Ronald, now in his fifth year, was slowly adjusting to life under his grandparents’ roof. He had almost forgotten his father, whom he would soon come to regard as belonging to an almost legendary past. The change from Bloemfontein to Birmingham had confused him, and sometimes he expected to see the verandah of Bank House jutting out from his grandparents’ home in Ashfield Road; but as the weeks passed and memories of South Africa began to fade, he took more notice of the adults around him. His Uncle Willie and his Aunt Jane were still living at home, and there was also a lodger, a sandy-haired insurance clerk who sat on the stairs singing ‘Polly-Wolly-Doodle’ to the accompaniment of a banjo, and making eyes at Jane. The family thought him common, and they were horrified when she became engaged to him. Ronald secretly longed for a banjo.
In the evening his grandfather would return from a day spent tramping the streets of Birmingham and cajoling orders for Jeyes Fluid from shopkeepers and factory managers. John Suffield had a long beard and seemed very old. He was sixty-three, and he vowed that he would live to be a hundred. A very jolly man, he did not seem to object to earning his living as a commercial traveller, even though he had once managed his own drapery shop in the city centre. Sometimes he would take a sheet of paper and a pen with an extra fine nib. Then he would draw a circle around a six-pence, and in this little space would write in fine copperplate the words of the entire Lord’s Prayer. His ancestors had been engravers and plate-makers, which was perhaps why he had inherited this skill; he would talk with pride about how King William IV had given the family a coat of arms because they did fine work for him, and how Lord Suffield was a distant relative (which was not true).
So it was that Ronald began to learn the ways of the Suffield family. He came to feel far closer to them than to the family of his dead father. His Tolkien grandfather lived only a little way up the road, and sometimes Ronald was taken to see him; but John Benjamin Tolkien was eighty-nine and had been badly shaken by his son’s death. Six months after Arthur died, the old man was in his own grave, and another of the boy’s links with the Tolkiens was severed.
There was, however, Ronald’s Aunt Grace, his father’s younger sister, who told him stories of the Tolkien ancestors: stories which sounded improbable but which were, said Aunt Grace, firmly based on fact. She alleged that the family name had originally been ‘von Hohenzollern’, for they had emanated from the Hohenzollern district of the Holy Roman Empire. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, ‘foolhardy’; and the name stuck. The family was also supposed to have connections with France and to have intermarried with the nobility in that country, where they acquired a French version of their nickname, du Téméraire. Opinion differed among the Tolkiens as to why and when their ancestors had come t England. The more prosaic said it was in 1756 to escape the Prussian invasion of Saxony, where they had lands. Aunt Grace preferred the more romantic (if implausible) story of how one of the du Téméraires had fled across the Channel in 1794 to escape the guillotine, apparently then assuming a form of the old name, ‘Tolkien’. This gentleman was reputedly an accomplished harpsichordist and clock-repairer. Certainly the story – typical of the kind of tale that middle-class families tell about their origins – gave colour to the presence of Tolkiens in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century, making their living as clock and watch manufacturers and piano-makers. And it was as a piano-maker and music-seller that John Benjamin Tolkien, Arthur’s father, had come to Birmingham and set up business some years later.
The Tolkiens always liked to tell stories that gave a romantic colouring to their origins; but whatever the truth of those stories the family was at the time of Ronald’s childhood entirely English in character and appearance, indistinguishable from thousands of other middle-class tradespeople who populated the Birmingham suburbs. In any case Ronald was more interested in his mother’s family. He soon developed a strong affection for the Suffields and for what they represented. He discovered that though the family was now to be found chiefly in Birmingham, its origins were in the quiet Worcestershire town of Evesham, where Suffields had lived for many generations. Being in a sense a homeless child -for his journey from South Africa and the wanderings that now began gave him a sense of rootlessness – he held on to this concept of Evesham in particular and the whole West Midland area in general as being his true home. He once wrote: ‘Though a Tolkien by name, I am a Suffield by tastes, talents and upbringing.’ And of Worcestershire he said: ‘Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way “home” to me, as no other part of the world is.’
By the summer of 1896 Mabel Tolkien had found somewhere cheap enough for herself and the children to live independently, and they moved out of Birmingham to the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile or so beyond the southern edge of the city. The effect of this move on Ronald was deep and permanent. Just at the age when his imagination was opening out, he found himself in the English countryside.
The house they came to was 5 Gracewell, a semi-detached brick cottage at the end of a row. Mabel Tolkien had rented it from a local landowner. Outside the gate the road ran up a hill into Moseley village and thence on towards Birmingham. In the other direction it led towards Stratford-upon-Avon. But traffic was limited to the occasional farm cart or tradesman’s wagon, and it was easy to forget the city that was so near.
Over the road a meadow led to the River Cole, little more than a broad stream, and upon this stood Sarehole Mill, an old brick building with a tall chimney. Corn had been ground here for three centuries, but times were changing. A steam-engine had been installed to provide power when the river was low and now the mill’s chief work was the grinding of bones to make manure. Yet the water still tumbled over the sluice and rushed beneath the great wheel, while inside the building everything was covered with a fine white dust. Hilary Tolkien was only two and a half, but soon he was accompanying his elder brother on expeditions across the meadow to the mill, where they would stare through the fence at the water-wheel turning in its dark cavern, or run round to the yard where the sacks were swung down on to a waiting cart. Sometimes they would venture through the gate and gaze into an open doorway, where they could see the great leather belts and pulleys and shafts, and the men at work. There were two millers, father and son. The old man had a black beard, but it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty clothes and sharp-eyed face. Ronald named him ‘the White Ogre’. When he yelled at them to clear off they would scamper away from the yard, and run round to a place behind the mill where there was a silent pool with swans swimming on it. At the foot of the pool the dark waters suddenly plunged over the sluice to the great wheel below: a dangerous and exciting place.
Not far from Sarehole Mill, a little way up the hill towards Moseley, was a deep tree-lined sandpit that became another favourite haunt for the boys. Indeed, explorations could be made in many directions, though there were hazards. An old farmer who once chased Ronald for picking mushrooms was given the nickname ‘the Black Ogre’ by the boys. Such delicious terrors were the essence of those days at Sarehole, here recalled (nearly eighty years later) by Hilary Tolkien:
‘We spent lovely summers just picking flowers and trespassing. The Black Ogre used to take people’s shoes and stockings from the bank where they’d left them to paddle, and run away with them, make them go and ask for them. And then he’d thrash them! The White Ogre wasn’t quite so bad. But in order to get to the place where we used to blackberry (called the Dell) we had to go through the white one’s land, and he didn’t like us very much because the path was narrow through his field, and we traipsed off after corn-cockles and other pretty things. My mother got us lunch to have in this lovely place, but when she arrived she made a deep voice, and we both ran!’
There were few houses at Sarehole beside the row of cottages where the Tolkiens lived, but Hall Green village was only a little distance away down a lane and across a ford. Ronald and Hilary would sometimes buy sweets from an old woman with no teeth who kept a stall there. Gradually they made friends with the local children. This was not easy, for their own middle-class