Puck of Pook's Hill

Patterns in a life become clearer in retrospect, as the shape of a landscape reveals itself with a longer perspective. Each of my historical projects, such as they are, seemed at the time to begin with a chance encounter, something glimpsed by accident: a portrait reproduced, a scene from a film, a paragraph in a book browsed at random. It was like walking along a path in the countryside with views all round, when across the path in front darted some unidentified creature, coming from the unknown, vanishing into the unknown, intent on its own purposes; and something about it made me say to myself: I have to know more about that. I didn't ask at the time why this particular sighting and not another should have been so compelling. It is only now, by a process of accumulation, that I can begin to see the common factor and can trace, if not the reasons, at least the first occurrence.

This was when I was given for the Christmas that coincided with my tenth birthday a copy of Rudyard Kipling's collection of children's stories, Puck of Pook's Hill.

In his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling tells how in 1902 he acquired Bateman's, a seventeenth-century ironmaster's house, and its estate of thirty-odd acres in the valley of the Dudwell near Burwash in the weald of Sussex. Still only in his thirties, he had already achieved fame and prosperity as a writer, but he had never until that time settled in England. Now, with his American wife and two surviving children, John and Elsie, he set about writing himself into the landscape that was to be his home for the rest of his life, by uncovering and then elaborating its history.

He found himself, as he says, overwhelmed with material: the sinking of a well-shaft brought to light a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a Cromwellian spoon and finally some fragments of bronze Roman horse furniture; the scouring of an old pond produced Elizabethan pottery, 'all pearly with the patina of centuries', while 'its deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge'. Just beyond his western boundary, in a little valley 'running from Nowhere to Nothing-at-all', were the remains of an old forge dating back to Roman times, from which 'the ghost of a road', known locally as the Gunway and popularly connected with the defeat of the Armada, crossed his fields. On the brook, where the Kipling children had their own small boat, there had been a mill from time immemorial and in the water-meadows there was an

Fig. 1.

Una explains Dan's catapult to Parnesius, illustration by Harold Robert Millar for 'A Centurion of the Thirtieth', in Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906.

old fairy ring. Thus, Kipling says, 'the Old Things of our Valley glided into every aspect of our outdoor works. Earth, Air, Water and People had been, I saw it at last, in full conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or reached our Valley'.

During their first summer at Bateman's the Kipling children acted for their parents out of doors a shortened version of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', and this gave him his starting-point. He cast his history as a series of stories centred on two children, Dan and Una, of the same age and in the same circumstances as his own. By rehearsing their play three times over on midsummer eve on the natural stage of the fairy-ring they contrive to conjure up Puck, the one fairy left in England and the spirit of their countryside, and through him they encounter certain historical figures connected with it, who tell them stories of its past.

In the first, told by Puck himself, they learn about Weland, a Norse god come down in the world, who...