ORIGINAL PAPER A Glimpse Through the Magic Door: Ursula Moray Williams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse Colin Davison Published online: 8 December 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The first full biography of Ursula Moray Williams has been published to mark the centenary of her birth. In this article, its author, Colin Davison, assesses her work in the context of her life, paying particular attention to the way that her extraordinary childhood influenced her writing. He also examines new evidence about where her ideas came from for some of her best-known works. Keywords Ursula Moray Williams Á Little Wooden Horse Á Gobbolino Á Girl Guides Á Pinocchio When Ursula Moray Williams described her aims as a writer, she chose her words with care. She sought to take children ‘‘through the magic door [into] the enchanted country’’ (1972). The metaphor was not accidental. She could describe the door; she had lived in the country (Fig. 1). Events have been taking place across England over the past year to mark the centenary of the birth of one of its most prolific and best-loved children’s writers. Nowhere have the celebrations been more extensive than in Hampshire. For although Williams wrote all her most familiar titles during the 70 years after she left Colin Davison is the author of the first full biography of Ursula Moray Williams, Through the Magic Door: Ursula Moray Williams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse, published by Northumbria Press, an imprint of Northumbria University. He is a Slavonic Studies graduate and former journalist. He worked in Yugoslavia and Brussels, edited regional daily newspapers in England, including the Western Morning News, and served as Group Editor of the regional newspapers division of the Daily Mail media group. He served on the Code Committee of the UK Press Complaints Commission and acted as a publishing consultant in central Europe. C. Davison (&) 1 Bakers Lane, Ashton under Hill, Evesham WR11 7ZS, UK e-mail: [email protected]123 Children’s Literature in Education (2012) 43:113–128 DOI 10.1007/s10583-011-9144-1
Transcript
ORI GIN AL PA PER
A Glimpse Through the Magic Door: Ursula MorayWilliams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse
Colin Davison
Published online: 8 December 2011
� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract The first full biography of Ursula Moray Williams has been published to
mark the centenary of her birth. In this article, its author, Colin Davison, assesses
her work in the context of her life, paying particular attention to the way that her
extraordinary childhood influenced her writing. He also examines new evidence
about where her ideas came from for some of her best-known works.
Keywords Ursula Moray Williams � Little Wooden Horse � Gobbolino �Girl Guides � Pinocchio
When Ursula Moray Williams described her aims as a writer, she chose her words
with care. She sought to take children ‘‘through the magic door [into] the enchanted
country’’ (1972). The metaphor was not accidental. She could describe the door; she
had lived in the country (Fig. 1).
Events have been taking place across England over the past year to mark the
centenary of the birth of one of its most prolific and best-loved children’s writers.
Nowhere have the celebrations been more extensive than in Hampshire. For
although Williams wrote all her most familiar titles during the 70 years after she left
Colin Davison is the author of the first full biography of Ursula Moray Williams, Through the MagicDoor: Ursula Moray Williams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse, published by Northumbria
Press, an imprint of Northumbria University. He is a Slavonic Studies graduate and former journalist. He
worked in Yugoslavia and Brussels, edited regional daily newspapers in England, including the WesternMorning News, and served as Group Editor of the regional newspapers division of the Daily Mail media
group. He served on the Code Committee of the UK Press Complaints Commission and acted as a
publishing consultant in central Europe.
C. Davison (&)
1 Bakers Lane, Ashton under Hill, Evesham WR11 7ZS, UK
Children’s Literature in Education (2012) 43:113–128
DOI 10.1007/s10583-011-9144-1
the county, her magical childhood there shaped not only the incidents and characters
of her fiction, but also her own view of the very purpose of juvenile literature.
In 2006, I had just taken early retirement after a career as an editor of regional
newspapers when obituaries appeared in the British broadsheet dailies about an
author who had published 68 books for children between 1931 and 1987. She had
lived in a village near my own, but I had known her only through the books read to
our children at bedtime.
‘‘Just one more page, just one more paragraph,’’ they would demand at the end of
a thrilling passage of Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse or of Gobbolino theWitch’s Cat. ‘‘Just one more LINE,’’ they pleaded if mum or dad failed to oblige. I
wondered again, as I read the death notices, about the personality of the writer who
had created such bewitching characters. The discovery of a life as remarkable and as
inspirational as those of her brave, fictional heroes, led me to write her biography
(Davison, 2011) (Fig. 2).
Ursula was born on 19 April 1911 at Petersfield, Hampshire, ten minutes after her
sister Barbara, and two years to the day after the birth of a brother who had died in
infancy. Their father, a Classics teacher keen to command a social status greater
than his wealth, gave them both his second Christian name, Moray. It was not their
only common characteristic, for the twins were identical in appearance, and with
similar interests and aptitudes.
Horses were their first love, and the family’s lack of means to provide real
mounts did not prevent the girls from joining the local hunt. By the age of ten they
had built up a stable of hobby horses, made out of Moray’s old bed socks stuffed
with rags and tied onto broomsticks, and after exploratory adventures joined a
gathering of foxhounds (Fig. 3).
The girls were splendidly turned out in scarlet jackets and white breeches that only the
unduly critical might have likened to pyjamas. Huntsmen offered rides on their horses,
but a young onlooker was not amused. ‘‘Those silly children think they can go hunting on
their hobby horses. They think they’re real,’’ she called out. (qtd. in Moss, 1971, p. 58).
That, of course, was exactly the point, and in The Twins and Their Ponies(1936b), which retells the incident, the exploits of their wooden heroes more than
Fig. 1 Ursula Moray Williams,aged 58, photographed by afriend, Inge Gosney in 1970
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match any by animals of mortal flesh, and put to shame those riders who might be
regarded as ‘‘show-offs, and snobbish and selfish.’’ (Williams, 1938b).
For a time the girls attended a primary school in Petersfield, but their education
was largely conducted at home, partly by their mother Mabel, who had trained at the
Froebel Institute in Germany as a kindergarten teacher. As a result, the twins became
voracious readers. By the age of ten, Ursula had read or had read to her around 60
books. She loved those of Mary Louisa Molesworth, especially Christmas-Tree Land(1884) with its final reunion of the children, the chosen tree and their long-lost father,
and The Secret Garden (1910) by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The cannibals and
sharks of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) captivated the twins’
imagination, but it was Ballantyne’s The Kitten Pilgrims (1882) that they really
Fig. 3 Tally ho! Ursula andBarbara dressed to join the huntnear their childhood home atPetersfield, Hampshire
Fig. 2 Cover of ColinDavison’s biography of UrsulaMoray Williams (2011)
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adored—its words and frightening pictures relating the perilous journey of two
kittens sent out into the world by their mother to overcome evil beasts such as Giant
Sloth and Rhinoceros Sulkyface.
A Danish nanny (Fig. 4) had taught the girls to draw, and from the age of ten they
started to write and illustrate books, 200–300 pages in length, always about horses
or children, to present to each other at Christmas and on birthdays. For twelve weeks
from late September, and again from mid-January, they worked simultaneously with
pens and paint-boxes at opposite ends of a large table for two hours at a time, one
guarding her work from the eyes of the other with a barricade of dictionaries set on
end and opened across their spines. There was uproar if either felt the rival had
peeped. ‘‘Much as we loved my parents and governess,’’ Williams recalled, ‘‘the
real and personal part of our lives was segregated even from them. Once lessons and
meals were finished we were off together to our mainly imaginary and vastly
superior world, which we defended fiercely from adult intrusion or participation’’
(Williams, 1973, p. 13).
The tradition continued for six years. By the second year, the family had moved
to North Stoneham, near Southampton, into an extraordinary, crumbling, half-
abandoned mansion, overlooking lakes, and surrounded by trees and deep
undergrowth teeming with nightingales whose song would keep visitors awake at
night (Fig. 5).
The twins and their younger brother Alan had stayed with relatives in the summer
of 1922 while their parents made their new home habitable. All they knew of it was
from their father’s description of ‘‘a folly deep in the woods.’’ What they found
beyond the portico with its Ionic columns and the 12-foot high, wooden double
doors, was magical indeed. Around the entrance hall were stacked glass cases of
stuffed animals and birds including, elevated above the rest, a rather handsome
Fig. 4 Ursula and Barbara withthe Danish nanny Elsa Muellerwho taught them to draw. Theportrait was taken in LavantStreet, Petersfield, close to theirfavourite bookshop
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puffin. Beyond lay a second hall, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to display
a tall organ in a richly ornamented case, no longer suitable for playing anything
other than hide-and-seek in the cavernous space that may once have accommodated
the manual. Another door led to a round saloon, 24 feet across, whose pilasters were
surmounted by a glass dome painted with what appeared to be a copy of a picture by
Michelangelo. What had been planned as a grand reception area was to prove ideal
for roller-skating, indoor tennis and cricket, particularly after the cupola collapsed
during a storm shortly after the family’s arrival, and plain glass was substituted for
the former Classical scenes.1
Further in still came the most magnificent room in the house, lined with shelves
reaching almost to the ceiling, stacked with what appeared to be leather-bound
volumes in English and Latin. They proved in fact to be merely spines glued to
detachable boards—another conceit in this house of many illusions.
Williams was to use descriptions of North Stoneham House in nine of her books
and short stories, with similar settings used more fleetingly in as many more. She
provided sketches from which artist Faith Jaques worked to illustrate Grandpapa’sFolly and the Woodworm-Bookworm (1974), and described the building in greatest
detail in A Castle for John-Peter (1941), named after and dedicated to her husband,
Conrad Southey ‘‘Peter’’ John.
In the latter title, almost every incident and detail is lovingly recalled from life at
North Stoneham. ‘‘The house was the biggest John-Peter had ever seen, and the
oldest and most tumbledown.’’ Alongside a corridor were ‘‘dusty little rooms, lit by
skylights. Some of the floors were quite rotten, so that John-Peter’s foot went
through the boards when he stepped inside. All the rooms were empty and felt very
lonely and cold’’ (Williams, 1941, pp. 17–18).
Outside stood great cedars and a grove of ancient yews, where in real life
Williams was to find another audience for her writing. She and her sister had been
encouraged to join the Girl Guides, and had attended some of the movement’s
earliest camps in Hampshire (Fig. 6). There she had quickly gained popularity for
her fireside stories, and when later she was to become a patrol leader, lieutenant and
Brown Owl of several packs, her Brownies would gather in the clearing for
meetings that usually included a new tale often involving a moral twist or a punch-
line that depended upon a sound education, such as the proper use of knots.
Fig. 5 North StonehamHouse—the impressive edificewith a crumbling interior thatbecame Ursula’s childhoodhome
1 Part of her unpublished memoir, ‘‘I Lived in this House,’’ which describes North Stoneham, appeared in
Williams (1969) and Williams (1989). The full typescript is held in the Seven Stories archive in
Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Information is taken also from Barstow (2000) Recollections of NorthStoneham, from interviews conducted by this article’s author, and other sources.
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The Pack was sitting under the largest yew tree in the wood, and it had just had
tea, so everybody was rather crumby, and rather sticky, and not very inclined
to move, and the bits of paper that had been wrapped round the tea were
gradually fluttering out of the Brownie ring and trying to hide under the
bracken where they wouldn’t be noticed (Williams, 1926–1927).
As a leader, Williams received copies of the Girl Guides’ Association catalogue.
The issue for October 1931 listed 200 mostly practical but dull books such as BasketMaking at Home, and Peeps at the Union Jack and Other Flags of the BritishEmpire. In a letter eventually forwarded in 1932 to George Anderson, a director of
Harrap, she commented, ‘‘Children seem to prefer books containing coloured
pictures and short stories,’’ and enclosed a selection of her own. He immediately
agreed to publish them under the title For Brownies and persuaded the Association
to sell it through its movement for a commission of 2.5 per cent.
Guides and Brownies were to appear in 18 of Williams’ works, and in six of her
first ten. Given their frequent appearance at this formative stage of the writer’s
career, it is possibly surprising that so little attention has been given to the influence
of the movement on the author’s output as a whole. Courage, kindness,
determination, loyalty, inventiveness—all were values represented by the organi-
sation, in Williams’ fiction and in her life. The generality of such qualities may
make it hard to argue an exclusive and consequential link between these activities,
but the similarities of form between the stories told within the Brownie ring and that
of the vast majority of Williams’ mature output are surely not accidental. The
evening meetings demanded short pieces that could be told in ten minutes or so.
Nearly all her classic stories like Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse (1938a) and
Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat (1942) largely comprise short adventures, just long
enough to be told around a campfire, or at bedtime, and no doubt contributed to their
popularity. When, however, the author attempted longer, continuous narratives, the
results—with the possible exception of The Noble Hawks (1959b) and certainly of
The Toymaker’s Daughter (1968)—were usually less successful.
Fig. 6 The twins picturedshortly after joining the GirlGuides
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Williams’ approach to Harrap had been made through her uncle, Stanley Unwin,
head of George Allen & Unwin. His firm published only one of his niece’s books
during his lifetime, Grandfather (1933b), a remarkable collection of stories in blank
verse dedicated to his father. For many years, however, he acted as Williams’
benefactor: he paid for educational and holiday trips to Switzerland, and when
Barbara won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, he encouraged Ursula to stay
home to write. She was not yet twenty when he delivered her first contract, from the
unlikely source of A & C Black, for Jean-Pierre (1931), a tripping tale written in
verse, set in the Alps, illustrated by the author’s own scissor-cuts.
The author, whose language thereafter was always robust and direct, soon
regretted the affected spellings, correcting ‘‘faeries’’ and other archaisms in her own
copy after printing, but it was in other regards an achievement of which she was
justly proud, a precursor of modern picture books, and an indication of themes to
recur in her fiction for the next 57 years: nature, faith, courage, home-coming and
its figurative representation - food. For good measure, the story concludes not with
one, but with two home-comings: for Jean-Pierre, whose mother,
Kissed him, tucked him up in bed,
‘‘Angels keep thee safe,’’ she said.
And, after a bit of a butting from dad, for his little chamois goat, whose mother
sought him in the hay, gave him all the milk she had, and licked his tears away with
a goodnight plea:
‘‘May the faeries guard my son,
Sleep … O little wicked one.’’
(Williams, 1931, pp. 30-2)
Williams, aged 26, had published 15 books by the autumn of 1937, all illustrated
by herself. Her output had been diverse as well as prolific: two titles in verse, two
sets of Alpine short stories, a comic fairy tale The Pettabomination (1933c), plays
for children in The Autumn Sweepers (1933a), volumes for Brownies, and three
books about horses, Kelpie, the Gipsies’ Pony (1934), Sandy-on-the-Shore (1936a)
and Dumpling (1937), creatures real enough to feel them blowing and ‘‘lipping’’ at
the reader’s hand. The Adventures of Boss and Dingbatt, the only title ever issued
under her married name, Ursula John (1937), was a remarkably simple but charming
picture book of two cuddly toys, with large-format photographs taken at their flat in
Hampton, Middlesex, by husband Peter.
On her Swiss honeymoon two years earlier, Williams had bought baby-clothes
for the children she longed for. Like the cuddly toys, they were still waiting for
employment, but at the end of 1937 Williams discovered she was pregnant.
Throughout her career, it would happen that she produced her best work when she
was happiest. In June 1938 her first child was born—the first of four boys—and
three months later there appeared the book that would make her famous, Adventuresof the Little Wooden Horse (Fig. 7).
More than 30 years later, Williams spoke about her childhood reading to the
commentator Elaine Moss. After she mentioned Pinocchio, the latter suggested
it might have been partly responsible for the creation of the little wooden horse
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(Moss, 1971). The association had not been evident to Williams at the time, but it
stuck in her mind, so when Anne Wood, the children’s TV producer and later
creator of Teletubbies asked her to contribute a magazine article, she returned to re-
examine the link between the two books:
As a child of six or seven my mother read aloud to my twin sister and myself
the original translation of Collodi’s Pinocchio. She read it again and again …and every time I listened I was consumed by the same distress at Pinocchio’s
treatment of his father Gepetto. … Each time I heard the story I hoped that this
time things would be different and Pinocchio would behave better, but he
never did.
The Little Wooden Horse was, I think, an unconscious vindication of
Pinocchio’s guilt. He was Pinocchio as I would have wished him to be,
although in writing the book I never realised that I had related him to Collodi’s
immortal story. But now I see that Uncle Peder’s carved wooden hero must
have risen very positively from the ashes of my early distress, as, armed with a
staunch and loving heart, he marched out into the world to dedicate himself to
the cause of his well-loved master. (Williams, 1976, p. 5)
This passage has been widely cited, although a connection admitted by the author
as at best an ‘‘unconscious’’ influence surely merits further investigation. The Little
Wooden Horse, it now seems, first appeared much earlier in Williams’ writing and,
as so often, the inspiration probably came from her childhood.
There is no doubt that Pinocchio, first published in England by the twins’ great-
uncle T. Fisher Unwin in 1892, had been popular in the Williams nursery, although
Fig. 7 The Little WoodenHorse with Uncle Peder. One ofthe original illustrations byJoyce Lankester Brisley
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curiously Ursula failed to include it in an inventory of books that she had read, or
heard her mother read. She set out the list for her own amusement in August 1931,
marking all those she liked best with stars, and kept it up to date for several years,
but although the catalogue included more than 600 titles, Pinocchio was not among
them. She referred to it for the first time as a favourite childhood story in a piece
written for a magazine run by story-teller and librarian Eileen Colwell (Williams,
1938c), three months after publication of Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse.
Perhaps the writing of the latter had brought it to mind, or it might just have been
that the publication of a new edition of Pinocchio by Dent that year, after a gap of
12 years, acted as a reminder (Fig. 8).
There is no other obvious example in Williams’ work where she has derived her
theme from another author: Gobbolino owes little to The Kitten Pilgrims(Ballantyne, 1882), just as The Good Little Christmas Tree (1943) is not derivative
of Molesworth’s Christmas-Tree Land (1884). However, borrowing elements from
her life was a different matter. These appear constantly in her fiction, with Uncle
Peder presented in Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse as the small protagonist’s
father-figure. Most readers, unaware of the preferred Christian name of the author’s
husband, would fail to make the connection to the book’s dedicatee, Conrad
Southey John.
As for the hero, ‘‘his actual creation in my mind was not so straightforward as it
might appear. The idea came to me in a flash,’’ Williams said later (Williams,
1970b). Yet every natural phenomenon has its cause. And there was arguably a real
Pinocchio in Williams’ life.
It was the puppet’s treatment of his father who had made sacrifices ‘‘to give his
ungrateful little son a schooling’’ that had apparently caused her distress as a young
girl. Just before Williams began writing Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, she
had to travel to Cambridge University to rescue her younger brother Alan who had
threatened to shoot himself with a revolver. After secretly joining the Communist
Party, he had been sent down for publishing an intemperate attack on the masters of
King’s College, and feared facing the father who had paid his school and university
fees. Imagination, always creative but not always just, might have suggested that
Alan was Pinocchio, and wished for a happy ending.
Fig. 8 Williams’ own sketch ofthe Little Wooden Horse—oneof many she would dash off forchildren and fans
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So many of Williams’ small adventurers sally forth more in the hope of a happy
return than for the excitement of leaving home behind that it seems questionable
that Pinocchio should have been the sole inspiration of her first best-selling title.
The author confirmed late in life that the Little Wooden Horse had appeared in at
least one of the early stories made up for her sister. ‘‘My chief memories of him,
dear fellow, is of telling my twin sister stories as we huddled under the bedclothes
aged about ten onwards’’ (Williams, 1997), she told a young fan who wrote saying
how much he loved the character. That would date the Little Wooden Horse’s
creation back to her days in Petersfield, before the move to North Stoneham. Why
then a little wooden horse with wheels, not a hobby-horse, or the real horse that the
twins had longed for?
A clue is offered by a contemporary photograph held at Petersfield Museum
(Fig. 9). For a year or more, the sisters would have passed the Lavant Street Post
Office run by Llewellyn E. Bradley on their way to school. It was a few doors away
from the photographic studio where they had had their portraits taken, but the Post
Office was a greater point of interest, for it also served as ‘‘Bookseller, Stationer,
News Agent, Fancy Repository,’’ and home to Bradley’s Library. It was crammed
with tempting items, books that the girls borrowed or occasionally bought, postcards
and toys. The photograph shows something that, given the girls’ interests, they
cannot have failed to notice on their daily walks. Hanging in pride of place from the
awning immediately beside the entrance, are four splendid, striped, little wooden
horses.
George Harrap loved the story. Time magazine named it one of its books of the
year—together with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Adolf Hitler’s MeinKampf. Anne Wood, creator of Teletubbies, called it ‘‘one of the greatest children’s
Fig. 9 The L.E. Bradley bookshop that Williams would have passed daily—displaying an array of littlewooden horses under its awning. Photograph: Petersfield Museum, Hampshire, file 7/203
122 Children’s Literature in Education (2012) 43:113–128
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books ever written’’ (2010); Margery Fisher, while recommending other Williams
titles, praised Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse most extensively, and called it
‘‘wise, mature, richly written.’’ It helped younger children, she wrote, when they
‘‘must get on their tricycles and venture out to see what the world is like’’ (Fisher,
1961, pp. 41–42).
Behind the book’s success is considerable technical skill, as when the author
handles the tricky problem of creating a talking animal. Faced with being sold, the
wooden horse at first keeps his thoughts to himself, then ‘‘at last … made a great
effort and sobbed out, ‘Oh, master, I don’t want to leave you!’’’ (Williams, 1938a,
p. 13). Above all is the tantalisingly consistent illogicality of a hero who can win a
race despite losing all his wheels, and remove his own head. The culmination of
such glorious absurdity comes after an unfortunate decapitation when he sets out ‘‘to
look for his wooden head by the banks of the stream.’’ He might have been fearful,
but fortunately ‘‘he had no painted eyes with which to see his shadow in the
moonlight’’ (p. 131). Adults could not intrude here, with their tiresome particularity.
Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse has remained in print almost continuously
for 73 years, the latest edition by Macmillan appearing in October 2011. Its
achievement would have been nearly matched by Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat,which sold out within a few months of its first publication. It then puzzlingly
disappeared from sale for more than 20 years, although Harrap continued to reprint
less successful Williams’ titles. No correspondence survives from the time, but a
1963 letter from Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books, hints at an explanation.
She suggested using the author’s original illustrations to keep down the cost of an
abridged version to be published the following year. In fact, the Puffin edition
appeared with completely new artwork, and although the spikier and more sprightly
Gobbolino might be considered an improvement on his plump and fluffy predecessor,
his creation suggests some mishap suffered by his precursor (Figs. 10, 11).
Harrap lost many thousands of books during the Blitz, leading to the conclusion that
the original drawings and the moulds from which printing plates for Gobbolino were
cast, probably the manuscript too, were likewise destroyed. Otherwise it is hard to
Fig. 10 Gobbolino as heappeared in Williams’ originalillustration, now lost, for Harrap
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understand the publisher’s failure to reprint such an instantly gripping and captivating
story that seemed certain to repeat the success of The Little Wooden Horse.2
Between the two classic titles, Williams had published Adventures of Puffin(1939). She had just revisited North Stoneham House, where her parents were still
living, to sort through its contents before demolition. Among the bric-a-brac she
found the stuffed birds in their cases (mentioned above), including the handsome
puffin, inspiring her to write the story in the following three months. The familiar
pattern of peregrination opens with the finding of an egg, and ends—against all
odds—with its happy hatch. The language too bursts with energy and life. The
opening moments are filled with tension caused by fear that the egg might easily fall
‘‘rackety-cracketty’’ over the edge of its cliff, and the story ends exuberantly, its
author riding confidently on a rolling wave of words:
Trotting out on to the ledge again, he put a wing around the tiny Puffin’s
shoulders … Sitting side by side while all the rainbow colours faded out of the
granite cliffs, while the moon rose, and mermaids dived in and out of silver
ripples, combing their hair, while seals barked, and waves washed sighs into
hollow places, Puffin told his little companion the story of his life; and when,
his adventures told, they sat quietly in the moonlight, he began the tale of all
the wonderful things they were going to do. (Williams, 1939, p. 198)
With its refrain, ‘‘there’s nuffin’ that a puffin cannot do,’’ the book curiously
anticipates a theme of the Puffin Club (Penguin’s organisation for young readers),
which Williams was so vigorously to support later; but despite exciting episodes,
contemporary references—probably inserted at the suggestion of her husband
Peter—quickly made the work seem old-fashioned. The same could not be said of
her next major title.
By 1942, the family had moved from constant air raids in Surrey to the
comparative safety of Gloucestershire. There a young visitor watched as Williams
cut out shapes freehand from coloured paper for The Good Little Christmas Tree(1943) and stuck them down on black backgrounds (Fig. 12). The audacity of the
Fig. 11 Gobbolino as heappeared in Williams’ perkynew version for Kaye Webb atPuffin
2 A replica edition of 1981 supports this theory. Although printed on higher grade paper than the wartime
original, illustrations show slight fill-in, indicating they have been copied from the printed page, and the
only coloured picture is missing.
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Christmas tree able to pull up his roots and wander through the woods, and the
repeated imagery of the candles flickering, the icicles sparkling, the toadstools
gleaming, the diamonds glittering, and the cookies dangling from his branches,
‘‘bobbing about like so many little brown mice’’ (Williams, 1943, unpaged) is
inimitable. The theme of sacrifice and deliverance so perfectly captured the spirit of
the times that the BBC adapted the story for broadcast on the Sunday before the
happy Christmas of 1945, and repeated it several times thereafter.
For Williams, however, the outbreak of peace also marked the start of a period of
greater personal difficulties. In addition to bringing up four boys, plus another
habitually adopted during school holidays, she had to care at home for two increasingly
infirm parents over the next nine years. She had to endure the death within a short
period of her adored husband and her sister, and then took on the burden of looking
after another dying relative. She lost the sight of one eye, and battled through a cancer
thought likely to kill her. Inevitably such vicissitudes affected the quality of her work:
Secrets of the Wood (1955b), Hobbie (1958a) and No Ponies for Miss Pobjoy (1975)
are not the products of an author whose energies were wholly concentrated on her
creative powers. Yet when imagination roamed freely, Williams returned to top form.
Grumpa (1955a) is a cheeky, whimsical portrait of the author’s father, who had
become notoriously tetchy; The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie (1959a) opens
memorably:
One August bank holiday afternoon a little shipwrecked cat called Mackenzie
was swimming for his life towards a desert island, pursued by eight hungry
sharks. … The sharks took their time …. ‘‘Take your time, my friend!’’ they
seemed to say …. ‘‘Swim all afternoon and we will eat you for tea! Or swim
all evening, and we’ll have you for supper!’’ (p. 9)
Fig. 12 A detail of one of Williams’ paper-cuts for The Good Little Christmas Tree. ‘‘Tic-tic-tic andthere was a boy. Tic-tic-tic and there was a Christmas tree,’’ recalled a guest who watched her work
Children’s Literature in Education (2012) 43:113–128 125
123
Jockin the Jester (1951) and The Noble Hawks (1959b) explore new territory as
extended narratives of the Middle Ages. Boy in a Barn (1970a) is a gripping
adventure inspired by a chalet holiday in Austria. Bogwoppit (1978a) is a splendid
creature such as might have lived in a dank cellar of North Stoneham. The late titles
Spid (1985) and Grandma and the Ghowlies (1986) return to perennial concerns
about home and security, but with a delight in the overturning of adult order.
The unevenness of these middle years is nowhere better exemplified than in what
became a trilogy starting with The Three Toymakers (1945). The final volume, TheToymaker’s Daughter (1968), is among the finest of all Williams’ achievements,
and one in which she comes closest to creating mature, contradictory personalities
in a world of moral complexity. In the redemption of Malkin and his miscreant doll,
Marta, the author produces the most moving climax in any of her novels. The book
would surely have been reissued and become recognised as a classic were it not for
the fact that the preceding volume, Malkin’s Mountain (1948) is based upon a
preposterous concept of a moving mountain containing a heart that must be restored
with a magic key from a music box.
Williams’ later work was increasingly influenced by her work in the community,
and a concern particularly for children of low educational attainment. Four volumes
of short stories for slow readers, Hurricanes (1971), published while a school
governor, tackle issues such as motherhood and delinquency, often very effectively,
in simple language. Even more telling was her sometimes exhausting work as an
outstanding juvenile magistrate. From The Moonball (1958b) onwards, children
from dysfunctional families appear more frequently in her novels. But, through their
own efforts, the love of those around them, and after the occasional disciplinary
walloping, they find the same happy homes in which their predecessors have been
accommodated for some time.
In August 1972, Williams spoke at the fourth annual conference at St. Luke’s
College, Exeter, about writing ‘‘for the forgotten child in myself, the child that I
hope I shall never quite forget.’’ Children came under pressure to enter into literary
imagination on adult terms, she said. Instead, she offered her own vision:
As writers and educationalists our role is to play the Pied Piper and pipe the
children up the mountain and through the magic door and to leave them there
inside the enchanted country. The grown-ups can only follow so far, or the
glamour goes. (Williams, 1972)
To the end of her writing career, Williams continued to describe that enchanted
country in loving detail: the animals, the Girl Guides, the vicars, the tumble-down
mansion, the cakes and puddings, and the unusually high incidence of twins, usually
identical. The visitors’ guide to that magic land could be naı̈ve. ‘‘Would Hitler’s
megalomania have been less if his early years had known the comfort of a Fluff?’’ she
once asked in an article about cuddly toys (Williams, 1978b). And the scenery could
look disconcertingly old-fashioned, like a black-and-white postcard of the English
countryside. Its inhabitants and their customs were preserved by a memory unsullied
by the contradictions and uncertainties of adulthood. Life was a fairly simple story,
simply told, particularly in short episodes in that dreamy time before actual sleep. For
one who felt instinctively what it was to be a child, its values never changed.
126 Children’s Literature in Education (2012) 43:113–128
123
The centenary in 2011 of Williams’ birth offered a suitable opportunity to
reassess the extensive, diverse, and often inspiring output of this children’s writer.
Of her own assessment of what she achieved, one might look to Paddy on the Island(1987), her last published work, which appeared when she was 76, and was the only
one dedicated to all four of her sons. Williams loved Shakespeare—The Tempest in
particular. A greedy, lazy donkey in Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse is called
Caliban, and she wrote a late unpublished story called ‘‘The Singing Island.’’ Now
at the end of her final adventure, her hero Paddy prepares, Prospero-like, to set aside
his magic powers and asks himself if his adventure has all been worthwhile. Yes, he
answers after a little hesitation, and goes off to rejoin his family.
References
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Fisher, Margery. (1961). Intent upon Reading: A Critical Appraisal of Modern Fiction for Children.
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