A little trip across Gloucestershire
From Northleach wool to Slad mills
It was just a coincidence that the two books I picked up to read this week are both set in my home county of Gloucestershire, the heart of the Cotswolds. Obviously I knew that Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s glorious memoir of childhood, was set in the unappetisingly-named village of Slad, but the setting of The Woolpack, by Cynthia Hartnett, a historical novel for children which I first read fifty years ago, was a lovely surprise. The two books are set more than 400 years apart, and at opposite ends of the county. Slad, where Lee grew up, is a small village in one of the five steep valleys that lead down from the Cotswold escarpment into the market town of Stroud, in the south-west. The Woolpack is set much closer to my home, in the sunny uplands towards the Oxfordshire border, among the wooltraders of Northleach and Burford.
I wanted to read the Laurie Lee book because his experience growing up in rural Gloucestershire in the years immediately after World War One would have been very similar to that of Edna Healey, nee Edmunds, who was born in Coleford, just fourteen miles away as the crow flies, on the edge of the Forest of Dean (also in Gloucestershire, of course, but also almost in Wales!). These little villages and small towns are miles off the beaten track, a world away from the glamorous Soho Farmhouse version of the Cotswolds, and I suspect life being lived there a hundred years ago had not changed much for centuries. These are communities where history lingers around every corner. The Forest of Dean is no romantic idyll: as Edna put it ‘it was a workplace where iron, coal and stone were hewn out of the ground.’ And, of course, where sheep, the principal crop of the county, were brought to market.
Similarly, Slad was just one of the villages housing the workforce for busy Stroud. ‘This was the hour when walkers and bicyclists flowed down the long hills to Stroud, when the hooters called through the morning dews and factories puffed their plumes. From each corner of Stroud’s five valleys girls were running to shops and looms, with sleep in their eyes and eggy cheeks.’ The looms, of course, were still spinning and weaving Cotswold wool in the 1920s. At the peak of the Industrial Revolution, some two hundred mills operated in the valleys around Stroud. Nowadays the few remaining mills have either been converted into smart flats or artisan workshops.
If Laurie Lee and Edna Edmunds had ever compared notes, they would have found much in common. They lived in simple, family-crowded houses, where they shared bedrooms with siblings, with water pumped from a well behind the house or carried along the street from a standpipe, with outdoor privies, with Saturday night baths, the water for the tin bath warmed on a small wood-fire. No radio, no television, no fridge or vacuum cleaner. Edna was chapel, Laurie was Church of England, but for both of them Sunday involved smart clothes, Sunday School in the morning, services twice a day. They both attended the little local primary school, Edna happily (she would go on to win a scholarship aged eleven to the grammar school), Laurie less so, having neither the ambition or the inspiration that changed Edna’s life and would carry her all the way to Oxford University. As he wrote:
Our village school was poor and crowded, but in the end I relished it. It had a lively reek of steaming life: boys’ boots, girls’ hair, stoves and sweat, blue ink, white chalk, and shavings. We learned notjing abstract or tenuous here - just simple patterns of facts and letters, portable tricks of calculation, no more than was needed to measure a shed, write out a bill, read a swine-disease warning.
Simpler lives, with occasional joys, all the more precious for being seldom.
At the age of fourteen, Lee left school and got a job as an office boy at a firm of accountants in Stroud. Four years later he famously hoisted his violin and his pack onto his back and set off on his walk to Spain. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t think I had ever read Cider with Rosie before, and I very much enjoyed it. There have been several TV adaptations, the one I remember starred Rosemary Leach, and I have scoured the internet on your behalf but to no avail, no photo of her playing the part of Laurie’s mother seems to exist, so you will have to make do with Samantha Morton, who I am sure was also excellent.
At the other end of the Cotswolds are the fields full of the sheep that grow the wool that fed the mills of Stroud and possibly even made an appearance at the market at Coleford.
The Woolpack was a Carnegie Medal winner in 1951, making it the best children’s book of the year, written by Cynthia Harnett. The author (1893-1981) trained as an artist and illustrated her book herself - there were other historical novels for children that I think I remember reading, Ring Out, Bow Bells, and A Load of Unicorn. All based in medieval England. This one has been sitting on my shelf for many years, along with several other classics of children’s literature, all of which remind me that my passion for historical adventure is not new: So which came first, my love of history, or my love of historical fiction?
I worry terribly today that history is given such a raw deal in the school curriculum. My three children only ever seemed to cover the Romans, Eleanor of Acquitaine and the causes of World War Two. Not even in the right order. When I was a child, we started with the Romans, in fact I think with pre-history and the ancient Egyptians, and kept slogging through in chronological order until serious exams like O’levels led us down cul-de-sacs or made us do huge leaps: to this day I am extremely hazy about anything between 1660 and 1837…but this does mean that I can place the post-1066 Kings and Queens of England in the right order, I know dates like 1215 and 1588 and 1649 and can tell you why they are important. Reading good historical fiction brings history alive for children who do not have the privilege of inspirational teachers, and fills in gaps in syllabuses. So if you are worrying that your children or grandchildren don’t know much about Mary Queen of Scots, can I recommend Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time? If they seem to have missed the entire English Civil War, try Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Rider of the White Horse.
Which brings me back to Cynthia Harnett, which I re-read quickly on two train journeys this week with great pleasure. It is set in 1493, and in the wool towns of Northleach and Burford, just a few miles from where I live.
The plot is simple: who is stealing wool from Nicholas Fetterlock’s father, and smuggling it to France. Nicholas is just twelve and he is reeling from the shock of being betrothed to eleven year old Cecily, whom he has never met. But she will turn out to be quite the tomboy, and as resourceful when it comes to solving riddles as he could wish for. The two things that most impressed me were the depth of Harnett’s research, and her determination not to dumb down her story for the children who will read it: by the end of the book you will know more than you did before about the Lombards and the Medici bankers, about the power of the Merchants of the Wool Staple to control trade, about the mechanics of carding, spinning and weaving, dyeing and fulling. And you will understand a little more about the wealth of the Cotswold sheep farmers and how that has translated into the beautiful houses, churches and villages that we associate with the Cotswolds today.
Harnett’s books are out of print, which seems a shame, but I was pleased to discover that The Wool Pack is featured on the website of Oxford’s Story Museum, partly because of its local connections - Burford is a stop on the main road between Oxford and Northleach, as is Witney of blanket-making fame. So, not forgotten…And, of course, there are many wonderful writers for children today who can open the doors of history for young eyes and ears: Michael Morpurgo and Berlie Doherty were two that my children loved, and now that I have grandchildren I would be delighted to hear any other recommendations.
A passion for history has to start with a passion for stories. Who are the best story-tellers today?
I know it's a million years old but when I was a kid I loved Cpt Marryat's Children of the New Forest. It introduced me to the English Civil War and it has fascinated me ever since.
As someone who grew up in Longlevens and spent many happy times strolling around Painswick and Slad, I love this. I want to share with you what I have written about Ivor Gurney.