Squirrel Nutkin: Anarchy for Under Fives

Squirrel Nutkin: Anarchy for Under Fives

Nutkin embodies the spirit of irreverence, making him an excellent role model for children

Graham Greene, writing about Beatrix Potter in 1933, called The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin “an unsatisfactory book, less interesting than her first (The Tailor of Gloucester).” 

I couldn’t agree less. 

First published in 1903, Squirrel Nutkin is more than “a Tale about a tail”. It is a story of brave defiance in the face (quite literally in the face) of tyranny, with a morally ambiguous ending. The hero, a squirrel named Nutkin, is one of the most flamboyantly subversive characters in children’s literature.

The book also presents the child with images of a wild, pristine world free from human intrusion: pictures of Lakeland wildlife and landscape that are precise and physical, but also romantic. These images last a lifetime. The one that took root in my own imagination shows the squirrels coming through the wood in a long single file, each carrying a fish. Their leader, however, carries no fish, is not walking in line, but is bounding ahead, singing:

“The man in the wilderness said to me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’
I answered him as I thought good –
‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood’”

This strange, formal procession through the green forest, with its suggestion of religious or pagan ceremony, together with the teasing beauty of the verse and Nutkin’s ecstatic fearlessness, created a sense of enchanted freedom. When I look at it now, the illustration has lost much of its power - it is even a bit pale and disappointing - but the mental image formed decades ago remains just as vivid. 

The procession through the forest, bearing gifts of fish

The story of Squirrel Nutkin is simple in form, a rhythmical repetition of similar events over six days. The tension builds through the steady escalation of Nutkin’s provocative challenges to authority, and the reader’s nervous uncertainty about exactly when that authority, in the form of a huge tawny owl, will react. 

It begins with a society of squirrels living in a wood by a lake, including Nutkin, his brother Twinkleberry, and their cousins. Twinkleberry has no real role in the story other than as the only named member of the large crowd of cousins. It is Autumn, and the squirrels sail across the lake to an island to gather nuts. But before they can do this, they have to ask permission from Old Brown, the owl who lives in an oak tree at the heart of the wooded island. It is not explained why Old Brown has the power to grant or deny this permission. 

On the first day, the squirrels offer Old Brown “three fat mice” and all of them (except Nutkin) bow down before the owl: “Old Mr. Brown, will you favour us with permission to gather nuts upon your island?” But Nutkin scorns such obsequiousness from the start, preferring to dance up and down and demand that the owl answer a riddle – the first of eight rhymes which punctuate the story. The owl studiously ignores Nutkin and shuts his eyes, saying nothing. 

Each morning, the compliant squirrels bring a new set of gifts to propitiate Old Brown – a fat dead mole, minnows, beetles wrapped in dock leaves, honey, and finally, an egg. Notably, all the presents are either dead smaller animals, or items stolen from other creatures. And each day, Nutkin’s behaviour becomes more provocative and defiant. 

On day two, he tickles Old Brown with a nettle:

“Old Mr B!, Riddle-me-ree!
Hitty Pitty within the wall,
Hitty Pitty without the wall;
If you touch Hitty Pitty,
Hitty Pitty will bite you!”

(‘Hitty Pitty’ is the nettle itself)

Provocation: Beatrix Potter's Old Brown is a remarkably accurate portrait of a tawny owl

Now Old Brown wakes up and fixes Nutkin with the expression of a cat wondering whether it is worth the effort to pounce on an insect. The owl’s ominous silence throughout the story adds to the sense of imminent danger. 

The denouement comes on day six. Nutkin chants another riddle, dancing up and down “like a sunbeam”. But it’s the picture that tells the real story here: Old Brown’s huge owl-face bursts out of the tree, inches from the reckless dancing figure of Nutkin. The sense of sudden movement in this illustration is extraordinary, and, for a small child, as shocking as those moments in horror films when a face thrusts up out of nowhere, pushing right into the viewer’s own face. 

Dancing in the face of danger: one of the most frightening - and inspiring - pictures in children's literature

A couple of pages later, Old Brown’s patience runs out, and he catches Nutkin: “There was Old Brown, sitting on his doorstep, quite still, with his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened. But Nutkin was in his waistcoat pocket!”

As Potter writes, this should be the end of the story, but Nutkin is not so easily extinguished. He escapes, but loses his tail to the owl’s claws and beak. 

This ending is quite abrupt and is left open to interpretation. Many children will listen to the story being read aloud by a parent, rather than reading it for themselves, so they will be at the mercy of any spin the adult chooses to impose on the conclusion. This might involve the implication that the loss of his tail serves Nutkin right for defying authority, with the adult framing the story for the child as a lesson on the consequences of wilful nonconformity. 

This is certainly the majority interpretation given by the reviewers (all adults) on the Goodreads website.  Almost all of them, depressingly, call the book “a morality tale” in which “impudent” Nutkin “got what was coming to him”, or “a cautionary tale about how manners do not cost a thing and you should respect people.” Most of them express admiration for the saintly patience of Old Brown, and “no sympathy” for Nutkin.

So the superficially conventional ending allows the book’s more anarchic subtext to slip neatly under adult radar, like Peter Rabbit squeezing under the fence. 

 
For children lucky enough to have parents who resist the temptation to moralise (I was one of these), or those with the precocious strength of mind to reject such interpretations, the ‘message’ is less trite and more fertile. Nutkin loses most of his tail, but he’s still alive, and it is his name, not Old Brown’s, on the cover of the book. His loss of speech and poetry is a little more concerning, although this return to zoological reality also occurs at the end of Mrs Tiggywinkle, when she loses her clothes and her true hedgehog nature is restored. 

Potter’s prose tends to be dry and tactfully detached; she never patronises her young readers by telling them what to think, so I doubt whether the ending is intended as a lesson. Also, I’m not sure how much Potter’s original intention, whatever it was, matters, compared with the book’s effect on children. 

This effect, when you are three or four years old, resembles the experience of vicarious pleasure in watching another child defying an adult: Nutkin is the child who goes too far, and who, thrillingly, is not burdened by the natural timidity that keeps others obedient (look at how the other squirrels are all watching intently, from a safe distance).

But there’s more to it than this. Nutkin is the spirit of irreverence. He ignores the concept of ‘respect’ and ridicules the owl’s complacent authority. He suggests that creativity and play are as worthwhile as duty and conformity (he may not work with nuts, but he does invent games). He shows that you can confound and baffle tyrants using words, humour and poetry, and he does it with an inspiring insouciance. I can’t think of many better ‘lessons’ for young children in 2015. If The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is misinterpreted by adults, but continues to fascinate and delight children, then that is a measure of its subversive power. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

Beatrix Potter as a child, photo taken by her father
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

‘Owl Island’ in the book is St Herbert’s Island on Derwentwater, in the Lake District.

The quotation from Graham Greene is from an essay about Beatrix Potter in Graham Greene: Collected Essays, Penguin, 1970.

All illustrations of Squirrel Nutkin in this article are from the Project Gutenberg Ebook of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

(This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net)

The Runaway by Ruth Morris

The Runaway, by 

Ruth Morris

 

(Published in America as ‘Runaway Girl’)

Updated April 30, 2015

*Contains Spoilers*

I plan to talk about children’s literature here occasionally, so I’ll begin with a book that fulfils all my self-imposed criteria for inclusion in this blog: it’s underrated, obscure, and (more or less) forgotten. It is out of print, though you can still find plenty of old copies on Amazon. It is also remarkably difficult to find any information about the author, Ruth Morris, who does not seem to have written any other books. 

 
Until I read The Runaway at the age of 10, Australia was just a big blank island on the map, sitting there at the bottom of the world, home to koalas, kangaroos, and a few dusty facts from geography lessons. It had never really occurred to me that real children might live there, children with the courage to walk off alone into the outback to escape their ghastly relatives.

The ‘outback’ itself was a new word and a new idea, opening up a vision of vast spaces and wild emptiness that was, and still is, fascinating for an English child from an intensively cultivated landscape. Other strange words were used by the characters in the story, none of them explained, so you had to guess from the context: swag, bonzer, beaut, billy, crook, tucker, kelpie, galah. 

From what I have been able to discover, the book was first published in 1961 by Michael Joseph. The American edition was retitled ‘Runaway Girl’ by Random House and came out in 1962. In 1964, it appeared in paperback under Penguin’s Peacock imprint. The U.S. edition was illustrated (by Beth Krush), the British edition wasn’t. 

The Penguin Peacock edition

Reading it again for the first time in decades, I was surprised by how closely it fitted my memory of it, and how well it has weathered the test of time. In fact I can’t see any reason why The Runaway should have disappeared from children’s shelves.

The American edition, retitled and with illustrations by Beth Krush

Joanne Mitchell, the narrator, is a 12-year-old orphan who has been living for some years with her aunt and uncle, wealthy socialites in Melbourne. Aunt Valeria, Joanne tells us, “used to tell her friends I was ‘a civilized child, intelligent about prettying up the house’.” But when Aunt Valeria and Uncle Robert take a cruise to Europe, Joanne is cast out of civilization and packed off to stay indefinitely on a sheep station in remote Queensland, with relatives she has never met. She’s OK with this idea, imagining picnics in the bush and exciting drives to visit other sheep stations. 

Her arrival at the isolated backwater is powerfully described. “Red dust lay thickly over the tired wooden station buildings and stirred little eddies underfoot.” She is met by Uncle Fred, “a bent stick of a man with sparse gray hair and the face of someone who is always stubbing his toe on disappointment.” A bleak lunch follows in the station hotel, heavy with uncomfortable silences over slices of cold boiled mutton. 

“ ‘How’s Aunt Lilian?’ ” Joanne asks, trying to make polite conversation. 

“ ‘Good. She’s good.’ The flies settled back on the tablecloth. And in the sugar bowl too.”

But Aunt Lilian is not good, she’s grim. When Fred and Joanne finally arrive at the sheep station after 30 miles by jeep over rough, empty country, it is clear that Aunt Lilian sees Joanne only as a useful pair of hands. The house is spartan, cheerless, scoured clean, the yard a flowerless desert. For the next two months, Joanne is an unpaid servant, helping the neurotic Lilian scrub every inch of the already spotless house, every day. Aunt Lilian is no Marilla Cuthbert – there is no warmth hiding behind her dour exterior.

Life with Aunt Lilian 

Joanne finally snaps after Aunt Lilian sends her to help out at her (Lilian’s) sister’s farm a few miles away. She travels alone, in a horse-drawn buggy, full of hope that the sister will be different. But she finds another bare yard, chained dogs, dirty scattered bones, and a neat, arid, empty house (Lilian’s sister is out). 

“A solitary petunia raised a defiant but ill-nourished head from the edge of a drain. It must have been a great-great grandchild of the last, long-forgotten cultivated flower that ever bloomed at Four Creeks.”

Turning the reluctant horse, Darkie, around, Joanne heads off into the unknown and the adventure begins. She cuts off her red hair and becomes Joe Casey, judging that a boy will attract less attention than a lone girl wandering and camping in the outback.

The character I remembered most clearly from my childhood reading of this book was the old sheep drover who encounters Joanne (now Joe) on the open road. This memory seemed slightly surprising; gnarled, short-tempered old men have no obvious appeal for 10-year-old female readers. The drover, though, is an original creation, and I was pleased to find him exactly the same, full of laconic anecdotes about the dogs, sheep, bars, and mates of his past, stories that always begin with “Knew a bloke once. . . ”

From a distance, the drover looks like “a mound of rags with a hat on top”. He is unimpressed by his young companion’s clumsiness in harnessing horses and lighting fires, and contemptuous of her ignorance of the subtle distinctions between types of sheepdog. But he saves Joe/Joanne from starvation, and teaches her how to survive in the bush. 

Camping in the outback with the sheep drover

The drover is not a cosy character. Joanne notes his tough treatment of his “dirty, smelly” dogs, and he blithely abandons her alone at a desolate crossroads when it suits him, with a casual “So long”. He’s a man of the road who doesn’t ask too many questions; he accepts you, but admits no responsibility. He does however give Joanne a puppy, which makes the lonely black nights camping rough in the bush a little more bearable.

The trio – Joanne, the horse, the puppy – continue the road trip, staying for a while with the Bryce family, a struggling mother and her brood of boys (the challenge of pretending to be a boy among real boys is something girl readers might empathise with). This brief respite is curtailed when Mrs Bryce’s husband returns and becomes suspicious of the cuckoo in his nest. 

Joanne’s sense of freedom and her discovery of the natural world is set against her acute loneliness and constant hunger. Every random stranger represents a possible threat: the danger of being discovered and sent back to Aunt Lilian. 

Joanne's lonely nights with Darkie the horse and Abby the puppy 

The happy ending, with Joanne finding a new home, is not delivered before a final burst of tension. She runs away one last time in the middle of the night, terrified that her new family will find out that she is not a boy, and reject her (echoes of Anne of Green Gables).

The conclusion gives the book a satisfying symmetry. Joanne’s story begins with a long-distance train journey westbound into the unknown, and ends with another long, despairing train ride to Brisbane, where she descends among strangers onto the platform, before her new father appears and all is well.

Re-reading the book, I was looking for reasons why it should be out of print, and couldn’t really find any. It is set in the 1950s, but there’s nothing that freezes the story in that era; it feels timeless. There is no racism. If you were hypersensitive, you might object to Mr Mitchell’s implication, on discovering Joanne is not a boy, that girls are naturally disposed to enjoy helping around the house. But the broader message is that girls are the equal of boys in terms of courage and survival in the wilderness. Adults might wonder why Joanne’s adoptive family were not contacted by social services, but this is not likely to worry young readers. The descriptions of Joanne’s puppy sometimes border on the over-sweet, but again, this seems unlikely to irritate the literary sensibilities of children. 

As a character, Joanne has an everygirl quality, making her easy to identify with. She has no exceptional talents or quirks, but is simply an affectionate, observant child in need of a home. She doesn’t seek adventure, but is forced to confront it. The story perhaps has more appeal for children outside Australia, because they are most likely to enjoy the exploration of an unknown territory and culture. Joanne is 12, but I would suggest a slightly younger readership (9 to 11), given the greater sophistication of children in 2015.

So who is, or was, Ruth Morris? The only information I could find initially came from the website Jane Badger Books, which says that she was born in 1926 in Queenscliff, Melbourne, Victoria, the daughter of the garrison commander at Port Phillip, Victoria, and was educated at Melbourne University. She taught for a while, then spent two years in England working on farms and for people with disabilities, before returning to Australia. The Runaway was apparently based on a journey she made through Queensland in an old Ford in 1956. 

This biographical information was confirmed by Dr Catriona Mills, senior researcher at AustLit, the Australian literature database. She said that they had no record of any publications other than The Runaway. 

Ruth Morris in 1961, when The Runaway was published. From the Australian Women's Weekly. 

Catriona Mills did however unearth three newspaper articles about the publication of the book. The first, in the Australian Women's Weekly, dated November 8, 1961, says that Ruth’s trip around Queensland lasted six months, was undertaken alone apart from her cattle dog, Cappy. “I never would have done it without him,” she said.

The article says that she married a Geoffrey Webb of Culcairn, New South Wales, after her trip, and, mysteriously, that she had finished another book “about two youngsters’ adventures in the foothills of the Baw Baws.”  But I could find no record of this book. Nor did the the Peacock edition of The Runaway include one of those useful ‘about the author’ sections that all Puffin books used to have.
 
It is surprising if Morris did not publish again, because The Runaway is the work of someone who enjoys writing and does it with conviction.

If anyone reading this knows anything more about Ruth Morris (not to be confused with the Canadian prison reformer of the same name, born in 1933), or would like to share anything else about The Runaway, please feel free to comment below. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

A galah (Eolophus roseicapillus). Joanne talks about seeing flocks of these pink birds against the pale blue skies of Queensland.  Photo: David Cook/Wikimedia Commons

Many thanks to Jane Badger Books, and to Dr Catriona Mills of AustLit, the Australian literature database, for the biographical information and links to newspapers. 

Links to articles from the National Library of Australia's Trove digitisation project: Australian Women's Weekly 1961, 1962; and The Canberra Times, 1962.