Short Stories for Children Read online

  Walter de la Mare

  SHORT STORIES

  FOR CHILDREN

  Edited by

  GILES DE LA MARE

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Abbreviations

  STORIES IN COLLECTIONS

  BROOMSTICKS AND OTHER TALES (1925)

  Pigtails, Ltd

  The Dutch Cheese

  Miss Jemima

  The Thief

  Broomsticks

  Lucy

  A Nose

  The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire

  The Lovely Myfanwy

  Alice’s Godmother

  Maria-Fly

  Visitors

  THE LORD FISH (1933)

  The Lord Fish

  A Penny a Day

  The Magic Jacket

  Dick and the Beanstalk

  The Scarecrow

  The Old Lion

  Sambo and the Snow Mountains

  Bibliographical Appendix

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Unlike his adult stories, most of Walter de la Mare’s much-loved stories for children remained in print until the 1980s in Faber’s Collected Stories for Children (1947) and the later Puffin version of this (1977); and, apart from ‘The Dutch Cheese’, an early story, they were all of them published for the first time within ten years in the 1920s and 1930s. However, three distinctive stories, ‘Pigtails, Ltd’, ‘The Thief’ and ‘A Nose’, that are included in Short Stories for Children, have never been reprinted since they originally appeared in Broomsticks and Other Tales, his first volume of children’s stories, in 1925. That volume was followed by The Lord Fish in 1933.

  Because they are vivid and timeless, and now unfamiliar, I have included one of the 1925 Bold woodcut ‘designs’ with each of the Broomsticks stories, and one of the 1933 Rex Whistler engravings with each of the Lord Fish stories, with the kind permission of Constable & Robinson and Faber & Faber respectively.

  Quirky, disparate, unpredictable, acutely observed, sometimes frightening, and often preoccupied with states of mind and personal identity, they have much in common with the adult stories. Some of them are peopled with giants, witches, kind elves, evil and spiteful fairies, and imprisoned maidens in castles, but most are not. We find ourselves in railway trains, a mansion in the City of London, another Elizabethan one in a mysterious tract of country, a remote farmhouse near the sea, a waterlogged forest, a drawing-room being watched by a fly; and, among other things, we encounter a wise monkey, a haunted cat, a fish magician, a baron transmogrified into a donkey, a thief desperate to be burgled, a man who believes he has a wax nose, and a godmother celebrating her 350th birthday. Some are morality tales; others, like the extraordinary ‘Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire’ and ‘Pigtails, Ltd’, lead you to think they may be but then veer away into surreality. As in de la Mare’s poems, everyday reality may at any time become undercut by disturbing uncertainty and dark, though not always malign, forces.

  With the publication of Short Stories for Children, fifty years after his death, the plan to bring all Walter de la Mare’s short stories back into print has been completed.

  The same general arrangement has been adopted as in the Complete Poems. All the stories have been grouped chronologically according to the volumes in which they originally appeared. Short Stories 1895–1926 includes the first three main collections and uncollected stories from the earlier period; Short Stories 1927–1956 the last three main collections and uncollected and unpublished stories from the later period; and Short Stories for Children the two children’s collections.

  With one or two exceptions, the text is based on the latest printed versions worked on by de la Mare, Stories, Essays and Poems (1938), Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942) and Collected Stories for Children (1947) being the three chief sources for these apart from the eight main collections. For further details, see the Bibliographical Appendix on page 349.

  The contents of the three volumes are as follows:

  I SHORT STORIES 1895–1926

  Stories in Collections

  The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)

  Ding Dong Bell (1924, 1936)

  The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)

  Uncollected Stories

  II SHORT STORIES 1927–1956

  Stories in Collections

  On the Edge: Short Stories (1930)

  The Wind Blows Over (1936)

  A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)

  Uncollected Stories

  Unpublished Stories

  III SHORT STORIES FOR CHILDREN

  Stories in Collections

  Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925)

  The Lord Fish (1933)

  I am very grateful to the late Dorothy Marshall for help in tracking down uncollected stories and checking references, to Theresa Whistler for information about early manuscript versions, and to Tom Knott for his very accurate and precise typesetting of the manuscript of this volume. The late Leonard Clark’s Checklist for the 1956 National Book League exhibition of de la Mare books and MSS has been a useful source of information.

  Giles de la Mare

  ABBREVIATIONS

  MAIN COLLECTIONS

  R The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)

  DDB Ding Dong Bell (1924, 1936)

  Br Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925)

  C The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)

  OE On the Edge: Short Stories (1930)

  LF The Lord Fish (1933)

  WBO The Wind Blows Over (1936)

  Beg A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)

  OTHER COLLECTIONS

  SSS Seven Short Stories (1931)

  SEP Stories, Essays and Poems (1938)

  BS Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942)

  CSC Collected Stories for Children (1947)

  CT The Collected Tales of Walter de la Mare (1950)

  SSV Selected Stories and Verses of Walter de la Mare (1952)

  GS Walter de la Mare: Ghost Stories (1956)

  uncoll

  uncollected

  STORIES IN COLLECTIONS

  BROOMSTICKS AND OTHER TALES (1925)

  Pigtails, Ltd*

  How such a very peculiar notion had ever come into Miss Rawlings’s mind, even she herself could not possibly have said. When had it come? She could not answer that question, either. It had simply stolen in little by little like a beam of sunshine into a large room. Not, of course, into an empty room, for Miss Rawlings had many, many things to think about. She was by far the most important person in the Parish, and everyone – from Archdeacon Tomlington and his two curates, Mr Moffatt and Mr Timbs, down to little old Mrs Ort, the humpbacked charwoman who lived in the top attic of a cottage down by Clopbourne (or, as they called it, Clobburne) Bridge – everyone knew how practical she was.

  But once that sunny beam had begun to steal into Miss Rawlings’s mind and into her life, it had lightened up with its dangerous gold everything that was there. It was nevertheless an extremely fantastic notion, because it could not possibly be true. How could Miss Rawlings ever have lost a little girl if there had never been any little girl to lose? Yet that exactly was Miss Rawlings’s idea. It had flitted into her imagination like a nimble, bright-feathered bird. And once it was really there, she never hesitated to talk about it; not at all. ‘My little girl, you know,’ she’d say, with an emphatic nod and a pleasant smile on her broad face. Or rather, ‘My little gal’ – for she always pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Sal, the short for Sarah. This too was an odd thing; for Miss Rawlings had been brought up by her parents with the very best education, and seldom mispronounced even such words as ‘Chloe’ or
‘Psyche’ or ‘epitome’ or ‘misled’. And so far as I know – though that is not very far – there is hardly a word of one syllable in our enormous language (except shall and pal) that is pronounced like Sal; for Pall Mall, of course, is pronounced Pell Mell. Still, Miss Rawlings did talk about her little girl, and she called her her little gal.

  It never occurred to anybody in the Parish – not even to Mr Timbs – to compare the Little Gal to a gay little bird or to a beam of sunshine. Mrs Tomlington said, indeed – and many other persons in the Parish agreed with her – it was nothing but a bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet. But whether or not, partly because she delighted in bright colours, and partly because, in fashion or out, she had entirely her own taste in dress, there could not be a larger or brighter or flowerier bonnet for any bee to be in. Apart from puce silk and maroon velvet and heliotrope feathers and ribbons, and pompons and rosettes, Miss Rawlings’s bonnets always consisted of handsome, spreading flowers – blue-red roses, purple pansies, mauve cineraria – a dizzying little garden for any bee’s amusement. And this bee sang rather than buzzed in it the whole day long.

  You might almost say it had made a new woman of her. Miss Rawlings had always been active and positive and good-humoured and kind. But now her spirits were so much more animated. She went bobbing and floating through the Parish like a balloon. Her interest in everything seemed to have first been multiplied by nine, and then by nine again. And eighty-one times anything is a pretty large quantity. Beggars, blind men, gypsies, hawkers, crossing-sweepers positively smacked their lips when they saw Miss Rawlings come sailing down the street. Her heart was like the Atlantic, and they like rowboats on the deep – especially the blind men. As for her donations to the parochial Funds, they were first doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled.

  There was first, for example, the Fund for giving all the little parish girls and boys not only a bun and an orange and a Tree at Christmas and a picnic with Veal and Ham Pie and Ice Pudding in June, but a Jack-in-the-green on May-day and a huge Guy on November the fifth, with squibs and Roman candles and Chinese crackers and so on. There was not only the Fund for the Delight of Infants of Every Conceivable Description; there was also the Wooden-Legged Orphans’ Fund. There was the Home for Manx and Tabby Cats; and the Garden by the River with the Willows for Widowed Gentlewomen. There was the Threepenny-Bit-with-a-Hole-in-It Society; and the Organ Grinders’ Sick Monkey and Blanket Fund; and there was the oak-beamed Supper Room in the Three Wild Geese for the use of Ancient Mariners – haggis and toad-in-the-hole, and plum-duff and jam roly-poly – that kind of thing. And there were many others. If Miss Rawlings had been in another parish, it would have been a sad thing indeed for the cats and widows and orphans and organ monkeys in her own.

  With such a power and quantity of money, of course, writing cheques was very much like writing in birthday books. Still, it is not easy to give too much to a Fund; and few people make the attempt. Miss Rawlings, too, was a practical woman. She knew perfectly well that (wheresoever it may end) charity must begin at home, so all this time she was keeping what the Ancient Mariners at the Three Wild Geese called a ‘weather eye’ wide open for her lost Little Gal. But how, it may be asked, could she keep any kind of eye open for a lost Little Gal, when she didn’t know what the lost Little Gal was like? And the answer to that is that Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well.

  She may not have known where the absurd notion came from, or when, or why; but she knew that. She knew what the Little Gal looked like as well as a mother thrush knows what an egg looks like; or Sir Christopher Wren knew what a cathedral looks like; or Mr Peace a gold watch. But as with the thrush and Sir Christopher, a good many little things had happened to Miss Rawlings first. And this quite apart from the old wooden doll she used to lug about when she was seven, called Quatta.

  One morning, for example, Miss Rawlings had been out in her carriage and was thinking of nothing in particular, nothing whatsoever, when not very far from the little stone Bridge at Clobburne she happened to glance up at a window in the upper part of a small old house. And at that window there seemed to show a face with dark bright eyes watching her. Just a glimpse. I say ‘seemed’, for when in the carriage Miss Rawlings rapidly twisted her head to get a better view, she discovered either that there had been nobody there at all, or that the somebody had swiftly drawn back, or that the bright dark eyes were just two close-together flaws in the diamond-shaped bits of glass. In the last case what Miss Rawlings had seen was mainly ‘out of her mind’. But, if so, it went back again and stayed there! It was excessively odd, indeed, how clear a remembrance that glimpse left behind it.

  Then again Miss Rawlings, like her renowned aunt Felicia, had always enjoyed a weakness for taking naps in the train, the flowers and plumes and bows in her bonnet nodding the while above her head. The sound of the wheels on the iron lines was like a lullaby, the fields trailing softly away beyond the window drowsed her eyes. Whether asleep or not, she would generally close her eyes and appear to be napping. And not once, or twice, but three separate times, owing to a scritch of the whistle or a sudden jolt of the train, she had rapidly opened them again to find herself staring out – rather like a large animal in a small field – at a little girl sitting on the opposite seat, who, in turn, had already fixed her eyes on Miss Rawlings’s countenance. In every case there had been a look of intense, patient interest on the little girl’s face.

  Perhaps Miss Rawlings’s was a countenance that all little girls are apt to look at with extreme interest – especially when the owner of it is asleep in a train. It was a broad countenance with a small but powerful nose with a round tip. There was a good deal of fresh colour in the flat cheeks beneath the treacle-coloured eyes; and the hair stood like a wig beneath the huge bonnet. Miss Rawlings, too, had a habit of folding her kid-gloved hands upon her lap as if she were an image. Nonetheless, you could hardly call it only a ‘coincidence’ that these little girls were so much alike, and so much like the face at the window. And so very much like the real lost Little Gal that had always, it seemed, been at the back of Miss Rawlings’s mind.

  I don’t mean at all that there was any kind of ghost in Miss Rawlings’s family. Her family was far too practical for that; and her mansion was most richly furnished. All I mean is that all these little girls happened to have a rather narrow face, a brown pigtail, rather small dark-brown bright eyes and narrow hands, and, except for the one at the window, they wore round beaver hats and buttoned coats. No; there was no ghost there. What Miss Rawlings was after was an absolutely real Little Gal. And her name was Barbara Allan.

  This sounds utterly absurd. But so it had come about. For a long time – having talked about her Little Gal again and again to the Archdeacon and Mrs Tomlington and Mr Moffatt and other ladies and gentlemen in the Parish – Miss Rawlings had had no name at all for her small friend. But one still, summery evening, there being a faint red in the sky, while she was wandering gently about her immense drawing-room, she had happened to open a book lying on an ‘occasional’ table. It was a book of poetry – crimson and gilt-edged, with a brass clasp – and on the very page under her nose she had read this line:

  Fell in love with Barbara Allan.

  The words ran through her mind like wildfire. Barbara Allan – it was the name! Or how very like it! An echo? Certainly some words and names are echoes of one another – sisters or brothers once removed, so to speak. Tomlington and Pocklingham, for example; or quince and shrimp; or angelica and cyclamen. All I mean is that the very instant Miss Rawlings saw that printed ‘Barbara Allan’ it ran through her heart like an old tune in a nursery. It was her Little Gal, or ever so near it; as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing – viz, crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry.

  Now if Miss Rawlings had been of royal blood and had lived in a fairy tale – if, that is, she had been a Queen in Grimm – it would have been a quite ordinary thing that she should be seeking a lost Princess, or badly in need of one. But, except that
her paternal grandfather was a Sir Samuel Rawlings, she was but very remotely connected with royalty. And yet, if you think about it, seeing that once upon a time there were only marvellous Adam and beautiful Eve in the Garden – that is, in the whole wide world, – and seeing that all of Us as well as all of the earth’s Kings and Queens must have descended from them, therefore all of Us must have descended from Kings and Queens. So too with bold Miss Rawlings. But – unlike Mrs Tomlington – she had not come down by the grand staircase.

  Since, then, Miss Rawlings did not live in a fairy tale or in Grimm, but was a very real person in a truly real Parish, her friends and acquaintances were all inclined in private to agree with Mrs Tomlington that her Little Gal was nothing but a bee in her bonnet. And that the longer it stayed there the louder it buzzed. Indeed, Miss Rawlings almost began to think of nothing else. She became absent-minded, quite forgetting her soup and fish and chicken and French roll when she sat at dinner. She left on the gas. She signed blank cheques for the Funds. She pointed out Sunsets to blind beggars, and asked after deaf ones’ children. She gave brand-new mantles and dolmans away to the Rummagers; ordered coals from her fishmonger; rode third-class with a first-class ticket; addressed a postcard to Mrs Tomfoolington – almost every kind of absent-minded thing imaginable.

  And now she was always searching – even in the house sometimes; even in the kitchen-quarters. And her plump country maids would gladly help too. ‘No, m’m, she ain’t here,’ ‘No, m’m, we ain’t a-seed her yet.’ ‘Lor, yes’m, the Room’s all ready.’