuck in the first tape while I was drooling into the window, and I woke to find myself begrudgingly entranced.  After that first listen, "The Children of Green Knowe, by Lucy M. Boston, read by William Franklin," became a staple for our Christmas drive, until one year, probably due to the impermanence of cassette tapes, the familiar blue box disappeared from the library shelf.  I was despondent.  When Green Knowe returned to the library, it was an edition with a different reader, which simply did not work.  I don't know where my mother finally found a copy of the coveted original, but it turned up under the tree one year and to this day sits in a treasured place on my shelf.  Thanks to the aid of a work friend in college, I was able to convert those tapes to digital, and now Green Knowe is always with me on my phone, and backed up on my computer, and in the cloud, and on two different memory sticks.  Yes, I do indeed have two copies of the book itself (and its sequels), but not even I can read it like William Franklin. And sometimes, when the outside world seems like it is careening out of control, there is something reassuring about having a well-loved voice read you a well-loved story.

Part of the magic of Green Knowe is that it is a real place.  The Manor at Hemingford Grey has been lived in continuously since it was built in the 1130s.  Lucy Boston acquired the home during the Second World War, and it was the house and grounds which inspired her beloved series of children's books.  Her daughter-in-law, Diana, lives there still and offers tours to the literary pilgrim on appointment.  My first term at Oxford, I discovered this possibility and immediately went about securing an appointment for myself.

Tolly (the little boy sitting in the corner of the railway carriage at the beginning of the book) comes to Green Knowe for the first time through rain and flood, a diplomatic orphan journeying to an ancestral home he has never seen and a great-grandmother he has never met.  The sun was shining the day I took the train to Green Knowe, though the disparate weather certainly didn't dampen my excitement.  First of all, I love trains, and then of course there was the joy of listening to one of my favorite stories while literally following along the same route in my physical world.  The train in the book stops at the fictional station of Penny Soaky.  In real life I stopped at Huntingdon, but, like Tolly, took a cab from the station. Unlike Tolly, who, due to the flood, catches his first glimpse of the house by lantern light from the prow of a rowing boat, my cab took me all the way to the Manor, and dropped me off in the full light of afternoon.

The house and grounds are not (how could they be) exactly as I had been dreaming them, but they are festooned with so many of the details of the books, that one cannot help being carried away.  I arrived early enough to enjoy a walk through the gardens before the couple of other visitors arrived, and Diana welcomed us inside, through the very door Tolly would have used, into the strange entrance hall full of the "big old mirrors all reflecting each other," and the "welcoming angels" with their bird-nest hats, and even the board from the stables with the "funny writing" on it that spells out the name of Tolly's magical ghost horse, Feste.

From the entrance hall, we followed Diana "up winding stairs" to a small room where we viewed a gathering of Lucy Boston's hand-made quilts, and then again up "through a high, arched room like a knights' hall, that she called the Music Room."  It was here, during the war, that Lucy would gather the town to listen to BBC radio broadcasts or music.  I can imagine few cozier places to spend a wartime Christmas.

And from the Music Room "on up more stairs to the very top of the house." Here was really what I had come to see.  Tolly's childhood room from my own childhood dreams.  A room I had so often inhabited in my imagination, and which I had countless times drawn and even, one summer, daringly tried to recreate as a cardboard miniature on my grandmother's living room floor.

I caught my breath as Diana swung open the door to reveal the "room under the roof, with a ceiling the shape of the roof and all the beams showing.  It was a long room with a triangle of wall at each end and no walls at the sides, because the sloping ceiling came down to the floor, like a tent.  There were windows on three sides, and a little low wooden bed in the middle covered with a patchwork quilt, as unlike a school bed as anything could be.  There was a low table, a chest of drawers and lots of smooth, polished, empty floor.  At one side there was a beautiful old rocking horse - not a 'safetey' rocking horse hanging on iron swings from a centre shaft, but a horse whose legs were stretched to full gallup, fixed to long rockers so that it could, if you rode it violently, both rear and kick.  On the other side was a doll's house.  By the bed was a wooden box painted vermillion with bright patterns all over it . . ."

There it all was, and there too, when Diana opened the painted box, were Toby's sword and Alexander's flute!  And best, oh best of all, Toby's Japanese mouse.  Diana smiled as she passed him around, telling us that he was her favorite part too, as she had watched so many guests, coming on pilgrimage from the world over, as their eyes filled with tears to see this tiny token in this little attic bedroom.  Oh how the stories of our childhood shape and stay with us!  I found a model of that same little mouse on sale in Diana's gift shop, and to this day he sits lovingly on my own bedside table.

The tour wound to an end back downstairs in the room where Tolly meets his great-grandmother, Mrs. Oldknowe, for the first time.  There, opposite the fire where Mrs. Oldknowe tells Tolly the many stories of the house, on a table facing the window that looks out into the garden, sat the original hand-written manuscript of the first book.  Dear fellow readers, tell me that you too could not help but to let your eyes fill with tears of joy at a moment like that.  To stand in the room, at the very table, and see the words on the page that first accepted them surrounded by the walls that inspired them.  That small moment remains one of the most magical of all my travels.

Several years after this pilgrimage, I was working as an assistant stage-manager on a particularly un-challenging production, and so had ample time to read backstage.  I took that opportunity to read, for the first time, the several sequels Boston had written about the magic in her Hemingford Grey home.  Even though the characters change from book to book, and my beloved Tolly and Mrs. Oldknowe are sometimes absent, I found myself again carried away by the simple, joyful magic of Lucy Boston's imagination.  Like Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and like Harry Potter, here are children's books fit for every age.  Any great work will speak to you in different ways on different readings at different times in your life, but the very best are the ones that can reawaken that childlike sense of awe and magic.

So in a reflective mood on a hot summer afternoon, I invite you to visit Green Knowe for the first time or again, by page or in person.  Or at least take advantage of this languid season to revisit one of the stories that shaped your own childhood.