It was not so very long after the days of Alison Uttley that I read a book that, though about a boy, moved towards adult experience too. It was by Hugh Walpole, who wrote prolifically in the early years of the last century.
He was a very popular novelist in his day, and also played a part in public life, working for the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in St. Petersburg during the First World War, and then being a welcome guest of the Wagners at the Bayreuth Festival. But after Somerset Maugham caricatured him in a novel, his reputation declined, and he is now almost forgotten.
I have read nothing by him except for one story, and a novel. The story was in one of the wonderful anthologies we studied in the Lower School at S. Thomas’, about a boy called Jeremy, taken from a book called Jeremy and Hamlet. That was the second of three books about Jeremy, and then to my immense joy I discovered on the shelves at home the first book, called simply Jeremy. I recall reading it in the garden at home, a pleasure I tried to recapture in Places where I read.
I mentioned there that I could not recall details of the different stories in the book, except for the ending where Hamlet waits for Jeremy when he goes away to boarding school – Hamlet lay down upon the mat just inside the hall-door. Someone tried to pull him away. He growled, showing his teeth. His master had gone out. He would wait for his return—and no one should move him.
But then I found the book last year, and much of it came back as I read. In the first chapter Jeremy turns eight, though until I reread the book I would have thought of him as older. But I remembered his sense that no one understood him except his artist uncle Samuel, I remembered his struggles with his nurse called the Jampot, I remembered his joy in the pantomime to which Samuel took him though he had been punished and was supposed to stay at home while the rest of his family went.
The book is set in a cathedral town where Jeremy’s father is a conscientious but dull vicar. There are beautiful touches about the habitues of the Cathedral, with a glorious account of ‘all that had happened during that wonderful Christmas’. But these are just glossed over, before the story of the pantomime, and it would take too long to cite all of them. I must be content then with the best vignette –
Miss Maple had a children’s party at which there was nothing to eat, so that al the children cried with disappointment, and one small boy (the youngest son of the Precentor) actually bit Miss Maple.
A blissful read, which makes me long to find more of Walpole’s writing, including what is considered his best known work Rogue Herries, the first of a set of four historical novels. But I suspect I will find nothing better than the three Jeremy books, and in particular the second with its expansion on that most moving of relationships, between a boy and his dog.
The pictures include French and German versions of the book, and before them the cover of a book I long to read, Jeremy and Hamlet.