Diana Wynne Jones and two more coincidences

A previous article gives details of two occasions when something that Diana Wynne Jones had just written about manifested in her life. 

Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains two more examples of this phenomenon.

The first ‘coincidence’ happened at a time when she was working on her book Fire and Hemlock, for which the plot was, she thought, her own invention. An acquaintance railroaded her into a visiting a place where people started discussing a local legend - which strongly resembled her plot.

The second incident happened while she was working on Archer’s Goon. One of the characters discovers a newborn baby in the snow. The same acquaintance went out for a walk and found an abandoned baby!

The two incidents in Diana Wynne Jones’s own words:

The Fire and Hemlock incident 
“Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting. 

Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. 

As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. 

This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before - I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book.”

Antonia White's travel nightmare

The novelist Antonia White describes a nightmare journey in her unfinished autobiographical novel Clara IV.

Clara goes on holiday to Austria without her husband; being alone has a bad effect on her. She becomes demoralised and mismanages everything including her money, which helps to make the return journey one long endurance test.

Clara’s travel nightmare 
The long journey home involves taking a train to Linz, a train from Linz to Ostend, a steamboat from Ostend to Dover followed by a train to London and finally a taxi to her house.

On the long train ride to Ostend, it seems to Clara as though her journey will never end and she will never find herself safely back home.

By the time she gets to Ostend she is in a trance of weariness. She has had a sleepless night in a horrible third-class compartment, which was all that she could afford. She has not slept for thirty-six hours and as she has very little money left has eaten almost nothing during the journey. She would happily exchange the beautiful and expensive new handbag that she had unwisely bought in Vienna for just a cup of tea and a couple of aspirins. Half blinded by a bad headache, she has to carry her heavy luggage onto the ferry herself as she cannot afford to pay a porter. 

White magic on the ferry
Clara is horrified to see how awful she looks and how dirty and creased her clothes are when she catches sight of herself in the washroom mirror, but she is too ill and exhausted to do anything about it until after she has rested for a while.

Antonia White, Terry Pratchett, snakes and a big coincidence

The novelists Antonia White and Stella Benson have more in common than biographical material that has a very depressing and exasperating effect on impressionable readers.

Stella Benson’s love of snakes  has already been covered; I have recently learned that, at least as a child, Antonia  White was a snake lover too. Not only that, but just like Stella Benson she was taken behind the scenes at London Zoo to meet some snakes.

Antonia White was a small girl and Stella Benson an adult when they visited the snakes, which was around 1904/05 for Antonia and in 1917 for Stella. The big coincidence here is that the same person was involved in both invitations to see the snakes up close.

How the visits came about
As previously mentioned, Stella Benson’s privileged visits came about because at the time she was staying with a friend whose husband, Edouard (sometimes anglicised to Edward) Boulenger, was Director of Reptiles at London Zoo.

Some years earlier, Antonia’s father had been great friends with both the eminent Belgian zoologist George Boulenger and his son the above-mentioned Edouard, who at the time was Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo.

Edouard conducted Antonia on tours of the snake cages. She loved holding some of them, which neither of her parents had the courage to do.

Stella Benson felt that she had the soul of a snake. Antonia White sometimes felt less than human. Perhaps they both felt drawn to snakes because they had reptilian-like personalities.

Antonia White, cults and independent thinking

This article was inspired by something very disturbing that I read in As Once in May, a collection of Antonia White’s autobiographical writings.

While taking time out to work on a different article, I had occasion to return to Sheri S. Tepper’s fantasy novel Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore. A previously overlooked speech there is a very good counterweight to the offending passage. It puts what Antonia White tells us about her Catholic boarding school into context; it suggests that she was treated like a cult member.

Antonia White’s alarming school story
Antonia White said that while the nuns at the convent school she attended did not crush the spirits of the pupils - high spirits and general childish naughtiness were not discouraged - they cracked down hard on any attempts to show independence of mind and tried to stamp it out:

“Through years of training, the nuns had learned to recognise the faintest signs of such an attitude, and it was severely repressed. They could detect it the slightest thing...an inclination to answer back, and, most of all, in the faintest speculation in matters of faith. The world was waiting for us outside, with its Satan-set traps of heresy, free thought and easy morals, and the whole object of our education was to arm us against its snares...Mental pride... the most dangerous of all our temptations.”

Many people will be outraged by this, and for several reasons.