What do Alan Garner and L. M. Montgomery have in common?

A previous article describes how neither Noel Streatfeild nor Isaac Asimov ever forgot being refused some information that they had eagerly asked for. They never forgave their teachers for impatiently brushing them off either.

I have since read about two more very different writers who also experienced painful incidents that they never forgot: as children they were unjustly and cruelly punished for speaking in ways that their teachers disapproved of. 

The first incident was mentioned by L. M. Montgomery in a letter she wrote in 1907 about some discoveries she made while reading the Bible:

“When I was a child a school teacher gave me a whipping because I used the expression "by the skin of my teeth." He said it was slang. If I had but known then what I know now!!! It is in Job—those very words.”

From The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber 1905-1909

What’s wrong with a gentle reminder of the importance of speaking good English? That teacher should have known his Bible too.

I wonder if that teacher ever learned about the literary achievements of his former pupil.

The second incident involves Alan Garner.

Something about Alan Garner’s Owl Service

The Owl Service (1967) by Alan Garner OBE FRSL is an award-winning fantasy novel for young adults that affected me very strongly the first time I read it. 

The Owl Service is a story of the supernatural. It involves something that has been called in other articles a scripted scenario.

The story is set in modern Wales.  The plotline is based on a story from Welsh mythology, a story about betrayal and destruction involving a triangle of two men and a woman.

Three teenagers, Alison the English girl, Roger the English boy and Gwyn the Welsh boy, re-enact the story - or rather the story re-enacts itself through them as it has been doing down the years and through the generations. 

The girl is once again the betrayer, and the two boys hit each other where it hurts most. 

Some of the witty remarks that various characters make have a positive effect when read; there are also some very cruel and hurtful comments that are painful to read and have a very negative effect. This article highlights some of the best and worst of these comments.

Parents and step-parents
Alison’s mother is a terrible emotional blackmailer and Gwyn’s bitter mother seems sadistically determined to sabotage his life, not just for personal reasons but because of unfinished business from the past. 

Public libraries present

For much of my life, I took the existence of public libraries for granted: they were just there. I can now look at them more objectively and put my experiences into various contexts.

I now know something about the background and history of public libraries and about other people’s views on and experiences of them.

There was a long discussion about free public libraries on the old Conservative Conserpiracy Forum. Some posters approved of them, others did not. I made several contributions in their favour and challenged some of the points made by the antis.

In addition to my personal memories, those old posts and some information I compiled at the time are the main source of material for the public library articles.

This one will bring my personal experience up to date. 

Leaving the public library behind
After leaving school, I continued to be a great user of local public libraries for some years. Then came a time when I allowed my membership to lapse and even forgot that public libraries existed! Buying books instead of borrowing them became the norm for me.

There were several reasons for my defection:

I had moved to an area where the local library was not at all impressive; it was small and there was a very poor showing on the shelves, with little to make browsing worthwhile.

I became interested in New Age and other types of metaphysical books that my library didn’t stock.

I could afford to buy whatever books I wanted, fiction and non-fiction, new or second-hand as available, and I was spoilt for choice as there were many bookshops of various kinds within easy reach including specialist, second-hand and discount. There were charity shops everywhere and they were a good source of cheap books. Some street market stalls sold books too. Browsing in all these places was enjoyable and very productive.

L. M. Montgomery and Rudyard Kipling’s Cat

The Cat That Walked by Himself is one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s children’s classic Just So Stories (1902). 

This book contains tales about various wild animals:

“...the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

The Cat walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

L. M. Montgomery knew this story, and it meant a lot to her. Her heroine Emily Starr mentions it after her friend Dean warns her about the pressure to conform at school:

“"...Don't let them make anything of you but yourself, that's all. I don't think they will.’

"No, they won't," said Emily decidedly. "I'm like Kipling's cat--I walk by my wild lone and wave my wild tail where so it pleases me. That's why the Murrays look askance at me. They think I should only run with the pack."”
From Emily Climbs (1925)

Later in the book, Emily gets the chance to go to live in New York. She is very torn, thinking about what she might gain and what she might lose:

“Would the Wind Woman come to her in the crowded city streets? Could she be like Kipling's cat there?”

She decides to remain with her people and the old farm on her beloved Prince Edward Island, even though it means missing many opportunities to broaden her horizons and have a career. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery made some very different decisions, and she came to regret them as terrible mistakes.

Stella Gibbons and some libraries

Terry Pratchett is not the only writer of interest who both feasted on library books and created books for other library users to read.

Stella Gibbons, whose life and books have been featured on here, is another writer who both took out and put in. My first encounter with her work was via books that came from the public library. 

Internal evidence from her books suggests to me that Stella Gibbons considered libraries to be an important part of life and that she was very familiar with the various types, not to mention the differing social classes and educational and intellectual levels of the members.

She found much good reading material on the family bookshelves when young, but probably joined a public library too.

As an adult she was a user of her local public library for many years. She may also have subscribed to a circulating library as they were still going strong in the first half of the 20th century despite the competition from the free public libraries and she features two of them in one of her books.

Ringing out the old year and ringing in the new

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s very popular poem Ring Out, Wild Bells describes a ritual in which the bells in English parish churches are rung at midnight on New Year’s Eve to mark the departure of the old year and the arrival of the new one. 

It is a way of saying both ‘good riddance’ and ‘welcome’!

The words speak for themselves; I find them inspiring but also depressing: new beginnings seem possible, but the golden age he wished for is still not here after 170 years. 

Ring Out, Wild Bells was first published in 1850, the year Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate. It forms part of his elegy In Memoriam.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

This poem is in the public domain and can be found online in many places, including Project Gutenberg.

The poetry and the poet:

Public libraries past

This is the time of year when people take stock and look both backwards and forwards. This makes it an appropriate occasion to publish articles about the past history of and future prospects for public libraries.

After realising retrospectively how fortunate I was to have had so much good-quality free reading material, I went on to think about the people of the past and wonder what they had in the way of public libraries. 

There is a lot of information about the libraries of the past available online. I now know that the public libraries I used were preceded first by libraries that charged their members then later by free libraries that were established by Victorian social reformers primarily for the improvement of the working classes. 

Predecessors of public libraries
As books were an expensive luxury, for many centuries only people at the higher levels of society had their own private libraries. 

Ecclesiastical, vocational, social and educational establishments also had collections of books, semi-private libraries that only selected people had access to.

Circulating libraries, or lending libraries, were established in the 18th century. It was just the books that circulated: these were not mobile or travelling libraries! 

Circulating libraries were run for profit, so subscriptions and borrowing fees were payable. Although there were costs, borrowing a book was very much cheaper than buying it would have been. By joining a circulating library, even people who could afford to buy books would get a lot more reading material for their money.