The Boggart, and The Boggart and the Monster

Susan Cooper is perhaps best known for The Dark is Rising Sequence, a beautiful series of novels which draw heavily on Arthurian mythology and the Celtic landscape – and which are so terrifying that I was an older teenager before I was brave enough to read them all!

However, she has also written a number of terrific books for younger children, and it is to two of these that I turn now. In The Boggart, Cooper draws from the myth of the shape-shifting, mostly invisible, mischievous spirit that belongs to a house. Old Devon MacDevon dies, leaving his tumbledown Castle Keep – located on an island in a Scottish loch – inhabited only by the boggart. His Canadian relatives, the Volniks, inherit. They have full lives in Canada and cannot move to rural Scotland; instead they visit and arrange for the sale of the castle; when they leave, they inadvertently take the boggart with them.

The boggart is miserable in Canada. Unnoticed, lonely, and suffering terribly from culture shock, he does everything he can to get the family's attention: he smashes things; he eats all the ice cream; he wreaks havoc with traffic lights; he gets into the controls of the theatre where Mr Volnik works and produces the most magical theatre lighting ever seen. With the help of a Scottish friend, the Volnik children, Emily and Jessup, eventually work out what is going on and find a way to send the boggart home.

In the sequel, The Boggart and the Monster, Emily and Jessup return to holiday at Castle Keep with family friend and new owner, Mr Maconochie. While on a trip from Castle Keep to Loch Ness, to which the boggart has invited himself, they realise that the Loch Ness monster needs their help. A lazy boggart who has spent so long in one particular shape that she can't remember how to change, Nessie is about to be discovered by a scientific crew. With the assistance of Castle Keep's boggart and the children, however, she manages to shape-shift and find a safe new home.

The stories are charming. The boggart is a trickster, and the games he gets up to are highly amusing – especially as so few know of his existence. People are flummoxed when the cup they thought was half-full is suddenly empty; objects disappear; strange noises wake them in the night. He turns into a seal and taunts the seals of the loch; he turns into a gull and soars into the sky. The imagery of flying is particularly exhilarating.

However, the real gift lies in the sense of place and belonging that runs through the stories like a golden thread. Emily and Jessup are Canadian, of mixed ancestry; but they feel right at home in Scotland. At some level, they belong there, or at least big parts of them do. In one scene, a seal hauls itself up from the loch to gaze into Emily's eyes; and in that infinite moment there is deep communication and belonging.

Meanwhile the boggart is miserable in Canada, and his longing for home fills the air with an aching sadness that affects even those unaware of his presence.

On the boggart's return home (and we are moving across novels now), he has to grieve the loss of Devon MacDevon, his companion for many decades; and establish himself with a new owner who doesn't know of his existence. Cooper writes of the boggart's grieving beautifully. In one scene, in wordless sorrow, the boggart keens the funeral lament, and mimics the sounds of the funeral march with its rolling carts and tramping feet, that accompanied the death of an earlier MacDevon. As a creature of pure spirit and pure emotion, with very few words, at moments of high gratitude he may lay a small cool invisible hand on a human's cheek just for an instant.

Like a young child, the boggart slips between extremes of sorrow and joy; and so the text is, for the child reader, emotionally manageable. Cooper balances strong feelings with humour and playfulness, and the result is a brace of stories which are by turns sad, entrancing and hilarious.

Personally, I resonate with the theme of belonging to and longing for a landscape. I am a Cornishwoman whose people have lived in Australia for 160 years. I visited Cornwall for the first time last year, and felt a powerful resonance; I felt, for the first time in my life, deeply at home. The light, the landscape, the architecture, the way people chatted in the shops: I belonged in a deep and immediate way. And yet, like the Volniks, my home and my more recent family history is in another place that is also called home.

Now when my longing for Cornwall threatens to overwhelm me, like a child I go back to Cooper's books – The Dark is Rising Sequence, The Boggart books – and immerse myself in the Celtic landscape of grey stone buildings and dark waters and the ever-present calling of the gulls, and wonder about that distant place that is both stranger and friend, intimately familiar and deeply known, which landscape is knit into my bones.

(For an earlier post on the relationship between stories and my interior landscape, written before I visited Cornwall, click here.)

Lichen and Running Water

Is it possible to be born into the wrong landscape? I wonder. I was born in Melbourne. Both sides of my family have been in Australia for many generations. I grew up with high skies and eucalyptus trees, and know no other landscape well. Yet I have never really felt at ease here. Perhaps it's psychological, reflecting only a certain discomfort with my own skin. Or perhaps my soul has its roots in another land. Because whatever the cause, and try as I might, I cannot fall in love with thin dry forests and red dirt. I have read, and loved, Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, that hypnotic mythical story set on a property studded with Australian trees. I devoured Tim Winton's Dirt Music, located in the West, and Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, set in the Blue Mountains. Foggy Highway, by Paul Kelly and the Stormwater Boys, is on repeat in our household as it tells the stories of Australia. I've lived in Melbourne and Perth and driven the thousands of miles between and around the two, drinking in the landscape. It is stunning, awe inspiring, humbling. But I do not rest easy here.

I just don't feel at home. Even in the depths of a Melbourne winter (which don't run that deep these days), I yearn for muddy puddles and endless days of thick rain. I hunger for green pasture, fence posts exuberant with lichen, and fields and folds flowing as far as the eye can see.

What is my interior landscape? Could it be genetically prescribed? My ancestors were miners and innkeepers from Cornwall and who knows where else. I haven't been there, but perhaps that landscape tallies with my own.

After all, whenever I read Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, I get a tingle of recognition. Greenwitch is the third of a sequence, The Dark is Rising. The series draws from myth and legend to tell of the endless struggle between Dark and the Light. In Greenwitch, based in a fishing village in Cornwall, the battle for good is aided by the even more powerful neutral force of the Earth. A young girl, Jane, participates in the village's annual spring ritual for good fishing and good harvest. The ritual involves the nocturnal making of the Greenwitch, which is tossed into the sea. Jane's pity for the Greenwitch, and her relationship with it, shapes the story and affects the eternal struggle. And the description of the houses, the village, the seawall, the sea - all so different to my own experience - feel deeply familiar. As I read, I sense the tang of salt and hear gulls in the distance; the sound of waves fills the air. The landscape, the stones, the village are like a dream I can't quite remember, something I love but have never known.

Another book set in a village in Cornwall has a similar effect. Every time I read The Mousehole Cat, by Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley, I cry. This picture book is set in the town of Mousehole, pronounced Mowzel, so named because of the narrowness of the gap through which the fishing boats have to pass from the open sea into the harbour. It's based on an old Cornish legend about a time when winter storms were so bad that no boat could get through the gap to the fishing grounds. The village is slowly starving, so Old Tom, who has no living dependents, decides he must risk destruction in order to feed the town. His cat, Mowzer, sings to and soothes the Great Storm Cat as Old Tom steers his boat to the fishing grounds, and brings home enough fish for everyone. The language and the illustrations are complementary: each intricate, each adding richness and depth to the story. This is a book to read over and over again, and treasure. But beware: it may not be just the landscape that brings tears to my eyes. If you plan to read it aloud to a little one, be prepared for your voice to crack, and keep a box of tissues within easy reach.

I'm not just hooked on stories from Cornwall. Stories set in the north of England also grab me in the guts, so familiar do they feel. Many of us read Jane Gardam's Bilgewater or A Long Way from Verona at high school. Less well known, but absolutely wonderful, are two collections of her short stories. The Hollow Land, set in the Cumbrian fells, recounts the low-key adventures of Harry and Bell as they lock up the fell gate, explore an old mine, listen to ghost stories on a rainy night, find a frozen cataract, and spend time with various eccentric villagers. A Few Fair Days is set on the coast of north Yorkshire, and tells stories about young Lucy. Nothing much happens, but everything is important: a windy day, when mother airs out blankets and Lucy goes for an impromptu solitary wander; an empty house, which the village children commandeer for their elaborate games; a feisty aunt, frequently absent, who breaks all the rules; a house guest who wears a wig.

The stories are shaped by their respective landscapes. The Hollow Land is set on the fells, a land riddled with abandoned mines and studded with sheep. Just as the water runs secret paths, sometimes aboveground, but more often underground until the rains come, many of the stories are about things known to the locals, but unspoken and hidden from outsiders. On the other hand, A Few Fair Days is set in a cold and blustery country of stony slopes and sand dunes, heady with the smell of the sea. Houses are large and chilly, and time drags. Most of the action takes place away from home, in an abandoned house or down in the dunes; and many of the stories are about things uncovered, things which must be recognised for what they are. In this windy landscape, obfuscation and opacity are soon blown away.

In all her stories, which are gentle, funny and kind, Gardam displays her acute ear for dialogue: the offhand comments made by mothers to children, the two short phrases that convey a whole relationship. And she takes the reader back to childhood, when playing on a piece of defunct farm machinery takes a whole afternoon, and aunts loom large.

One day, I hope to visit England. There I suppose I will find that I am not English either, and like all children who have lived in various countries, and all children born to immigrants - however long ago -, I will have to resign myself to statelessness for my interior landscape at least. In the meantime, I continue to search out stories of lichen and running water, endless rain and grey skies, green fields dotted with sheep, dark seas and cobblestones, and noses that drip with cold.

> Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley The Mousehole Cat (Aladdin, 1996); Susan Cooper Greenwitch (Atheneum, 1974); Jane Gardam A Few Fair Days (New York: Greenwillow, 1988 (1971)); Jane Gardam The Hollow Land (London: Puffin, 1983 (1981)).

Futtocks, shrouds, loblolly boys

After the birth of my third child a few months ago, I found myself with a desperate urge to read about shipboard life. I don't know whether it was a primal response to the watery nature of birth (my waters broke early so those few days were rather awash), or whether I was just yearning to be afloat, far far from the cares of attending to three pre-school children! Whatever the reason, I ran away to sea.

First I re-read an old favourite, Night Birds on Nantucket (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase). It begins with the delightful Dido Twite comatose on the deck of a whaling boat, being kept alive with whale oil and molasses, and moves on to a fiendish plot to blow up the English House of Parliament with a long gun positioned on Nantucket. Simple pleasure. Then I moved on to Victory by Susan Cooper, which tells the tale of a girl in the present, born into a sailing family, and her connection with a sailor on the HMS Victory. I read it in a single sitting, and it brought a tear to my eye. After that, I considered Moby Dick, but I don't have a copy and wasn't about to head out to my local library in my pajamas, leaky breasts and all, just so I could stay afloat between feeds.

Then, serendipity. I remembered seeing pictures of boats on some books at a friend's house. I called my friend, and he provided a home delivery service of the first half dozen books in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian - along with an enormous wodge of French cheese. (Incidentally, but not unimportantly, let me note here that if you ever want to give a real gift to a postpartum mum (and I'm not talking baby socks), give her French cheese. After nine months of cheese free pregnancy, and a day of labour, and a week of sleepless nights, French cheese is just the thing to raise her from the dead. Fromager d'Affinois, to be precise.) Anyway, the time (and the cheese) was ripe, I launched in, and I've been at sea with Jack and Stephen ever since. (I'm now in book 8.)

The books, which begin with Master and Commander and improve after this, chart the relationship between a ship's captain, Jack Aubrey, and his best friend and surgeon, Stephen Maturin. Jack is jovial, fat, and much given to weak witticisms, which make him collapse with laughter. He's a brilliant sailor, and an utter naif ashore. Conversely, Stephen is sallow, dour, an oaf at sea, but a cunning intelligence agent, a renowned naturalist and a gifted surgeon. The story follows their adventures through the wars between England and France, Spain and the United States (not to mention the minor powers).

It's a modern Odyssey, and should be approached as one story over a leisurely 20 (yes, 20) books. Threads disappear and reappear several books later, whether it is a love interest, an old enemy, a surgical incident, or a little joke. The dialogue reminds me of Jane Austen's gentle wit. O'Brian has an acute ear for conversation, and picks out idiosyncrasies which enthral the reader. Jack, for example, frequently begins one platitude, and ends with another.

For all Jack's cheerful idiocies, he is a canny sailor and a gifted violinist. Jack and Stephen, who plays the 'cello, spend evenings in the captain's cabin trying out new music, and practicing old favourites. In peacetime, when they're not playing music, or attending poetry competitions, they enjoy wonderful food - fresh roasted coffee, drowned baby, soused hog's head - that is, until the food runs out and they're down to salt pork and ship's biscuits. I learned that weevils taste bitter; maggots just feel soft and cold in your mouth.

Stephen is a gift to the landlubber reader. I've barely been on a boat, let alone at sea on a sailing ship, and so I am grateful for him. When he decides to go for a spontaneous solo swim, just as the boat is turning and thus narrowly avoids drowning; when he trips over ropes and is hit in the head by spars; when he absent-mindedly walks through tar then all over the newly washed decks; when he mixes up east and west, north and south, starboard and larboard; when, after a decade at sea, he still can't get into or out of a boat safely, then I feel there's a place on the ship for me.

The books are written with great good humour; I find myself laughing out loud at them in public places (trams, trains, waiting rooms). And they are gripping; even I, who thought myself completely disinterested in war, am utterly enthralled by the fire and heat of battle, and the gory surgery that must follow. The language is beautiful: the words are rich and gracious, and redolent of the nineteenth century. Close male friends address each other as 'joy' (belowdecks use far fouler language), and some of the mannerisms are so addictive that I find them slipping out in my own conversation. I recently startled my husband by saying Prithee...

Although my friends are probably not so grateful (they now roll their eyes when I mention these books), I thank heavens that this is a long series. Because when it ends, I'm going to cry, and then start at the start again. I'm so hooked that I've even diversified. I found a picture book of cross-sections of the HMS Victory, and fish it out to show poor unsuspecting dinner guests where the orlop is. And I spent a small fortune on an old book, Epics of the Square-Rigged Ships, just because it had photographs of a barque in full sail, and of the heart stopping view up the mainmast.

> Joan Aiken Night Birds on Nantucket (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, but new editions are widely available); Susan Cooper Victory (London: Random House, 2006); Patrick O'Brian Master and Commander (first in a long series) (lots of editions); Stephen Biesty Cross-Sections: Man of War (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1993); DW Domville-Fife Epics of the Square-Rigged Ships (London: Seeley, 1958).