If reading is a pleasure, re-reading is surely an even greater pleasure. When it comes to poetry, I’m not sure the first time even counts: if your reader doesn’t want to read your poem again immediately, you can hardly call it a success. And ‘re-reading’ more generally is somehow the proper pleasure of Christmas. In the British media, it’s semi-traditional now to do a nostalgic Christmas or Advent piece about the pleasure of revisiting certain classic children’s books set at this time of year — the current favourites seem to be Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (newly dramatised on the BBC World Service) and the poet John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.1 Christmas is about ‘re-reading’ in a wider way too, since so many people at this time of year nostalgically revisit a whole set of ‘texts’ associated only with this season, whether that’s favourite Christmas films, carols or even Bible readings.
We live close to a couple of excellent public libraries, and I usually visit the wonderful Bibliothèque Arkoun about once a week. It has a good children’s library, an excellent poetry section, and also an unusually large collection of novels in English. In my ongoing attempt to acquaint myself more fully with French literature, I usually get something out every week and then, if I really like it, stump up for my own copy. The librarians seem to have a policy of scattering a few new editions of pocket “classics” amid the standard fare of cookbooks, biographies, parenting guides, the most recent novels and some popular philosophy (this is France, after all) on their central “display table” of new titles. I’ve got into the habit of borrowing whatever “classic” they’ve chosen this week and that’s how I encountered Fénelon’s wonderful Les aventures de Télémaque, which I will certainly write about here in due course. (I have my own copy now, and I see they’ve returned the one I borrowed to the display table: hopeful I suppose that since one person actually borrowed it, someone else might too.)
This week, though, in accordance with the season, I was in the mood for re-reading. To this end, I found Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises and Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, which I don’t think I’ve read since I was a teenager. In French, I found an interesting looking edition of Villon’s complete works, with parallel ‘translations’ into modern French (very helpful actually) and — best discovery of all — a fantastic Pléiade (i.e. fancy, pricy, hardback, small format, India paper) Anthologie bilingue de la poésie latine. This is a Latin verse anthology of the kind that was common in early modernity, but which I’ve never seen in the Anglophone world — that is, an anthology that runs right from the earliest classical Latin (fragments of Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey) through to today, presenting Latin poetry as a literary continuum over more than two millenia. There’s a bit (and often much more than a bit) of everything here: classical, late antique, early and high medieval, Renaissance and early modern verse. The only name that was unfamiliar to me was the very last: a Latin poem in a kind of fragmentary free verse by Pascal Quignard (born in 1948) which I found quite moving and unexpected, and a perfect conclusion to the collection.2 As a one volume introduction to Latin verse, I don’t think it can be bettered, and it’s almost worth buying even if you don’t read French, just to have such a wonderful array of things in a single book. If you can read French though, it also has some helpful notes on all the pieces, albeit in a tiny print, at the back.
Given the season, I was drawn to the section of late antique and medieval Latin verse and some of the great Latin hymns. The one I had half in mind, though, isn’t included. It’s the lovely medieval Latin carol which in some versions is extremely long, but begins like this:
Angelus ad virginem,Subintrans in conclave,Virginis formidinemDemulcens, inquit “Ave!Ave, regina virginum:Coeli terraeque dominumConcipies et paries intactaSalutem hominum;Tu porta coeli factaMedela criminum.”The angel to the girlAs he entered her room,To soothe away her fearGreeted her saying “Hail!Hail, queen of maidens:The lord of the heaven and of the earthYou shall conceive and bear untouchedThe salvation of mankind;You are made the gate of heaven,The cure of all wickedness.
I first read this bit of Latin verse, though, not in any Latin anthology but in my favourite Christmas novel of all. The book, Antonia Forest’s End of Term, first published in 1958, is notionally a “boarding school story” but don’t let that put you off — banish immediately any thoughts of Enid Blyton or Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. Forest’s books about the conveniently large Marlow family are quite unlike any other set of “school stories” — most of them are not actually set at school, for a start — and although there are some obvious stylistic links to authors like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Forest’s books are not really like anything much else at all. I have read all of them many times, and I still regret very much that I never finished and sent the letter I drafted repeatedly to Antonia Forest before her death in 2003.
Unlike the standard Christmas favourites, like Cooper and Masefield, with their ultimately cosy creepiness, this book confronts the strangeness of the Christmas story head on, without the resonant proxies for religion supplied by myth and magic. As Miranda, a Jewish character roped at the last minute into a non-speaking part in the nativity play remarks afterwards, “It’s a queer story isn’t it?”. The magic of Forest’s writing is of a different order, with its unique combination of wit, pitch-perfect characterisation, range of reference and unblinking moral realism.
As anyone who has read much of it knows, the best children’s literature is a paragon of economy and discipline compared to most supposedly “literary fiction”. All of Forest’s books are extremely well written. But End of Term is particularly remarkable, I think, for its thematic coherence, so lightly worn that I’m not sure I even noticed it consciously until I had been re-reading it for years.
Here is Nicola (in some sense the main protagonist, though in fact she isn’t in all the books), waiting for a lift home from school at half-term, reflecting with embarrassment on an accidentally unguarded remark she’d made to the cathedral choirmaster. It’s helpful to know here that Ann is Nicola’s least favourite sister; Rowan is one of her favourite; and Giles is her beloved eldest brother, still at this point (Nicola is only a fairly young 13) an object of hero-worship:
Nicola sat down on the running-board, and considered soberly why Dr Herrick had been so amused when she’d talked about believing properly. Perhaps he did himself — which was odd, seeing how people talked about science having made everything different; Ann probably believed properly, too, with all the voluntary chapel she put in: only when Ann thought something, Nicola generally thought the opposite, so that didn’t make it very convincing. What did Rowan think? And Giles? Giles was a sensible person. He’d know what was true and what wasn’t. But Giles was in the Pacific, there didn’t seem much chance of asking him, even if she could have overcome the embarrassment of even beginning such a conversation.
The scene then segues immediately to Nicola’s sorrow and embarrassment (which she is determined not to show) about being humiliatingly left out of the netball team, of which she had previously been captain: an adolescent disaster, caused in this case by the manipulations of an older pupil who dislikes her. Characteristically for Forest’s stories, which have an emotional and social realism which is almost painful, this episode is related quite plainly, and though both Nicola and several other people eventually work out who was responsible, the older pupil never gets her come-uppance. Adult care and authority in these books is mostly well-meaning but markedly imperfect, and Forest is unsparing in her depiction of all the ways we hurt one another, and how often that hurting is — if we are really honest — intentional.
This moment is quite early in the book, and it’s only one of a series of increasingly sophisticated conversations and observations about religious faith, seen from the perspectives of almost all the main characters in turn, and culminating in the performance of a kind of Nativity play-come-carol service in the cathedral, of which all the main characters are either participants or observers: the titular “End of Term”.
Alongside a pacy and in some ways conventional ‘school-story’ plot — of sports teams and teachers and the casting of the school play and so on — the book is to a large extent about the Christmas story and what we are to make of it, and secondarily about what it means to be vaguely Church of England (like Nicola’s family and most of the characters by default); or Catholic — like Patrick, Nicola’s best friend away from school, who comes from an old recusant family; or Nicola’s rebarbative but unexpectedly devout grandmother, visiting from Paris, who converted on her second marriage to a Frenchman — an unforgettable portrait of acerbity, whom no-one, including Nicola’s own mother, much likes; or indeed Jewish (like Miranda, Nicola’s best friend, whose last-minute roping into the school Christmas play in the cathedral is the source of a religious and ethical dilemma; the novel also deals frankly with anti-semitism). Forest was herself a Catholic convert from a Jewish family, whose real name was Patricia Rubinstein.
Any attempt at summary seems particularly unsatisfactory in this case, though. Partly because the astonishingly convincing characterisation can only be experienced by reading the books themselves, and partly because of the range and density of passing references. Other literature is almost a character itself. Riding in the gathering dark across the downs with Nicola at half-term, Patrick starts to recite a series of poems, as they come to him: the Lyke Wake Dirge, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and Browning’s “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix”. Patrick is older than Nicola and much more moved by poetry and music than she is: she is mildly interested but not enraptured, but this scene links to the series of carols and readings in the final performance. When I first read Forest a lot of her references and more fleeting allusions went over my head — not to mention bits of untranslated French and Latin, which is hard to imagine encountering in any novel now, let alone one supposedly intended for children — but I learnt many good poems from her novels and, more nebulously but even more importantly, I caught a glimpse of all that was out there to be read.
Forest’s books are miracles of economy, wit, emotional restraint and some of the most real characters I have ever encountered in fiction. It is truly a scandal that, despite some reprints in the last twenty years by ‘Girls Gone By’ publishers, she is once more out of print (and a second-hand copy even of a dog-eared 80s paperback will now set you back close to £100). Happily, though, you can “borrow” End of Term by the hour from the fantastic Internet Archive.
I’ll be taking a break now but will be back in the second week of January. Thanks to all of you who’ve been reading, liking, sharing, commenting and emailing me about these little essays over the last few months. It’s been a great pleasure and I’m looking forward to writing more next year.
Finally, to keep you going, here’s a lovely Christmas poem which is not in fact in any of Forest’s books, but is just the kind of thing I discovered by reading them. I love how Jesus in this version is startlingly eloquent, but still a baby who wants a feed and to be sung to sleep: “give me thy Breast / And sing ‘By, by, lullay’.” As Patrick observes to himself as he listens to the singing in End of Term, ‘only the older carols . . . managed to mean what they said without being embarrassing’.
This Endris Night
This endris night I saw a sight, endris: recently past, other
A star as bright as day,
And ever among, a maiden sung, ever among: every now and then
"Lullay, by, by, lullay."This lovely lady sat and sung,
And to her child did say,
"My son, my brother, my father dear,
Why liest thou thus in hay?My sweetest brid, 'tis thus betid brid: bird betid: happened
Though thou be king verray, verray: in truth
But nevertheless I will not cease
To sing 'By, by, lullay'."The child then spake in his talking,
And to his mother said,
"I am kenned as heaven-king kenned: known, recognised
In crib though I be laid.For angels bright done to me light; done: gave
Thou knowest 'tis no nay.
And of that sight thou mayst be light
To sing, 'By, by, lullay'.""Now, sweet son, since thou art king,
Why art thou laid in stall?
Why ne thou ordained thy bedding
In some great kinge's hall?"Methinks 'tis right that king or knight
Should lie in good array.
And then among, it were no wrong among: in those circumstances
To sing 'By, by, lullay'.""Mary mother, I am thy Child,
Though I be laid in stall;
For lords and dukes shall worship Me,
And so shall kinges all."Ye shall well see that kinges three
Shall come the Twelfth Day.
For this behest give Me thy breast behest: promise
And sing, 'By by, lullay'.""Now tell, sweet Son, I Thee do pray,
Thou art me Lief and Dear— Lief: beloved
How should I keep Thee to Thy pay, pay: liking
And make Thee glad of cheer?For all Thy will I would fulfill—
Thou wottest full well, in fay; wottest: knows fay: faith
And for all this I will Thee kiss,
And sing, 'By, by, lullay'.""My dear mother, when time it be,
Thou take Me up on loft,
And set Me then upon thy knee,
And handle me full soft."And in thy arm thou hill Me warm, hill: cover
And keepe night and day,
And if I weep, and may not sleep,
Then sing, 'By, by, lullay'.""Now sweet Son, since it is come so,
That all is at Thy will,
I pray Thee grant to me a boon,
If it be right and skill: skill: reasonable"That child or man, who will or can
Be merry on my day,
To bliss Them bring—and I shall sing,
'Lullay, by, by, lullay'."
Roughly a year ago Robert Macfarlane published a piece in the Guardian about Cooper’s book, which he’d also written about for the Economist magazine back in 2014, and just a few days ago I read a piece by Alexander Poots about the appeal of these sorts of stories, and their evocation of a ‘deep England’, focusing on Masefield’s Box of Delights.
The poem is called ‘Inter aerias fagos’ (‘Among the beech trees of the air’ or ‘the airy beech trees’), a phrase borrowed from a letter written by Petrarch to Bruni in 1361. The poem is described by Quignard himself as ‘a “cut-up” which tells the story of the Latin language. Ancient distress, medieval beauty, resurgent (renaissante) savagery (or ‘wildness’)’, a fascinating summary in itself.
This is rather a late comment on a pre-Xmas post, but picking up from our conversation on children's poetry where you referred to these books, I bought the first of the series on your recommendation (thankfully £4 for a well-read 1970s paperback rather than £100!).
I must admit the first thing that struck me were the names, only a few pages in: Nick, Lawrence, Tim – how come the female main characters have names that are at best ambi-gender but really tend more to boys' names (and, somewhat related, the naval obsession of Nick/Nicola)? It didn't feel like a point that was clearly resolved, at least not with the type of open explanation that appears for George in the Famous Five.
While poetry seemed to be only present occasionally in the first book, the high culture references were there throughout. I don't know whether these were aspirational (in the sense of what the contemporary readership ought to learn) or direct (in the sense of what that readership actually did know). Likewise the idea that a group of 12 - 13 year olds putting on by themselves scenes from Shakespeare would be boringly familiar and that they might need something more original to stand out! Such a 1940s world, long before TV let alone phones and ipads, is a very foreign one and I don't have a good sense as to what 'ordinary' entertainment would be.
Anyhow, thanks for the recommendation: I hadn't heard of them before and wouldn't have read them as a child, for lazily sexist principles, but interesting to read, both culturally and in their own right, as an adult.
I really enjoyed this piece . Antonia Forest was such a good writer . The discussion of religion in EOT is unusual for children’s books of the time- mostly it’s just taken as read that everyone believes ( see, for example, the Chalet School books where the religiosity can be a bit much). Lawrie’s interpretation of the Shepherd Boy’s words. ( ‘ lest He too, one day should be a Shepherd) is particularly interesting given that she is probably the least sensitive to religion of all the characters. For her it’s a matter of theatre.
One criticism: it’s a misreading of Dark is Rising to think of it as cosy. It really isn’t.