Henrietta’s House by Elizabeth Goudge ~ 1942.  Alternate American title: The Blue Hills. This edition: Puffin (Penguin), 1972. Illustrated by Anthony Maitland. Paperback. ISBN: 0-1403.0520-3. 191 pages.

My rating: 8.5/10. I’ve been playing amidst the juvenilia these past few days, and last night settled in to read this much-anticipated slender story. No surprises here, but no disappointments, either. Elizabeth Goudge lets herself go in full imaginative flight in this gentle and beautifully written juvenile adventure/fairy tale/moralistic tale.

Contains elements of her other two better-known juveniles, The Little White Horse, and especially Linnets and Valerians. Best approached with a willingness to surrender disbelief and just go with it! The usual Goudge theological and philosophical debate is present, but in this case makes more sense and is easier to digest than in some of her other books; two statues/church carvings, a laughing imp and a crying child, appear and reappear as analogies to the “mockery of Providence and the cringing human soul”, which sounds rather deep but which makes complete sense as one works one’s way through this multi-layered story.

This is a less common Goudge title, and I went to some trouble to acquire it. I suspect it is much more abundant in British used bookshops and libraries; used paperback copies on ABE start at $20 (with shipping) and hardcovers climb steeply into the $60s and $70s.

A must-read for the Goudge collector; one to share with a bookish child who is open to a good old-fashioned story. The fictional children are gloriously real, all expected flaws and faults fully present, though they are supremely fortunate in the adults in their lives!

This edition has extremely well drawn pen-and-ink illustrations by Anthony Maitland; I’d love to find this in a larger hardcover one day.

*****

Young Henrietta, first introduced in The City of Bells as a poet’s daughter living with her adopted family in the cathedral city of Torminster – her father is alive and well, but is off roaming the world unencumbered by such prosaic details such as the housing, feeding and clothing of his offspring – is waiting on the railway platform for her beloved companion, Hugh Anthony, to return from his first term at boarding school.

Hugh`s birthday is impending, and a gala rural picnic is planned; what happens on the way to the picnic is told, in vivid detail, in this novel.

The birthday party leaves Torminster in five different equipages, and due to their varying rates of speed, soon lose sight of each other. Only one arrives at the designated rendezvous; the other four parties take the long way round and have some strange adventures before everyone finds each other in a completely unplanned-for common destination. Several extra guests add an unexpected dimension.

And that’s all I’m going to tell you, as the details of the adventures and the reference of the title are best discovered by the reader. Because this is, as the author declares at the close, a fairy tale, everything works out perfectly and a happy ending for all is assured.

Elizabeth Goudge is not for everyone, but if you’ve been exposed and find that she has “taken”, you will appreciate this slightly fantastical outing. A prior acquaintance with the characters (who also appear in The City of Bells and The Sister of the Angels) will add to your appreciation, but is not at all necessary; the story works beautifully as a stand-alone as well.

*****

I am here including a slightly edited review of Henrietta’s House from the Elizabeth Goudge Society website, which gives some background information on the author and the inspiration for the book. This is best read after reading the novel, so the references will make sense.

The dedication reads: ” For Dorothy Pope. There were once two little girls, and 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. And now that they are grown up they are still friends, and the one who lived in Torminster dedicates this book to the one who lived in the Blue Hills, because it was she who saw the White Fishes in the cave. ”

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.” (She is of course referring to the 20th century and not the 21st.)

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 generation’s 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 observe that “(t)he 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.”

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.”

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 heart’s 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 … the cringing human soul and the mockery of Providence.” 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.”

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.

Read Full Post »