Lucy M. Boston (1892 – 1990) was an English children's writer. She is best known for the six books in the Green Knowe series (1954-1976).
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Boston was born in Southport in Lancashire in 1892 and died in 1990. During her long life-time, she distinguished herself as a writer, mainly of children’s books and as the creator of a magical garden; she was also an accomplished artist, who had studied drawing and painting in Vienna and it is surely this artistic gift which, added to her ability as an accomplished needlewoman, enabled her to a make a series of outstandingly beautiful and artistic patchworks.As an author, she was a late starter as her first book didn't appear until she was over sixty.
Lucy was the fifth of six children. She had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, dealing with her early life and family, she describes life in a typically solid and affluent middle class Victorian family. The family were committed Wesleyans. Her father, James Wood, was an engineer and businessman who for some years was Mayor of Southport. Lucy describes her father as ‘an eccentric with big ideas, a small, good-humoured, dynamic man’,(1) to whom it was said that Lucy bore a striking resemblance. She was also said by the family to be his favourite and she clearly loved and admired him very much.
Lucy’s father was already forty when he married her mother, who was half his age, the daughter of a Wesleyan minister. A photograph of the parents, probably taken at the time of their marriage, shows Mary standing dutifully beside her husband looking, perhaps, a little doubtful, even resigned; James, seated, is holding a prayer book and looking more confidently, if slightly quizzically, towards the camera. It was not, Lucy tells us, a love-match but one made under pressure from her mother’s family since they had seven daughters. Her mother is described as ‘delicate, intensely sensitive, and without a trace of sensuous feeling.’ She goes on to say: ‘She bore, as Victorian wives had to, a child every year, but had little maternal feeling.’ Lucy adds: ‘She should have been a nun. She was very gentle.’ Her mother’s religious beliefs were rigid and she held that every word of scripture was literally true.
Although it must have gone against the grain of her rather retiring character, her mother had to perform duties as Mayoress for many years, at which Lucy says she must have been very bad. In particular, entertaining must have been a strain for her as ‘her idea of food was that it was a sad necessity. [After her husband’s death] she even began to think it was not even necessary and the boys raged with hunger.’
As evidence of her father’s eccentricity – and religious fervour – Lucy describes the interior of the house he bought and had decorated in preparation for his marriage and the family he intended to raise there. In every room, painted friezes carried religious mottos, such as ‘He that giveth to the poor shall not lack’, ‘Honour they father and thy mother’ and ‘The soul is not where it lives but where it loves. (2)
But what she describes as ‘the triumph of eccentricity’ was the drawing room. Her father had recently visited the Holy Land and had brought back many things with the idea of creating what she describes as ‘a holy and uplifting room’. There was a continuous frieze of a painted landscape representing the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho, while from the ceiling hung antique brass lamp-holders such as might have hung in Solomon’s Temple. Recesses in the walls were divided by wooden arcades of the Moorish onion shape and there were many beautiful objects made of brass, as well as other rarities displayed in a glass-fronted cupboard. Lucy says: ‘This unexpected room did not look at all like a Kardomah Café as you might think. It looked like a gentleman’s enthusiastic and satisfied near-lunacy.’
Her father was clearly a passionate man with an appreciation of the aesthetic side of life, albeit channelled largely through his religious convictions, whereas her mother was devout, and abstemious. The passionate side of her father’s nature seems to be echoed in Lucy’s own passion for music, art and nature, while much of her development as a teenager and young woman seems to have been partly driven by a need to cast off her mother’s repressive influence.
Lucy’s father died when she was six. This marked a huge change in the family fortunes. For one thing, as was the custom, her mother had been left only enough money to keep the house together, while each child was left a small fortune to be spent on their education. (One surmises that it was these ‘private means’ which later enabled Lucy to break free from family ties and to live independently.) Her mother, now in reduced circumstances and with no experience of handling finances, was saved, Lucy says, ‘by having no interest in anything money could buy, a natural and extreme frugality and austerity.’ She adds that, as positive attributes, her mother also had ‘no vulgarity, no inquisitiveness and no possessiveness.’ Despite the ‘reduced circumstances’ her mother always gave ten percent of her income to charity.
A major change in the circumstance of the Wood children was that now they all went to school. One important factors which comes into the picture around this time and may also provide some clues to Lucy’s later development, was a move to Westmorland where they spent a year near to her mother’s family home at Arnside. This was said to be for the benefit of her mother’s health. Whatever the reason, this move to glorious countryside, then unspoilt by tourism or any hint of modernisation, gave all the children a much more free and easy life-style than had been possible in Southport. Lucy describes ecstatically the ‘wide and inexhaustible joys of Arnside’, which is on an estuary of the river Kent. The children were free to wander woods and fields, explore the cliffs and coves of the river. In Lucy’s case, the return of Spring, with primroses and fields of wild daffodils, was especially thrilling since in Southport the only signs of Spring were the red and white hawthorns along the streets and her mother never had a single flower in the house. Lucy clearly developed an awareness of plants and gardens at an early age and mentions several times how dull and barren she found the gardens of her childhood. This is significant in the context of her later development as a gardener and the outstanding garden which she created at The Manor.
The return to Southport, after the idyllic year in Westmorland, was hard for Lucy. Every night she wept bitter tears and grieved for all she was now parted from: worn rocks and turf under her feet instead of pavements, ‘the night sounds of the river birds, flocks of sandpipers in flight, curlews and solitary gulls.’ (3)
When she left school Lucy went to a finishing school in Paris and perhaps the most important event in this ‘gap’ year was that the time came for her to be formally received into the Wesleyan community. To her mother’s horror, she refused. Her mother wept and implored, told her she was ‘lost’, but Lucy remained adamant. ‘Yet as I stepped out of the fold into the unknown I repeated privately to myself, ‘He shall keep my soul until that day’. I knew I was in search, not in denial. The abandonment of one’s father’s faith is a deep fear and sorrow and I felt an outsider.’ She went up to Somerville College, Oxford, to read English in Autumn 1914, in the first months of the First World War. During her second term she grew increasingly restless – she wanted to be sharing the experience of her generation. She decided to leave college and go to war as a volunteer nurse. Her ambition was to get to France, where, as she put it, ‘it was all going on.’ In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, she gives a full count of her war-time experiences in which she showed all the irreverence for red tape and conventional attitudes which were to become characteristic of her entire life. She was posted to a casualty clearing station in France where she befriended wounded soldiers and tried to humanise the stark hospital experience by, for example, playing draughts with them. This activity nearly got her dismissed by the starchy American nurse in charge of the ward, who was outraged to see Lucy sitting on a bed! ‘Nurse, get off that bed at once! Don’t you know it’s unprofessional to sit on a patient’s bed?’
During this time, Lucy’s relationship with her brothers and with her mother’s cousin Harold Boston was close. They, of course, were all serving in the armed forces but any leaves or spare time they had were spent together. Philip, her youngest brother, was reported missing in 1917 when his plane was shot down. Later that same year, Lucy and Harold were married, but following the failure of the marriage in 1935 she wandered in France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, visiting the musical capitals of Europe. She also studied painting in Vienna and immersed herself in this for the next three or four years. (4)
Lucy’s memoir of her childhood and youth, Perverse and Foolish, published in 1979, ends with her return to England in 1937, when she took rooms in Cambridge where her son, Peter Boston, born in 1918 and now aged nineteen, was an undergraduate at the University. One day, hearing that a house was for sale in the near-by village of Hemingford Grey, Lucy remembered that years before, in 1915, she had glimpsed from the river a seemingly derelict farmhouse. She jumped to the conclusion that this must be the house for sale, drove out to Hemingford Grey in a taxi, knocked at the door and announced the astonished owners that she would be interested in buying it. It turned out that they had only that morning decided to sell it and that the house advertised for sale was a completely different one. She never did find out which house she should have gone to see.
Another autobiographical memoir, entitled Memory in a House, describes her life thereafter, including the renovation and restoration of The Manor. The whole of that book, actually published before Perverse and Foolish and written when Lucy was eighty-one, can truly be described as an extended love letter to the house. In 1992 the two memoirs were published in chronological order in a single volume, entitled Memories.
The ancient Norman Manor house, built in about 1130, is reputed to be one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in the British Isles. It became the focus and inspiration for her creativity for the rest of her life. Although work on the garden began as soon as necessary work on the house was finished, in respect of her writing Lucy was a late starter. Her first book, Yew Hall, a novel for adults, was published in 1954 when she was over sixty and she describes it as ‘a poem to celebrate my love of the house.’ There followed a series of children’s books, all set in The Manor, in which she brings to life the people who she imagines might have lived there.
Lucy Boston lived at The Manor for almost fifty years in which time she created the romantic garden which she felt was an appropriate setting for the ancient house, wrote all her children’s books and created over twenty patchwork masterpieces. Surprisingly, and rather frustratingly to anyone interested in the provenance and creation of the patchworks, the only mention of patchwork in Memory in a House comes when she describes repairing an old patchwork hanging in the dining-room, in which every piece of material was pre-1830. As a result, the patchworks were scarcely known about until, in 1976, when the celebrated conductor and keyboard player, Christopher Hogwood, who was a close friend, arranged an exhibition of them at the King’s Lynn Festival. Fortunately for us, her daughter-in law, Diana Boston, has been able to tell the story of the patchworks, using a collection of letters which Lucy wrote to her niece, Caroline Hemming, another patchwork enthusiast, as well as catalogues and patchwork paraphernalia amongst her possessions.(5) This painstaking and beautifully presented labour of love was published as The Patchworks of Lucy Boston in 1995. A new edition is now available.
The Green Knowe series:
The Green Knowe series was published by Faber and Faber and also in Puffin Books
Other fictional works:
Lucy M. Boston also wrote a short story called "Curfew" which appeared in the anthology The House of the Nightmare: and other Eerie Tales, published in 1967.
In 2011, Boston's supernatural tales were collected in the volume Curfew & Other Eerie Tales (Dublin: Swan River Press). This volume includes unpublished tales as well as a reprint of the two act play The Horned Man.
Perverse and Foolish and Memory in a House were published together in 1992 under the title Memories, with an Introduction by Jill Paton Walsh and linking passage and postscript by Peter Boston. Publisher: Colt Books Ltd. Cambridge.
A 2009 film, From Time To Time, was written and directed by Julian Fellowes, who also wrote Gosford Park (2001). It is based on the second of the books in the Greene Knowe series.
1.BOSTON Lucy M. Perverse and Foolish The Bodley Head 1979
2.Ibid
3.Ibid
4.See Peter Boston’s ‘linking’ text in Memories Colt Books Ltd. Cambridge 1992
5. BOSTON Diana The Patchworks of Lucy Boston Colt Books Ltd. Cambridge 1995. New edition published by Oldknow Books 2009
6. BOSTON Lucy M Memory in a House The Bodley Head 1973
There is an article about Lucy Boston with illustrations of some of the patchworks on the Website, QuiltStory, at this link: http://www.quilt.co.uk/?p=76
In Lucy Boston A Bodley Head Monograph published in 1965, Jasper Rose discusses and anayses Lucy Boston as a children's writer.
A gallery of the real Green Knowe,The Manor at Hemingford Grey
A paper by David Lenander examining the themes in the book The River At Green Knowe, "Crosscurrents in The River at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston" Synopses, cover art, and reviews at FantasyLiterature.net
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