Philippa Pearce 1920 – [2006]
British writer, brought up in Great Shelford, a village
just outside Cambridge in England. Philippa Pearce’s father was the flour-miller and
they lived in the house beside the mill on the River Cam, where she swam, fished,
canoed and skated. She returned to the area as a parent herself and lived in a cottage
close to her home. Her living in an area where her family has lived for generations is in
keeping with one of the great themes in her writing: it is not nostalgia but an
acknowledgement of the continuum between past and present, parents and children,
the children and the parents they become. After leaving Cambridge University in 1942,
she worked as a civil servant, then an educational and children’s book editor at two
publishing houses, and finally as a scriptwriter and producer for BBC Radio. One
summer, she was hospitalised in Cambridge for TB. The summer was a particularly fine
one and she was frustrated at being cooped up in hospital when she could have been
enjoying the pleasures of the river. Her first book, Minnow on the Say (1955, illustrated
by Edward Ardizzone, published in US as The Minnow Leads to Treasure) was the
result of her intense daydreaming about the river.
Commended for the Carnegie Award, The Minnow on the Say describes Adam’s and
David’s search for hidden treasure. Adam’s parents are both dead and he lives with his
aunt, Dinah Codling, and his grandfather. Miss Codling can no longer afford to keep
Adam in the house that the Codling family have lived in for centuries and at the end of
the summer is sending him to live with cousins in Birmingham. Adam hopes to prevent
this by finding the treasure hidden by an ancestor. The novel is full of the heat and
dappled shade of a summer holiday spent on water, as the two boys use their canoe
called ‘The Minnow’ to search along the banks of the River Say, following the only clue
they have to the whereabouts of the treasure.
Her next novel, Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), is certainly her greatest and it won the
Carnegie Award. It too is set in the area where Philippa Pearce grew up. Her father had
retired and her parents were selling their house and the book is really a celebration of
the garden that she, and her father before her, had enjoyed as children. The garden of
the title is a description of the one she knew as a child; Susan Einzig’s illustrations are
based on family photographs and drawings. Part of the richness of Philippa Pearce’s
writing stems from the vivid sense of place that she creates. She does not simply
describe what a place looks like, but what it feels like to be there; she is writing from the
inside for she has been there herself.
At the start of the book, all Tom wants to do is spend his summer at home building a
tree-house in the garden with his brother Peter; but Peter has measles and Tom is sent
to stay with his uncle and aunt in their gardenless flat. When he discovers the beautiful
garden that appears every night at the back of the house, and makes friends with Hatty,
the only child who can see him there, he seems to have everything he wants – he even
gets to build the tree-house he had longed for. Soon, however, this is not enough: he
wants to stay in the garden for ever. Philippa Pearce has said that the walled garden
represents the sheltered security of early childhood and it is here that Tom seeks to
remain, able to be a boy at play for ever. Hatty on the other hand longs to see beyond
the garden walls and through the novel, unnoticed by Tom, she grows up and moves
out of the garden.
Time and the connections between the past and present are the issues at the heart of
Tom’s Midnight Garden. Tom plays in a garden that no longer exists with a girl who, he
thinks, is probably now dead. Yet there is never a sense that Tom is going back in time
as there is in other novels on a similar theme, e.g. Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope
Farmer. It is the garden itself that matters to Tom; he does not care when it existed, only
that it exists now when he opens the back door. Although he is saddened by the fact
that Hatty is probably dead in his own time, his interest in time is essentially practical:
he wants to be able to conquer it so that he can stay in the garden.
Tom’s Midnight Garden is a powerful book, full of longing and contradictory yearnings:
to stay a child for ever and yet to be able to grow up and explore the world that lies
beyond one’s childhood home. The closing lines of the book hint at how these opposing
feelings are reconciled as Tom puts his arms around an old woman and embraces the
little girl she still is.
A Dog So Small (1962, illustrated by Antony Maitland) is also partly set in the area that
Pearce grew up in. Again, the River Say is the Cam, the Barleys are the Shelfords and
the town of Castleford is Cambridge without the university. The novel opens and closes
in London and the dénouement takes place on Hampstead Heath, Pearce’s favourite
part of London. This splitting of the setting of the novel is fundamental to the plot: Ben
wants a dog but, because his family lives in central London without easy access to a
park, he has to make do with the part-time care of his grandfather’s dog during
occasional visits to the country. Ben’s yearning becomes so great that a dog comes to
him, ‘a dog so small that you could only see it with your eyes shut’. So Ben closes his
eyes and in doing so does not see the changes that are taking place that will eventually
allow him to have what he desires. A Dog So Small emphasises the dependence of
children on the actions of adults and, as in Minnow on the Say and Tom’s Midnight
Garden, these actions are the result of the willingness of adults to enable children to
gain what they desire.
This is brought out even more strongly in The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978,
illustrated by Alan Baker). Indeed, this short novel – winner of the Whitbread Award – is
as much about Mrs Sparrow as it is about her children. The narrator even refers to the
adults by their first names, highlighting that their lives are as tied in with the fate of the
gerbils of the title as those of the rest of the family. This novel and the collections of
short stories that she wrote in the 1960s and 1970s also demonstrate a shift by Pearce
to a simpler writing style. This restraint in style and seeming determination to steer away
from fantasy and stick to the realities of everyday life have been criticised by some.
However, she has managed to show that it is possible to write about children’s deepest
longings and preoccupations, using language that they themselves use and understand
in contexts that they are familiar with. She highlights the significance that lies behind
everyday occurrences: the tensions at the heart of a step-family revealed by the fight
over keeping a pair of gerbils; the fear of not living up to a parent’s expectations in the
running away from a blackberry-picking expedition. The actions of different members of
a family reveal not only their individual characters but that of the family as a whole.
Children understand this and Pearce never patronises them.
The family at the centre of The Way to Sattin Shore (1983, illustrated by Charlotte
Voake) is a family in crisis, although at the start not everyone is aware of this. Kate has
been told that her father died when she was born. Now she feels hemmed in and
restricted by her grandmother’s watchful presence. She also longs for eldest brother
Randall to spend time with her as he used to. She has questions she wants to ask and
envies Brian, her other brother Lenny’s friend, who simply asks when he wants the
answer to something. Kate’s chief longing, though, is only made explicit in the middle of
the book because it is only then that she herself becomes aware of its exact nature.
When she sees the sledge that Lenny and Brian have made, she realises that she too
could have made one if she had had a father to help her. The gap in her life that is her
father’s absence is now revealed for her and the reader.
The Way to Sattin Shore differs from the earlier major novels in that it is not based on a
fictionalised Cambridgeshire but on Stutton Shore in Suffolk, although again it is a place
that Pearce already knew. When she revisited it some years later she had an
impression of an emotionally charged meeting between two people of different ages –
the meeting that is the climax of the novel.
Descriptions of the countryside do not intrude on the plots of the novels. Yet the settings
of her books are never merely background – they are vital characters in themselves,
telling tales that interweave with and echo the main plot. Her playful use of a placename as the name of a minor character in Minnow on the Say emphasises this still
further. She also included connections between the characters in the first three novels,
a result of the reality of the setting for her: if the place is still there, so will the characters
be.
Although Pearce wrote several collections of short stories – including The Elm Street
Lot (1969), The Shadow-Cage and other Tales of the Supernatural (1977), The Lion at
School (1985) and The Rope and Other Stories (2000), and a retelling of Brian FairfaxLucy’s The Children of the House (1968, later reissued as The Children of Charlecote) –
she will be remembered for her novels, which with humour, grace and forbearance
show children and adults not only learning that when you get your heart’s desire you
have to learn how to live with it, but also that if you do not have the possible things, then
you have nothing. It is this need to reconcile reality with fantasy, the possible with the
impossible, that keeps these novels outside the realms of simple wish fulfilment. In each
novel it is a case of a ‘happier ever after ending’.
Mary Nathan, The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (ed. Victor Watson,
Cambridge University Press, 2001)
© Cambridge University Press 2001
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521550642