Notes from Castle on the Hill

What follows are some excerpts I want to remember from The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge; I posted about it here, too.  I loved reading this little book.  Makes me want to go to England to try to find that lost world.  But if I took to heart the lessons that the characters learn, I wouldn't worry so much about what I want to do, and be more cheerful about what I have to do.

Not that the book is didactic, but it's overtly religious message and moral overtones might be the cause for its scarcity on library shelves. Or maybe it's not so scarce as I assume, and I've just missed out on reading Goudge until recently.

The plot: Miss Brown loses her house in London in the Blitz and heads to the country. At the stations she hears a beggarly musician playing Delius’ “Song of Summer” and recovers her spirits – and give purpose to the musician by telling him so. Then on the train she meets  Mr. Birley, a gentleman historian and guardian to his two young adult nephews Stephen and Richard. Mr. Birley offers her a position as housekeeper in their family castle. Together with two little girls sent out of the city, Prunella (terrible name), the girl in love with Richard, and a couple other village residents, these characters discover reasons for living during a time of death.


And it’s all these reasons for living, despite tragedy and disappointment, that make the book worth reading. That, and the beautiful descriptions of the English countryside.


Some quotes:

Mr. Birley on life as a game of chess between God, the master, and man the amateur who “has free will, he does what he pleases, for it was he who chose to set up his will against that of the master in the first place, he throws the whole board into confusion time and again and by his foolishness delays the orderly ending of it all for countless generations, but every stupid move of his is dealt with by a masterly counter-stroke and slowly but inexorably the game sweeps on to the master’s victory.”
And on a lost Eden: “Only a legend, that story of the lost garden, but something of the truth must lie hidden in it, for one had only to look at oneself to see those two men who are the same man, fighting down the ages, the one a rebel forever, the other straining back always after the lost inheritance . . . And nature, god-like, went on quietly creating, creating, giving man time.”

By the end of the story, Mr. Birley is probably the least changed character, but even he finds that “there is a certain deep happiness that is experienced only by those who have lost, almost literally, everything. . . .He could not see that he possessed much at the moment except his immortal sou l. . . and this happiness.”


Stephen, the artistic younger brother, “Why do we keep on trying to build Jerusalem? We’ve been at it for several thousand years, and it seems a hopeless business, yet we’re for ever shoveling away the ruins of the old attempts and starting again. There’s no explanation except that there’s a model somewhere, and we’ve seen it vaguely through the debris. Man will go on till he’s got the thing right at last.” (also love his understanding of the comic under-statement of Beatrix Potter.)


He latter comes to terms with his revulsion for war by serving on the detail that digs bodies out of the rubble in London: “I’ve never loathed myself as I have since the war broke out; somehow seeing how bestial man can be shows one how despicable one is oneself. . . but it cuts both ways. And I’m happy because I know now that I shall never go to pieces; nor will humanity; we’ll win through.” After he uncovers a couple locked in an embrace in death, he becomes reconciled with death and life because he glimpses the peace beyond. After a more personal encounter with death, he understands “Separateness is only an illusion, a sort of curse on us because of sin. We refused to be children of God, we wouldn’t be brothers of each other, and so there was egotism and the hell of loneliness. But it’s only an imaginary hell. You can break out of it if you break away from yourself.”


Observations of Miss Brown: “It is a bitter draught that you love more than you are loved and there are few whose pride lets them face it. But it was Miss Brown’s habit to face everything . . . Requited love gets as much as it gives, but unrequited love gets nothing for itself and so it must be the best sort of love that there is. Perhaps it will teach me how to break away from that circle of myself.”

Mrs. Heather, an old village woman who leads tours of the castle, tells Miss Brown why she is always so happy even though her husband died leaving her 12 kids to raise, after she tells how she grew to love him by serving him: “You may know there’s sun outside a shuttered house, but you’re still in the dark, you don’t see till summat breaks the shutters open an’ you cry aloud for joy.”

And this: “[Life] has me, I thought, an’ naught can alter the fact that it has me, an’ if what I knew down there in the valley, with the sap risin’ in the branch under my hand, be life, then it don’t stop at death an’ it be the grandest thing God ever made; so I’d best cease complainin’ an’ let it do what it likes with what’s its own… Life’s very like a husband you know, my dear; it makes you bring forth fruit.”

Mrs. Heather’s view on putting one foot in front of the other, washing, drying, putting away, after a tragedy, helps the other characters endure their losses, as well. It takes Miss Brown some time to discover “the how and why of living,” but it is in a death to self that she finds it by the end of the book. And that is a death that no one mourns.

Reading high

Finished Linnets and Valerians last night and loved, loved loved it, even if the ending was a little too tidy and perfect. I spent the hour after I finished it in a state of distracted bliss. A happy mix between fairy tale fantasy and fantastical reality – British magical realism, I guess. Can I go live with Uncle Ambrose – or send him all my children? How many books are there where a group of four siblings have great bonding adventures? (The Penderwicks, the Pevensy’s, the Swallows and Amazon’s crowd, the Bobbsey’s, who else?)

YA fiction

Have been reading children’s literature lately, two books about very different childhoods. First I finished The Great Gilly Hopkins, the story of the flower child’s daughter who is dropped into foster care. Gilly is passed around from family to family and learns to be tough and heartless to survive the heartbreak of being unwanted. Her final foster home is with 3 other “rejects” of society, who actually learn to love her, so that when her grandmother discovers her existence and comes to get her, Gilly doesn’t want to leave. Her grandmother is a lonely, fussy old woman, but because of her loneliness, she is in a way just as needy as Gilly. So even though Gilly’s mother continues to reject her, the book ends on a hopeful note with Gilly finding a settled place and a purpose.

Written in the 70’s, this is one of those realistic Generation X chapter books so popular then. I went through a Katherine Patterson phase in grade school, along with a Judy Blume phase, a Lois Lowry phase, and a S. E. Hinton phase – all edgy, naturalistic (ok, maybe the paranormal stuff in Lowry was fantastic, but it was realistically portrayed), issue oriented books. (I also went through a Narnia phase, an L. M. Montgomery phase,an Alcott phase, a horse book phase, etc.,so I had balance. My own boys prefer fantasy and Brian Jacques type books, which is just fine with me, although I know there can be hidden ideologies there, too.) I had forgotten about the racial tension in this book, and I think I was oblivious to the pathos of the foster mother’s affection for the mentally disabled foster boy. I certainly did not tear up when I read this book as a kid – the only book I remember crying over was Gone With the Wind. (And for a long time I didn’t cry during movies, preferring to remain stoic and impartial, as a rejection of my mother’s pitiful sobbing. Then the floodgates were opened one day when I was pregnant, nursing a yearling, and holding a toddler while watching Farmer Hoggett dance when Babe is accepted into the sheep herding competition – a triumphant moment in film!) But Gilly’s encounter with Wordsworth through the blind African American neighbor, Mr. Randolph, was beautiful, if a bit contrived, as was the honesty of her 6th grade teacher in reaction to Gilly’s insult and the final goodbye of Trotter; all had me choked up. Although Gilly was not an admirably behaved child, she was smart and brave and recognized her worth when she finally believed she was needed.

In complete contrast is Linnets and Valerians, written by Elizabeth Goudge only about 15 years earlier, but set 60 years earlier. I’ve barely begun this story of 4 British siblings, left by their India-going father with a fussy grandmother, not too unlike Gilly’s grandmother, perhaps: a don’t touch/be quiet grandmother. The book begins with them escaping from their grandmother’s, “borrowing” a horse and cart, and tearing off across the English countryside, until, providentially, they are brought by the pony to their elderly uncle’s vicarage, a dusty, castlelike house with a kindly, dwarfish caretaker who talks to bees and other animals. The uncle doesn’t like children, but he likes to classically educate them, so the four are allowed to stay. They aren’t punished for their flight from their grandmother, their theft, or their snooping around the village, as long as they come to their lessons.

With the tone of a fairy tale, this book is a child’s fantasy of a perfect childhood: freedom to ramble interesting places, no meddling adults, no unbearable consequences for poor behavior. Gilly watches Sesame Street with her foster brother in the afternoons; the Linnets run around quaint villages and have tea. I wanted that latter kind of childhood, although reading about people like Gilly maybe made me appreciate what I did have: freedom to ride a bike around country roads, a mother who let us leave blanket tents up for days, lots of art supplies and pets, a vacant lot and a pond next door, horses to pat in the field behind our yard. Although I’ve tried not to overschedule my own kids, I know they lack many of those freedoms. And when they do have free time, they want to play Wii or watch a movie. Will they feel their lack or will they remember fondly what freedoms they do have?