Over the Hills and Far Away by Matthew Dennison

Author:Matthew Dennison [Dennison, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784975623
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2016-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

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‘A nest right away’

Beatrix in the porch of the restored Hill Top, 1913.

‘They came to the river, they came to the bridge – they crossed it hand in hand – then over the hills and far away she danced with Pigling Bland!’

The Tale of Pigling Bland, 1913

THREATENED WITH no escape from the muddle of his own making – caught in a gooseberry net in Mr McGregor’s garden by the large buttons of his jacket – Peter Rabbit ‘[gives] himself up for lost, and shed[s] big tears’. In the summer of 1905 it was not to be Beatrix’s response. She chose instead to draw succour from what she called ‘the strength that comes from the hills’.1 She bought a house and a farm.

Nine years earlier, Rupert Potter had rented a country house called Lakefield. It was a mid-eighteenth-century house on a hill, with large windows, a covered veranda and a walled garden steeply terraced, as well as attics full of lumber, including ‘ancient pistols and an ancient case and velvet hunting-cap… and a portfolio of chalk drawings, figures and heads, in the style of Fuseli, such as young ladies drew at school sixty years hence’ : a treasure trove for Beatrix.2 Broad views stretched across Esthwaite Water to Langdale Pikes and Grizedale Forest ; in good weather and bad, cloud banks dominated the horizon. Beatrix had busied herself with fungi. In an oak coppice, she found ‘poor specimens of the poisonous Agaricus phal-loides’ ; under a beech tree ‘the dark hairy stalks and tiny balls of one of the Mycetozoa’ ; ‘up the steep road towards Grizedale’ she sought out inaccessible copses armed with a basket for gathering specimens ; she painted the parasol mushroom, Lepiota procera.3 With Bertram she took ‘a long dragging walk’, relishing the fresh air and the luxuriance of ‘wild herbage’. Together the siblings killed a viper with a stick ; they cut off its head and noted the tail still twisting and twitching an hour later.4 Beatrix and her father went out with their cameras ; on her own Beatrix drove the carriage about the lanes and through the woods. She emerged unscathed from a collision on a hill that left her ‘convulsed with laughter’.5 In 1900, the Potters returned to Lakefield. On that occasion Beatrix painted a view of the garden, framed by its dramatic landscape setting. Two years later, Beatrix sketched the interior of one of the Lakefield cottages ; it became Ribby’s cottage in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan. It was at Lakefield that she encountered black Pomeranians too, models for Duchess in the same story.

Subsequently renamed Ees Wyke, Lakefield lies outside the village of Near Sawrey, which Beatrix first saw in the summer of 1882, during the Potters’ tenancy of Wray Castle. In 1896 she renewed her acquaintance with this unspoiled Lancashire hamlet ; she noted its ‘flowery little gardens’ and ‘nice old-fashioned people’ who lived their lives among the lanes and fields.6 She concluded that it

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