I loved Elizabeth Goudge’s books as a child – in particular, The Little White Horse – but I hadn’t heard of Linnets and Valerians until recently (thanks to a review here). I started reading it one mizzly grey day and thereafter could hardly leave the sofa to feed my daughter, speak to my partner, etc. etc. Nothing lifts the heart like an Elizabeth Goudge novel.
Written in 1964 but set in 1912, this is the story of the four Linnet children (Nan, Robert, Timothy and Betsy) who, locked up as punishment by their exasperated Grandmama and her companion (the Thunderbolt), escape to the garden rubbish heap:
Behind the hedge the sky was a bright blue. It dazzled the eyes and got inside the head and exploded there as a wild desire for wings, so that one could take off and soar up into it. There was a bird up there who had done just that, and his song came down to the earth he had left in a clear fall of music that was lovelier than anything the children had ever heard...
So it’s up over the hedge and off, their dog Absolom trotting along behind them. As dusk falls, they find a pony and trap outside a pub and ‘borrow’ it; the pony takes them back to his home, up on the moors. By great good fortune this home belongs to the children’s uncle, a vicar and retired schoolteacher, who lives there with his long-suffering factotum Ezra (who dances drunk in the moonlight), a dyspeptic owl named Hector, Andromache the cat and several hives of bees. Despite his gruff exterior (‘If there’s one thing I dislike more than a child, it’s a dog’) Uncle Ambrose takes in the children and loves them, and they adore him.
Exploring the village the children encounter wickedness, in the shape of shopkeeper Emma Cobley and her horrible cat Frederick, old Tom Biddle and the Lawsons, who run the pub. They also find the Lady Alicia, a recluse in an overgrown manor house, who has never recovered from the loss of her son. The children must play their part in vanquishing the evil and healing the tragedies of the past, and everything ends satisfactorily as it should.
Part of the great charm of Linnets and Valerians is the dry humour which weaves through it and prevents the good characters from being unattractive:
But in the library, with newspaper spread on the table and the boots and shoes arranged in rows, it transpired that Uncle Ambrose had cleaned shoes as a boy and had not forgotten the trick of it. He showed Timothy exactly how to set about it and he cleaned away himself with great concentration. Hector paced up and down the table like Napoleon on the deck of the Bellerophon, the cover of the tin of polish in his beak.
‘Manual labour,’ said Uncle Ambrose, holding up his right-hand Sunday boot and admiring the shine he had got upon it, ‘can be of great assistance in the development both of intellectual and spiritual powers.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Timothy dutifully, rubbing away at Betsy’s indoor strap shoes.
‘The Cistercian monks are agriculturists,’ continued Uncle Ambrose, ‘and all great saints either dig or cook according to sex or temperament.’
‘We aren’t digging or cooking,’ said Timothy.
Uncle Ambrose looked at him over the top of his spectacles. ‘Do you consider that you and I are great saints?’
‘No, sir,’ said Timothy.
‘I am glad to find you possessed both of humility and observation,’ said Uncle Ambrose. ‘Pass me the brown polish.’
Goudge is also very good at evoking place, and at writing about lonely people. But what really marks out her work is that it shimmers with spirituality and with the sense of other realities brushing up against our own, in particular a moral dimension. Here is the passage where Betsy is in Linden Manor and pursuing the monkey Abednego, who has run off with her doll Gertrude:
The door closed itself behind her and she was in darkness. She ran and ran, and felt as she ran that the strange dark tunnel was taking her right into the heart of a mountain. She forgot this was a house. Now and then a faint glimmer of light suggested that other tunnels led off to right and left, but she kept straight on because she very soon became so frightened that she could not stop. She was brave, but she thought she heard long swift loping footsteps padding up behind her and she pictured some creature rather like Abednego, but more horrible, reaching out for her with furry paws. She very soon forgot about Gertrude and even about the others and home, she forgot about everything except the hairy creature coming behind her. Then she tripped over something and fell headlong. She did not hurt herself, partly because she was so well cushioned with fat and partly because she fell on something soft, but she was startled and for a few moments she could only lie still with her face pressed against the softness.
Then she heard not the footsteps of the hairy creature but a soft humming, and it was so familiar and reassuring that immediately all the fear went out of her and she sat up and opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was a slanting sunbeam, and slowly and happily revolving in it, as though bathing their wings in the gold, were three bees. It was not total darkness about her now, but a dim green underwater light with the sunbeam slanting through it, and she thought at first that she was sitting on thick green moss in a cavern in the mountain. Then she realized that this must be a house after all because she was sitting on a green carpet.
The halls and passageways of the manor transform themselves into something alien and terrifying where a monstrous creature preys. One might say that Betsy’s internal state has engulfed her but in the context of the rest of the story, what happens is ‘real’. The manor, site of grief and what is past, is vulnerable to Emma Cobley’s magic and frequently stalked by Frederick (who is no ordinary cat and can suddenly grow immensely big). The bees protect Uncle Ambrose and those in his house, their harmonious and hard-working society a model for human society (I think this is a medieval trope in fact). In times of need or when one of the Linnets is unsure of where to go, a trio of golden bees appears to guide them. As such they surely represent God’s Trinity. Goudge’s magic is very Christian, Anglican, rather, with a strong sense of good, evil and duty; but also broad-minded, encompassing Pan, fairies and witchcraft in its world view as all part of Creation. Linnets and Valerians is just a lovely novel, I am only sorry that I never read it as a child.