The River at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Title: The River at Green Knowe.
Author: L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Genre: Literature, fiction, children's lit, nature, fantasy.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1959.
Summary: Around the ancient mansion of Green Knowe, the river runs wild, making a lot of islands filled with magical things and beings, perfect for a group of children to explore during a hot summer. And so begins a wonderful, magical summer for Ida, Oscar and Ping, who are staying with Ida's great-aunt at Green Knowe. As they chart the river in a canoe, they discover more and more incredible secrets and mysteries.
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ Lastly there was a slim nine-year-old with an Asiatic face.
"What's your name, dear boy?" Miss Sybilla bent down to bring her nose level with his, so that her beads fell forward and the melon seeds hung like a skipping rope between them.
The boy gave a gurgling sigh.
"Come, tell Auntie Sybilla your name, love."
He replied with exactly the same sound.
"Doesn't he speak English?" Miss Sybilla asked Ida. "We said they were all to speak English. What is his name?"
Ida. though so small, was clearly the head of the group and had established her position on the journey.
"That is his name, that he said. It is spelt HSU and it can't be said in English. So we shall call him Ping. He speaks English very well, only he hardly ever speaks."
♥ A hundred yards upstream there was a water gate controlling the flow into a branch that went off at right angles. The tumbling of the water over the bar filled the bedroom with its day-long, night-long sound. The main stream, undisturbed by the loss of half its volume, flowed quietly past Green Knowe, throwing out as it went, in its careless liberality, a loop of water that encircled the garden, and returned beside one wall of the house.
"Look at this house reflected in the water," said Ping, calling the others to look out of the side window. "Isn't it still. I can see us all looking out of the window, but our faces wiggle as if we were eating toffee." They ran from window to window, eager to see all there was.
"The sky is so blue I wonder why it doesn't reflect the river jut as the river reflects it, like barber's mirrors reflecting backward and forward for ever."
"Before it could reflect it would have to have something dark behind it like the bottom of the river. That's why."
"Well, outer space us behind the sky," said Oskar, "and that's dark, I suppose."
"Then I don't know why it doesn't reflect," said Ping. "But once is enough really. Look at the fish rising."
"Your eyes reflect," said Ida. "I can see a tiny pink sunset cloud and a tiny green pin-point earth. No colour photo was ever so minute"
"I see them huge, though," said Ping. "The cloud is so big that if it was a mountain you never could possibly climb to the top, and the earth stretches all the way to where the sky begins. Miles and miles and miles with woods and rushes and waterfalls and water-wheels and nightingales and bells and singing fishes."
"I shall like that," said Ida. "We'll have to go quietly by starlight to hear singing fishes. Do you know there are some, Ping, or are you just thinking it?"
"My father used to say," said Oskar, gazing far away at the sun which was shooting out rays kike cartwheel spokes, "that there isn't anything real except thoughts. Nothing is there at all unless somebody's thinking it. He said thoughts were more real than guns. He got shot by the Russians for saying that. But the thought wasn't shot, because I'm thinking it now. So if Ping has singing fishes, let's try and hear some. Why not?"
"I'm in a hurry to begin," said Ida. "I want the river. I could eat it."
♥
It was painted blue and brown, and the water that reflected it received it as part of itself. The canoe was lightly built and beautifully balanced, and it would comfortably hold three children. When Ida put the weight of one foot into it, it was like treading on the water itself. It yielded so far that she feared it was sinking under her, but then the water resisted, and she sat down feeling like a water-lily on its leaf. The boys followed her in. Ping sat in front and Oskar in the stern. They parted the willow strands that hung like a net across the opening, and the river was theirs.
♥
"It's a helmet!" screeched Ida.
"A head lid," said Ping. "An Oskar lid."
Oskar put it on. It fitted him perfectly. As his hands passed over it, the raised part on top that he had thought was the pedestal, became obviously the socket for his plumes.
They picked flowering rushes and tied the stalks into a firm base to fit the socket, and there was Oskar looking like King Arthur himself, at least to Ida's eyes. And because the helmet seemed to demand it of its wearer, Oskar stood up in the canoe all the way home - an art requiring much practice if the canoe was not to be overturned, and leaving all the work to the other two. But it looked magnificent.
♥ Then, overnight, the holiday season began in earnest. The river was crowded with boating parties, some of whom had never been in a boat before. They shouted instructions in voices of hysteria, they went bungling from bank to bank, lost their tempers when the boat rocked under their staggers and fell over-board amid jeers. Dogs stood in the bows and barked incessantly, outboard motors drummed and snorted past, bearing ladies who spoke shrilly to be heard above the noise. Bathers leapt from the banks dog-wise, and the impact of their bodies on the water sent waves that rocked every boat and added to the din. It was no longer the mysterious river on which the children had been so entranced. True it was winding, sparkling and cool, the water lip-lapped under the ribs of the canoe and the clouds had all the sky from horizon to horizon to move across. But the river had become ordinary, a playground for humans. Every creature whose real home it was had gone into hiding. It had no more private life than a swimming bath or fun fair.
♥
The children's eyes were screwed up against the fearful inquisitiveness of the rising sun at eye-level. Ahead of them on the river's edge stood a derelict building. The walls rose up out of the water, their stones green and yellow with slime. In this welcome shadow the water too was green and yellow, but each paddle as it dipped was surrounded by a sky-coloured ring. The place had so long been abandoned that it was impossible to tell for what purpose it had been built, whether house, barn or warehouse. It had the remains of a balcony from which iron steps led down to the water, but the ivy, which once perhaps was planted to take off the newness, had for generations been allowed to grow as it pleased. Nobody cared any more if the walls were wrapped around in a vast embrace, the windows covered, the gutters blocked, the slates lifted by prying ivy fingers. So unhampered and vigorous was the ivy that having covered the house its stringy growth, waving in the wind and feeling for support like caterpillars at the top of a stalk, had caught on neighbouring trees and wrapped them round too in its cocoon, as if the building had towers. Two windows still showed above the balcony. The sashes fell sideways, some panes were missing and the rest heavily curtained with layer upon layer of grey cobweb. As a last humiliation for the house, the was an ash sapling growing out of the chimney.
The children took hold of the iron rails of the steps and tied up the canoe.
"This must be where Ping's demons hide in the daytime," said Ida.
"Displaced demons," said Oskar dreamily.
"Let us visit them," said Ping.
♥
The man was intent on his line and float and had not noticed the canoe beneath the trees. What had most startled the children was his expression, unlike any they had seen before. It was the expression of a man alone in the universe, though they could not know that.
♥ "There you are. Make off now. And don't come back."
The children looked so crestfallen that the lion-man considered them for a moment with the ghost of his busman's humanity.
"I've never met three nicer behaved kids," he said. "But where one boat's been others will follow. Let be. I've dreamt you and you've dreamt me, see?"
♥ They huddled together, overcome by the immense solitude. Or perhaps it was not solitude, thought Ida, but rather that the three of them were the only ones who ought not to be there.
♥ "I don't know what we expect in this darkness. Even if there were a parliament of badgers we shouldn't see it. We'd only hear the barks and squeaks. The thing is to listen. We might hear a Litany of worms. Their noses would be as thin as blades of grass and they would sway from side to side in supplication. We shouldn't see them, of course."
"What do you imagine worms would sound like?"
"Like wind through a keyhole."
"Thou knowest that we are but dust," said Ida. "I wouldn't like to miss the worms."
♥ At this happy moment the wail of a distant fire siren tore the long silence of the night. Up and down, far and wide, vibrating like panic, it ripped up the space of dreams.
♥ "Oskar," said Ida, "I won't budge unless you come with me, and that's flat. I'm bigger than you and you've got to do what I say. If you go in the grass you could get lost, and we might tread on you while we were looking for you. Or a cat might get you and bring you in and play at killing you on the floor. Or an owl might eat you and spit your bones out in a pellet. You come with me or I'll break your nest open and catch you."
"I wish you'd go away. You talk like an ogress."
"Come with me," said Ping. "I promise to bring you back again. You can sleep in your nest, only we must be there on guard."
"What a lot of fuss about nothing," said Oskar, stepping out on to Ping's hand.
"Besides," said Ping, looking lovingly at the little person on his palm, "think how exciting the house will look. No cathedral was ever anything like so big. The biggest cathedral imaginable would go under the table, spires and all."
Ida was miserable because Ping had got Oskar, and because she had nagged just like any grown-up woman.
♥ "Come and stand on the window-frame." She lifted him up. They were still three special and equal friends, but the friendship had a most uncomfortable, lopsided feeling.
♥ Ping believed that a promise is a promise however small the person to whom it was made.
♥ This was the nearest to a quarrel that they had ever had.
They lay lonely and angry in their beds. And the rain teemed down and battered on the roof.
♥
Ida looked towards the windmill. She had been facing it all the time, but had been more interested in what was round her - water rats swimming in search of land, earwigs troubled at finding themselves afloat on sticks. Now she searched the hillock where the windmill stood for something unusual. She saw nothing except a dead tree lying uprooted near the water's edge. Its roots had been broken off, all but two which were bent back under one of those fuzzy knobs that the boles of elm trees often have, which, if the tree had been a piece of sculpture, would have been the head of a reclining figure. There were only two branches left, and they were crossed one over the other like legs. Quite an ordinary thing to see, really. Only while she was looking at it the branches moved and crossed the other leg over. And the foot swung contentedly in the lazy noon air.
..It did not move again, but Ida taking her eyes off it for a split second to look towards the windmill, saw behind the broken window-pane a watching eye as big and blood-shot as a bull's.
Another eye as big, but clear, bright and inquisitive, now opened in what Ida had once stupidly taken for a knob of a tree.
.."You weren't taken in, then," he said amiably.
"It was Oskar," said Ida. "This is Oskar. I would have walked past you without thinking. And this is Ping."
"It's good to be noticed, for a change. I sometimes wonder whether people aren't going blind, or perhaps can't see anything bigger than themselves, like ants. I see them rushing about, but they never seem to look higher than their own shoulders. Except boys. Boys are always best." (Ida was ashamed.) "Babies, of course. They gaze up out of their prams with round eyes willing to see anything that comes. I can even poke them and make them gurgle, but nobody takes any notice of what babies are looking at.Otherwise cats are the only things I have to talk to. They don't seem to notice any difference. Dogs always bark at me."
♥ The many creases of her huge bony face showed a lifelong discontent. There was not among them a line to show that she had ever smiled.
♥ "Dratted children! They're like water and lovers, get in anywhere. And their tongues will wag."
♥ "I suppose you're the lot we're looking for," one of them said as they drew nearer. "Three kids in a canoe who shot under the bridge at Wigglesoke at about twelve o'clock? We're the search party," he added with a grin. "Lucky you didn't get out into the Wash. Tide's running out strongly there. What a trip of innocents! Didn't you know any better than that? However, it looks as though we shan't need you, Doctor," he said to his companion. "Unless it's to certify them as idiots. Come on now."
♥ Maud Biggin was not upset at all.
"Hullo, Ham, Shem and Japhet!" was all she said, and thanked the rescue party politely but casually, as if they had brought back the cat.
"Children have nine lives," she said, "and if Ida takes after her aunt she's got ten." Even when the men told her that she would receive a bill later for the expenses of the rescue party, she only said: "Well, all experience has to be paid for, and a triple funeral would have cost much more."
♥ Three pairs of sand shoes pattered and skipped down the steep wooden staircase, only noticed by Dr Biggin as a sound of gaiety and by Sybilla Bun as a sound of healthy appetites.
♥
♥ The delighted children stopped paddling and every crease faded off the surface. The punt lay as if on a mirror which itself lay in empty space, for above and beyond the frame of bulrushes they could see nothing at all. There were white clouds above them and white clouds below, floating in a complete orb of hyacinth blue. When the swallows duped, they disputed each fly with the swallow that came up to meet them from below. The flies themselves in alighting on the surface met foot to foot with their doubles. Even an ice-cream carton alone in the blue space had a twin soul leaning towards it with the same enticing words in pink written upside down. And all the doubles were mysterious, both more shadowy and more brilliant than the originals because of an azure varnish that alone distinguished them. Ping lay over the end of the punt with his arms in the water up to the elbow and considered the black and golden Ping that considered him. Ida was twiddling above the surface with her fingers as if they were mosquito legs, to watch the precision with which the other fingers came to touch them. Oskar was standing, tall and subnurnt, and the other Oskar stuck down into the water exact and beautiful.
"It makes me wonder which is you," said Ida
"This one and I are sharing arms," said Ping. "He's got me up to the elbow and I've got him, like Siamese twins."
Oskar said: "It's only if we stay above the water that there are two. If I were to dive in I should slip right inside him and there would only be one. Doesn't that prove that the one underneath is the real one, and I'm only a sort of water ghost. I'm going to try."
He neatly dived in, and Ida saw the two Oskars meet and fuse till there was only one swimming away underwater. She was surprised how wretched she felt. "I wish he would come up again," she said and looked anxiously all round. Oskar's head bobbed up some distance away.
"There he is," said Ping. "Unless it's only a water ghost coming up to climb in the punt with us."
"Let's all be water ghosts then, in case," said Ida, and in they flashed.
When after struggling up over the side with elbows bent up like grasshoppers' legs, they were all in the punt again and getting their breath, Oskar said: "I was right, you see. That was the real one."
"Which one are you now, then?"
"I still feel the real one."
"Then what's the one that's in the water now, underneath you."
"Oh, I expect that's just the one that thought he was me."
"We shall get horribly mixed up," said Ida, diving in again. When she came up, she turned on her back and floated among the reflected clouds. The sun beat on her eyelids which looked to her crimson like pieces of stained glass.
♥ The three children applauded vigorously from the window-sill. The Committee appeared to notice them for the first time and even to see themselves as others saw them. The noise died down while the Chairman announced sternly that the meeting was adjourned indefinitely. He then made his way out, stopping to apologize to Dr Biggin for his inability to keep order.
♥ "I can't imagine dreadful things happening near Green Knowe. I know it is very old, but it feels like a refuge, something to be trusted."
"Green Knowe hasn't been there always," said Oskar. "Perhaps whatever frightened poor Piers Madeley was older than the house. Something so old that it didn't make sense, like the worst things in dreams."
♥ Outside, had there been street lights or headlights you would have thought it wad dark. There were massed shadows on the earth, but the sky was aware of the moon just under the horizon, and was catching a reflection of its light and relaying it to the river. Seen from the punt, the world was a symmetrical but unfamiliar pattern of bulky blacknesses jutting on to quicksilver. The daylight line between reality and reflection was gone. All the shapes were equally black, equally dense, and hung like clouds whose position in space is unknown, so that it was only if the punt passed through it, instead of bumping on it, that a reflected shadow could be known as such. The water, that is, as much of its surface as could be seen, wound among looming masses which at one moment, if one put out a hand to ward them off, were found not to be there, at another would be lowering, smothering and catching on one's hair. The course of the river that they thought they knew so well was as mysterious as a foreign language. They had to keep touching the surface with their paddles to reassure themselves that it was there, that they were on it, that it was the river they knew.
When at last the moon, heralded by a coppery haze, appeared above the flat earth and rolled behind the cottages like an immense orange beach ball, the enchantment was complete. Moonlight alone was a breathtaking adventure. The Amazon could not have bettered it.
At its first coming the moon seemed almost to bounce up, its movements could be watched. But once properly in the sky it hung like time.
♥ When the sun is in the sky every eye turns away to escape the blaze, but the moon compels sight an though to follow its course up towards the zenith, with the result that by contrast the height of trees and buildings seems dwarfed. Green Knowe seemed smaller, but at the same time charged with awe. It had changed its friendly old fairy tale quality for something far older and terrifyingly different. The house drew and held their attention so that the transformation of the moonlight-flattened garden went unnoticed. The bone-white walls were streaked with shadow patterns of leaves that were rhythmic and interlacing like patterns left by the ebb tide on sand. It had a curious look of wickerwork, which the rippling unevenness of the roof repeated. By daylight Green Knowe looked planted on the earth deliberately for all time, but now the glimmering outline before them looking as if it grew out of the earth, lightly springing up. No windows showed, but the house had a kind of dim glow. If Ida allowed herself to think of the walls as woven of rushes, instead of stone-built thee feet thick, then the hollow interior was so much the bigger, and having no upper floors must be imagined, by the marvel of its being constructed at all, as a sort of cathedral.
♥
The moon was going up like a kite. She had cleared the trees and was moving above the slant of the roof, just short of the finial. A drift of silky cloud was moving along to meet her ascent. The children approached the apex of the shadow of the building where it lay across the ground. Quite suddenly the cold brilliance above and the darkness into which they were walking filled them with a sense of fear as limitless as the night. They all had the same thought - while their eyes had been mesmerized by the moon they had forgotten to watch out. In that moment they became aware of a figure just in front of them, standing immobile at the point of the shadow and gazing up at the point of the house as they themselves had done a second before. The dark form was tall and roughly cloaked. It seemed to have a stag's head with antlers, and long naked human legs. The children dropped to the ground and backed into the nearest clump of bushes, from which they looked out like foxes. In the unnatural silence they could hear each other's teeth chattering. It sounded loud enough to give them away but they could not control it. It grew, as if in a nightmare the volume had been turned up. It seemed to shake the shadows and fill the open spaces, to materialize in figures that had not been there and now were. They grew out of the milky darkness and showed as silhouettes with deer's horns, with skins flapping over their shoulders as they moved. Each carried a spear which he shook high as he leaped repeatedly in salute to the moon, a wild homage which took place in absolute silence except for the unexplained rattling which increased as the leaping grew more furious. It had grown out of the chattering of their own teeth but was now something quite outside themselves and very threatening. Meanwhile the leader, wearing the stag's antlers, remained motionless like an inspired sorcerer proud with power.
As the moon moved to her appointed throne and shone there resplendent and worshipable, the leader gave a long wolf howl and broke into a pantomime of dreadful activity. The horned crowd opened out into a ritual dance, stamping round him to the accompaniment of a rhythmic rattling that was continuous and unnerving. It suggested rudimentary instruments such as tambourines and "the bones." It suggested also pursuit and death and the rattle of dry reed beds. The movements and gestures of the dancer were only less frightful than those of the leader, who was a genius in horror. They had a dramatic but inexplicable compulsion. The white-faced children felt that their limbs twitched and stamped of their own accord, that they could not keep out of it. This lasted until the moon had passed over, and was reigning, gloriously independent, in her sky. Then the dancers slipped the deerskin off their heads, wearing them like capes, and whirling round they charged - as it seemed to the children - straight at them, as if they had only waited for the end of their ritual to take vengeance on the intruders. They came within a spear's length - but passed straight on, making for the river bank. In that dreadful moment the children saw at close quarters the savage faces painted in black and white stripes, the hands painted red. They saw too, glinting in the cold light, the cause of that skeletal rattling, for every hunter wore round his neck strings of tusks, or horns, or teeth which knocked together as they swung to his movements. It was not a sound that could travel far, but the chatter of dead teeth must have come as the first warning of danger to nervous ears waking out of sleep in the marshlands.
The hunters streamed by the children, almost jostling them, but as the leaders had passed them unnoticed, so did all the rest, like a herd of animals. They boarded canoes that from the sound of it were hidden in the rushes near at hand. Their rapid paddle strokes drove through the water, where the moorhens fled with loud midnight cries, and the wild duck wheeled into flight with half-breathed clucks of alarm.
The children cautiously parted the leaves and crept our from their hiding-place. They looked down the river hoping to see the craft with its standing crew. But the moon had now met the shoal of cloud and passed behind it, so that from one moment to the next everything became dim and shadowy. A cold shudder of wind blew on the backs of their necks and ears, and rustled the balancing surface of blade and leaf along the river's edge and across the wide meadows. They were standing at midnight, alone, under a sky that was there before either earth or moon had been, and would be there long after. In this agonizing second of revelation that ALL passes, the bark of a disturbed heron caused them to clutch each other, and jerked loose their tongues.
♥ It is not to be expected that every day of the holidays will be filled with such adventures. Ida, Oskar and Ping were never at a loss and never bored. Many pleasant ordinary things can be done a second time, though they are never twice alike. The really extraordinary things can never be repeated.
♥
The audience could not resist joining in too, till Terak, rising to his full height, roared in a voice that would have silenced lions:
"SILENCE FOR THE ATOM BOMB!"
He held his hand a shrivelled balloon, which he began to inflate. Instantly there was dead silence. Ut was a quart-sized balloon which slowly, slowly grew bigger. When it was beginning to get tight, Terak tried scratching it with his finger. At the squawk, out popped the dachshunds again barking as if at a snake. They were silenced and treated one by one with puffs of air out of the balloon. Its diminished size was then inflated again to the same point and bigger. The tension and expectation were kept up so long that the audience became quite hysterical.
♥ "But we thought you believed in giants."
"I believe there were giants once - 20,000 years ago. But not now. There aren't any now. Because if there were we should know, shouldn't we. They're not things you could overlook."
"But..." said the children, but gave it up in despair.
As they were walking back to the canoes, each with a large ice-cream, which Dr Biggin had fallen behind to pay for, Ida said: "I'm sorry, Ping. One can't do anything for grown-ups. They're hopeless."
Ping sighed. "I can't understand, when it's the thing they want most in the world, and it's there before their eyes, why they won't see it."
"They are often like that," said Oskar wisely. "They don't like now. If it's really interesting it has to be then."
♥
