Timescape at Hemingford Grey: Lucy Boston's Centenary

A centenary suggests historical distance: lives that began a hundred years ago are usually some years ended, and a retrospective salute is a celebration of the past. But Lucy Boston, in this way as in others, breaks the rules. The interaction of past and present, the paramount theme of all but two of her major children's stories, is in her case a matter not only of imagination but of biography.

Lucy Boston was born in 1892, which means that many of the most venerated children's classics were published in her lifetime. The author of A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), in my view the finest modern children's book to explore the tense and tragic relationship between human beings and the rest of the animal world, was two years old when its nineteenth-century ancestor, The Jungle Book (1894), was published. The author of The Children of Green Knowe (1954), that celebration of what Penelope Lively terms "the presence of the past," was fourteen when Kipling's version of the same theme, Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), appeared.

I do not suggest that Kipling directly influenced Lucy Boston. (It is hard to imagine her being directly influenced by anybody.) But important similarities of theme and method between the two writers illuminate both Boston's Victorian origins and the modernity of her response to twentieth-century experience. Comparing The Jungle Book with A Stranger at Green Knowe, we find the same potentially tragic ambiguity of status in a solitary boy, who is briefly adopted into the animal world but is finally divorced from it by virtue of his humanness. But the biological vision in Boston's novel is notably more somber and pessimistic than Kipling's. Comparing Puck of Pook's Hill with The Children of Green Knowe, we see that the two writers share an awareness of historical immanence, an acute sense of house or landscape as the store of a living past that can be summoned by the magic of intuitive memory. But in Kipling's book there is a deep security of permanence, which in the Green Knowe series gradually fades from view beneath the threat and pressure of recent history.

Puck of Pook's Hill is relevant to the study of Boston, because The Children of Green Knowe shares with it not only a theme but a narrative method. In Kipling's book two children, Dan and Una (modeled on Kipling's own children, John and Elsie), are acting out scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream on their father's farm when they inadvertently call up the true figure of Puck, an immortal fairy presence in the landscape. Puck introduces them to a series of historical figures, standing for various periods in the past of this one place, and stories are told of their lives and times. The structure is episodic and awkward. Technically it is an uncertain blend of oral storytelling—linked short stories at bedtimes—with the continuity of an extended fiction. But as a loving evocation of a place, peopled over long centuries of habitation, the book is richly imagined. Kipling wrote it when he settled at his house, Bateman's, in Sussex, after years of traveling, and his biographer Charles Carrington notes: "Striking his roots into Sussex, Rudyard now explored the dimension of time as, in his travelling days, he had explored the dimension of space. His old inquiry: 'What should they know of England who only England know?' was taking a new direction. What can they know of present-day England who do not feel its continuity with England's past?" (379).

The similarities with Boston are striking. Both writers produce what might be called timescapes. Both did so having found a much-loved permanent dwelling after years of travel or expatriate living. Both depicted child characters based on their own children. Although Peter Boston grew up long before the Green Knowe series was begun and became its distinguished illustrator, Tolly is Peter as a child. And both authors opted for a "Chinese boxes" technique of inset narratives, which allowed for episodic storytelling. Great...