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Novels and Novelists

Mr. Walpole in the Nursery

Mr. Walpole in the Nursery

Jeremy — By Hugh Walpole

‘I am determined,’ says the author, ‘to give the truth and nothing but the truth about the years of Jeremy's life that I am describing.’

Jeremy Cole is a normal little English boy of eight.

…‘Sausages!’ He was across the floor in a moment, had thrown off his nightshirt, and was in his bath. Sausages! He was translated into a world of excitement and splendour. They had sausages so seldom, not always even on birthdays, and to-day, on a cold morning, with a crackling fire and marmalade…. Oh, he was happy.

Later that same day he is told that next year he is to go to school.

… ‘School!’ he turned upon her, his eyes wide and staring. ‘School!’ he turned on them all.

The word tumbled from him. In his soul was a confusion of triumph and dismay, of excitement and loneliness, of the sudden falling from him of all old standards, old horizons, of pride and humility.

A week or two passes, and he is punished for telling a lie by not being allowed to go to the pantomime.

page 62

At that judgment a quiver for an instant held Jeremy's face, turning it, for that moment, into something shapeless and old. His heart had given a wild leap of terror and dismay. But he showed no further sign….

The day dragged its weary length along…. Once or twice the Jampot tried to penetrate behind that little mask of anger and dismay.

Spring comes. Our eight-year-old leans from the window; ‘beneath the rind of the soil he could feel the pushing, heaving life struggling to answer the call of the sun above it.’

And Summer. When, as he drove to the holiday farm, ‘the wind blew across the moor, with the smell of sea-pinks and sea gulls in it.’ When, upon his arrival,

his happiness was almost intolerable; he could not speak, he could not move, and in the heart of his happiness there was a strange unhappiness that he had never known before … so that he felt like a stranger who was seeing his father or his mother or his aunt for the first time.

We confess we had no idea, until Mr. Walpole put it to us in such good round terms, that a perfectly normal little boy of eight thought and felt like this, especially when, as in the case of this little hero, his external existence was so insufferably dull, tepid, and stodgy.

Jeremy and his sisters spent half their time going for walks with an imbecile old nurse and later with an imbecile old governess, and the other half sitting in the nursery either being good or not being good. Their father, the Rev. Herbert Cole, was an ‘excellent father,’ but ‘the parish absorbed too much of his time to allow for intimacies’; their mother, ‘the most placid woman in Europe,’ they saw for half-an-hour before bedtime. We are given no sign that the children had any part in the life of the house or any real rich life of their own. Their little thrills, excitements and alarms all seem to have page 63 happened between meals, between bacon and strawberry jam, or treacle pudding, or fish pie, or the famous sausages, or saffron buns—a difficult diet to be gay upon. No wonder there are moments when poor Jeremy forgets his spring fancies and sighs—‘I'd like to eat jam and jam—lots of it,’ he thought. ‘It would be fun to be sick…’

But for all the author's determination, ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’ does not shine through the small heart he would explore. There is, however, no doubt that he enjoyed writing his book. He positively gambols.

Her teeth clicked as always when her temper was roused, the reason being that thirty years ago the arts and accomplishments of dentistry had not reached so fine a perfection as to-day can show. She had, moreover, bought a cheap set. Her teeth clicked.

As for the publisher,—he will stand no nonsense from anybody.

Jeremy is, indeed, one of the finest child characters ever presented, and in him Mr. Walpole has achieved a triumph.

What is our appropriate geste as we bow ourselves out?

(August 15, 1919).