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| The Mad Doctor |
Welcome back to The
MonsterGrrls’ Thir13en For Halloween.
Today we’re discussing Lucy M. Boston and her Green
Knowe series of books, which
feature an entirely different kind of haunted house.
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| Lucy M. Boston |
Born
in Southport, Lancashire to a typically affluent middle-class
Victorian family, Boston grew up a Wesleyan Methodist, and had a
father who had a passion and appreciation of the aesthetic side of
life, which awakened Boston’s own passions. Through him, she
developed passions for music, art and nature. When her father died,
she was sent to school at Westmoreland, and stayed close to her
mother’s family home at Arnside, which introduced her to English
country life and helped her to develop an awareness of plants and
gardens. Boston moved on to Somerville College, Oxford in the first
months of 1914 and WWI, and left college in her second term to go to
war as a volunteer nurse.
After
the war, Lucy married a distant cousin named Harold in Woodstock,
near Oxford. Though the union went south in 1935, she had one son,
Peter Shakerley Boston. Following the failure of her marriage, Lucy
traveled in France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, visiting Europe’s
musical capitals and studying painting in Vienna. She returned to
England in 1937 and took rooms in Cambridge to be close to her son
Peter, who was now 19 and an undergraduate. Hearing that a house was
for sale in the nearby village of Hemingford Gray, she remembered a
seemingly derelict house she had seen there in 1915 and jumped to the
conclusion that this was the house for sale. Upon her arrival and
announcement that she wished to buy the house, she found that the
owners had only that morning decided to sell, and that the house
advertised for sale was a different one. She never did find out
which house was the one advertised.
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| The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Boston's home |
After
renovating the ancient Norman Manor house, which had been built in
1130, she settled there, continuing the house’s restoration and
planting gardens. This house, dubbed the Manor, would be the focus
and inspiration for her creativity for the rest of her life, and
would eventually be known as Green Knowe. In 1954, at the age of sixty-two, Lucy M. Boston
would write The Children Of Green Knowe,
the first of six books about an old manor house in the English
countryside that is inhabited by the spirits of people who have lived
there in past times. Illustrated by her son Peter, the Green Knowe
series is fondly remembered, and is still around today to delight and thrill young readers.
In
The Children Of Green Knowe,
Toseland “Tolly” Oldknow goes on a holiday visit to his
grandmother, Linnet Oldknow, at Green Knowe, a manor house dating
from the Norman Conquest that has been continually inhabited by
Tolly’s ancestors, the d’Aulneaux family, later called Oldknow.
During his stay, Tolly discovers a painting of three children and
some of their personal artifacts, and begins to encounter the spirits
of three of his ancestors: Toby (an earlier Toseland), Alexander, and
an earlier Linnet who lived in the reign of Charles II.
In the second book in the series,
The Treasure Of Green Knowe (1958),
Tolly returns for the Easter
holidays to find the painting gone to an exhibit, and at risk of
being sold to pay for roof repairs to Green Knowe. He also finds
Mrs. Oldknow repairing a patchwork quilt, which allows Tolly to come
into contact with the spirits of a blind girl named Susan Oldknow and
her family, leading them on a search to find her mother Maria
Oldknowe’s jewels.
In
the third book, The River At Green Knowe (1959),
Green Knowe is let for the summer to a dotty archaeologist named
Doctor Biggin and her friend Miss Bun. Along for the ride are
Biggin’s niece Ida and two “displaced” refugee children, Oskar
and Ping. An exploration of an island-strewn river flowing past Green
Knowe reveals such things as flying horses, a giant who wishes to
join a circus, and a Bronze Age moon ceremony. Through it all, it is
made clear that Green Knowe protects its inhabitants, especially
those who are children.
The
fourth book in the series, A Stranger At Green Knowe
(1961), has Ping returning to Green Knowe to stay with Mrs Oldknow
and also telling the story of an escaped gorilla named Hanno, with
whom Ping develops a bond during a visit to a zoo prior to his visit
to the house. Hanno escapes and makes his way to Green Knowe, where
Ping befriends him. This book would be awarded the 1961 Carnegie
Medal.
Book
five, An Enemy At Green Knowe
(1964) is darker than its previous brethren. Ping and Tolly hear
from Mrs. Oldknow the story of Dr. Vogel, a necromancer and occultist
who came to a bad end at Green Knowe centuries before. Soon after,
Melanie Powers, a professor and an occultist herself, comes looking
for Vogel’s papers, with interests that are not academic, leading
to an eventual confrontation between Green Knowe and the forces of
evil. The sixth and final book, The Stones Of Green Knowe
(1976) would delve deeper into Green Knowe’s past, telling the
story of Roger d’Aulneaux, the son of the house’s original
builder, who discovers two throne-like stones that allow him to visit
the time of the Conquest and the later periods of Linnet, Susan, and
Tolly.
Lucy
Boston’s Green Knowe
series is a wonderful mix of fantasy and scares, with a continuing
generational theme. Though Green Knowe is most definitely haunted,
Boston sensed that haunted houses could be eerie without being
malevolent, and the series has enough creepy events and villains to
keep it from being saccharine, making this a perfect literary place
to visit for the Halloween season.
Come
back soon for the next post in The MonsterGrrls’ Thir13en
For Halloween, as we continue
our Tales Of Unease…
MAD DOCTOR’S
NOTE: The entire Green Knowe
series is available for purchase at Amazon.com (click the links for each book), or for lending at
your local library.
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