It is fascinating to watch Streatfeild casually and intuitively anticipate many of the findings of developmental psychology over the past 50 years. Saplings starts with an apparently idyllic beach scene, where the youngest child, Tuesday, is filling her bucket as she
hummed, a contented tuneless sound . . . Tuesday did not know that for a fortnight she had felt insecure because she was in one place and her father and mother in another . . . Because she was only four and people underrated her intelligence and spoke in front of her, she was the one of the children who was aware that Nan and Miss Glover [the attractive and perceptive Ruth, the governess, and Streatfeild’s alter ego] and the servants at home were afraid of something. Because they were afraid Tuesday was afraid. She wanted everybody where she could see them.
Here we feel the faint whisperings of war, a tiny dark cloud in an otherwise blue sky, picked up by a sensitive child who is experiencing separation anxiety, and who feels that her secure base is under threat. Only once a safe haven is in place – her mother and father together – can she play and explore contentedly.
Lena, the Wiltshire children’s mother, is perhaps the pivotal character of the book. We see her painful decline from charming but wayward mother at the start, through her terror at the possibility of separation from her husband Alex during the blitz and inability to provide the necessary psychological security for the children, to her alcoholic, sex-obsessed and suicidal premature widowhood. The trauma of war, the death of Alex, and its diminishing and distorting impact on the lives of the children would all have been mitigated had Lena been different, more maternal and more psychologically robust. Psychological pain arises out of the combination of the personal and the political – external threat, and the internal responses it evokes.
The seeds of Lena’s own insecure attachment, and thus her inability to provide real security in the face of threat for the children are clearly described:
Her mother [the children’s grandmother] had always been her ideal of all that was feminine and delicious. It had not hurt her as a child to be petted and exhibited one moment and to be shut away in her schoolroom or nursery the next... She had not got one unlovely memory of her parents when she had been a child... Mummie and Daddy were all charm, fun and happiness.
The idealisation, denial and inconsistency typical of insecure attachment are beautifully evoked here. Seen through the eyes of Ruth, Lena’s narcissism and inability to take the child’s point of view is highlighted:
Was Lena a good mother? There was no doubt that children were lucky who had parents, particularly a mother, whom they could show off . . . [But] on other counts Lena was not so good. She never even pretended the children came first . . . [that had to be Alex]. Was that not out-balanced by the perfect love always before the children’s eyes? [But] was it perfect love the children saw? Certainly Lena loved Alex, but perfect love in her philosophy was an ill-balanced affair, almost all body, the merest whiff of soul.
And again she describes Lena’s casual narcissistic approach to her care-giving relationships: ‘She threw the group round the fire off as if they were a frock she had worn in the morning and changed out of for the afternoon.’
Perhaps Streatfeild is moralising a little here, albeit through the mind of Ruth. She herself was probably more than a little frightened of her own sexuality, having fallen passionately in love with the flamboyant socialite Daphne Ionides, at a time when sapphism would have been anathema to a well-brought-up bishop’s daughter. Saplings is dedicated to Streatfeild’s mother, Janet, whose late baby, born when Streatfeild was fifteen, had provoked this passage in the second volume of her autobiography, Away from the Vicarage:
Back in 1915 the girls’ mother had given her two elder daughters a shock. She had told them she was having a baby. The girls had been horribly embarrassed by the news and had never discussed it. They knew – but how dimly – how babies were conceived and, of course, they must have been conceived themselves. But that was long ago and your father and mother didn’t go on doing it – not when the rest of the family were nearly grown up.
Streatfeild’s break from her sheltered vicarage upbringing had come, as it had for so many other girls, during the Great War when she had worked in a munitions factory in the East End of London. Here, and later though her ‘Care Committee’ social work she had encountered working class families. Albert and Ernie are the two East End little boys who accompany the Wiltshires on their evacuation to Yorkshire. Their mother, Mrs. Parker, is reluctant to let them go: ‘She had heard of a child who had been taken to hospital to have its tonsils out, and, because it was separated from its mother, had died there of a broken heart.’
Here Streatfeild in 1945 is anticipating the revolution in parental hospital visiting patterns that Bowlby was to initiate ten years later. Ironically it is Mrs. Parker’s insistence that the children return home that leads to their death from a direct hit on the family house. Mrs. Parker is as overprotective as Lena is neglectful; Lena is too dependent on her husband, while Mrs. Parker should not have been so easily able to overrule hers. The difference between them is that Mrs. Parker can imaginatively identify with her children and so see them as separate beings, whereas for Lena they are objects to be dealt with at her own convenience. Streatfeild’s treatment of this theme points to the strain which such awareness creates for parents. Lena thoughtlessly packs her children off to their grandparents while Mrs. Parker succumbs to her knowledge of her children’s distress, and thus indirectly causes their death. To insist on separation, while remaining aware of the pain it produces, requires a maturity of which neither woman was capable.
A key feature of secure attachment is the capacity of parents to be attuned and responsive to their children when distressed or threatened. The Wiltshire children are secure because despite their mother’s narcissism, their father has the capacity to think about their needs and feelings. Boarding school is portrayed as an environment that amplifies the misattunement and unresponsiveness of insecure-making parents. That is why Tony’s Hardyesque missing letter and Alex’s consequent failure to respond to his distress-signal is so poignant, and the subsequent relief when all is explained so uplifting: ‘It was to Tony as if he had been walking in a fog and it was lifting . . . Love poured through him.’
This episode prefigures the book’s central tragedy: Alex’s death in a bombing raid, Tony’s conviction that his father is buried alive, that he has heard him tapping for help beneath the rubble, that he failed to rescue him, his inability to talk to anyone about this, and his subsequent descent into depression.
Once more Streatfeild’s intuititons are uncannily accurate. Without the support of an attachment figure, Tony loses his capacity for reality-testing, and is tormented by his assumptions and fantasies about what happened. He blames himself for his father’s death; at an unconscious level perhaps he may have wished that harm might befall him, partly because he is still angry about the letter incident, partly because, if unheard and untempered by a secure base adult, separation protest can turn into a perversity of rage and destructiveness. (In a separate incident we see the evacuees destroying the summer house, ending with a symbolic act of defiant urination – an orgy of destruction that is a metaphor for war and its attraction for the dispossessed and insecure.)
It is only when Tony’s uncle finally tells him what really happened – that Alex died in the ambulance before reaching hospital and that the tapping, whatever it was, could not have been his father – that Tony is released from his nightmare:
The mist [in Tony’s mind] was rising. The nightmare was evaporating...Tony ran up the ride. With every step happiness welled up in him. The sky was more blue. The pine and bracken smelt better. The ground had more spring. As he neared the garden gate he began to jump as well as run.
Here Streatfeild, with a faint echo perhaps of Sassoon’s ‘everyone suddenly burst out singing . . .’, beautifully captures an universal end-of-war feeling of release from depression and guilt through the mind of
this adolescent boy.
The fate of Tony’s elder sister Laurel forms the theme of the last part of the book. Laurel appears to be the antithesis of a Ballet Shoes girl. Generations of girl readers of Ballet Shoes were inspired by its implicit proto-feminist message that, as a woman, you are not condemned to a life of housework and subjugation to men and procreation, but that you can do and be whatever you want (even if it does mean taking the bohemian route via the performing arts, rather than becoming lawyers or doctors). Laurel is different from Pauline, Posy and Petrova because she feels she is not good at anything – and for Streatfeild it is important for children to shine – after all it was her talents as an actress and writer that helped her escape from the dreary constrictions of vicarage life once the Great War was over. We see Streatfeild struggle with this – she likes Laurel and wants her to be happy, but how can she find herself? Then Laurel discovers that she is good at understanding and helping younger children, we see how her honesty and capacity to talk about difficulties will stand her in good stead – but it is through her sexuality that she begins to find herself.
Indeed sex is a rather surprising central theme in the book as a whole, especially as Streatfeild is exploring the curiously neglected theme of married sex, and the pull between a couple’s desire for each other, and the need not to threaten the Secure Base for the children. Lena is portrayed as driven by her sexual needs, while, in a reversal of the usual stereotype, Alex, and after his death Walter, have to restrain her voraciousness. Here are Lena and Alex on the beach at the start of the book:
He would have gone into the tent to put on his things. When they were first married, or even a few years ago, she would have gone with him. She would not have missed those seconds in the hot tent, the flash of passion that would have come from the closeness of his cool, naked body. But he had got so self-conscious, always worrying about what the children were thinking ...
It is the men who are sensitive to the children’s oedipal feelings, and see how important it is not to brandish adult sexuality under their noses.
With her father dead, and her mother embroiled with her new lover, Laurel gravitates to her aunt and uncle’s unhappy marriage. After Alex’s death, she forms a good relationship with her mother’s American lover, Walter, but even more so with her uncle John:
John was what Laurel craved. He needed love, he needed looking after. What they gave each other was as delicate as a wood anenome. It was bruisable, intensely fragile. Laurel, at one laugh, or even a wrong inflection, would have sunk back into the self-conscious, angular, bristly girl who came to the house. John had always wanted children, he had dreamt sometimes of how they would be. Laurel told her troubles, and even as she told them, because he did not find her plain or dull, the troubles began to evaporate.
John and Laurel are not lovers, but the unconsummated sexuality of her relationship with a man old enough to be her father helps Laurel to begin to find her self as a woman, symbolised by the string of pearls which he gives her and which she wears close to her bosom at school. She pretends they are from her American boyfriend, so raising her status with her peers – at last she has found something she is good at: boyfriends and sex. Of course it all goes wrong, she is threatened with expulsion, runs away, and is eventually saved by her kindly grandfather.
By today’s neo-puritan standards Laurel and John’s relationship might be considered ‘abusive’, but for Streatfeild John gives Laurel just the special feeling she needs to bring forth her burgeoning sexuality – just as a good father will make his daughters feel they are the most beautiful creatures in the world, within a context of absolute sexual security. With a dead father and a neglectful mother, Laurel would have been vulnerable to sexual abuse, but John’s love is protective and encouraging.
There is a curious echo in Saplings of the extraordinary family constellation Streatfeild creates in Ballet Shoes. There it is almost as if the three girls are brought into the world by their father – three Athenes emerging fully-formed from their Zeus’s brow. Their mothers, like Lena, are absent or neglectful, and the Professor collects them from different places around the globe and deposits them in the Gloucester Road – and then disappears himself. Without the constraints of a mother in whose footsteps they would dutifully follow, or a father to insist that they do so, they are able to discover themselves and their talents with the encouragement of various servants and tutors. Streatfeild had a difficult relationship with her own mother: as a child she felt misunderstood and undervalued, as an adolescent repelled by her sexuality, and in later life felt burdened by the responsibility of looking after her in her widowhood. In child fiction she can rewrite her own history as she chooses.
Lena, representing perhaps one aspect of Streatfeild’s feelings about her mother, matures with suffering. As a widow she remains unpredictable, but she is more loving and focused on the children and:
She had come off the pedestal on which she had lived while Alex was alive. She was anything but guarded and treasured. She was the provider, the planner . . . None of the children would have thought the holidays had started properly if she was not at the station to welcome them . . . She was Mum, rather unpredictable but as much part of home as the garden path and the front door.
The impact on Lena of the two aspects of war which run throughout the book are finely balanced. Streatfeild, for all her sensitivity to loss and separation in childhood, also sees the liberating aspect of conflict. If the Great War had not happened she herself might have remained for ever confined in her country parsonage. Without the pain of losing Alex, Lena would always have been a distant and idealised figure to her children. At least in her unhappiness they can begin to see her as she is, even when she descends into drunkenness and suicidality – here Streatfeild cleverly understands how destructiveness can so easily get out of hand and become addictive. Even the tapping and feeling of suffocation which Tony imagines comes from his trapped father can be seen, when the truth about Alex’s death is finally revealed, as symbols of the social constrictions which war sweeps aside. Sexuality is liberated, social class barriers broken down (Albert and Ernie evacuated to the Wiltshire grandparents’ middle class home), people are free to express feelings and are less bound by convention. There are winners and losers: Alex and the Parkers are dead, Lena only just survives, Tony and Laurel recover only after a huge amount of help from their grandfather, Tuesday becomes ‘aloof ’, ‘a bundle of nerves’; but the gifted and resilient Kim thrives, and Ruth gains in confidence and escapes from her subservient role as governess.
For all its contemporary relevance, when compared with her children’s books Saplings is perhaps not quite a novel of the first rank. Its psychological insights are too fleeting, its exploration of adult character often superficial. It is almost as though Streatfeild lacks the courage to pursue the full implications of the scenario she has created: the contrast between Lena and Ruth’s sexuality, the long-term implications of the trauma which the children have gone through. In 1945 it would have taken extraordinary powers of imagination to do so.
By the end of the book misery is forgotten, and we are reassured that the middle class values embodied in the Wiltshires will survive. Saplings has neither the full range of fantasy and make-believe which gives her children’s books such an endearing quality, nor has it the psychological maturity and accurate reflection of reality which we expect in writing of the highest order. This criticism reflects perhaps Streatfeild’s own dilemmas as a person. By nature rebellious, she became a pillar of the literary establishment, and in her life never really gave full reign to her waywardness or sexuality. The very success of her children’s writing depends on her ability to keep these two aspects of her psyche separate. She could re-order the world at will and have an outlet for her fantasies, while remaining within the safety of a story with a happy ending, shielding its readers from the full impact of reality. For her adult writing to have achieved the same stature would have demanded a maturity and integration that she lacked.
Saplings is perhaps the nearest she gets to bringing together her child-like and adult self. Ironically, had she fully succeeded in doing so her children’s writing might well have suffered. We should be grateful; without Ballet Shoes – and it is surely Streatfeild’s enduring qualities as a children’s writer that draws us to Saplings – the world would be the poorer.
Dr Jeremy Holmes
Barnstaple, 2000
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Noel Streatfeild, Saplings
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