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Wells, Birth Place of Elizabeth Goudge

Visiting a City of Bells

Written By Susan Lee Hauser (2019)

The train swung round a bend, the blue hills parted like a curtain and the city of Torminster was visible. . . . It seemed a buried city sunk at the bottom of the sea, where no life stirred and no sound was heard but the ringing of bells as the tide surged through forgotten towers and steeples. . . . and out of this sea rose a gray rock with three towers. . . The Cathedral. Chapt. I, ii

In July 2019 I re-visited the most beautiful cathedral city in England, Wells in Somerset, and soon after re-visited A City of Bells, Elizabeth Goudge’s loving tribute to Wells. I was delighted to recognize so much of what I saw and experienced in Wells reflected in her book. Goudge was born and spent her childhood in Wells and wrote Bells in 1935—one of her first books. Come on a tour with me and Miss Goudge!

by Barry Lewis – Picture Postcard Pretty- Wells CC

The water, that welled up no one knew how far down in the earth, was always inky black. . . . There were always pigeons wheeling round the holy well, the reflection of their wings passing over it like light. Chapt. I, iii

The most famous thing about Wells—and the origin of its name—is its ancient springs, which still flow around the Bishop’s Palace and right down the High Street through the market place. (Note that in this novel Miss Goudge has renamed the city “Torminster.”

Although the first church in the area was built in Saxon days (705 AD), there is some evidence that it was a holy place both for early British tribes and, later, for the Romans. The foundations of the Saxon church can be found today in the cemetery inside the cloister. The present cathedral was built from 1175 (under leadership of a Bishop Jocelin!) to the late 1400s, the first entirely Gothic-style cathedral in England.

The water from the wells is abundant around the city center. It flows in the gardens and moat of the Bishop’s Palace; it is home to fish and ducks, dragonflies and swans. (See below for more about the swans!) There is an actual well—Goudge’s “holy well,” above—that has stood in the market place for centuries. In the center of the photograph above you can see the well’s stone cover, and the channel to the right of the street runs with well water.

Between the tall Green Dragon and the equally tall bakery two doors off was wedged a little house only two stories high. . . . There were two gables, with a small window in each . . . and [a] large bow-window was to the right of the door and a smaller one to the left. Chapt. I, iii

The mystery house at the center of “The City of Bells” is still there on the high street at the market. (Both these photos, courtesy Robin McDowell Willis, 2018) The house is now a restaurant on the ground level; it is said that William Penn once spoke from the double windows. The name “Green Dragon” that Miss Goudge gives the tavern may have come from the fellow above, who can be found inside the Bishop’s Palace (see below).

Twice a week the market is full of vendors and shoppers for everything from books to delicious local cheeses or handmade jewelry to crocheted scarves or homemade sausage. But Wells is a busy city any day of the week. Tour buses now come barreling through “downtown” in a reverse of much of the same route Jocelyn took by foot in “Bells”: They completed the circuit of the Market Place and turned to their right up a steep street at a smart pace. Then they turned to their right a second time and passed under a stone archway into the Close. Instantly it seemed that they had come to the very center of peace. Chapt. I, iii

That ”steep street” is Sadler Street, and at its corner with the marketplace there is a pastry shop, much like the sweet shop Goudge often mentions. The “archway” of which Goudge writes is one of the old city gates, Brown’s Gate or The Dean’s Eye (1451). Incidentally, our apartment at 7A Cathedral Green—an apartment you may rent from Rural Retreats—was just two doors down from the gatehouse and several doors up from the Deanery, which is discussed below.

As for “the very center of peace,” that is the cathedral close, or green. It is a huge grassy area, sprinkled with starry daisy-like flowers and buttercups (are they in the aster family, dear reader?). The close may sometimes be the center of peace, but it was the center of football games, picnics, and play rehearsals while we were there (the city was conducting a theatre festival that weekend, with a local production of “As You Like It” set directly in front of the west doors of the cathedral.)

Jocelyn . . . looked across a space of green grass . . . to the . . . mass of the Cathedral. Its towers rose four-square against the sky and the wide expanse of the west front, rising like a precipice, was crowded with sculptured figures. They stood in their ranks, rising higher and higher, kings and queens and saints and angels, remote and still. Chapt. I, iii

Only the carved figures on the west front were still, those kings and queens and saints and angels who had faced a thousand such days and would face a thousand more. Chapt. II, iv

While Goudge describes the cathedral as being made of grey stone, Wells Cathedral is actually a honey color, made of local limestone. The entire western front is covered with some 300 statues, as Goudge says, of “kings and queens and saints and angels.” A good guidebook will help you figure out who’s who, but many of the statues are unrecognizable, having been destroyed in 1685’s Monmouth Rebellion. A handful have been restored recently, due to their actually crumbling. Interestingly, the front was originally painted with bright primary colors (as was much of the interior)!

In the photo above, you can see the audience and cast of “As You Like It,” which was performed on the front terrace that weekend. Inside the cathedral, I saw a new play about Jane Austin, “Austen Sisters,” written by and starring Susannah Harker and her sister Nelly. (Harker played Jane Bennett in the 1995 “Pride and Prejudice.”) It was fabulous!

My favorite carvings on the cathedral are the two seraphim flanking Christ triumphant at the top of the west front. They look like singing sunflowers, fresh from the set of “The Wizard of Oz”! (The bible describes seraphim as having six wings; quite often in art even up in the eighteenth century seraphim are depicted literally with six wings, but with no arms or legs!) Goudge’s favorite carving, as described by Henrietta in Bells, was the infant Christ over the west door:

Henrietta . . . was in too much of a hurry to look up at the carved baby over the west door, as she usually did, always hoping that he would jump and crow in his mother’s arms at the sound of the bell. . . . ‘I do wish He’d laugh,’ said Henrietta, looking up at the Christ Child. ‘If I could I’d pinch his toes and then I’m sure He’d laugh.’ ‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Hugh Anthony. ‘He’s only stone. Come on. Run.’ Chapt. II, iv

To his left, on the opposite side of the road to the Cathedral, was another smaller mass of gray masonry, the Deanery, and in front of him was a second archway. Once through it they were in a discreet road bordered on each side with gracious old houses standing back in walled gardens. Here dwelt the Canons of the Cathedral with their respective wives and families. Chapt. I, iii

The Deanery (photo above, left) is the former home of the Dean of the Cathedral, a magnificent 800-year-old mansion with its own Tudor garden out back. It is on the market for the first time, and rumors are that it may become an art gallery or a hotel. The photo on the right is of the Vicars’ Close, the oldest medieval residential street in Europe (1348). Built for cathedral clergymen, it now houses members of the choir and their families. I once had the good fortune to stay in the house in the far left back corner!

When she got to the Cathedral she turned to her left on to the Green by the west front, for it was possible for pedestrians to get from the Green to the Market Place through a little tunnel that bored through one of the houses. Chapt. II, iv

This “little tunnel” is another bit of medieval construction, known as the “Penniless Porch.” While it was a spot for beggars in earlier centuries, today one may frequently find a street musician playing and hoping for a bit of change. To the right through the opening is, as Goudge describes, the market place.

The interior of Wells Cathedral is nothing short of breathtaking. It beggars belief that the cathedral’s towering pillars and windows were built before the invention of hydraulic lifts and machinery. Some scholars credit the cathedral as being the first completely Gothic cathedral in Europe; certainly there are no Romanesque elements to be found anywhere, as there are in most medieval cathedrals. While the vaulting at the top of each pillar is spectacular, the other feature unique to Wells is the scissor arches at the crossing on all four sides. Absent from the original structure, the arches were added in the mid-14^th century to bolster the building after the structure began to sink under its own weight.

From where they stood at the west door it stretched away from their feet into the shadows in the distance so that they could not see where it ended. Great pillars stood in ordered ranks all the way up the nave, so tall that it gave one a crick in the neck to look up to the place where their straightness curved into lovely dim arching shapes that went up and up into the roof and criss-crossed high over your head like the branches of trees in a forest. Chapt. II, iv

Today you can tour the “higher parts” of the cathedral. During the tour you can observe the inner workings of the clock (see below), visit the masons’ drafting room, see a real stencil for the ceiling in the nave, sing through the singing holes in the western front (for the choir in the procession of psalms on Psalm Sunday); and enjoy some spectacular views in and outside the cathedral. This tour is relatively new and well worth the price and the stairs climbed!

Then they . . . planted themselves in front of the clock on the north wall of the Cathedral to watch it strike nine. . . . It was a wonderful clock. A great bell hung between the life-size figures of two gentlemen sitting down. They had bushy hair and square caps on their heads, and held sticks in their hands, and for most of the day they sat perfectly still gazing at each other with every appearance of acute boredom. But at each hour they suddenly came to agitated life and made savage onslaughts on the bell. They struck it with their sticks and kicked it with their feet and made a great deal of noise indeed. Chapt. III, i

Interior clock face with jousting figures

The cathedral clock is a marvel. The interior clock face is the oldest in Europe, and it tells the months, days, and the phases of the moon. Above the face three men on horseback rotate in a circle, with one poor fellow constantly being knocked back on his horse and popping up again at every rotation. This performance draws quite a crowd every hour, on the hour!

Another hourly ritual at the cathedral is pausing for prayer. Led by different members of the clergy, visitors are asked to stop whatever they are doing to provide silence for the prayers that are then offered, reminding all present that the magnificent building monuments and carvings were built and are maintained for the glory of God. If you are lucky, you may also hear the organist or choir members rehearsing in the space. At 4:30, vergers rope off the eastern end of the cathedral to prepare for evensong (to which everyone is invited). If you have never been to evensong, do not miss this beautiful and ancient ceremony!

At the far end of the Market Place yet another of the archways in which Torminster abounded led to the great trees and green grass that surrounded the moated Bishop’s Palace. . . . Gray, battlemented walls, with loopholes for arrows, surrounded it and its gardens, completely hiding them from sight, and a wide moat, brimful of water, surrounded the walls. Chapt. VI, iv

The foremost swan turned gracefully towards her . . . and then turning from her with beautiful contempt he pulled with his beak the bell-rope that hung from the Palace wall. He rang it once, imperiously . . . and instantly a human menial showered bread from a window. Chapt. VI, iv

The swans of Bishop’s Palace have been a fixture for centuries. Apparently, Miss Goudge had some less than pleasant encounters with the swans as a child (see quote above), but most visitors are charmed by them. Now and again the swans fly away, but they are soon replaced and newcomers are trained to ring the bell for food as did their predecessors. It is certainly one of the most photogenic spots in a very photogenic city! There are a café and gift shop adjacent to the moat where one can watch the swans and have tea before visiting the spectacular palace ruins and gardens.

Fewer lovelier rooms were to be met with at this time in England than the gallery of the Bishop’s Palace at Torminster. It stretched the whole length of one wing of the Palace. . . . From the walls of the gallery the former Bishops of Torminster looked down upon it from their portraits. Chapt. IX, ii

The bulk of the Bishop’s Palace was destroyed after the dissolution of the monasteries, but its ruins are still quite impressive. The portion of the palace described by Goudge—the gallery, stairwell, chapel, and some drawing rooms—remains for visitors. As you can see, the palace is still decorated for Christmas, recalling the party for the choirboys in City of Bells:

The polished floor shone like dark water.. . . At each end of the gallery a log-fire was blazing, its glow reflected on floor and walls, and in the center was a Christmas-tree, its top reaching to the ceiling and its branches laden with twinkling candles and presents done up in colored paper. Chapt. IX, ii

For fans of Elizabeth Goudge, no trip to Wells would be complete without paying homage to the house where she spent most of her childhood, a house affectionately called “the Rib.” Goudge was born elsewhere, the nearby but difficult to see “Tower House, but moved to this second location the age of three. The Rib can be found adjacent to both the eastern end of the cathedral and the Vicar’s Close. It is still a private home.

It is easy to fill a week or more with a visit to Wells. One can easily spend a couple days touring the cathedral—its carvings and stained glass, its high parts and outside carvings. There is a self-guided walking tour of the city, plenty of shopping (the cathedral also has a fine gift shop), several wonderful restaurants, a museum of the city and the surrounding area (including archaeological finds, as well as native flora and fauna), and nearby caverns and caves.

He saw this pattern now as a series of lovely things hung one behind the other like great curtains closest to him was the life of men with the moving figures of those he must love, an old man and a little girl and a husband and wife whose generosity would make their home his. Then came the city of bells and towers, then the blue hills behind it, then the sky that was now to him a rich o’erhanging firmament. And behind that? He was no imaginative child and his vision of wings and crowns was not as clear as Henrietta’s, but behind the things that are seen he was aware now of the things that are not seen and in his new-made pattern they were the warp.” Chapt. XIV, vii

For more information on Elizabeth Goudge, see this link, https://www.elizabethgoudge.org/index.php/a-short-biography/

All photos by Susan Lee Hauser (2019), unless otherwise noted.

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02 Oct

A Torminster Tale

Wells Somerset, a perfect late summer morning. A dark dogs leg of an arch and we enter the circle of The Green, lined with its gracious houses and the back of The Swann Inn, the very one from which the pumpkin shaped coach left to pick up travellers from the train station when Elizabeth lived here. The grass, velvet in the shadows, gardens hung with their late season’s colours and a few people wandering or going purposefully about their business.

We had come to find Tower House, where Elizabeth had been born and where is lived out the first few years of her life. We knew, thanks to Sylvia Gower approximately whereabouts it was, but I thought I would ask at the local museum anyway. After a little investigation with the help of Google, the curator told me she thought it was in St Andrews Rd and gave me directions, it wasn’t far.

We passed mullioned windows where the notes of practising musicians fell over the pavements, an older melodious sound in contrast to the modern noise of traffic. Tall stone walls and mature trees seemed to hide the most likely candidate. But although there were doors in the wall, there was no indication of a name or anything to confirm our belief. Along one side of the garden wall the ground was raised and we tried from here to glimpse a view, to gain some clue as to what lay behind its defences, but no luck. We crossed the road and mounted the step to a Music college, balancing precariously, but still trees blocked a view. We walked back around the perimeter, and I picked up a chestnut from amongst the debris fallen from what we really thought was Elizabeth’s garden. She was fond of redheads, and the poll of the cob in my hand was a small consolation.

My partner, however, was a little more pro-active and tried the green door in the wall as we passed. I think we were both a little surprised when the handle turned and the door opened to his touch. There could be no doubt, we had found Tower House, easily recognisable from George’s black and white photo. Nick quickly snapped a few shots and we were just about to close the door and quietly leave when the most Goudgian moment occurred.

A woman was walking towards us burdened with bags of shopping and I knew from her expression and the route she was taking that she was the owner and resident of the house. I stepped forward and asked her if she was indeed the person who lived here, and if this was Tower house, the Tower House that Elizabeth Goudge had been born in? At the mention of Elizabeth’s name she smiled and assured us we did indeed have the right house and then invited us in for a better look!

After putting her shopping away she introduced herself as Pam. She told us she had lived here for many years and had got a little wary of tourists. I told her about the website and she confessed that “she didn’t do them” but seemed pleased and interested that we had met so fortuitously.

She asked us if we would like to see something rather special, indeed something unique to the place we were in. We were as intrigued as she intended us to be and followed her, without turning round as she also requested. We walked through the walled garden, past herbaceous beds and through an orchard which would have delighted the young Elizabeth, tawny grass with the dew still on and caught leaves dealing out splashes of colour. It was quiet, the sound of traffic muted by the high old walls, covered with climbers.

As we drew closer to the wall we had tried so hard to see over, she asked us to turn around and look.

Wells Somerset

It was a view that only those who lived there would be able to see. The towers of the cathedral rising over the walls and greeting the tower of her home across the city streets. A ripple of roofs, a mountain side of carved stone and pinnacles, trees from other gardens. The view that Hugh Anthony and Henrietta would have seen from their bedroom window, the view that had shaped Elizabeth’s early world.

Pam had also met Kate Lindeman from the states and had shown her a rosemary tree such as Elizabeth had written about, growing to “the height of Our Lord while he was alive on earth.” My partner snapped away while we spoke and then we took our leave, speechless at our luck. If we hadn’t persisted and hung about, if we hadn’t had the courage to try the door, to “walk into the painting” we would not have been in the right place at the right time to have gained access to a place so connected with Elizabeth, which had helped to shape the person she became.

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02 Aug

The Enchanted Kingdom

Hello Deborah,

I want to thank you for doing this website and having an Elizabeth Goudge Society [how does one join?]. At this time of year, coming up to Christmas, I often re-read either The Herb of Grace or The Dean’s Watch or one of her children’s books for the amazing descriptions of wonderful Christmases in England.

I started reading her books when I was about ten years old, living in New Jersey and getting them from the library and they became the enchanted kingdom I disappeared into when my own life was too difficult [my mother was ill and alcoholic and times could be rough]. I read the adult books because the library didn’t have any of her children’s books.

Many years later, an animal lover and intrepid about wild animals, I took a break from being a research librarian and went to work with seals and sea lions in a free-release setting in Key West Florida. Here I won the trust of an abused sea lion by singing to her because I remembered this being described in The Child From the Sea. And it worked — this 300 pound beast crawled into my lap. The only problem was that every time I stopped singing she growled at me. I must have sung every show tune I knew for hours.

Elizabeth Goudge’s books, along with the Mary Poppins books, Wind in the Willows and everything by Rumer Godden, were all instrumental in my decision to up sticks from the USA and move to England. I lived in Devon for 20 years [1986 to 2006] in a thatched cottage and made a lovely garden. Here too I found ultimately almost all of EG’s books in wonderful second-hand bookshops [mostly in Ashburton] and off Amazon. And I found Providence Cottage in Marldon, still called that, and whoever they were they had corgis, which I think Elizabeth might have enjoyed.

Of course I spent time in the New Forest and Buckler’s Hard and imagined that a small lane south of the Hard going down to the River Beaulieu would lead to the Herb of Grace. [That’s still my favourite book of all.] I also visited Ely [but I think that the cathedral she describes in The Dean’s Watch seems to be the cathedral in Lincoln] and Wells [where I had my first collision with nettles – ouch! — while I was standing on a fallen log to peer over the high stone wall at the back of the choir master’s house, which I thought must be the place were she was born].

And like Elizabeth I started having spiritual and ghostly experiences in England, which had never happened to me in the United States. All positive I’m glad to say, or at least not fearful. I always had an open mind in that regard, and rather hoped such things existed, but never expected to experience them. It is most amazing and lovely and helps me to live more fully and trustingly.

I’m happy to say that I was pretty much born an Anglophile, and living in England suited me entirely, even though for various reasons I retired to France in 2006, where I have again made a garden and continue read Elizabeth Goudge.

Thanks again for the lovely website, I am going to enjoy reading the various postings on Goudge Talk [and you are welcome to post this if you would like to].

Now that I’ve been thinking about it, there are so many areas of my real life that have been influenced by Elizabeth Goudge. Reading the Scent of Water [and later the Joy of the Snow] I grew to want my own four-poster bed [and found out that she never did have one, but gave it instead to Mary in Scent of Water] and a green carpet with roses and ribbons. Here’s a picture of my bedroom in my thatched cottage, with four-poster [only a flat-pack pine, but an artist friend painted it for me] and you can see a bit of the carpet too].

The scene on the end of the bed shows my unicorn [I’ve always had a unicorn] and, in one of those strange things that keep happening to me, it prophesied the area I would later move to in France — not too far from where I live are the wonderful ruins of Crozant Castle built on a rocky promontory where the river curves and it looks very much like the imaginary scene on my bed. I have two prophetic paintings — the other was made for me by a friend in NYC many years ago that was supposed to be of my Manhattan street and the brownstone I lived in, but as he said “the sea and the fields kept bursting in and I couldn’t stop them” and indeed between the NY brownstones you can see the sea, and pouring out between them is a patchwork of fields. I should say I had no notion then of ever moving to England, and in fact, didn’t really know Devon existed [I’d read EG’s books set there, but the county didn’t really register in my mind]. But ten years later when I moved to Devon, England, I found exactly those fields, the red earth of that red sandstone area of Devon and the patchwork of colours of the different crops.

warm regards Nancy Wolff

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28 Jul

City of Bells

When Elizabeth embarked on this book, Britain was a place on the edge of darkness. War was bubbling under the surface of an old establishment Britain. The government announced that it would triple the size of the R. A. F. The first steel rolled out of the Corby mills and Britain protested on an international level over Germany’s introduction of conscription.

It was a country of new ideas and a change in government, Stanley Baldwin was elected as the head of a national government, still led by the Conservatives but with a reduced majority, and Clement Atley became the leader of the Labour party. Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated the use of radar, an invention that would play a large part in the War to come,

We have no way of knowing how much of this Elizabeth assimilated, although her father Henry must have been a socialist at heart, with his liberal values and interest in the conditions of the working man.

But in the face of change Elizabeth did what she always did and retreated into an unthreatening past. She set her new novel in the small city of Wells in Somerset amid the blue Mendip hills during the opening of the Edwardian age. It was the same era that Elizabeth had grown up in, passing her formative years in the cathedral close, in a secure and privileged background.

The story opens with Jocelyn going to visit his Grandparents after fighting in the Boer War. He has returned damaged in body, mind and spirit, rudderless until he is washed up on the steps of the empty shop in the market square. His journey and the relationships he forms in this quiet little city shape the rest of his life.

The pivotal point of the book takes place at Christmas and gives us some wonderful insights into the way Elizabeth spent her own Christmas and the way she felt about this festival.

Jocelyn has been living in the market house, which he turns into a bookshop, for some months. During the clear out he has come across the manuscript of a poem/play that the previous occupant had written then discarded. As he begins to piece it together he becomes aware that it “was amazingly beautiful poetry, but though the plot was mapped out to the end, the actual writing was only a little more than half finished” (Goudge p 169)

The poet’s name is Ferranti, a friend of Jocelyn’s grandfather until he disappears one night. Jocelyn feels a strange connection with this unknown poet, who is going through a period of self-doubt and worth much as Jocelyn is. He is compelled to wrestle with the same problems and decides that the work is of such merit that it deserves to be completed. The problems of finishing someone else’s work are finally overcome and he finishes on Christmas Eve. He has promised to read the story to Henrietta and the family and Christmas morning sets off to do so, gloomy with the prospect of a boring day.
From here the story takes off, leaving for a while the idyll of Wells and journeying into the “real” world, the mean streets of London with their evil-smelling gas lighting up only poverty and hopelessness.

We also glean information about how Elizabeth herself viewed Christmas. Like Jocelyn, she was invariably gloomy about the whole charade.
“I have a very gloomy friend who continually remarks a quotation from Homer I think “My friends, even this will pass and I am afraid I feel that way about Christmas.” She once wrote to a very good friend

“For years Christmas day had been for him a day when one ate too much so as not to disappoint cook, stifled a great many yawns and made a lot of silly jokes to hide an inner sadness that was both a lament for romance and belief that had faded and a vague sense of unsatisfied expectations”
(Goudge City of Bells p171 )

Not the sort of remark you expected her to make. But of cause, she was referring the material layer of the season not the reason or ritual of it.

Elizabeth did see the “starlit sky full of wings and a manger with a baby in it….”
(Goudge City of Bells p171) She still also loved the small fairy tales and customs of the day, such as the stirring of the Christmas pudding and the wishes that were made, the leaping flames when it was set alight the manifestation that they would be granted, Father Christmas bringing the “noble” turkey on his sledge, and the gathering around the fire to listen to stories.

Jocelyn meditates much as Elizabeth must at some time have done on the fact that if people who were far superior to them in intelligence and intellect could believe in the gift of God then they would be stupid to dismiss it. This is the start of his journey, the “toys of religion” put aside for a more considered approach.

Did the deepening of Elizabeth’s faith start as a child with the beauty and pageantry of Christmas in the cathedral? It must have influenced her.

I was watching a fascinating programme called “How To Build a Cathedral” back in June and one of the cathedrals featured was Wells. During the Middle Ages, the statues on the west front of the cathedral came to life on special days and sang to the people, made possible by secret galleries which connected them and were accessible to the choir. I find it strange that Elizabeth didn’t know this. What a wonderful image. For a few brief moments, architecture, sculpture and a kind of sacred theatre fused, and this small cathedral in the English West Country became Jerusalem itself. The Reformation of the church would have discontinued all such practices, as smacking of idolatry and popish artefacts. But it seems to have been totally airbrushed out of the Edwardian times when Elizabeth and her family lived there.

It is an image that Elizabeth would surely have woven into her story if she had known about it. She writes in loving detail about the commemoration of Wells patron saint and benefactors and All Saints’ Day, “when the choir at evensong sang “Who are whose like stars appearing?” and the figures on the west front surely swelled a little to find themselves so appreciated.” (Goudge p 141/142). A perfect opportunity to allude to the statues singing.

Henrietta often wishes that the statues could laugh and talk, and it is the practicable Hugh Anthony that reminds her they are made of stone.

For Elizabeth, this very special birthday was always the start of her religious year, marking it out, reaffirming her faith as Christ was reborn. She wrote to the same friend, “As I am writing I send my Christmas card for you and Jay. Frank (the American boy) took it when he was in the Holy Land with Freddy last April, and I loved it so much that I borrowed the negative from him and had some copies enlarged and mounted. The Garden of Gethsemane is over the wall to the left (the trees are growing in the garden) and as Frank was just going to take the photo a shepherd came by leading his sheep. It doesn’t look as though the scene had changed much in 2000 years does it?”

This was the gift Elizabeth possessed, the art of bringing into people’s lives something incredible that happen 2000 years ago and making it relevant and meaningful today.

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Book Review

27 Jul

Children & Childhood

Article of the Month September 2009
Deborah Gaudin

Children & Childhood
(In the books of Elizabeth Goudge.)

Elizabeth was born and grew up an only child of loving parents in the safe and privileged environment of Edwardian Wells. She herself tells us that she led a life of bliss and comfort, secure in the knowledge of being loved and cared for. One of her first memories is of her mother and father and herself ” The three of us were on the same hearthrug together, our arms about each other and my mother was saying in her clear voice A three-fold cord shall not be broken.” ( Goudge p 5 1974). Her life revolved around the gentle and well ordered lives of her parents, a clerical father and her well educated mother.

She was fortunate, most children in the Edwardian age had left what little schooling they were going to have and were working by the age of nine. They would have been seen as valuable contributors to the family income. Children ‘s education was arranged in such a way that they could attend school and hold down a job at the same time, a state of affairs that did not change until 1918 when the school leaving age was raised to 12. Schools still arrange long summer holidays which used to coincide with harvest time.

Elizabeth like the majority of children living then could have grown up having no contact with other children not in her social class. Class conscious parents were worried about their off-spring not only catching physical infections, but catching bad manners and speech as well. This was not the case in Elizabeth’s upbringing, she says, ” My parents were more aware of the suffering of the world beyond the charmed circle than were many of their friends, my father because he had been born in London and as a young priest had worked in a factory town, and my mother because she was deeply compassionate and had made it her business to know.” ( Goudge p60 1974) Any one who has read The City Of Bells will remember the children giving away their toys at Christmas, something that Elizabeth herself was encouraged to do every year. At a very young age she was made aware of the unequal nature of social existence and its harsh realities stayed with her for life.

About herself at this age Elizabeth says” I have met many delightful untarnished only children but I was too spoilt to be one of them. I do not see how the spoiling could have been avoided. In my early years no one expected that my mother would live long. She herself was quite sure she would not and like so many sensitive extroverts her own suffering caused her not only to be acutely aware of illness in others but even to imagine it was there when it was not. She considered me a delicate child who might not live long either. Whichever way she looked at it fear of being parted from this adored child, whom she had nearly died to bring into the world, was always a shadow upon her. And so she, who if she had been a well woman would have been the wise mother of many children, was in illness the reverse.” (Goudge p 76 1974 )

Contact with children of her own age, would have occurred only when she was on holiday with her Oxfordshire or Guernsey cousins. On the Island away from the strict conventions of the cathedral close and her anxious parents she had a larger degree of liberty. Her childhood Island reminisces are of family beach parties where she hunted in rock pools and climbed cliffs, or helped her grandfather with his weather station, an idyllic time, her “rainbow days ” as she describes them.

At home in Wells she attended a small day school run by a gentle governess, Miss Lavingham, undoubtedly in the company of children of the local Clergy. One of her friends was Dorothy Pope to whom she was to dedicated her book Henrietta’s House I’d like to think that a “Hugh Anthony” also attended the school. He comes across as such a forceful and likeable boy, just the sort of companion needed by a lonely young girl, whose only masculine company would have been her busy father and their gardener. Somewhere along the way, instead of becoming self obsessed as many only children do, perhaps bred into her, perhaps learnt from Mrs Kennion, the house keeper of the Bishops Palace whom she loved to visit, was born a love of children.

When as an adolescent Elizabeth was returned to Ely at the end of her school education, her parents were perplexed as to what to do with her. It was her Mother who suggested Reading College of Art, as it would lead to teaching, and Elizabeth had “always loved children.”

There is a revealing piece in the forward to A Child’s Garden of Verse by Robert Louis Stevenson written by Elizabeth in the early fifties. She speaks of her own room in Wells, and unwittingly paints a picture of a rather lonely child who like Robert Louis looked out of the window for inspiration and companionship. There is however no sense of self pity, instead she sees that time of her life as having a “very special magic.” Of her childhood Elizabeth says, ” Childhood then was a world to itself. The door which shut off the nursery wing from the rest of the house made a very real dividing line between the life of the child and the adult. Behind it Nanny and her charges lived in their own kingdom, from which they issued at stated times to shed the light of their countenances upon the outer world. Visitors from this outer world, even mothers and fathers, did not enter the kingdom without hesitating at the portal and saying politely “May I come in, please Nanny?” This state of things made for magic in both worlds, the same sort of magic that an island holds. There was a concentration of quietness and orderliness within the world, a feeling of adventure in leaving it, that fostered imagination and a sense of beauty.”
( Goudge p 23 1955.)

Here we find the template for the Eliots nursery and Ellen who looked after them so devotedly with the help of the long suffering Margaret., a throw back to the Edwardian era she had grown up in

All her life Elizabeth found the openness and lack of guile that most children posses to be very engaging, and any child that she came into contact with seems to have taken to this shy, retiring woman. She had the time to listen to them, probably taking their views and concerns seriously, as Mrs Kennion had hers.

Like the aunts that she speaks so eloquently of in her auto-biography, Elizabeth too had young relations to stay.

” I looked out of my window not long ago and saw almost an exact replica of “A Good Play.” The two small boys who were staying with me had climbed the roof of the wood shed, and with flag flying were going ” a sailing on the billows” there. They had dragged chairs to the top of the wood shed and provisions from the larder, and it was really a better place than the stairs because there was no way of getting them down”
(Goudge p 29 1955.)
A vivid picture of her nephews from a holiday taken with their Aunt, and obviously having a great time, knowing that Aunt Elizabeth would have secretly been thrilled with their imaginative play. It was probably Jessie who had the unenviable task of enticing them safely back down. I still see Elizabeth as more Lucilla than Margaret, certainly during this stage of her life.

Although Elizabeth doesn’t explore the psyche of seriously troubled children, the portraits that she draws of them are not black and white; Ben with his fears and phobias, Tommy with his selfishness and anger, Caroline’s chronic shyness and their relationships with there mostly absent parents are at times painfully described.
The little girls who are evacuated from London in The Castle On The Hill and who are then orphaned with their feelings of abandonment and confusion.
The terror and fear of the young John from the Rosemary Tree, and the schooling and upbringing of his three girls all speak of an inherent understanding of the anxieties suffered by the young.

Like all experienced writers, Elizabeth writes about the world she inhabits and the people she comes into contact with. Her young nephews, a god daughter of Jessie’s who stayed with them in her school holidays and her neighbours children would have kept her informed about the rapidly changing world of child care and education.

When the Goudge Convention visited All Saints church at Peppard Common last year, we were met by Sylvia Seymour who had visited Elizabeth many times when delivering the Parish Magazine. “She always enquired after my children” she said, ” and was pleased to hear any news about them and their lives.” Elizabeth retained her childhood sense of wonder and adventure, something which enabled her to extract maximum enjoyment from the small pleasures of life. She too goes for the heart of an issue as she perceives it without guile or subterfuge. her empathy is with the children and the young at heart, it is always the adults in her books that are the grabbers, the self obsessed and selfish. They have to be reminded by their off spring to take the right course and make the right decisions, decisions that effect all of their lives.

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22 Jul

Henrietta’s House

Just holding this book in your hand is guaranteed to bring on feelings of nostalgia. The picture, by R. L. Steel who also provides the illustrations in the book, shows a young girl opening a pair of wrought iron gates onto a smooth green lawn. On top of the brick built gate-posts sit two opposing figures. One is of a typical West Country pixie, the other is a small naked child, covering its eyes with a fore arm. Mature trees obscure your view into a garden. The girl who is the Henrietta of the title is dressed in all her Edwardian Sunday finery. Her pink dress has a full skirt over a petticoat, a ruffled hem and a tight belt with a large bow. The matching bodice has short puffed sleeves and a ruffled collar to match the hemline. On her plaited black hair dressed with pink bows is a large brimmed sun hat, tilted back so that her heart shaped face and smile of welcome are clearly visible.

Underneath the dust jacket the boards are the colour of the Chinese lantern seed heads which currently fill my brass jug, with a small black line drawing of the house seen through the open gates. The pages are printed on a thick, cheap paper, it was printed in 1949 and paper for books was still in short supply. It was probably printed on “re-cycled” paper, without the bleach used to whiten such today. It smells slightly musty and has obviously been a well loved present as a childish hand has written in the front, ” Wishing Jennifer a Happy Birthday, Brenda and Christine.”

The dedication reads;- ” For Dorothy Pope. There were once two little girls, one had fair hair and lived in the Cathedral Close of Torminster and the other had dark hair and lived in the blue hills above the city, and they were friends. Now that they are grown up they are still friends, and the one who lived in Torminster dedicates this little book to the one who lived in the blue hills, because it was she who saw the White Fishes in the cave. ” ( Goudge 1942. )

The fair haired child who lived in the city is obviously Elizabeth herself, and her friend Dorothy the template for Henrietta. I find it comforting to think that they remained in contact throughout their lives. It is an indication of Elizabeth’s loyalty and commitment. Elizabeth herself says that she never revisited any of the places she lived in because she wanted to remember them how they had been and not how they had become. So perhaps they corresponded with each other as she did with so many friends and admirers, a habit inherited from her Father.

It is a gentle story, a sequel to Sister of Angels and City of Bells, a tapestry woven with words around the charm of an Edwardian summer, when as Elizabeth says ” this story is set at the beginning of the present century, and in those days the world was often silent and sleepy, and not the bustling, noisy place that it is today.” ( Goudge 1949.). She is of cause referring to the 20^th century and not the 21^st.

In 1941 as the story was being written, British troops were fighting in the desert against Rommel, the Germans were taking on the might of Russia and The Americans were about to enter the war after the massacre at Pearl Harbour. A gloomy time, with no end of the war in sight and on the home front the introduction of clothes rationing. What better place and time to escape to than the opulence of Wells in a time before either World Wars had blighted her generations life.

The story starts with Henrietta waiting on the platform for Hugh Anthony to return for the holidays from boarding school ending their first separation from each other, and chronicles the delights of a summer in the countryside surrounding the tiny city where Elizabeth lived out the first few years of her life.

It contains many of her childhood memories from the way that hat elastic hurts the chin, to stately picnics in the hills
The story is as pedestrian as the procession of carts that convey the party to the picnic, and therein lies its charm. We are not hurried on to the next piece of drama, but have time to observed that ” The canterbury bells, and sweet williams, the roses and the sweet peas, the delphiniums and the syringa were a blaze of colour and scent in the gardens and all the birds were singing”(Goudge 1942 p 42 ).

Hills for Elizabeth were, as for so many of us, a place of heightened spirituality. They house the gods, myths and legends. They are the place of the solitary, the Hermit, the Wise Man. We ascend above the valleys and plains of every day life and looking back and down are able to see the bigger picture, to view where we have come from and how far we have travelled to get here.” Looking back he could see the great grey rock of the Cathedral and the old twisted roofs of Torminster, dwarfed by distance into a toy town that a child might have played with, and looking ahead, far up against the sky, he could see the blue hills growing in power and might as they drew nearer to them. He felt for a moment gripped between the grey rock of the Cathedral and the grandeur of the hills, two mighty things that time did not touch.” ( Goudge 1942 p 65)

All of the people invited on Hugh Anthony’s birthday picnic end up getting “lost”. None of them with the exception of Grandmother’s party arrive at their preordained destination. But all of them are enriched by their experiences, they all attain something vital to their well being, even if like the Dean they didn’t at first know that this was necessary.

The Dean recaptures his innocence and love of his fellow man, Hugh Anthony loses some of his pride and arrogance. Grandfather rescues another soul in distress, Jocelyn and Felicity lose their car and find fairy land, and Henrietta, well Henrietta finds her hearts desire.

The strange figures sitting on top of the gateposts are explained as they come from the Cathedral at Wells and must have captured the young Elizabeth’s imagination. The explanation of their meaning given in the story by Henrietta’s Grandfather sounds as if it had originally been told to Elizabeth by her father. ” Replicas of those two figures in the chantry in the south choir aisle of which I told you Bates. The cringing human soul and the mockery of Providence.” (Goudge 1942 p 94) Elizabeth herself was to call her future Devonshire home Providence Cottage, so the Symbology obviously stuck with her.

I thought at first that the caves Elizabeth writes about so vividly were the ones at Wookey Hole, especially as the Old Man in the ruined house could have been a metaphor for the Witch of Wookey. with his wax figurines and pins. But there are no recorded sightings of cave fish in Wookey, and the caves themselves weren’t open to the public in the time that Elizabeth lived here.

Cheddar gorge however is close and one of the caves there is actually called the Cathedral cave for its stunning similarity to a cathedral interior. I love the idea of being able to look up inside rabbit burrows and see the rabbits looking back at you in astonishment, a picture an imaginative child would conjure up. Cheddar too has its underground river complete with little rowing boat, its vast system of unseen caves riddling the Mendip hills like a honeycomb.

I have been unable to find the fish, all sources telling me that the lead content in the water, (the hills have been mined for lead since before the Romans arrived,) is too high for fish to survive. So maybe, the fish were flashes of light reflected back by a carried lamp, a code between friends for a shared magical experience. But I like to think the girls saw them on that long ago Edwardian afternoon. ” Look! cried Hugh Anthony excitedly, kneeling beside the still, inky pool, “There are white fishes here. Quite white. Like Ghosts.”
The Dean put his oil lamp on the ground and knelt beside him and together they watched fascinated as the strange white shapes swam round and round in the black water, their ghostly bodies rippling back and forth as though they were weaving some never-ending pattern upon the black loom of the water.” ( Goudge 1942 p 102)

The story was written at a time when the bells of all the churches and cathedrals of England were silenced, only to be rung in a time of national emergency. They were to signal the devastating news that we had been invaded by Germany. How people must have dreaded the thought of hearing them ring. It would have been an especial sadness for Elizabeth, whose life so far had been lived and to a large extent regulated by the bells of the cathedrals her father worked in. No wonder she wanted to transport herself and her readership back to a time of innocence, when the bells would have rung out for worship and celebration as they were intended to be.

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