"The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past."
Mary Webb
the author of those words is one of my favourite writers. relatively unknown - particularly outside of great britain - mary was born in march of 1881 in shropshire. her father ran a boarding school and was a great lover of poetry, art, and nature. mary was greatly influenced by him and loved to wander in shropshire fields, woods and lanes, studying the natural wonders of her environment. she developed an incredible sensitivity to and awareness of minute detail in nature, which is reflected throughout her poetry and prose.
her writing captures an england that is almost entirely gone.
mary published several books including "the golden arrow", "gone to earth", "the house in dormer forest", "seven for a secret", and her most widely known, "precious bane".
mary’s writing is rich and detailed and unashamedly romantic. not in the sense of romance as so many people experience it in literature, but as a depiction of the echo we sense in nature of our deep passions. the incredible detail in her writing slows the reading process down and you find yourself rereading sections of her work just to unravel the visual tapestry she has crafted and not miss some finer detail.
mary's writing is perfectly complimented in my opinion by the viewing of the paintings of helen allingham. helen grew up in the same town as i did - altrincham - a cheshire market town dating back in the legal records to the year 1290, but there is evidence to suggest that people lived there when the romans were in england. helen lived in altrincham roughly one hundred years before i did and is likely one of the more widely known people to have emerged from the town.
here are some paintings by helen. i should add that these are not fanciful works as much as a record of buildings and situations that helen documented. the first entitled "the briars" is a building that apparently still stands more or less as is depicted in this artwork.
this painting is entitled "in wormley wood".
wormley wood is an ancient woodland in hertforshire that has been managed for timber production since the middle ages.
here is one of my favourite allingham paintings, "blackdown from whitley common".
if you would like to see more of helen's artwork then go here: http://www.helenallingham.com/ThumbGallery.htm
a site devoted to mary webb’s work has been created and at that site you can find a thorough overview of her work as well as sample chapters, a short story, and some of her poems.
go here: http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/webb.htm
here’s a sample of mary’s writing from her book “precious bane”. precious bane tells the story of a woman born with a harelip. in nineteenth century england, a harelip was regarded as a curse and suggested that the person was almost certainly possessed with the ability to place curses on others. in this story, the protagonist “prue” finds solace in her illumined inner world, particularly in the apple-filled attic of her home where she experiences a sort of mystical intuition, a 'blessedness' she might not have found but for her 'hare-shotten lip'. prue's inner radiance is noticed by the travelling weaver, kester woodseaves, whose love for her becomes 'the one maister-thread of pure gold'.
like kester the weaver, the story takes several plain threads - the threads of ordinary people's lives - and through webb's masterful weaving emerges a tapestry that is hard to forget.
Book 1 Chapter 1
SARN MERE
“It was at a love-spinning that I saw Kester first. And if, in these new-fangled days, when strange inventions crowd upon us, when I hear tell there is even a machine coming into use in some parts of the country for reaping and mowing, if those that mayhappen will read this don't know what a love-spinning was, they shall hear in good time. But though it was Jancis Beguildy's love-spinning, she being three-and-twenty at that time and I being two years less, yet that is not the beginning of the story I have set out to tell.
Kester says that all tales, true tales or romancings, go farther back than the days of the child; aye, farther even than the little babe in its cot of rushes. Maybe you never slept in a cot of rushes; but all of us did at Sarn. There is such a plenty of rushes at Sarn, and old Beguildy's missus was a great one for plaiting them on rounded barrel-hoops. Then they'd be set on rockers, and a nice clean cradle they made, soft and green, so that the babe could feel as big-sorted as a little caterpillar (painted butterflies-as-is-to-be, Kester calls them) sleeping in its cocoon. Kester's very set about such things. Never will he say caterpillars. He'll say, 'There's a lot of butter-flies-as-is-to-be on our cabbages, Prue.' He won't say 'It's winter.' He'll say, 'Summer's sleeping.' And there's no bud little enough nor sad-coloured enough for Kester not to callen it the beginnings of the blow.
But the time is not yet come for speaking of Kester. It is the story of us all at Sarn, of Mother and Gideon and me, and Jancis (that was so beautiful), and Wizard Beguildy, and the two or three other folk that lived in those parts, that I did set out to tell. There were but a few, and maybe always will be, for there's a discouragement about the place. It may be the water lapping, year in and year out - everywhere you look and listen, water; or the big trees waiting and considering on your right hand and on your left; or the unbreathing quiet of the place, as if it was created but an hour gone, and not created for us. Or it may be that the soil is very poor and marshy, with little nature or goodness in the grass, which is ever so where reeds and rushes grow in plenty, and the flower of the paigle. Happen you call it cowslip, but we always named it the paigle, or keys of heaven. It was a wonderful thing to see our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were, so that you would think not even an angel's feet were good enough to walk there. You could make a tossy-ball before a thrush had gone over his song twice, for you'd only got to sit down and gather with both hands. Every way you looked there was naught but gold, saving towards Sarn, where the woods began, and the great stretch of grey water, gleaming and wincing in the sun. Neither woods nor water looked darksome in that fine spring weather, with the leaves coming new, and buds the colour of corn in the birch-tops. Only in our oak wood there was always a look of the back-end of the year, their young leaves being so brown. So there was always a breath of October in our May. But it was a pleasant thing to sit in the meadows and look away to the far hills. The larches spired up in their quick green, and the cowslip gold seemed to get into your heart, and even Sarn Mere was nothing but a blue mist in a yellow mist of birch-tops. And there was such a dream on the place that if a wild bee came by, let alone a bumble, it startled you like a shout. If a bee comes in at the window now to my jar of gillyflowers, I can see it all in clear colours, with Plash lying under the sunset, beyond the woods, looking like a jagged piece of bottle glass. Plash Mere was bigger than Sarn, and there wasn't a tree by it, so where there were no hills beyond it you could see the clouds rooted in it on the far side, and I used to think they looked like the white water-lilies that lay round the margins of Sarn half the summer through. There was nothing about plash that was different from any other lake or pool. There was no troubling of the waters, as at Sarn, nor any village sounding its bells beneath the furthest deeps. It was true, what folks said of Sarn, that there was summat to be felt there.”
i have reread this book five times that i can remember. mary webb died almost unrecognized as an author and yet ironically, very shortly after her death she was mentioned in a speech by the then prime minister and almost immediately achieved a fame denied her through her life. through the nineteen thirties she was a best seller. her fame reignited in the late eighties and nineties.
all of her books are available through the usual sources.
