Previously I wrote about the artist and writer Gwen Raverat’s lifelong love of the River Cam, and how returning to live by the river in Cambridge inspired her later art and writing. It got me thinking about another beautiful riverside house, the Manor at Hemingford Grey, which overlooks the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire. Lucy M. Boston moved into this twelfth-century house while it was a near-ruin in 1939 and spent many years restoring it and creating her world-famous garden, pictured above with its coronation-themed topiary. She had trained as an artist, and only became a writer after moving there. This post is about how the seeds of Boston’s love for the Manor and its garden were planted in early childhood in her first family homes.
No ordinary castle
Near the start of The Children of Green Knowe (1954) the first in Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series of novels for children, there is a memorable image of a young boy called Tolly holding a lamp aloft as he is rowed across dangerous floodwaters in the blackest of December nights. His mother has died and his father is living abroad with his new wife, who shows little interest in her stepson. So when Tolly is told by his boarding-school master that he is to spend Christmas with a great-grandmother he has never met, the lonely boy is intrigued. But it will be his encounter with Green Knowe itself that truly seizes his imagination.
It’s ‘a house you can barely believe in when you see it’1 and when Green Knowe first takes shape for Tolly, rising up through the darkness, he thinks it resembles a castle on the riverbank. This impression is reinforced when the gardener Boggis, who has rowed him over the flooded Fenland river that night, leads him into a hallway crowded with mirrors, dried flowers and old paintings. It seems to Tolly that he is
on the ground floor of a castle, much like the ruined castles that he had explored on school picnics, only this was not a ruin. It looked as if it never could be. Its thick stone walls were strong, warm and lively. It was furnished with comfortable polished old-fashioned things as if living in castles was quite ordinary.
His great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow is patiently waiting for him in an armchair beside an huge fireplace in which a peat and log fire blazes, and she is anything but ordinary, of course. She tells Tolly to call her ‘Granny’ and after giving him supper, leads him ‘up winding stairs and through a high, arched room like a knight’s hall, that she called the Music Room’ to his bedroom in the attic. There, he is delighted to see a large rocking-horse, a locked toybox and a tiny, delicately carved Japanese mouse that fits neatly into his small hand. He takes it to bed with him, and sleeps peacefully.
The next day Mrs Oldknow teaches him how to attract garden birds by smearing margarine on his hands and holding them out to be perched on. She is one of the first adults he has met who does not issue rules or advice, and he responds to her warmth as trustingly as the wild birds that hop onto her fingers. ‘He forgot about her being frighteningly old,’ Boston writes. ‘She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.’
His grandmother’s kindly respect, her air of mystery, and her stories about past generations of Oldknows who lived in this ancient English house gradually weave a spell around Tolly. As he begins to feel at home there (and discovers that Green Knowe is in fact a twelfth-century Norman manor rather than a castle) the children who lived in this magical house hundreds of years ago come to life, and become his friends.
A crucible of the imagination
Given that her Green Knowe books have never been been out of print in the UK since the 1950s, it might be surprising to discover that Lucy Boston never intended to be a writer, and only started writing novels when she was sixty. By that time she had already lived a varied and inventive life – as well as restoring a house and creating a garden, she hand-stitched exquisite patchworks – so becoming a best-selling novelist and winning a Carnegie Medal was just another chapter in her extraordinary life story.
The stylish photograph of Lucy Boston above was taken when she was almost eighty, and setting out on another creative adventure as the author of two extraordinary memoirs, Memory in a House (1973), about her life at the Manor, and Perverse and Foolish (1979), about her childhood and youth. In 1992, to mark Boston’s centenary year, these books were published together in chronological order by Oldknow Books in a single volume called Memories (currently only available second-hand). There’s an insightful introduction the novelist Jill Paton Walsh, who knew Lucy Boston well and writes that
…the personality laid bare in Perverse and Foolish is recognisably the wayward, passionate and undiplomatic person who rescued and loved the Manor House at Hemingford Grey, and turned it into a crucible of the imagination.
There can be no doubt that restoring and living in this beautiful historic house inspired Boston to become a writer, but also that long before she moved there, two other childhood places influenced her deeply.
Born in 1892 into a strict, affluent Wesleyan Methodist family in Southport, Lancashire, Lucy was the last but one of six children. Her father James Wood was an engineer who later became Southport’s town mayor; her mother Mary (née Garrett) was the daughter of a minister and almost thirty years younger than her husband. In Perverse and Foolish, Boston describes her father as good-humoured, dynamic and ‘an eccentric with big ideas’. Years before he married or indeed even met his future wife, he transformed an ordinary Southport townhouse into a unique family home.
My father, having bought the house, began - in which I see my likeness to him - by knocking off the roof and the whole back of the house in order to double the depth and put on an extra storey. He built out a wing on one side and put in outsized bow windows on the whole front and back. It dominated the modest street. All this was in preparation for the family he intended to have.
Once the building work was finished, her father instructed skilled craftsmen to paint the doors in pastel colours, with panels decorated with painted flowers and ribbons containing moral maxims. I wondered, reading this, if the work of William Morris was an influence on Wood, and I thought about the beautiful hand-painted walls, doors and ceilings of the unique David Parr House in Cambridge, particularly in the small drawing room, with its mottos and scrolls around the room.
Boston describes how, painted above the picture rail of the Wood family’s breakfast room there was a lengthy passage from Scripture that stretched along three walls: ‘While one was stirring one’s porridge one’s eyes turned round the room to read it’. She writes that the many texts to be found all over the house were not for ostentation, ‘but rather that Father just felt happy among them.’ The triumph of his eccentricity was the drawing room, where, following his visit to the Holy Land, he brought back trunkfuls of items and attempted to create his own Middle Eastern fantasy in a suburban Victorian home. But although the room was full of colour, polished brass and rare objects, the cluttered effect looked less like a holy, uplifting space, Boston observes, than ‘a gentleman’s enthusiastic and satisfied near-lunacy’.
She wonders what her more conventional mother made of it all. ‘She was totally indifferent to the appearance of things, but possibly not to the expression on visitors’ faces.’ Curiously, her father’s sense of showmanship did not extend as far as the sterile back garden in Southport, which was almost bare of flowers. ‘I do not remember seeing a daffodil even in the park,’ Lucy writes, recalling that her ‘penny careful’ mother never had a flower in the house.
Sadly, Boston’s ebullient father died when she was just six years old, leaving her mother to manage the family, guided by her increasing zeal for religion. The only book that young Lucy was ever permitted to read, apart from religious tracts, was Alice in Wonderland, an indulgence permitted only after a bout of tuberculosis. Her mother’s health issues led to the family relocating for a year to a large house in the village of Arnside overlooking the estuary of the river Kent when Lucy was ten. The unexpected freedom she had there to explore the countryside and estuary, alone or with her siblings, made her feel as if her life had truly begun. ‘Now at Arnside I received the full impact of the returning sun,’ Boston recalls of her first encounter with a rural spring. ‘Every inch of that earth responded.’ The memory of that happiness in nature kindled a similar response, and become a guiding principle, in her later life.
At 18, Lucy shocked her mother by refusing to be received into the Wesleyan community, and in 1914, just as the First World War began, she went up to Somerville College, Oxford to study classics. But she soon gave up her studies and volunteered as a nurse at military hospitals in France. In 1917 she married her distant cousin, Harold Boston and they had a son, Peter. After the marriage ended in the early 1930s, Lucy moved to Italy and Austria, where she attended classical concerts, built up her record collection and studied drawing and painting in Vienna. She moved back to England in 1937, and took lodgings opposite King’s College, Cambridge where her son was studying architecture. But instead of spending her days painting King’s College Chapel as she had planned, she found herself the new owner of the Manor at Hemingford Grey, a village not far from Cambridge.
The house was virtually a ruin when she moved in, and she would dedicate the rest of her life to bringing it back to its original Norman simplicity, and creating her imaginative English garden, with its Alice-in-Wonderland style topiary in the shape of orbs and giant chess pieces. ‘Now after thirty-three years of living in it, it begins to be taken for my work of art,’ Lucy Boston writes in Memory in a House, ‘and in the sense that it lives in this century there must be some truth in that.’
As she restored the house, the house was transforming her in its turn by giving her the gift of writing. As she wrote her first Green Knowe novel on the dining room table in winter, by the warmth of the peat and log fire in the huge fireplace, she remembered the old rocking horse from her childhood nursery in Southport, and invented a young boy called Tolly to play on it. Now, that same rocking horse stands in the attic bedroom of the Manor along with a toy box and a tiny, delicately carved Japanese mouse. Do go and see it if you can.
For more information, and details about booking a visit to the house, see The Manor, Hemingford Grey’s website.
What I’ve been reading
I loved this nostalgic, wintry post by Deborah Vass about The Children of Green Knowe, and felt cheered by Rona Maynard’s assertion that ‘everything I know about language goes back to the first line in the first book I loved’ here, showing that good books for children really do matter. Victoria Olsen’s thoughtful post on ‘the grief plot’ made me think about the stories we tell ourselves and the relationship of art and family. A recent post by Henry Oliver on how to be a late bloomer in 2024 struck a chord with me, and Lucy Boston’s ‘late blossoming’ shows that getting older is no obstacle to creativity.
I’d love to know if there’s a particular place that inspires your writing, or just where you feel happy. I enjoyed Anne Boyd Rioux’s celebration of writing in hotel rooms as a way of escaping from the demands of domesticity, and the joy (and at times, necessity) of getting out of the house to write.
In that spirit, here are my suggestions for writerly places to escape to in 2024: there’s a a delightful-sounding five-day Paris Writing Retreat in May, organized by literary agent Jonathan Ruppin and author and lecturer Dr Emma Claire Sweeney. The combination of Paris, good writing advice AND different desks to write on during the day all sound very appealing to me, and there’s an early bird discount if you book before 28 February.
If studying Virginia Woolf and Childhood appeals, there’s Literature Cambridge’s summer course, taking place online and in person during late July and early August 2024. I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking part again in both courses, talking about the touching relationship between Woolf and her nephew Julian Bell.
For more information about the Manor, Hemingford Grey, and to book a visit to the house with Diana Boston (Lucy’s daughter-in-law), see the website here. My essay about Lucy Boston’s memoir Memory in a House (1973) is forthcoming in Slightly Foxed Magazine. Thanks for reading and as ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection (Faber & Faber, 2013).
'Charming and violent and gifted'
Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This essay is about the writer Virginia Woolf’s relationship with sister Vanessa Bell’s oldest son, the poet Julian Bell. In 1929, when Julian was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, Virginia wrote to Vanessa: ‘I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done… he’s too charming and violent and gifted altogether.’ Woolf was right in that Vanessa’s much-loved firstborn child would cause her great pain, but not in ways anyone could have predicted.
Thank you very much for the mention! I haven't visited the house for many years, but your piece makes me long to do so again. The garden in early summer is magical: she chose the most beautiful old roses. An extraordinary woman in an extraordinary house.
Thank you for taking me back to my childhood when I avidly waiting for the next 'Children of Knowe' to come out. I believe I only ever got 4 of them which I don't think is the whole set - maybe I should now read the other two.
You ask what places inspired us to write. I am not a writer but I do remember a blissful time at the end of my university dissertation when I took myself over to Paris to edit and proofread it in the small parks/squares of Paris, living off brioche and croissant! Made a dreary job most enjoyable.