The TV production of Lost Hearts ranged widely over my home county, moving south to shoot the unvarying agricultural vistas I was so familiar with; I would have recognised the landscape of the ominous opening scene, as Stephen’s carriage emerges from the morning haze of a long Fenland drove, passing vast fields where the ghost children wait.†† This premature appearance of the two grey-skinned horrors is one of the film’s weaknesses, for it raises too many questions about their motivation, and their foreshadowed knowledge of future events; in this way, at least, I think James’s original, where the spirits are portrayed as forces of vengeful hunger, works better. But the hurdy-gurdy music of the film, the wonderful visuals of its ghosts, coupled with Joseph O’Conor’s predatory Mr Abney – and of course the circumstances in which I first encountered it – means that the adaptation retains pre-eminence for me.
It has an added layer of poignancy, I now discover: the child actor Simon Gipps-Kent, who conveys Stephen’s likeability and wide-eyed terror with such effectiveness, died fourteen years after the film was made from a morphine overdose, aged twenty-eight.
From the dreaming spires, I head north-west through the drizzle and darkness, edging my way the last few miles along puddle-filled minor roads. Then, through an attractive village, an open gate and a gravel driveway, until the sturdy walls of one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in the country loom above me. It’s not quite the opening of Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, in which the main character comes to his great-grandmother’s – a place modelled on this building, Hemingford Grey Manor – in the middle of a flood of near-biblical proportions. But in terms of atmosphere it comes close, evoking the scene where Toseland reaches the house by boat – one of the most magical arrivals in children’s literature:
Illustration (‘Watery Arrival’) by Peter Boston from The Children of Green Knowe, reproduced here by kind permission of Diana Boston
They rowed round two corners in the road and then in at a big white gate. Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by quite a strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in elastic jigsaw shapes and made gold rings round the tree trunks. At last they came to a still pool reaching to the steps of the house, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel.
Published in 1954, The Children of Green Knowe is another book I encountered through its BBC adaptation, which aired in four half-hour teatime episodes from late November 1986. As it was my second year at grammar school I was perhaps a little too old to be watching it – certainly the cooler boys in my class wouldn’t have admitted to doing so. However, I definitely wasn’t the only one, with my friend James gaining the nickname Tolly due to his perceived likeness to the central character (Tolly is the familiar form of Toseland). The name stuck for a while, and as I view the series again now the face of the young actor, Alec Christie, who played the main role, has become inseparable in my memory from that of my classmate.
The Children of Green Knowe is the first of six children’s novels set around the eponymous twelfth-century house of its title. Born in 1892, Lucy Boston did not start writing the series until she was in her sixties; by then she had been living in Hemingford Grey, twelve miles from Cambridge, since 1937, having purchased the riverside manor after the failure of her marriage. The house (and its topiary-strewn garden) features at the heart of all of the books, with the spirits of its former inhabitants offering a usually reassuring presence.‡‡
The Children of Green Knowe commences with seven-year-old Tolly travelling, like so many characters in bygone children’s fiction, alone by train. (John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, filmed two years before by the BBC – and also avidly watched by my younger self – is another.) Tolly, however, breaks one of the apparent rules of this kind of story by not being an orphan – his parents are in Burma and he’s been summoned from boarding school for Christmas by his great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, whom he has never met. The wise, elderly lady seems a version of what Lucy Boston herself was to become – she spent the rest of her days in the manor, where she passed away, aged ninety-seven, in 1990.
Tolly is entranced by the house and his ancient relative’s tales of the past, which seem to come alive in the manifestations of the three benign ancestral Oldknow children, Toby, Linnet and Alexander. Victims of the Great Plague of 1665, they appear to him, alongside various tamed spectral animals and birds, when the whim suits, and Tolly pieces together their lost existences from the fragments they reveal about themselves. More prosaically, the young Toseland might be reconstructing the children’s lives in his head from the stories his great-grandmother tells him and the family artefacts she shows him. In any case, The Children of Green Knowe is a magical piece of writing about imagination and what it is to be a child.
It’s also a book that captures the weather in an almost touchable way – from its opening flood to the dramatic later blizzard, both of which were drawn from Lucy Boston’s memories of the devastating winter of 1947. Harsh heavy snowfalls were followed, that March, by the worst flooding ever recorded along Britain’s east coast, affecting a hundred thousand homes and turning the Fens into an inland sea. It was a transformation which Boston describes in her recollections of Hemingford, Memory in a House:
It was like trying to shovel away the sky. The flakes were huge, purposeful and giddy, fantastic to watch when we sat inside. They descended on the garden, and through their rising and falling play one could glimpse the steady disappearance of all known features. The frozen moat was filled up level with its banks, the big yews were glittering pyramids rising from the ground; drifts changed all contours.
I’m shown around the manor by Diana Boston – the wife of Lucy’s late son Peter, who etched the Green Knowe books’ striking white-on-black scraperboard illustrations and line drawings. The atmosphere of the place hits me the instant I enter. Diana’s enthusiasm for the house and its story is palpable. She gets me to don a pair of linen gloves, so I can handle the numerous intricate, but now fragile, quilts that Lucy Boston also worked on; these home-made treasures feature at the core of the second novel in the series, The Chimneys of Green Knowe. I have to admit my ignorance at this point, as Diana has assumed my fandom extends to every detail of the stories. At the time of my visit I have read only the opening title and have somewhat vague, thirty-year-old memories of its action.
She seems a little disappointed in me.
I do, however, vividly remember Toby’s carved wooden mouse, which Diana takes down from a high shelf and places in my hands – I run my thumb over the comforting smoothness of its dark wood, surprised by its weight. It is exactly like its illustration in the book (executed more than sixty years ago by Diana’s husband), and happens to be the very artefact used in the television adaptation.
We head to the first floor’s imposing music room. Here, during the Second World War, Lucy held evening recitals for airmen from the nearby base – but because she was an eccentric outsider and fluent in German, many of the locals had suspicions that she was spying for the enemy, rather than doing her morale-boosting bit for the war effort. The men sat on cushions in the church-like alcoves as the industrial-sized trumpet of the gramophone crackled out its sound. Diana puts a record beneath its needle now, to demonstrate: the effect on the room is transformative, almost placing me among the milling throng of blue-suited young men to whom this steadfast, ancient house must have seemed such a place of sanctuary compared to the uncertainty of their own impermanent prospects.