There can be a real thrill in testing out an idea you’ve read about. Is it true? Does it hold up to the glaring light of day?
A concept Sheldon Vanauken considers in “A Severe Mercy” is that going to England will be like coming home because of the many English books he and his wife absorbed during childhood. As Sheldon and Davy travel to study at Oxford, they feel as though “coming to England was like coming home, coming to a home half-remembered—but home.”
For Sheldon, his English childhood was briefly realized when his family lived there for a year. He writes of himself in the third person at the beginning of the book, “As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west. Partly, he supposed, it was because of the year in Kensington when he was very small: Kensington and the Round Pond and tea in the nursery and ‘Here comes a chopper to chop your head’. And being taken out to the shires to visit country friends. That year had given England reality–perhaps that was why it lived in the books. And even as a boy he had wanted to go to Oxford. When in the end he had gone up, it had seemed both right and inevitable.”
From “Wind in the Willows” to “Winnie the Pooh,” the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the world of “The Little Grey Men,” there is an array of cozy British stories. While we may never have had a “nurse” and rarely take tea at 4 o’clock, we can feel sure that we know what it is like. While many of us would snub British cookery, the stews and Yorkshire puddings (which, unless you are reading up in Tasha Tudor cookbooks, you’re probably not even too sure what that is) so often mentioned sound warm and nourishing.
Beyond these, there is the canon of mythical worlds: The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. The fantastical places the characters go never infringe on their distinctively British sensibilities.
But is it true that we can feel as though we’ve been to England?
In talking with a “Nana” visiting from “across the pond,” she asked if I had visited England, to which I replied with regret that I have as yet not. Here, I added Vanauken’s sentiment that I felt as though I had, having been so immersed in the world of British storybooks. The Nana at the park did not dismiss my fantasy, and we quickly forged a bond over old British books. They are the best the English language has to offer for the young and young at heart.
We were briefly united. She, who resided in an old farmhouse thought to have been built in part in the 1450s, and I, who lived in a place of very recent construction in an uninhabitably warm place that was until recently a rice paddy (which in part explains the flooding…).
While she didn’t consciously recall “The Little Grey Men,” she thought perhaps it was read to her as a child. We agreed on the merits of Cicely Mary Barker as an illustrator and the charms of Paddington Bear.
The conversation took a comical turn when I mentioned the joys of Milly-Molly-Mandy, to which the Nana replied in shock that she had not heard that name since reading the stories herself as a little girl growing up in Merry Old England.
Whether you’ve been to England or not, there is a world of enjoyment in the realm of British storybooks for Anglophiles everywhere.
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