The Chimneys of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Title: The Chimneys of Green Knowe.
Author: L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Genre: Literature, fiction, children's lit, nature, time travel, fantasy, ghost stories.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1958.
Summary: Down for the summer vacation at Green Knowe, while his great-grandmother mends the old patchworks in the evenings, Tolly pieces together the lives of the Oldknow family. This starts him on a hunt for missing jewels and he discovers some very special things about 'the others' who lived at Green Knowe in the past, mainly a young blind woman named Susan, and her loyal friend, Jacob, saved from slave plantation in Barbados, who gives her the gift of self-reliance and independence.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥
♥ His great-grandmother, Mrs. Oldknow, was waiting for him at the front door. They hugged each other and she was little and soft and shaped like a partridge.
♥ He was in a hurry to go over the house and garden to see that everything was the same, but as soon as he crossed the threshold he knew that it wasn't. He stood looking at the vases full of spring flowers and the carved cherubs under the ends of the beams, on whose shoulders last year's nests were still undisturbed. Orlando kept on barking till the walls re-echoed, so that it was impossible to listen to the house itself-that house where anything might happen and children could play hide-and-seek from one century into another.
♥ "When I told the boys at school that you lived in a sort of castle with ghosts, they didn't believe me."
"Ghosts! What a thing to call them."
"What do you call them?"
"The others."
"I like this house. It's like living in a book that keeps coming true."
♥ In the morning the first thing he saw was the old rocking horse, standing there quite still as if it had fallen into a trance until some other child should come and wake it. He had outgrown it. At school he was learning to ride real horses.
♥ He spent a long time handling the collection. He could never guess what each piece would weigh. Some like cowrie shells were unexpectedly heavy-he popped one into his mouth to "taste" the shape..
♥ Mrs. Oldknow traced with her fingers the wide-spaced letters engraved on the box and seemed far away in thought.
"To think how often I have sat there sewing in the summer and even mending the patchwork, and all the time all these things were there! The beginning and the end so near together like a telescope when you shut it up."
♥ When they first discovered she was blind-and no one could tell by looking at her-there was great weeping and wailing. Maria's cry of despair was:
"Whatever shall I do with a blind daughter-I can't take her into society-she'll never be married-there will be no pleasure in dressing her-she won't even be able to dress herself and we'll have her for always." At this point Maria had the vapours and had to be put to bed.
The grandmother said it was a judgement on Maria for her flighty life, and though the child would be little more than an idiot she would try to see that it was at least a Christian one.
♥ All these talkers behaved freely as though Susan, because she couldn't see them, couldn't hear them either, or at least did not count. But Susan heard far more than other people, and understood it better too. She had nothing to do but listen-hers was a world of voices. Voices did not deceive her and she could not see the smiles that were meant to deceive. She knew at once what people really meant, what they thought of the person they were speaking to, and even what they didn't say. Caxton she feared and hated. When her mother or father were present he would pinch her cheek and talk baby talk, but when only Mrs. Softly was there, he would say: "It should have been drowned like a kitten." By the time Susan was your age she knew everybody's secretes.
♥ Sometimes, but not nearly often enough, her father was at home, on leave between one voyage and the next. He loved his daughter very deeply. Her blindness seemed to him not a defect but a mysterious charm. It tore his heart to see how stupidly Maria and Mrs. Softly treated her, how they forced her to be helpless when all the time she was eager and curious and self-confident. Every time he came home it struck him afresh. Sometimes he was away for a year, in which time Sefton had grown noticeably more independent and wilful, but the only change in Susan was that each time when he went away she minded more. He did not know what to do for her. In those days nobody had heard of Braille and there were no schools for the blind. If they were poor they had to be beggars. If rich they were prisoners with servants. Captain Oldknow could tell by his love for Susan that their treatment of her was as wrong as it was unnecessary.
♥ "I have her in here and make a fuss of her every night, and however much you criticize me, the child dotes on her mother. You must admit it."
"I do admit it. I wold rather it was the other way round."
♥
He soon found he was quite exhausted, so he took off the blindfold and went off into the garden with Orlando. After some crazy romping he felt better and then he remembered that blind people has dogs to lead them, so he put Orlando on the lead and put his foot on it while he bandaged his eyes again. Off went Orlando straining like a cart-horse. There was grass under his feet, then gravel, then grass again and Tolly very soon had an unreasoning terror of walking over the edge of the earth. Although he dragged back on the lead it seemed to him that they went like the wind. He had no idea which way he was facing-every stumble left him more uncertain. Where was the wall, where the river or the moat? In a panic he let Orlando go and pulled off his blindfold. He was still on the lawn, facing back to where he had started from-the only direction he had not expected. The world whizzed round him into position again. He flopped into his great-grandmother's garden chair was there in the sun and lay back to recover his self-confidence.
&heats; Tolly made a careful note of the distance between himself and the tree. I will walk there without looking, he decided, and set off with his eyes screwed shut. He walked and walked, stretching out his hands to feel the first beech twigs at the extreme end of the branches. But there was only empty air. He walked further, as far as it could possibly be-but still only emptiness all round him. And there ought to be ivy underfoot, but there wasn't. Why was it all empty? Had everything disappeared? He opened his eyes, and found he had hardly moved from where he started. It was silly to be so relieved at finding the world was there. His many steps had been timorous two-inch shuffles instead of paces.
♥
♥ "It's jolly tiring not having eyes," he said. "You have to think everything out. But do you know what I have discovered? After my eyes the most useful things I've got are my feet."
"Not your hands?"
"Well, you can't feel anything unless it's there to feel. There's an awful lot of emptiness. But there's always something under your feet. And they're quite intelligent."
"Did you think they were only what's inside your boots?"
Tolly laughed. "I suppose I knew but I never thought about how much they enjoy the ground."
"Babies' feet enjoy everything hugely."
"So do dogs'."
"So do cats'-more than any. What fun to draw your claws in and out and walk so paddily."
"Do you think horse enjoy their feet? Though of course they haven't got any," said Tolly rather sadly, not liking horses to be without anything."
"Oh, immensely, in a leggy sort of way."
♥ "I'm going to climb the beech tree this afternoon," he said.
"Mind the rotten branches. There are so few you forget there might be any."
She spoke as though she climbed the tree frequently herself.
Tolly, who had got into the habit of thinking of her as Granny Partridge, grinned as he imagined her flying up with a whirr. She met his grin with her wrinkly smile that still had something boyish about it, something rather like his own, as if she could read his thoughts.
"All your family have a good heads for height," she added as she helped him to apple pie, putting his mind to rest on that score.
♥ When they had washed up together Mrs. Oldknow with a guilty smile brought out the patchwork.
"I'm like the other old lady," she said. "I do enjoy it. And it's too windy for me outside today."
"Would you like the fox fur muff? It might make you think things."
"No, thank you. I don't like thoughts creeping up my legs."
♥ The difficulty with the beech tree was to start.
♥
♥ He came presently to the Slave Market, where often the slaves for sale had been brought direct from West Africa and looked like wild unhappy animals. But there were always some changing hands who had been in slavery already for a long time, who were herded into the marketplace obediently like farm horses, some with their children running free beside them. At this time there was an unusual number being sold, because on many of the West Indian islands the slaves had mutinied and wherever possible would side with the French, under a promise of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The ringleaders were everywhere being rounded up. Had they been free men they would have been shot, as traitors. But a slave has a money value. Like a kicking or bolting horse he is not shot, but sold to someone who does not know his faults. All those suspected of an inclination to mutiny were being shipped to America, and where possible fresh drafts from Africa brought in.
♥ The Captain shrugged. "I'll get a fan for Susan," he repeated to himself, turning away. No gentle plea followed him as he had feared. Perhaps Jacob knew that a shrug is something you can't plead with.
♥
As soon as they had passed, Jacob's body slid round the tree, and seeing the Captain still there, he gave him a confidential, independent grin. He bore him no grudge for refusing to protect him. Jacob was on his own again, one against the world.
Captain Oldknow walked on up the avenue. As he passed Jacob he put out a hand and brushed the lambswool head in farewell. Jacob could hardly take his eyes off the dangers and chances of the world long enough to roll them up at him. His bent elbow and hands on the tree-trunk were like a lizard's. The Captain stopped beside the little body that took no more notice of him. He took hold of the neck of Jacob's shirt.
"Come along, Jacob. I'll find out who I ought to buy you from. You shall grow up free."
♥ "How do you know he won't steal?" Maria joined in. "Nothing will be safe. I shall be terrified for my jewels. And what will the neighbours say? The fashion for black pages is quite out. Nobody dreams of having one now that they can't be slaves. A black slave is one thing, a black man is quite another. Perfectly horrid."
♥ Now and again Jacob said:
"Tree put out arm here." And he ducked under it and Susan feeling his movement ducked too. It was more fun than having things moved out of her way, which made space so empty.
♥ But I've always taken a pride in dressing her beautifully. Do me justice in that."
"You turn her into a doll, my dear. All curls and laces and ribbons. My mother will say that I am a Jacobin, but I do believe in liberty, especially for children. Let her rip. There's time enough for her to simper later."
♥ "What a long story," said Tolly. "It's quite hard to come back to now."
♥ Jonathan could never imagine a problem until he ran up against it.
♥
"The dough was a good idea, Jacob." Jonathan gave him the credit due to him. "Now Miss Susan will learn as quickly as you, if not more quickly."
♥ "There are a lot of things Susan couldn't see," he said.
"She could smell, you know."
Tolly took a great breath of the spring night.
"Do you think she could smell stars?"
"I nearly can myself tonight. She could certainly smell the kind of thing that stars belong to and happen in. Sometimes you make things smaller by giving them a name to themselves, like 'star'. Imagine Susan taking a breath of it and just thinking All that."
♥ "I've been looking for Jacob in his closet, but I only scared myself. I hope I don't have bad dreams."
"Why ever should you?"
"I don't like being touched by things I can't see."
"That's one of the disadvantages of having eyes. They make people afraid when they can't see. Everything that touched Susan was something she couldn't see. But far from being afraid she wanted to catch everything in the act of being real. She even put her finger in the candle-flame to see what being burnt was like. Now go to sleep. 'Tomorrow is another day.'"
♥
♥ Tolly felt very hungry and went indoors. Inside the house it was neither yesterday nor today but somewhere lost in between. In the living-room the patchwork curtains were drawn across the three big windows. They let in a coloured gloom like stained glass, darkened by the surrounding yews. He had never seen the room like this before. Nothing could be more mysterious-a room for Rumpelstiltskin to rage in, for a stepmother's mirror, or a sword that spoke. In the evening the many colours of the hangings were festive in the firelight but now, drawn against the day, they seemed to be shielding old secrets. The smell of the house was heavy and strange. Orlando's ears cocked this way and that and his nose twitched. Into the hearth a grey shaft of light came down from the chimney, such as creeps into caves from a sloping crack in the roof. It was so different from the brooding over-beautiful twilight enclosed by the curtains as to look like something coldly evil.
♥ The sunset was fading. He could see the light from the living-room windows where Mrs. Oldknow had lit the candles. The garden was not quite so much his own after sunset. He had not realized how dark it had become until he found his eyes could not follow Orlando who was merely a shadow that came and went. The bamboo rustled and a frog croaked at long regular intervals as if repeating a warning. It was hard to remember that it was only a frog, when the mist was rising and making shapes like things, and a hush was closing in. He looked up at St. Christopher as he neared the house but he cold only just make out where he stood wrapped about with ivy and shadows. To one side of the statue and about level with its stone thighs the house windows shone apricot.
♥
♥ Betsy was glad enough to leave Susan with Jacob. She had no professional ideas about how clean a child should be in order to reflect glory on the one who looked after it. She thought clean once a day for a visit to Nanny was enough.
♥
Susan's desire was the drum.
"Today we make ju-ju," Jacob announced.
From his special hiding-place he brought out his surprises, his early-morning work. He had taken a small sack, and into its loose weave he had threaded the stalks of silver willow leaves, carefully, in overlapping rows to look like fish scales. This was to go over his head. But first he had woven (remembering the basket-making he had seen on the Plantation) a sharp osier beak. It was yellow, open like a seagull crying, and out of it lolled a tongue of strawberry stuff. He contrived to fasten the beak on his forehead with a strap. Over this he wore the sack with a hole for the beak to come through and for him to see out. But for decorative eyes he had filched for the occasion two of the round brass horse ornaments from the coach-house and had fastened them on the sack. They were the more horrifying for being equally suitable for fish or sea-bird. Jacob was too young when his parents were captured in Africa to have seen real tribal magic, but he had heard about it in fireside stories, and he quite understood that a ju-ju is many-sided, that it must be both magnificent and grotesque, both superhuman and less than human, in this case fish, bird of prey, man and beast, ghost and play-actor. So his fish-bird had a crest of cock's tail feathers (acquired simply by seizing and holding tight till the cock got away without them). These flopped like hair around the brassy eyes. For good measure he wore the lion-coloured catskin head downward in place of a tail, so that when he danced the cat sprang.
The beak, tongue, feathers and fish-scales, but not the eyes, were intelligible to Susan, but whether it conveyed awe I cannot say.
Jacob explained to her that they must lay presents for the Drowned Sailor Boy in front of St. Christopher (Big Stone ju-ju man) and there she would drum and he would dance and the Spirit would take the presents and go away.
"What presents shall we give him?"
"What sailor boy need."
Jacob produced a toy hammock woven by himself out of garden twine, a hymn-book given him by the ship's chaplain, a canoe carved out of a small piece of wood, a home-made harpoon, and his own most treasured jackknife given him by an amiable sailor. This last terrible sacrifice he thought necessary to make the performance real.
Susan could think of nothing of hers that a sailor boy could want.
"Give Missy's hair to make his ghost wife."
He cut off a hazel curl and wrapped it in the hammock.
These gifts were laid on a pike of sticks and set on fire.
Susan couldn't wait any longer to begin drumming, and soon the ritual was in full swing, bare feet stamping, hands clapping, the basketwork beak turning to left and right, the cat leaping and clawing behind. The bitter smoke of burnt paper and hair rose to St. Christopher's stone nostrils and Jacob's voice was raised in weird prayers or threats in his own language.
Most unfortunately the grandmother had not gone to church this time, but had taken a stroll to escape from the unrest of spring-cleaning, and was now coming back through the garden. The tap of her approaching stick was not heard.
Her horror knew no bounds. She was as fierce and relentless as any witch-doctor, clapping her hands and calling for Betsy, for Boggis, for Sefton, threatening with her cane and shrieking like a seagull.
"Oh! You wicked blasphemous obscene heathen! You savage! The altars of Baal in our own garden! The shame of it, the bestiality!"
♥ The fire would be most comforting. Orlando streaked off toward the house and Tolly followed slowly, looking at the shapes of the trees whose boughs he knew so well, and at the shape of the spaces between the trees, usually alive with birds, but now they were all asleep. Everything seemed fixed in a trance of eternal sameness.
♥ He turned a resolute back to the house, though well aware that there was something behind him that he didn't like to think of. The house itself felt wrong, it felt too big, smothering the darkness. He knew that Caxton's snaky eyes were watching, that if he turned he would see, perhaps downstairs, perhaps upstairs, a shape behind the glass. Or perhaps Caxton was standing in wait under the shadow of the yew tree where he must passe. Tolly's instinct told him that frightened things had a peculiar attraction for Caxton that brought them instantly to his notice, but if he could manage not to be frightened he wouldn't be seen.
♥
In those days an arrival was a real and prolonged excitement. Instead of a mere sweep of headlights so dazzling in their approach as to make everything else invisible and the brisk slam of a car door, there was first the clatter of the postillion's hooves on the gravel to announce that the chaise was following. Then the wonderful moment of certain expectation when everyone ran out with lanterns. The chaise was heard bowling up the drive and the leading horses came into the swinging lantern light, and it shone fierily on wheels and windows, on horses and grooms and footmen, and on the ladies being handed out by gentlemen. But to Susan all this commotion was in sound. She heard the hubbub of well-known voices and the patter of recognizable steps going this way and that, her grandmother's stick and little cough, the clamour in the kitchen before the green baize door swung to and cut it off. She heard the thrilling change from trot to walk of the four horses and the gravel falling off the wheels like water off a water-wheel, dying away as they slowed down. She heard the coachman put up his whip in its socket, the rains flap on the horses' backs, the grooms run forward to the horses, who were stretching their necks and shaking their heads in a jungle of harness as they relaxed after the long pull; the creak of springs and the opening door. She smelled the hot metal of the lanterns, the sweat of the horses, the leather polish on the harness, and when the chaise door was opened the always unlikeable smell of the inside of any kind of carriage.
♥ ("I wanted to ask you what the Press Gang was," Tolly interrupted.
"It was a roving gang who kidnapped men for the Navy. There were not enough sailors for the Fleet, and without the Fleet the French could not be defeated. So this dreadful way of getting them was allowed. Captain Oldknow detested it and would never himself have been satisfied with unwilling sailors. But it was not to ships like his that they were sent, but to those that had a bad name and so could not get men.")
♥ ..Granny Partridge went gamely in, any difficulty she had being expressed in clicks and tchks which are common to old ladies and birds.
♥ "Take me up the river in a punt. Let's look for kingfishers."
The holidays were slipping past as smoothly and relentlessly as the river.
♥ Jacob had the intelligence to see that a person who could not see would not be afraid of height. He taught her to climb and watched over her with the greatest care. She was handicapped by her long clinging frocks which were always in the way, getting under her feet or catching on the wood. Jacob fetched his old white cotton pantaloons that the Captain had bought him in Barbados, ad he made Susan put them on, stuffing her dress inside and hitching them round her waist with a red handkerchief. This was an unheard-of thing for little girls in those days, but Susan didn't know what clothes looked like and Jacob didn't know what little white girls could or could not do. Little black girls could run about quite naked. So they were both perfectly happy. There was no one to see them.
.."Miss Susan climb like cat, Very clever hands and feet and not afraid ever."
The Captain was silent. His heart stopped at the thought of Susan falling. And yet, while he had known nothing about it, she had learnt, and her face was shining with pride. He could have thrashed Jacob for letting her risk it. He could have embraced him for teaching her freedom.
♥ "'For desperate ills, desperate remedies'," he said to Maria. "Since she is blind she must be allowed some things that would not be usual for a young lady. The pantaloons were a wise precaution and do not offend me at her age. There will be time enough for her to be elegant and sedate."
"You are out of date, my dear husband, as well as out of touch from seeing nothing but oceans. Since the French Revolution nobody believes in the Age of Innocence. It is quite out of fashion."
♥ He came in with his imagination full of fire.
♥
♥ It was easy squirming up her little flue, harder to guide her along the hoists in the scorching fog of smoke and clatter of falling tiles, but she followed him with confidence. He lowered himself into the main chimney straddling and bracing his back against the wall to support her as she climbed in herself feet first and began the descent. If it seems impossible for her to have done it, you must remember that this black chimney was no blacker, no more frightening-except for the noise and heat-than her ordinary world. She did not see the drop nor the difficulties to come. Here just as in a tree she must feel for finger and foothold and balance, and unlike Jacob she could shut her eyes against the smarting smoke and hot sparks without any disadvantage. It was Jacob, always braced to take the weight if she should slip, imagining the result to them both if either should be helpless with coughing, guiding her feet and telling her what to do (for which he had to abandon his wet towel)-Jacob with a red-hot fragment in his woolly hair that he had no free hand to brush away, who had the anguish and the anxiety.
♥
♥ "I do hope Caxton's ghost isn't here," said Tolly.
"Nobody's bothering to keep his memory alive. Certainly not I."
♥ They left the two footmen outside looking nervous in a crowd of wild women. They stood stiffly and hoped they were impressive, but the gypsy women did not help them to feel it. They jabbered to each other, pointed and laughed.
♥ And now it was nearly the end of the very last day. Tolly went into the garden. Almost no time left, he thought. Four hours, three hours, two hours, one hour-even in the last minute something might happen. Why do people only invent things that go faster and faster, instead of finding some way to keep it at now?
♥ "Ai, Missy!" Jacob's voice came sadly thorough the garden where Tolly was again alone.
"You blind, but you see things sometimes when I can't."
The robin was back again with another worm, and the nestlings' clamour was imprudent in such absolute silence.
♥
