Joining the circus with Beatrix Potter
This post is part of a series revisiting my favourite childhood reads.
When I was about seven or eight I was given a child’s typewriter. An internet search reveals that it was a Petite 990, a name sadly lacking in glamour. Mine had burgundy keys and all the usual foibles of a grown-up typewriter including sticky keys and uneven spacing. It made me feel like a writer. One of the first things I can remember typing was a story about sheep, I don’t think there was any plot to speak of, it was literally just sheep talking to each other. That story was inspired by chapters nine to eleven of Beatrix Potter’s book ‘The Fairy Caravan’ where a number of Lakeland sheep tell each other stories and reminisce. It’s a book I associate with wanting to write, but why did it inspire me, and what would it be like to revisit it as an adult?
‘The Fairy Caravan’ is an oddity in Beatrix Potter terms. For starters, it was written for an American audience rather than a British one. In the summer of 1927 Gail Parsons Coolidge and her son Henry P (to whom the book is dedicated) visited the Lake District, hoping to seek out the locations in Beatrix’s books. The author was touched by their appreciation of the simpler pleasures on offer in Cumbria and wanted to write something for her American fans. She felt the eventual book was too personal to be shared with an audience in closer proximity to her and it wasn’t published in the UK until 1952, nine years after her death. It was appeared in the US in 1929 and did only ‘adequately’. It’s an oddity for other reasons too, it’s a chapter book rather than a small tale. (My battered Young Puffin copy carries the advice that it is a book for ‘those who have developed reading stamina’.) The only other chapter book was ‘The Tale of Little Pig Robinson’, interestingly also a late work. It’s full of fairy stories. The fairies exist alongside the usual cast of talking animals and shadowy ‘Big Folk’ and are unusual in Beatrix’s work.
In the book Tuppenny the guinea-pig runs away and is adopted by Alexander and William’s Circus. The circus is run by Pony Billy and Sandy, a West Highland Terrier. Other members of the circus include Jenny Ferret, Xarifa the Dormouse and Paddy Pig. They are made invisible to the Big Folk through the use of magical fernseed and perform for animals in the farms and fields, travelling around in the Fairy Caravan. There’s no real through narrative and the book moves through vignettes of circus life and stories told by the characters. Tuppenny is set up as the central character but moves out of the limelight as the book progresses, becoming the character who feeds the questions that prompt the stories. That feels like a bit of a shame as he’s an engaging presence.
As I reread the book I was interested in a couple of questions – could I remember what it was about the sheep chapters that engaged me enough to want to try and imitate them, and what could I say about the book as a whole and its influence?
In some ways the deeply Lake District rooted sheep chapters feel like a rather odd jumping off point. They are bound up with the habits of the Herdwick breed and the realities of life on the fells. Even given the fact that I grew up in Cumbria and would have recognised the landscape and the sheep, it was a curious choice. If there was something specific in that the stories the sheep tell then it’s lost to me now. I do wonder if some of it was a joy in the language used. ‘The Fairy Caravan’ comes with a glossary in which Beatrix Potter carefully explains to her young readers some of the Cumbrian dialect words, as well as terms relating to sheep and nature. There’s a sense of discovery and code cracking at play that might well have appealed to me as I started to get interested in how language worked and how words were derived. The idea that the stories that we (or sheep) tell each other might need decoding for outsiders lodging somewhere in my brain for future use.
The future nature writer might have noticed what Marta McDowell calls ‘almost a catalog of wild flowers of the North Country’. ‘The Fairy Caravan’ is full of plants. McDowell counts 77 different species, including trees, flowers and edibles. Toadstools and fernseed provide plot devices. It’s explained that the name for foxgloves comes from ‘folks gloves’, fairy gloves; white stitchwort is known as ‘milk maids’ and cuckoo pint is ‘lords and ladies’.
The snowdrops that had been a sheet of white – white as the linen sheets bleaching on the drying green – had passed; and now were daffodils in hundreds. Not the big bunchy tame ones that we call ‘Butter-and-eggs’ but the little wild daffodillies that dance in the wind.
Spring bursts in the woods, cherry trees are white with blossom, beeches burst into bud, blackbirds sing. This is classic Potter. Flick through the picture books and you see cottage gardens and countryside scenes alive with the colours, scents and sounds of spring and summer. ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’ is the only tale that takes place in winter. It’s Christmas Eve and mice with their exquisite stitching save the day for the eponymous tailor.
In ‘The Fairy Caravan’ Beatrix makes a return to this darker time of the year. There’s the story of how Pony Billy ended up in the pound after a thick fall of snow, and an adventure for some lost hens who come upon a Christmas tree and a party with dancing and music attended by wood mice, moles, rabbits and squirrels.
Only one tree grew there, a very small spruce, a little Christmas tree some four foot high. As the night grew darker – the branches of this little tree became all tipped with light, and wreathed with icicles and chains of frost.
There’s darkness too in some of the interactions. Foxes threaten sheep, sheep get stuck in the crags, cats threaten mice, the toadstools make Paddy Pig unwell. All is not sweetness and light in Beatrix’s fictional worlds. A keen observer, artist, writer and farmer, she does not patronise her readers by shielding them from the realities of country life.
Rereading the book again I was struck by a sense of exoticism that pervades the narrative. It’s there from the opening sentence:
In the Land of Green Ginger there is a town called Marmalade, which is inhabited exclusively by guinea-pigs.
Redolent with spice and sticky sweetness, this is a beginning that promises something different. I now wonder if it’s a nod to Hull, at the opposite side of the country to Lakeland. The Land of Green Ginger is a narrow street in the historic port town (city status was only granted in 1897), possibly named for the sale and storage of the spice during the Medieval period. ‘The Land of Green Ginger’ is also the name of a 1927 novel (i.e. of the same period as ‘The Fairy Caravan’) by Winifred Holtby, a writer whose work is infused with the landscape and places of her native East Riding. The circus is also a touch of the exotic, with its caravan, ‘Pygmy Elephant’ (Paddy Pig with a stocking trunk) and Princess Xarifa sat in a howdah made from a colourful tin tea caddy. Beatrix saw Ginnet’s Travelling Circus in Ambleside in 1895 and enjoyed it immensely, clearly storing the memories for future use. Into the circus she drops Tuppenny, who becomes the Sultan of Zanzibar:
He wore the scarlet bandana handkerchief robe, a brass curtain-ring round his neck, a green sash with a wooden sword stuck in it, and the crystal-headed pin stuck in his turban of rolled up hair; and at gala performances his whiskers were dyed pink!
There’s even a parrot in a cage at Codlin Croft Farm.
All of this contrasts with the familiar and the domestic. The market town Sandy visits resembles a Lake District market town, the farms and hearths, smithies and shops are recognisable to readers who have come via ‘The Tale of Ginger and Pickles’ or ‘The Tale of Samuel Whiskers’.
There are gardens and beehives, bunches of herbs hanging from kitchen ceilings and pots and pans. Jenny Ferret cooks for her circus family. Pony Billy searches for the missing Paddy Pig. Xarifa tells Tuppenny stories.
Fairies provide an otherworldly (rather than exotic) touch. ‘All fairies are peppery’ says Xarifa when asked by Tuppeny if the fairies in the story she is about to tell are ‘good’. The main fairy story comes in the final chapter ‘The Fairy in the Oak’ where fairies are used to tell a story with an environmental message, in this case about the felling of trees. The District Council want to widen the road for cars, felling the old oak tree where the fairy lives in the process, ‘surely it is cruel to cut down a very fine tree’, the surveyors having ‘no sentiment; and no respect’ for trees or fairies. The timber is used to build a bridge over the river, and the fairy lives there, guarding small children crossing on their way to school and lightening the load of farm horses. A happy ending of sorts. Reading it now, the story reminds me of those told by Tabby Ackroyd to the Brontë children in the Haworth parsonage, where fairies at the bottom of the valleys were driven away by the dirt and noise from the new mills and factories. No happy ending there.
The fairy oak chapter isn’t the only environmental message in the book. Early on, the circus sets camp by a quarry and Jenny Ferret uses things salvaged from the rubbish left by Big Folk, including an old frying pan and some sardine tins, to make breakfast. There’s also a diatribe against asphalt roads, made for lorries, ‘shrieking, oily, smelly monsters’ rather than horses, with even ‘Mistress Heelis’ (aka Beatrix Potter) implicated. The conservationist speaks. In her will, Beatrix left fifteen farms and 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust, seeking to safeguard the landscape and a way of life. I’m not sure to what degree I took on board this aspect of the book on first encounter but it forms part of a pattern of childhood reading that held the natural world as something worth caring about.
‘The Fairy Caravan’ ends with the sound of sheep, plovers and curlews, as the caravan moves on.
But still in the broad green lonnin going up to the intake, I can trace my pony’s fairy footsteps, and hear his eager neighing. I can hear the rattle of the tilt-cart’s wheels, and the music of the Fairy Caravan.
I knew what a lonnin (lane) was, we had one in our village, and if I heard a rattle I couldn’t explain whilst up there on my bike, perhaps I’d have imagined a fairy caravan too.
‘The Fairy Caravan’ is not an entirely satisfying read, at least not as an adult. I longed for more of a narrative drive, more interaction between the central characters and more of the circus. That said, there’s plenty of glimpses of the usual Potter magic there, and I can spot the elements that have been lifelong pulls for me – writing with specificity about place and nature and a call to care for the world around us. A blending of the familiar with the unfamiliar has always been attractive too, low fantasy rather than high, always a foot in this world.
At seven or eight, the part of me that always wanted to be writer was working out how by reading, imitating and typing. ‘The Fairy Caravan’ gave me some of the early scaffolding. Joining the circus with Beatrix Potter was a lucky break.
Bibliography
Beatrix Potter; The Fairy Caravan (1929)
Linda Lear; Beatrix Potter. The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius (2007)
Marta McDowell; Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (2013)
Emily Zach, The Art of Beatrix Potter (2016)
The Tale of the Land of Green Ginger was a children's book by Noel Langley, published in the 1930s, a fantastic sequel to Aladdin. I remember it from primary school in the 1970s. Probably a bit 'orientalist' for 21st century tastes, though I see it has been reissued. I remember seeking out the street during a teenage visit to a very grim and depressed Hull in 1984 (which still had beige-coloured municipal phone boxes in those days).
Long live Beatrix Potter! I bought Peter Rabbit for my daughter, aged 3, as a non-chocolate Easter present, and it was still her favourite book when she started school a year and a half later. The small format appealed, but so did the verve of the story and the beautiful illustrations.
This was a lovely reminder of a book I hadn't thought about for a long time - remember how excited I was to discover a BP I hadn't read. It's maybe not as perfect as her great works; but I've always had a soft spot for Tuppenny...