This gently witty 1946 story about reconciliation and the restoration of equilibrium is an enduring treat, albeit one that reads differently at different stages of life
There's a good one just off Kensington High Street, a fine one in Hampstead, and a fabulous one near my mother's house in Dublin, which, after dark has, just as it should, a light shining from a single window high in the tower wall.
Sometimes the yearning is so strong that I gaze up at these houses wondering if it would be possible to knock on the front door and ask if I could climb the spiral stair and look at the tower room, just to see if it has floors and walls in silvery oak and stone, and a vaulted ceiling carved with stars and a sickle moon.
I'm quite reasonable about it – obviously I don't expect to find an arched door too small for a grownup, a miniature grate with a fire of pine cones, a white sheepskin rug, a four-poster bed with blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars and a blue wooden box with sugar biscuits – but I do wonder whether, if I did knock, the owner would instantly identify a fellow reader of Elizabeth Goudge's 1946 book The Little White Horse, and the room where the orphaned Maria finds sanctuary, "as chickens scurry for shelter under their mother's wings … safe for evermore".
I was given the lovely 1963 Puffin edition when I was eight, but imagined myself just as grown up as 13-year-old Maria, "considered plain, with her queer silvery-grey eyes that were so disconcertingly penetrating, her straight reddish hair and thin pale face with its distressing freckles". It was clear to me then, when I read and re-read it as an escape from the pains of flu, exams or being brutally misunderstood by the world, until the book disintegrated, that Maria – plain and vain, but also good, sensible, practical and brave – was the hero, as she returns to Moonacre, the home of her ancestors, and resolves the conflicts that are tearing apart the perfect little world.
I was surprised when, more or less grown up, I found an excellent hardback copy – blue cover, silver lettering – in a junk shop, and realised that it was not about Maria, needlework, curiously leonine dogs or even ponies, but a rare subject in a children's book, or indeed in any literature: middle-aged love. Its themes of reconciliation and restoring equilibrium must have had a powerful extra resonance when it was first published in 1946, in the shambles of the postwar world.
The 2008 film The Secret of Moonacre was entertaining enough for a wet afternoon, with an endearingly twitchy performance by Juliet Stevenson as the indigestion-tormented governess, Miss Heliotrope. However, as so often with adaptations of children's classics, it precisely missed the quality of the original. Instead of the gentle wit and delicately paced storytelling of the book, the film slathered on the Disneyesque fantasy – princess beds, fabulous frocks, tumbling curls, chase scenes and dungeons, swords and sorcery, CGI special effects – ignoring the solid, prosaic details – the cooking pots, the worn carpets, the darned gowns, the geraniums, the sunshine and the moonlight– on which Goudge built the fairytale so securely. Instead of one silver horse, barely glimpsed in a woodland clearing, the film created a flood tide of white horses worthy of a Guinness ad.
There is magic and terror in Goudge's wild wood, too, but the real danger is not from a man hiding behind a tree with a knife, but of taking one wrong turn, out of pride and stubbornness, and ruining the rest of your life. It's still a useful lesson, with side orders of a mug of Lemsip and a man-sized box of paper hankies.
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