How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books - Couverture rigide

Bodger, Joan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0771011180 ISBN 13 : 9780771011184

Editeur : McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1999

A propos du livre

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Chapter 1
Caldecott Country
 
 
We were bound for Whitchurch, just thirty miles down the road from Liverpool. A few hours before, we had disembarked from a staid, broad-beamed Cunard liner, which had taken more than a week to cross the Atlantic. While still on shipboard we had discovered a 1957 Saturday Book in the ship’s library and had read a delightful article on Randolph Caldecott, the early illustrator of children’s books. Whitchurch, we read, was the town in which Caldecott had lived as a very young man, and scenes in the town and the countryside roundabout had been immortalized in his Picture Books.
 
In a last-minute decision we had set it as a cautious destination for our first day’s journey. We were glad now that we had not been more ambitious. We had arranged months beforehand to rent a car at the docks, but when we were met by the car rental company’s agent we discovered that by some mischance or inefficiency we could not be supplied with the kind of car we had requested. We knew, of course, that English cars are small, by American standards, but the car actually supplied must have been built for midgets. Somehow we managed to wedge ourselves and four suitcases into an impossible space and to set off undaunted. Well, almost undaunted. There was something peculiar about the gearshift, which worked without benefit of clutch, but we told ourselves cheerfully that John would soon get the hang of it. He never did.
 
Now we were racing down the Great Chester Road, on the wrong side, it seemed to us, in a strange car which we barely knew how to rein in at the crossroads. We had hoped to see the famous arcades of Chester, but the road bypassed the town almost before we knew where we were, and town gave way to open countryside. Chester is where Randolph Caldecott was born and went to school. Thinking of him now as John tried to get the knack of shifting gears without a clutch, I was about to say that driving the new car put me in mind of the desperate John Gilpin on his runaway steed, perhaps Caldecott’s most successful portraiture. Looking at the grim-set look in my husband’s eye I decided to forgo the literary allusion.
 
Instead, I turned my thoughts to Whitchurch. We planned to drive into town, consult the local librarian, take some Caldecott Picture Books out of the library or buy them in the local bookshop, and stroll about town identifying the house where he had lived, the familiar scenes he had sketched as background for the nursery rhymes. Ah, innocence! Suddenly, before we expected it, we saw a small brick building marked Whitchurch Council School standing by itself along the roadside. John stopped the car so Ian and I could go in and ask the teacher to direct us. I wondered what it would be like to talk to children who walked to school each morning over the very fields and country lanes made famous in the Caldecott illus trations. Did every household own a dog-eared copy or two, or did the teacher have the thrill and pleasure of introducing the books? If so, the experience must be akin to holding a child up to the mirror for the first time and letting him recognize what it is that the rest of the world holds dear.
 
It was a one-room branch schoolhouse that we had found. The children, sitting at double desks, stared at us, round-eyed. Ian hung back at the door, too shy to enter. Despite the calendar’s claim to June, the air outside was chill and raw. Every door and window in the tiny schoolroom was open. The children sat with their feet on stone flags and I noticed that the walls were red brick, patchily covered with thin plaster. The thought flashed through my mind that even the children were burnished to the same hue as the bricks, as though they, too, had sprung from the clay. The boys sat with knobby red knees bare, gaping at Ian in his long flannel-lined blue jeans with turned-up cuffs. The young teacher had never heard of Randolph Caldecott. I explained as best I could, but she shook her head, not comprehending why Americans should come so far to look for a man who illustrated nursery rhymes. She obviously thought our quest frivolous and our interruption rude (which it may have been), but she suggested we continue into town and ask for more information at the Town Hall. Ian, who had blushed scarlet under the gaze of boys his own age, was glad to make his escape.
 
We came to the square-towered church at the top of the High Street and plunged down the hill into the town. The shops and inns were crowded, people spilling out of the buildings, over the narrow sidewalks, and into the streets. At last we saw a building marked Town Hall and John suggested that Lucy and I hop out while he and Ian found a place to park. I had to hold Lucy in my arms to breach the crowd near the doorway, but once inside we made our way easily to a dank little library on the ground floor. The girl at the desk said that the librarian was on holiday, and she wrinkled her brow in thought when I asked about Randolph Caldecott. She had seen a book about him somewhere in the library, but it was not in the children’s section. She went to look in the shelves and came back with Henry Blackburn’s Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir written in 1886, the year Caldecott died. I settled gratefully to taking notes, resigning myself to the stark fact that none of Caldecott’s own books was to be had.
 
Randolph Caldecott was a bright, handsome, pleasant boy when he came to Whitchurch in 1861. Not much is known of his early childhood except that it was a happy one and that he was head boy at the Henry VIII grammar school in Chester. There he is remembered as having spent hours drawing, modeling from clay, and carving from wood. He, like us, must have come down from Chester on the Great Road on the day he first came to Whitchurch. Perhaps an apprentice job in a bank does not seem to us ideal for a fifteen-year-old boy who loved beauty and the out-of-doors, but young Caldecott fell in love with Whitchurch from the very first. As careful and thorough with a column of figures as he was with his own drawings, he does not seem to have been in a state of rebellion against his apprenticeship. His zestfulness soon endeared him to his fellow workers and townspeople alike, for he made friends easily and  joined in the life of town and countryside. His biographer and close friend, Henry Blackburn, reports that he took lodgings “in an old farmhouse about two miles from town where he used to go fishing and shooting, to the meets of hounds, to markets and cattle fairs.”
 
At this point in my reading Lucy became restless. I took the book back to the desk and went out with her into the cobbled courtyard in the rear of the building. Travel with a two-year-old can be complicated, but it has its compensations. Because of Lucy I had left the musty library and we now found ourselves in the middle of a market fair, watching and listening in fascination as the hawkers cried their wares – cheap crockery, sharp knives, plastic shopping baskets. Before our very eyes we saw the end of an era as many a farmer’s wife rushed to buy the new garish pink or blue synthetic carryall in preference to her old hand-caned basket. My only comfort was uncharitable. The plastic handles looked as though they would break easily and in that case they could not be mended.
 
Caldecott must have loved Whitchurch especially on days such as this, when the inns were filled to overflowing, when red-faced farmers argued the price of a bull on every street corner, when the farmers’ wives came to gossip and haggle at the stalls in the market place or the little shops that line the High Street. I have never seen so many beautiful babies. Beside them Lucy, usually considered rosy, looked a trifle pale and unhealthy. I found that Lucy, in her fleece-lined pale pink snow suit, and I, in my Joseph’s colors raincoat, were being stared at and studied, even as I was studying the local inhabitants. (This was the sort of scene that Caldecott would have loved to dash off for the pages of the Graphic!) The women, on that rainy day, bore little resemblance to the “lasses” in the Picture Books. They wore navy blue mackintoshes r brown or black wool coats, and they covered their heads with plastic hoods. The bare-kneed children wore high black boots and navy blue mackintoshes belted with a wide buckle at the waist. Only the men, and especially the old ones, seemed unchanged by time. True, the fabrics they wore were transformed by a century’s progress, but their silhouettes were the same as that of the old gaffers in Daddy Darwin’s Dovecote. The stained and colorless mackintoshes reached only to the knee, for all the world cut on the same lines as the peasant smocks worn a century ago. Boots had replaced gaiters, but the hats (whatever their shape on the day of purchase) were as round and limp as the one worn by the farmer who sows his corn in The House that Jack Built. And everywhere was the same broad, beefy countenance, also made familiar by that same farmer.
 
John and Ian came shouldering their way through the crowd and we held a family council. The car had been parked in the inn yard at the Swan but there were no rooms for hire. We had arrived in Whitchurch on the day of the semiannual cattle market. Farmers had flocked there from all over Shropshire and beyond. It was already afternoon. We should decide about a night’s lodging, but we were too tired and hungry to make decisions. We bought tomatoes from one stall, cheese from another, and made our way back to the car to drive out into the country.
 
Down a narrow lane we found a wide (though muddy) spot to park near a gate, and pulled over for a picnic. Never had food tasted so good! After nine days of elaborate menus aboard ship we reveled in this simple fare and the freedom to eat it when and where we chose. The children sat astride the gate and gazed across the misty fields...

Biographie de l'auteur

Joan Bodger became a professional storyteller in 1948, when she took a course in storytelling at Columbia University. She has told stories and given workshops throughout North America, Britain, Australia, and Japan, and was a co-founder of the Toronto Storytellers School. For many years she led an annual tour, “A Winter’s Journey to King Arthur’s Britain.”

Joan Bodger was also a Gestalt therapist who used folk-tale archetypes as tools of her trade. In 1982, the Chaplain’s Corps hired her to use stories as therapy with U.S. Marines. (She had been a U.S. Army staff-sergeant during World War II.) In 1986 she conducted workshops for psychiatrists and businessmen in Tokyo.

Joan was director of the first Head Start Program in New York State. Her later work, as director of a therapeutic nursery school in an orphanage for New York City children, was described in a book by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles. In 1968, hired as Director of Children’s Services, State Library of Missouri, she was fired within a few months as a “Communist pornographer” in a cause célèbre. Her name was cleared by the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. In the 1980s, she directed a project, funded by the Children’s Aid Foundation of Ontario, in which she taught abusive mothers to use nursery rhymes as an alternative to violence.

From 1958 to 1970, Joan reviewed children’s books for the New York Times Book Review. She has taught as an editor at Random House-Pantheon-Knopf. Twice she has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award.

How the Heather Looks, released in a new edition by McClelland & Stewart and Tundra Books, was first published by Viking Press (New York, 1965). Joan Bodger’s autobiography, The Crack in the Teacup was released in 2000. Joan Bodger also wrote for children: Melinda’s Ball (Oxford Canada, 1982); Clever-Lazy (reissued by Tundra in 1997); and The Forest Family (Tundra, 1999).

Joan Bodger passed away in 2002.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: McClelland & Stewart Inc.
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0771011180
• ISBN 13: 9780771011184
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 249