{"id":150,"date":"2019-02-15T17:00:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T17:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=150"},"modified":"2018-07-02T14:06:34","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T14:06:34","slug":"at-green-knowe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"At Green Knowe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019ve been thinking more about book illustrations and how they work to produce tourist effects, and remembering in particular another expedition I undertook with the children to the house outside Cambridge that inspired the classic The Children of Green Knowe <\/em>(1954). Like Hill Top Farm – the topic of my last post – Lucy Boston\u2019s Manor at Hemingford Gray has been preserved in the state in which the elderly author left it at her death. Owned and occupied by Diana Boston, Lucy Boston\u2019s daughter-in-law, since the writer\u2019s death in 1990, it is open to visitors by appointment only. It welcomes only about 3,500 a year, of whom perhaps 2,000 have come principally to see the garden, celebrated for its collection of iris. For those who have come as literary tourists, however, as we did, the tour of the house works because it so efficiently replicates the structure of the first of Boston\u2019s series of six children\u2019s novels (1954-1976).<\/p>\n

A visit to the Manor House today mimics the arrival of the seven-year-old Toseland (\u2018Tolly\u2019 for short) at the house of his great grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, described in the opening of The Children of Green Knowe.<\/em> Arriving by boat because of flooding, Tolly, escorted by Mr Boggis, walks into the entrance hall:<\/p>\n

As they stepped in, a similar door opened at the far end of the house and another man and boy entered there.\u00a0 Then Toseland saw that it was only themselves in a big mirror\u2026.There were three big old mirrors all reflecting each other so that at first Toseland was puzzled to find what was real \u2026 He almost wondered which was really himself.<\/p>\n

Tolly is made strange to himself, and multiplied between the real and the fictional. The effect is redoubled for the tourist, for the mirrors are all still there, and the mind\u2019s eye momentarily sees Tolly, and Mr Boggis, and one\u2019s own self all jumbled together in the hall. Our guide said kindly to my children, \u2018you can pretend you\u2019re two little Tollies\u2019, and then, just like the fictional Mrs Oldknow, took us up the same way that Tolly went to bed: \u2018up winding stairs \u2026 to the very top of the house\u2019, into a room containing \u2018a low wooden bed \u2026a beautiful old rocking-horse\u2026a doll\u2019s house\u2019, \u00a0a \u2018wooden box painted vermilion with bright patterns all over it\u2019 a \u2018wicker bird-cage hung from one of the beams\u2019, and \u2018a big mirror reflecting all the rest,\u2019 prompting Tolly\u2019s response, \u2018In this house \u2026everything is twice!\u2019 Tolly\u2019s sense that \u2018everything is twice\u2019 anticipates the tourist\u2019s sense of replication \u2013 everything is indeed \u2018twice\u2019 \u2013 once in the text, and once \u2018for real\u2019. Feste the rocking-horse is there, and so is the linnet\u2019s cage. The chest-of drawers still holds \u2018two curly white china dogs\u2019 and \u2018an old clock\u2019. My girls knelt on the very window-seat from which Tolly looked out over the flood-waters and peered out towards the river.<\/p>\n

The doubleness of the house is not just a matter of mirrors for Tolly; the attic room also contains a doll\u2019s house that is a replica of Green Knowe:<\/p>\n

Why, it\u2019s this house! \u2026 Look, here\u2019s the Knight\u2019s Hall, and here\u2019s the stairs, and here\u2019s my room!\u00a0 Here\u2019s the rocking-horse and here\u2019s the red box, and here\u2019s the tiny bird-cage! But it\u2019s got four beds in it. Are there sometimes other children here?<\/p>\n

Reiterated in miniature, the house also turns out to reiterate its past in the shape of three ghostly Restoration children, Toby, Linnet, and Alexander, who become Tolly\u2019s companions and surrogate brothers and sisters. Tolly\u2019s entry-points to this magical emotional world are two-fold: the hole in the floorboards in which Tolly finds the key to the toy-chest and Toby\u2019s \u2018Japanese mouse.\u2019 Both are still there in the house. Child-visitors (or particularly enthusiastic adults\u2026) are also offered the chance to turn the key in the chest and find Toby\u2019s sword, Linnet\u2019s doll, Alexander\u2019s flute, the marbles and dominoes, and other items that call up the children\u2019s stories. Sitting on the chest-of-drawers is Toby\u2019s ebony Japanese mouse: only it too is there \u2018twice\u2019 \u2013 once for real, and once in replica for visitors to hold. As a special treat my children were allowed to hold the real one as well, which they preferred, they said, as it was colder, hairier, and its eyes glistened more. The mouse\u2019s part aliveness and part not-aliveness, its realness and not-realness, perfectly summaries the visitor\u2019s ambiguous relation with the fiction and the house. Fittingly, the replica mouse is one of few souvenirs that the house provides. The effect of uncanny twinning and doubling, whereby the real modern child replicates the actions of the fictive twentieth-century child who replicates the actions of the ghostly Restoration children, is strongly reinforced by the way that the house is preserved so as to correspond not just with the careful descriptions of it in the book, but with the original illustrations to the story which themselves insist on the detail of the contents of the attic.<\/p>\n

Although on the dining-table downstairs there lies an exercise book containing the manuscript of The Children of Green Knowe<\/em>, and a chair pushed carelessly back, as though the author had just walked into the kitchen for a cup of tea, The Manor is not presented primarily as a writer\u2019s workshop. Rather, the house works as a physical counterpart to the texts because it expresses the same qualities of distress, nostalgia for the past, and a precariously-achieved consolation. The Manor clearly pre-existed both the author Lucy Boston and her fictional surrogate Mrs Oldknow, the loving curator of the ghosts. It is not the writer who provides the keys to the world of fantasy, but the place and its array of talismanic artefacts. In Hemingford Grey, hyper-realism and Gothic fantasy inhabit the text and house equally and simultaneously. So powerfully strange was this experience that I bought a replica of Tolly\u2019s mouse, to remind me of it \u2013 it sits on my desk this minute. That day I watched my children walk into a book and saw how they would in their turn become the ghosts of children.<\/p>\n

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                        I\u2019ve been thinking more about book illustrations and how they work to produce tourist effects, and remembering in particular another expedition I undertook with the children to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,95,28,33,34,35,32,31,30,29,92,4,93,36],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-green-knowe","tag-hemingford-gray","tag-history-of-reading","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-love-of-literature","tag-lucy-boston","tag-nicola-watson","tag-the-children-of-green-knowe","tag-the-literary-tourist-readers-and-places-in-romantic-and-victorian-britain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}