The road to Greene Knowe
Judy Taylor
MEMORIES by Lucy Boston Colt Books, £14.95, pp. 340 It would have been no surprise at all to have been celebrating Lucy Boston's 100th birthday this year with her in the Manor in Hemingford Grey, but sadly she only made it to 97. A year or two before her death in 1990 Lucy was still working in her garden for eight hours a day in the summer months, frustrated because she was unable to keep up the 12 hours to which she had been accustomed since the end of the war. A striking woman in appearance, burnt nut-brown by the sun and the wind, startlingly handsome with piercing black eyes, she was without doubt the Mrs Old- know from her 'Green Knowe' children's books, just as her house was Green Knowe itself.
Lucy Boston had first seen what appeared to be a semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse in 1915 when, on her days off as a VAD at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cam- bridge, she had punted past it on the river. Over 20 years later, after time spent in France, Italy and Austria, after marriage, the birth of her son, and the break-up of her marriage, she returned to Hemingford Grey. 'I hear this house is for sale,' Lucy said at the door, astounding the owners who had decided to sell but had told no one of their intention. She bought the Manor from them on the spot — and learned that it was a Norman manor house built in 1120. The house and its garden became Lucy's passion, 'It was like falling in love.' It was also the start of a long peri- od of discovery and restoration which turned the manor from a neglected and ill- used building into the striking house it is today.
Lucy Boston's first book, published in 1954 when she was already 62, was a novel, Yew Hall. The same year she also wrote The Children of Green Knowe and asked her son Peter to illustrate it. It was a book she intended for adults but because of the illustrations Faber insisted that it should be published on the children's list. Both books were celebrations of her house, the first an attempt to record the spell that it exerted over her and the second 'to people the place'. In the next 20 years The Children was followed by five more Green Knowe books, for the fourth of which, The Stranger at Green Knowe, its author was awarded The Carnegie Medal by The Library Asso- ciation. The overwhelming success of the series has been confirmed by the way children across the world have responded to the magic with such enthusiasm.
Lucy Boston's account of how she found her house and how she and Peter restored it was first told in Memory in a House in 1973 and the story of her own unorthodox and adventurous childhood and youth in Perverse and Foolish in 1979. To mark the centenary of her birth the two books have been reissued in chronological order in one volume, Memories. Read consecutively like this they make an engaging story. Hers was a large Lancashire family with strict Wesleyan principles, the six children brought up on the text, 'Come out of her, my children [Babylon, the Great Whore], and be ye different.' And different they all turned out to be.
After a year in Paris shortly before the first world war, Lucy went up to Somerville but stayed only two terms before leaving to become a nurse, first in England and then in war-torn France. In the second world war she opened the doors of the Manor to the Amis de France Libre and then to the airmen from the neighbouring Wyton aero- drome, feeding them, listening to their troubles and holding regular gramophone concerts for them in the candlelit music room. Mainly because of a dirndl skirt she had acquired during a stay in Austria (but also through reports from her uneasy neighbours) Lucy was at one time suspect- ed of being a German spy and had to endure the supposedly covert presence at these concerts of 'a man from Intelligence'. To link the reissue of his mother's two books Peter Boston has written a touching piece of what he remembers of his parents brief marriage, and there is an introduction by Jill Paton Walsh in which she sets into context Lucy Boston's success in writing for children and records her pleasure in Lucy's friendship.
Judy Taylor was Children's Books editor at the Bodley Head, 1957-1980.
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