Memories in a House
The inspiration behind Lucy M. Boston's Green Knowe books
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.