'In And Out The Dusty Bluebells' by Karen Maitland

In the last few weeks, people have been flocking to see the wonderful bluebell woods in Devon, where the carpet of flowers spreads beneath the trees like a violet-blue mist. I heard one visitor say, the bluebell wood was ‘an enchanting place’. They thought so too in the Middle Ages, but unlike the 21st century visitor, they did not mean it was beautiful, they regarded bluebell woods as places of sinister and dangerous bewitchment.

Bluebells were harvested as early in the Bronze Age, for the gluey sap which was used to fixed feathers to arrow shafts. During the Tudor period, bluebell sap was used as starch to stiffen muslin and the immense ruffs worn by the Elizabethans. It was used as a glue in bookbinding, because the poisonous sap also discouraged insects from attacking the books. In the Middle Ages, bluebells were thought to be a cure for leprosy, consumption, snake bites and spider bites. Bluebells could prevent nightmares if the flowers were threaded and hung over the bed. But whatever you needed bluebells for, you never went to collect them alone.

Photo: Dr Richard Murray

Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

A child who picked bluebells alone would be spirited away by the fairy folk, never to be seen again. Even an adult who ventured into a bluebell wood by themselves was in mortal danger. They would be pixie-led, and forced to wander round and round, unable to find their way out, until they died of exhaustion, unless someone else entered the wood, thereby breaking the enchantment, and guided the bewildered victim home. Bluebells were known as Deadmen’s bells, because whoever hears them ringing, is listening to their own death knell and will be taken by a malicious spirit within weeks.

Pig trapped by his nightmares of goblins.

From 'The Fairy Caravan.' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

The much-loved children’s author, Beatrix Potter, makes great use of these old superstitions in her only full-length novel for older children The Fairy Caravan (1929). In the novel, the circus characters have to travel through a small bluebell wood, Pringle Wood, and are warned not to eat anything they find there because they will never leave if they do. Even though most heed the warning, they still find themselves going round in circles for hours, until the pony pulling the caravan almost collapses with exhaustion. The pig, who naturally disobeys the injunction, is trapped in a hollow tree by his own hallucinations and is only finally rescued by the pony who protects himself with fern seed plaited in his mane, which was a amulet that medieval travellers used to render themselves and their horses invisible to evil spirits. The pony also asks the blacksmith to reverse his horseshoes. Again, people thought that by reversing your clothes and wearing a garment inside out you could break enchantment or a run of bad luck.

Pony searching the bluebell wood for pig.

From 'The Fairy Caravan' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

Bluebells are highly poisonous, and when not in flower the bulbs can be easily mistaken for ramsons or wild garlic, which often grows in the same habitat, so the warning that you might never leave the bluebell wood if you ate anything there was probably sound advice.

Whenever I see a bluebell wood, I am reminded me of a circle game we used to play as children in the sixties.

"In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
Who will be my master?

Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
I am your master now."

In some versions, they are called ‘dusky’ bluebells or ‘Scottish’ bluebells. There is much speculation about the age of this song. Some say that it refers to the hiring fairs that took place around April-May, but a group of country children in the 1900’s reported that ‘the master’ in the song was the sinister Fairy King, who like the pied piper, would lead unwary children dancing into the underworld, from which there was no return. This is probably not, of course, the original meaning of the game, but it is interesting that Edwardian children were still aware of the ancient superstition.

Other common beliefs were that if you placed a garland of bluebells on someone you wanted to question, they would be compelled to tell the truth. Perhaps the sweetest one is if you manage to turn one of the flowers inside out without tearing it, you will eventually win the one you love. Again, it is the act of physically reversing an object, which turns or reverse your fortune. The task also requires patience and gentleness, two qualities which might well help a young lad or lass win the heart of any future lover. Either that, or it took so long to master the art, you might well have stopped fancying the person by then, which solved the problem.

BEATRIX POTTER and the SAILING SQUIRRELS by Penny Dolan.

There are a large number of characters in the manuscript I’m working on and I tend to differentiate them by giving each a certain quality, a shorthand for me while I’m working on the novel and eventually, and  by then more subtly, for the eleven year old reader. One character is, to me, rather squirrel-like: gingery hair, energetic, always alert for the one thing that matters to him, easily distracted by the new – and so on and so on – and all of which set today’s topic jangling in my mind: squirrels or, more particularly, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. And his new book cover.
 

This July, 150 years after Beatrix Potter's birth, Puffin Books are publishing five of the most popular books with re-designed covers, although I think that Puffin have retained the original illustrations inside. What? Immediately I was huffing and puffing because I usually dislike tampering with original illustrations. (Surely the delicacy of Sheppard’s work compared with that dreadful Disney Eeyore will prove my case?)

Born in London, Potter’s drawings celebrate the rural - the people, the animals and places she saw on holidays in Scotland and in the Lakes - and I feel the pictures are so much a part of the whole experience of those books. 

There is something Victorian in the quality of her observation, such a controlled passion for natural history. Her careful water-colours seem the female art form of the time, requiring no expansive canvasses, taking up not too much space, the skill entirely suitable for well-bred young ladies.

 Yet there is something quietly subversive about her work too. While one admires Potter’s art, knowledge and humour, there is no doubt that her delightfully marketable creatures live in a world that turns cruel in a trice. Death is ever present, whether from Mr McGregor to a cat sleeping casually in the background.

Besides, those various garments – from Peter Rabbit’s famous blue coat to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle bustling around in her full finery –  always carry a hint of those popular if dreadful glass-cased stuffed-kitten tableaux that can still found in “museums” such as Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight. Curious images, indeed.

Potter went to the London Zoological Gardens to find a live model for the character of Old Brown, the owl, and she tried working from live red squirrel specimens for Squirrel Nutkin himself, complaining that:

“I bought two but they weren’t a pair and fought so frightfully that I had to get rid of the handsome and most savage one. The other squirrel is rather a nice little animal but half of one ear has been bitten off, which spoils his appearance.”

“The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” has a real setting too. “Owl Island,” where Nutkin so naughtily tempts fate, is St Hubert’s Island on Derwentwater, which leads me on to one very memorable image. Potter’s picture of the flotilla of squirrels, going across the water to gather nuts. 

Potter’s perspective seems to be take you across the gently bobbing water all the way to the forbidden wood but I’ve never seen that image without, for a moment, wondering about the truth of that journey.  

 Where did this “flotilla of squirrels ” idea come from?

Then one night, quite recently, and agitated about matters much more important than those uppity art-work covers – and who isn’t at the moment, to be frank?  – I began reading two books by Tove Jansson, best known her Moomin books.

 My three a.m. titles were both for adults, one is more of a memoir and one a collection of short stories. The first, A Summer Book, is all about a grandmother and granddaughter, spending summers on a small island off the Finnish coast. Their relationship changes as one summer follows another.

The second set, A Winter Book, is about an old woman living alone and independently on that tiny island. 

Together, these two short books give a simple but thoughtful glimpse into the life of a proudly independent artist.

 
However, as I began the short story called The Squirrel, Jansson’s words sprang out at me:



“One winter day in November, near sunrise, she saw a squirrel at the landing place. It was sitting motionless near the water, scarcely visible in the half-light, and she knew it was a real squirrel and she hadn’t seem a living thing for a long time. You can’t count gulls: they’re always leaving, they’re like the wind over waves and grass.

She tried to remember everything she knew about squirrels. The wind carries them on pieces of wood from island to island. And then the wind drops, she thought with a touch of cruelty. . .

Why do squirrels go sailing? Are they curious or just hungry? Are they brave? No. Just ordinary and stupid. . . .It was possible the squirrel might stay overnight. It was possible the squirrel might stay the whole winter.”

The squirrel cannot do nothing but stay, making its home in her woodpile. The whole story revolves around the relationship between the wild squirrel and the elderly islander, revealing how physically demanding her solitary island life is becoming. Then, towards the end of the story, she goes down to the jetty and finds:

“The squirrel had gone – there was no doubt there had been seven pieces of board, not six, all the exactly the same distance from the water: sixty five centimetres.”

The story concludes with a further twist that I won’t reveal. 

However, with my head already busy with young Nutkin’s flotilla, I felt that Jansson’s sailing squirrel seemed a remarkably serendipitous coincidence. I went searching and came back with other instances.

Back in 1774, in his “History of Animated Nature”, Oliver Goldsmith reported

“Nothing can be more true than that Lapland squirrels, when they meet lakes or rivers, cross them in an extraordinary fashion.

Perceiving the breadth of the water, they return, as if by common consent, into the neighbouring forest, each in quest of a piece of bark, which answers all the purposes of boats for wafting them over. When the whole company are fitted in this manner, they boldly commit their little fleet to the waves ; every squirrel sitting on its own piece of bark, and fanning the air with its tail, to drive the vessel to its desired port. In this orderly manner they set forward, and often cross lakes several miles broad.

But that is not all. It may be rough in the middle of the lake, and the result then is lamentable. There the slightest additional gust of wind oversets the little sailor and his vessel together. The whole navy, that, but a few minutes before, rode proudly and securely along, is now overturned, and a shipwreck of two or three thousand sail ensues. This, which is so unfortunate for the little animal, is generally the most lucky accident in the world for the Laplander on the shore; who gathers up the dead bodies as they are thrown in by the waves, eats the flesh, and sells the skins for about a shilling the dozen."

All of which is an even sadder squirrel fate than escaping from Old Brown without your fine, feathery tail.

However, I couldn’t help noticing that all these squirrel tales seem to come from Northern lands. Had these clever red squirrels inherited their legendary journeying skills from the busy squirrel Rataskor who, according to Norse Legend, runs up and down Yggdrasil the world tree, carrying messages between the Eagle at the top and the Niddhogg below, while gnawing cunningly and everlastingly as he goes? 

That’s the problem. Once a writing idea, like my squirrellish character, gets into your head,  there are stories about and around them everywhere.

 I’ll end with this moralistic piece, taken from the ”Emblems” of the poet Francis Quarles, written in 1634.

"The squirrel when she must goe seeke her food

 By making passage through the angry flood

And feares to be devoured by the streame

Thus helpes her weakness by a stratagem.

On blocks, or chips, which on the waves doe flote

She nimbly leaps : and making them her boats,

By helpe of winds, of current, and of tide

Is wafted over to the other side.

Thus, that which for the body proves unfit

Must often be acquired by the wit."

Happy sailing, Squirrel Nutkin!

Postscript: While writing this post, I came across a new CBBC cartoon series about Peter Rabbit and his friends. I can offer no comment as I haven't seen it yet. Oh, well.

Perhaps my irritated crossness comes because, in this modern world, when children live lives far more removed from the natural world, I resent the smoothing and softening of these once-realistic anthropomorphic images?

 Penny Dolan