I’ve been meaning to post this all week, but in the mad rush up to Christmas I kept running out of time. So finally today, on Christmas Day, I am taking a few moments to write about one of my most favorite books, The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston.

I re-read this book at least once a year, but Christmas is really the best time for it. It’s the story of a boy, Toseland (“Tolly”), who comes to stay with his Great-grandmother Oldknow in the ancient manor house Green Knowe. His grandmother tells him stories of three other children who lived in the house in the 17th century: Toby, Alexander and Linnet. The stories mix past and present, and Tolly soon learns that Toby, Alexander and Linnet are still there at Green Knowe…in the walls, in the candlelit rooms, around dark corners and roaming the landscaped grounds.

The story takes place at Christmastime. The other-worldliness of Green Knowe starts off immediately: when Tolly arrives, the meadows around Green Knowe are flooded from winter rains. The house sits on a high point on the bank of a river, and rises out of the water “like an ark” (causing Tolly to think of Green Knowe as Green Noah). A taxi driver drives Tolly from the train station over flooded roads. When the water grows too deep and they can go no further, the groundskeeper from Green Knowe, Boggis, meets Tolly in a rowboat and takes him the rest of the way to the house. I’ll quote heavily from the book, because nothing but Lucy Boston’s beautiful words can really do the book justice:

Mr. Boggis handed him the lantern and told him to kneel up in the bows with it and shout if they were likely to bump into anything. They rowed round two corners in the road and then in at a big white gate. Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by quite a strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in elastic jigsaw shapes and made gold rings round the tree trunks. At last they came to a still pool reaching to the steps of the house, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel. The windows were all lit up, but it was too dark to see what kind of a house it was, only that it was high and narrow like a tower.

Boggis takes Tolly inside the mysterious old house, and he meets his Great-grandmother for the first time in a room “much like the ruined castles that he had explored on school picnics, only this was not a ruin.”

His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line  put in had made the face more like her. She was wearing a soft dress of folded velvet that was as black as a hole in darkness. The room was full of candles in glass candlesticks, and there was candlelight in her ring when she held out her hand to him.

“So you’ve come back!” she said, smiling, as he came forward, and he found himself leaning against her shoulder as if he knew her quite well.

“Why do you say ‘come back’?” he asked, not at all shy.

“I wondered whose face it would be of all the faces I knew,” she said. “They always come back. You are like another Toseland, your grandfather. What a good thing you have the right name, because I should always be calling you Tolly anyway…”

Several days later (after the flood waters have receded), the ghostly, Christmassy setting is captured this description of the first snow:

Outside, the world was most magical. It had stopped snowing. The garden looked like the back of a giant swan curled up to sleep. There was nothing but white slopes, white curves, white rounded softnesses with bright blue shadows. Nothing had been scraped aside or trodden on. The only footmarks were the birds’ round the door. The yew trees had disappeared. In their place were white hills with folds and creases in their sides. Tolly picked up a handful of snow and found it was made up of tiny violet stars. He could hardly eat his breakfast for excitement.

My favorite scene comes from the story Great-grandmother Oldknow tells Tolly about Linnet. It happens on Christmas Eve. The family has gone on foot to the little church in the village because the icy road is too slippery for horses and the ruts too hard for the carriage wheels. Linnet has to stay behind because she is too small to walk all that way. She curls up in her bed in her attic room with her little dog Orlando, and listens to “the wind singing through the icicles outside…an eerie sound that made her think of the enormous silence of the country across which it blew…” She hears more sounds, then finally gets up and opens the windows and peers outside and witnesses the miracle of the great stone statue of St. Christopher that sits in their garden come to life:

Out into the moonlight came St. Christopher himself, huge and gentle with his head among the stars, taking the stone Child on his shoulder to Midnight Mass. As they went past, Orlando lifted his chin and gave a little cry, and from the stables came a quiet whinny. All the birds in the spruce tree woke up and flew out of the window, circling round St. Christopher with excited calls. The stone giant strode across the lawns with his bare feet and soon came to the river. At the edge there was thin, loose ice that shivered like a windowpane as he stepped in. The water rushed round his legs and the reflection of the moon was torn to wet ribbons. The stream crept up to his waist and, as he still went on, to his armpits. When it looked as if he could go no farther Linnet heard a child’s voice singing gaily. The sound was torn and scattered by the wind as the moon’s reflection had been by the water, but she recognized the song as it came in snatches.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play
To call my true love to the dance,
Sing O my love, O my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

The Children of Green Knowe was written by Lucy M. Boston in 1954. Her son, Peter Boston, did the illustrations. It is the first of six books she wrote about Green Knowe, which she based on her real-life home of The Manor Hemingford Grey. The Manor, built in 1130, has the distinction of being one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in Great Britain. The house is open to the public now (Lucy Boston died in 1990, and her daughter-in-law now lives in the home and often gives the tours herself). I’ve never visited the house, but would love to one day.

A BBC miniseries was made of The Children of Green Knowe in the 1980s, the episodes are available for viewing on YouTube. I’ve watched several of the episodes and although the special effects are very dated, it seems to be a very faithful adaptation.

In 2009, Julian Fellowes (writer of 2001′s Gosford Park, for which he won an Oscar, and currently Downton Abbey) wrote the screenplay and directed a movie version of the second Green Knowe book, called The Chimneys of Green Knowe in the UK and The Treasure of Green Knowe in the US. The movie (to make things more confusing) was called neither—it was called From Time to Time.

I anxiously waited for From Time to Time to be released in the US, but unfortunately it never was. Likewise, Region 1 DVDs of the movie (i.e., US-formatted) do not seem to be available.

However, just yesterday I noticed that some industrious person has broken the movie into 10 pieces and uploaded it to YouTube. What a Happy Christmas present for me! I was finally able to see it, and although the story has been changed in some ways, I enjoyed it very much. How can one go wrong with Maggie Smith and Timothy Spall?

Well, family and friends are calling (not to mention the dogs). I’ve hidden in my home office writing this post long enough. I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas. I plan on curling up tonight with my copy of The Children of Green Knowe, because, as Great-grandmother Oldknow says to Tolly…I always come back.