‘That was our old religion, Master Harker,’ Cole said, nodding towards a wall-painting of men leading bulls and horses. ‘It was nothing like so good as the new, of course, but it was good fun in its day though, because it ended in a feast.’
‘You didn’t eat horses,’ Kay said, ‘did you?’
‘Ah, didn’t we,’ Cole said.
Cole Hawlings is the given name of the Punch and Judy man Kay Harker meets on his way home for the Christmas holidays, the strange man who says (colloquially, surely) that he’s played his show on Christmas Eve ‘since pagan times’, and who just might be the quarry of two shifty, vulpine men on Kay’s train.
In what is probably the most magically suggestive opening chapter of a novel
ever, Cole asks Kay to pass a strange message to a strange woman outside a nondescript baker’s, as the snow whirls down. As the chapter closes, Kay himself isn’t sure what message he’s passed or why he’s agreed. The author of
The Box of Delights, then-Poet Laureate John Masefield, combines the mystery of religious symbolism with the tense work of military codes and euphemism. Mystic interpretation is mixed up with criminal investigation, with the police no use in either case.
There’s also schoolboy slang, criminal lingo, ancient ciphers, gnomic portents and a very mysterious order of symbologies – even the landscape has secrets to yield (and is itself a real place disguised as a fictional one).
If you want to read the sort of novel that that blissful opening chapter suggests, you’d better read something by Susan Cooper – whose
Dark is Rising sequence take the premise of
The Box of Delights and spin it into something truly epic – or even CS Lewis. In fact, from Alan Garner to TH White via Joan Aiken, there aren’t many great children’s authors who don’t talk about Masefield. (
Sword in the Stone was published just four years after
The Box, but White says somewhere that he loved Kay Harker’s first adventure,
The Midnight Folk, ‘this side idolatory.’)
I don’t doubt that Lewis read
The Box of Delights, just because what comes with it is the license to write fantasies that are disordered, self-indulgent, rich with the imagery of a dream. The lamp-post in the snow, like the phoenix in the pub fire, has the surreal vibrancy of a dream.
Because Masefield doesn’t restrain himself to a formal, magical adventure. Kay isn’t just up against an evil wizard with a lust for power – the wicked Abner Brown is a gang boss whose men travel round Herefordshire in flying taxis, abducting members of the clergy. There are pistols as well as demons, and even demons shaped like aeroplanes. It’s a lurid Christmas extravaganza with something for everybody, and Abner is a true pantomime villain, who sometimes stops to speechify to himself about how bad he is:
‘Think what I will do to the tourist industry. Thousands will come to Tatchester to see the scene of the outrages … tea-rooms will enlarge their premises!’And Kay has quite an easy time of things, compared to Aiken’s or Cooper’s protagonists – Abner’s barely aware he exists for most of the book, and the big joke of the novel is that he kidnaps almost every other character but him. Masefield’s hero has time to eat ‘robber’s tea’, go to parties and sail toy boats. The whole thing is like a catalogue of things to please a young reader of 1935 – it would be interesting to know more about how Masefield came to write it. It’s dedicated to his wife – and when it was published, even his youngest child was twenty five years old. Masefield himself had been Poet Laureate for five years – maybe it was a welling up of things, in response to worthy commissions and deathly meetings.
It really is a book about delight, and obscure delight too. As well as earthly pleasures, Kay is set free in worlds of mystic joy. He runs through forests with Herne the Hunter, leaps through the ocean on the back of a dolphin, awakens the long-enspelled Very Good People and receives their benediction. This is the third time I’ve read the novel in less than a decade, and it still leaves me confused. I don’t really understand what the villains are trying to do, or how Kay rescues who he rescues where greater powers haven’t. I don’t understand what those powers mean, and what they want of him – ‘the Wolves are Running’, but are they only Abner’s gangs? Their battle against the mysterious trinity seems to run sideways through history. Masefield’s conception of history – and in the process, religion itself – feels like a bizarre resolution of contradictory concepts in a swelling of moral feeling: charity, love, humility…
And always that strange weightlessness of being beyond history, which is very Christmassy. At the same time, there is a quite pointed conversation about the madness of political dictators, between Kay and a man who once marched with Alexander the Great.
The Puffin edition was published thirty years into Masefield’s tenure as Poet Laureate, thirty years into the book’s life (it seems to have had an early start in memorable adaptations – several times on the wireless during the war and in the fifties). Kaye Webb describes it as
‘a special book, particularly suited to imaginative readers with inquiring minds’. She did so much for children’s publishing, just in those perfectly worded recommendations.
I can remember sitting on the carpet in our classroom and listening to it being read. It was in the Puffin edition, and we had it from Mr Llewellyn, a tall Welshman who looked a bit like a stretched out Nick Hewer from
The Apprentice. I thought that opening chapter was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard – so much was suggested, so much hung in the air, menace and magic in the same swirl of snow. I found a reprint in a charity shop and started reading along with Mr Llewellyn, which was very confusing because the reprint was heavily abridged. Thanks for nothing, Lions! I wonder who it was, at what meeting, who ordered those scenes to be cut out? I wonder what the difference was, when the text was left intact by Puffin, three decades after the original publication?
I’d like to know what happened to Mr Llewellyn – I remember he also read the first chapters of
Doctor Who and the Green Death to us, and I got up the courage to ask him who the author was, and never did anything about it for years. We obviously had tastes in common!
This has been an especially long blog, but it was for
The Box of Delights, after all. I don’t think I’ve done it justice – it’s surreal and beautiful and eerie and lovely.
The Guardian blogged about it just the other day, among their Christmas reads – and the lovely Jon took this photo of the book for me. Look at that cover – a perfect combination of 60s design and the original illustrations…
Hello! Here’s a Christmas card to you, from me and Duncan Grant – the one they were all after in the Bloomsbury group (apart from Clive, I suppose). There’s a bit I always liked in his biography, from someone who knew him in the early ’60s, soon after he’d lost Vanessa Bell:
I’m looking forward to seeing how Christmas with the Campbells goes this year. It’s always different - and the same - in unexpected ways. I’m still engrossed in the best Brenda novel so far, but I’m taking a heap of books back with me. I made the equivalent of a drunken trolley dash round Dulwich Library yesterday, after me and my Dad’s traditional festive pub crawl. Of these I will undoubtedly manage exactly one half, but you have to dream, don’t you? Curl up in that cave of Christmastime and restore your spirits.
