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 accents, long hair and pinafores were the subject of mockery, while they in their turn were unused to the Warwickshire dialect and the rough ways of the country boys. But they began to pick up something of the local vocabulary, adopting dialect words into their own speech: ‘chawl’ for a cheek of pork, ‘miskin’ for dustbin, ‘pikelet’ for crumpet, and ‘gamgee’ for cotton wool. This last owed its origins to a Dr Gamgee, a Birmingham man who had invented ‘gamgee-tissue’, a surgical dressing made from cotton wool. His name had become a household term in the district.
Mabel soon began to educate her sons, and they could have had no better teacher – nor she an apter pupil than Ronald, who could read by the time he was four and had soon learnt to write proficiently. His mother’s own handwriting was delightfully unconventional. Having acquired the skill of penmanship from her father, she chose an upright and elaborate style, ornamenting her capitals with delicate curls. Ronald soon began to practise a hand that was, though different from his mother’s, to become equally elegant and idiosyncratic. But his favourite lessons were those that concerned languages. Early in his Sarehole days his mother introduced him to the rudiments of Latin, and this delighted him. He was just as interested in the sounds and shapes of the words as in their meanings, and she began to realise that he had a special aptitude for language. She began to teach him French. He liked this much less, not for any particular reason; but the sounds did not please him as much as the sounds of Latin and English. She also tried to interest him in playing the piano, but without success. It seemed rather as if words took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant.
He was good at drawing too, particularly when the subject was a landscape or a tree. His mother taught him a great deal of botany, and he responded to this and soon became very knowledgeable. But again he was more interested in the shape and feel of a plant than in its botanical details. This was especially true of trees. And though he liked drawing trees he liked most of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It saddened him to discover that not everyone shared his feelings towards them. One incident in particular remained in his memory: ‘There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.’
Outside the school-room hours his mother gave him plenty of story-books. He was amused by Alice in Wonderland, though he had no desire to have adventures like Alice. He did not enjoy Treasure Island, nor the stories of Hans Andersen, nor The Pied Piper. But he liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow. He was even more pleased by the ‘Curdie’ books of George Macdonald, which were set in a remote kingdom where misshapen and malevolent goblins lurked beneath the mountains. The Arthurian legends also excited him. But most of all he found delight in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away in its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in the nameless North. Whenever he read it Ronald found it absorbing. ‘I desired dragons with a profound desire,’ he said long afterwards. ‘Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.’
Nor was he content merely to read about dragons. When he was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,’ he recalled. ‘My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon”, but had to say “a great green dragon”. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.’
The seasons passed at Sarehole. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated and the college on top of the hill in Moseley was illuminated with coloured lights. Somehow Mabel managed to feed and clothe the boys on her meagre income, eked out with occasional help from Tolkien or Suffield relatives. Hilary grew to look more and more like his father, while Ronald developed the long thin face of the Suffields. Occasionally a strange dream came to trouble him; a great wave towering up and advancing ineluctably over the trees and green fields, poised to engulf him and all around him. The dream was to recur for many years. Later he came to think of it as ‘my Atlantis complex’. But usually his sleep was undisturbed, and through the daily worries of the family’s poverty-stricken existence there shone his love for his mother and for the Sarehole countryside, a place for adventure and solace. He revelled in his surroundings with a desperate enjoyment, perhaps sensing that one day this paradise would be lost. And so it was, all too soon.
Christianity had played an increasingly important part in Mabel Tolkien’s life since her husband’s death, and each Sunday she had taken the boys on a long walk to a ‘high’ Anglican church. Then one Sunday Ronald and Hilary found that they were going by strange roads to a different place of worship: St Anne’s, Alcester Street, in the slums near the centre of Birmingham. It was a Roman Catholic church.
Mabel had been thinking for some time about becoming a Catholic. Nor did she take this step alone. Her sister May Incledon had returned from South Africa, now with two children, leaving her husband Walter to follow when he had completed his business. Unknown to him she too had decided to become a Catholic. During the spring of 1900 May and Mabel received instruction at St Anne’s, and in June of the same year they were received into the Church of Rome.
Immediately the wrath of their family fell upon them. Their father John Suffield had been brought up at a Methodist school, and was now a Unitarian. That his daughter should turn papist was to him an outrage beyond belief. May’s husband, Walter Incledon, considered himself to be a pillar of his local Anglican church, and for May to associate with Rome was simply out of the question. Returning to Birmingham he forbade her to enter a Catholic church again, and she had to obey him; though for consolation – or was it revenge? – she turned to spiritualism.
Walter Incledon had provided a little financial help for Mabel Tolkien since Arthur’s death. But now there would