Miss Smith, the cruel and evil witch with a very deceptive appearance, is a character in Beverley Nichols's Woodland Trilogy and its sequel. She first appeared on here in the article about three fictional modern-day witches and has been referred to in a few other articles.
I read the four books one last time before donating them, and I found some more material to comment on.
The Tree That Sat Down (1945), The Stream That Stood Still (1948), The Mountain of Magic (1950) and The Wickedest Witch in the World (1971) are intended for readers of 9 years and upwards. The younger readers will concentrate on the story and enjoy reading about the talking animals and the adventures of the children; I am interested in the incidental references to evil and the characteristics of witches.
I would not have noticed such things when I first read the stories as I was very young at the time, but now they are the main attraction. They provide yet more independent support for ideas mentioned in many other articles.
The Tree That Sat Down, the first book of the Woodland Trilogy, has something to say about good and evil:
“Evil is a very powerful force; there is only one force more powerful, which is Good. Evil is infectious; it spreads itself far and wide. If there is anything evil at large, all the other evil things know it by instinct; they rejoice and grow strong.”
“Miss Smith shivered and felt quite sick; real goodness always had that effect on her.”
Goodness and evil often do attract like and repel their opposite.
“Miss Smith...felt somebody coming, somebody very good, somebody so good that he might do her a lot of harm. She must go quickly, before it was too late.”
Miss Smith is very wary of anyone who isn't evil.
Witches dislike inquisitive people; they live in fear that their crimes and their deficiencies and differences from normal people will be exposed. They are always on the alert for threats.
They can sometimes get themselves off the hook by improvising cover stories and casting spells to distract and silence people, but they are not always able to raise the necessary power and they just dig themselves in deeper in the long run.
At one point, Miss Smith is working very long hours and this is causing problems for her. Beverley Nichols tells us that casting spells is very tiring and even the most powerful witches have not got an unlimited supply of energy. This is similar to what Arthur Conan Doyle says about his witch Helen Penclosa in The Parasite, and it is very lucky for the victims that this is so.
Miss Smith has an uncanny instinct: she can guess people's thoughts; she takes advantage of this to manipulate them. Witchlike people use their sensing and thought-reading powers to control their victims and to make people suffer by raising painful subjects or hitting them where it hurts most.
Miss Smith is icy cold to the touch; this is a good way of describing witches' lack of human warmth and the freezing effect they have on the people around them.
Conan Doyle mentions Helen Penclosa's cold eyes and cold smile; he also mentions Agatha Marden's cold voice and the chilling effect of her presence when she was being remotely controlled by the witch.
The effect that Miss Smith has on people and her surroundings and the actions that she takes against them - she poisons all the goods in the willow tree shop and turns people's washing black for example - can be seen as a metaphor for the effect that witchlike people have on others and the environment as they pass through life: withering, blighting, cheating, contaminating, sabotaging and destroying.
Miss Smith's visit to the shop brought bad luck; everything went wrong afterwards. There are many articles on here about strings of misfortunes that happened after an encounter with an energy vampire or unconscious witch.
Miss Smith has a pretty parlour that is only for show; it exists just to fool people into thinking that she is a good and moral person. The furnishings are the exact opposite of everything that she likes, but she can at least reverse the pictures when no one else is around. They are double-sided: one has St. Paul's Cathedral on one side and a depiction of Hell on the other, and the pictures of Saints have demons and devils on the back.
This is very symbolic of the upside-down, back-to-front world of black magic and its practitioners.
The Swedish edition of The Wickedest Witch in the World, shows the two sides of Miss Smith - the beautiful young woman she appears to be at first sight and the old witch that she really is:
Witches waste resources and get their victims obsessed with unrealistic or unreachable goals. In The Mountain of Magic, Miss Smith inflames the imagination of all the animals and children in the area with exciting stories about a – non-existent - treasure. She gets them all working very hard on a task that they don't realise is fruitless and is intended to destroy them all.
This is symbolic; people who are under the influence of witchlike forces often waste their lives following pied pipers and willow-the-wisps to their doom. The golden treasure that they seek turns into dust and ashes.
The Mountain of Magic has a character called the Imp, who is friends with a little girl called Jill. He is not caught up in the treasure hunting mania; he quite rightly distrusts Miss Smith and wonders whether the treasure really exists. When he tells Jill this, she won't listen. Rather than think for herself and listen to her friend, she believes what the compass that Miss Smith reversed to make good people show as evil and vice versa tells her.
Jill gets angry; she tells the Imp that she doesn't trust him and she doesn't want to see him ever again. This seems like a mild version of the attack-dog syndrome and the shunning techniques that are used in cults to silence dissenters and people who tell the truth.
The Imp continues to investigate Miss Smith and he gets caught. Like many witches, she is a very sadistic person: she talks in front of him about various ways to torture him, including starving him then eating a delicious meal while making him watch. This can be seen as a metaphor for the feeling of starving at the feast of life that engulfs some people who are hostage to witchlike forces.
Miss Smith ties the Imp up in such a way that the more he struggles to escape, the tighter the knots are drawn. This can be seen as a metaphor for what doesn't work when trying to escape from the web of a witch.
One of the characters in The Wickedest Witch in the World, which has more material of interest then some of the other books, is a beetle called Beelzebub. He is an ally of Miss Smith; he has dark purple wings and a bright red body:
“...when you get dark purple and bright red next to each other, it's a very bad sign.”
This sounds rather strange, but by coincidence, in Walter de la Mare's Return, Arthur Lawford, who is possesed by the ghost of an evil dead Frenchman, puts on “an old faded purple and crimson dressing-gown that had belonged to his grandfather...”
Then there is the red and purple outfit that Princess Diana wore and Meghan Markle imitated:
The final trawl through Beverley Nichols's four books about Miss Smith inspired more commentary than I was expecting, all the more as they were abridged paperbacks rather than the full-length hardbacks in which I first encountered the witch. While this made it easier to part with the books, it has left me feeling that there may be even more material of interest in the complete editions. I would very much like to see the original versions of these stories again. Like many other books I would like to get, they are rarely available and then only at very high prices.
These are abridged versions:
