Houses in Children’s Literature

On the way home from Scotland last year we stopped at Belton House to look round the house and garden. But what I really wanted to see most of all was the sundial, featured in Helen Cresswell’s novel, Moondial, where Minty ‘discovers its secret power and travels back in time to carry out a perilous task’.
Houses in children’s stories have captured my imagination for many years. My sister and I grew up leafing through illustrations in Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories: Miss Muggins’ shop, Billy Blunt’s father’s corn-shop, the blacksmith’s forge and teacher’s cottage. I used to trace the journey to school (the short cut across the fields) from ‘the nice white cottage with the thatched roof’ past the Moggs’ cottage where little-friend- Susan lived till I had worn the pages quite thin. Perhaps it is no coincidence that our older daughter (also brought up on these books) has moved to a similar village and lives in a thatched cottage too and that I moved to a house with railings not unlike the one by the crossroads where the little girl Jessamine lived. Nothing comes from nothing, it seems.
Another house that captivated me early on was the tall stuccoed house in Kensington featured in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, London home of the Fossil children and assorted lodgers they passed on the stairs. Much earlier memories were Beatrix Potter’s watercolour interiors: the untidy home of The Tailor of Gloucester or the doll’s house in The Tale of Two Bad Mice with its faux leg of ham and pastries made from wax.
As a young teenager I fell in love with a remote old house in Wales in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Its collection of owl-like plates and discovered panel of a beautiful young woman with a wreath of green oak leaves in her hair became ‘curioser and curcurioser’, to quote Alice, as the novel sped on until its final crescendo. And the room was full of petals from skylight and rafters, and all about them a fragrance, and petals, flowers falling, broom, meadowsweet, falling, flowers of the oak. It is therefore no surprise to reread that the author lived ‘in an old half-timbered house in the middle of a field in Cheshire, delving into his three passions – archaeology, history and the local folklore’.
At the same time I was visiting the local library and regularly borrowing little hardback books of essays by Alison Uttley, detailing the Elizabethan farmhouse in Derbyshire she wrote about in The Country Child. These books were a natural progression from her tales of Little Grey Rabbit I’d loved years before. I can still recall Margaret Tempest’s illustrations of Moldy Warp the mole, sitting in his armchair by an unearthed Roman mosaic or Grey Rabbit’s sitting room with its chintz-covered armchairs and festive decorations of holly and mistletoe.
Sylvanian houses and castles have featured in so many children’s tales from Snow White to The Sleeping Beauty: a gingerbread cottage covered in sweets in Hansel and Gretel or the grandmother’s cottage Red Riding Hood enters to be met by a wolf. How many children have peered through casement windows with Goldilocks to spy three bowls of steaming porridge or gazed on Hans Christian Andersen’s little fir tree, bedecked with shining candles for Christmas? We have entered palaces, worn glass slippers only to lose one on the steps outside. Our carriages have turned to pumpkins again on the stroke of midnight and we’ve wandered home, barefoot, in rags. And it all seems as real in our imagination as recalling summer holidays on forgotten beaches once upon a time.
Living these stories led us on to hide in wardrobes and re-enter magic lands as we grew older. I used to gaze out of our bedroom window watching soft snowflakes falling, illuminated by the lamp-post outside as if Narnia were just round the corner.
And now as a grown up I can’t explore a kitchen garden in the grounds of an old house without looking for a half-hidden door, expecting a robin to show me a key that would lead in me into another Secret Garden. Tom’s Midnight Garden or the sinister foreboding topiary trees of Green Knowe are but a step away through another door, in another direction.
Fact fuses with fiction in Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe. When I visited her medieval house and grounds in the Fens where she wrote her stories I saw not only all the beautiful quilts she had made but also Toby’s rocking horse, chest and Linnet’s carved mouse that feature in the story. It is as if the children who died in the Plague still live there and you can imagine you hear their grandmother singing, rocking the old cradle as she did centuries ago.
Ghosts and ‘time travel’ feature in many more stories: Charlottes Sometimes, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and The Naming of William Rutherford.
War-time stories set in old houses evoke more suspense and danger: Carrie’s War and Goodnight Mr. Tom. Ann Frank’s Diary came alive for me when I stood by the top window of that tall house by the Amsterdam canal looking out on the overgrown forsythia as she must done in hiding fifty years before.
And then inevitably we grow up and read adult novels set in old houses and, in turn, show our children picture books with interiors by Shirley Hughes and Janet Ahlberg. We gaze at the crowded details, mesmerised like children once more and find ourselves clambering in search of dusty story books, unopened for years, with illustrations of mermaids holding mirrors studded with coral and shells in palaces long forgotten. Our reading journey has come full circle but may have only just begun. And if we have the time and patience we may consider writing our very own stories too.

Published in The Hedgerow