eBook The Joy of the Snow ePub

Loved this autobiography.

I'm not sure what I was hoping to find in this autobiography by Elizabeth Goudge, but whatever it was, it wasn't here. Some of her books are pure genius, especially A Scent of Water, but perhaps The Joy of the Snow just illustrates the fact that an author's life has little to do with her muse.

Elizabeth Goudge, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, (1900-1984) daugher of an Anglican priest and theologian and a lady born in Guernsey.
She was the author of best selling novels, including Green Dolphin Country, which won the Metro Golden Meyer film prize of £30,000, and was made into a 1947 Award winning film. Her children’s novel, The Littile White Horse, J.K.Rowlings favourite children’s book, won the Carnegie Award in 1947.
I have read or dipped into Goudge’s autobiography so often that my copy is falling to pieces. Each time I read it, beginning with her early years in Wells and visits to her grandparents and other relatives in Guernsey, during her Edwardian childhood, I am entranced.
In her own words. “Old age, I find, is a time when you start doing all the things that in earlier years you reprobated in older people, and were certain you would never do yourself,m and if there was one thing more than another that I was determined not to do, it was to write an autobiography. But I was asked to do it by a few friends of the type to whom one says, in the words of Philip Sidney, ‘Your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment.’ And so I obeyed. This book is an attempt to recapture happy memories, and only happy ones, and with them some of the joy in places and people that I have known, and share them. And to share too, some of the conclusions I have come to about work and life.”
Re-reading this book forty-six years after Goudge wrote it, I am profoundly grateful to her. Each time I read The Joy of Snow I am swept back into history and the life of a great lady whose realisations and novels are always a delight.

Because of the title, I thought Elizabeth Goudge's book was about happiness in her elder years, the "winter of life." However, it turned out to be a book about the happy memories and joys she found in places and people throughout her life, many of these recollections drawn from her characteristic appreciation of nature which she always wrote about glowingly. The book is also a summing up about conclusions she came to regarding work and life.

Knowing that Elizabeth had been the daughter of an Anglican clergyman/scholar, and knowing also that one of Elizabeth's books entitled The White Witch had become very much sought after during the time when Harry Potter stories were the rage, I particularly wanted to learn what Elizabeth's own attitude was toward "witchcraft." This book turned out to be exactly the right place to find out about her convictions regarding pagan and supernatural matters, although her concepts differed a good deal from those portrayed in American movies at the turn of the 20 th century. She tells how both she and her parents drew distinctions about these phenomena, especially in one chapter entitled "ESP."

Goudge's mother inherited an extraordinary psychic ability but she felt that no person ought to have such power over another and she refused to make use of her ESP.

Elizabeth's father told her the story of how a minister friend of his was approached by a folk healer who, knowing no one to whom she could pass on her store of esoteric herbal knowledge and spells, wanted to entrust this minister with her expertise. She said to him " 'You sir, are the best man I know.'...Patiently he tired to explain why it is best that a priest should not also be a warlock, but it was hard for her to understand. 'But they are good spells,' she kept telling him. 'I know they are,' he said, 'but I cannot use them.' She was convinced at last but she went away weeping." Miss Goudge prefaces this story by saying, "Black magic is a thing too vile to speak of but many of the white witches and warlocks were wonderful people, dedicated to their work of healing. I knew the daughter of a Dartmoor white witch and she told me how her mother never failed to answer a call for help. Fortified by prayer and a dram of whiskey she would go out on the coldest winter night, carrying her lantern, and tramp for miles across the moor to bring help to someone ill at a lonely farm."

It was on a walking tour at Skye that Elizabeth experienced "the moor terror." At Devon, "where these unexplainable things are commonplace," she heard what people called "the singing in the wilderness." She was on a deserted path after a late snow-fall which was extremely beautiful. She writes, "The whole world was pure blue and white and it seemed that the sun had lit every crystal to a point of fire. There was a silence so absolute that it seemed a living presence. And then came the singing. It was a solo voice, ringing out joy and praise. One would have said it was a woman's voice, only could any woman sing like that, with such simplicity and beauty? It lasted for some minutes, and then ceased, and the deep silence came back once more. I stayed where I was, as rooted in the snow as the trees, but there was no return of the singing and so I went back to the cottage and mechanically began the first task of the day...."

Elizabeth recounts stories about three ghosts that she herself experienced and expresses her explanation of what ghosts may be. Once, when Elizabeth was a young woman and her family was living at Ely cathedral, she (and others before her) would often see the ghost of a grey-cowled, faceless monk.

The neighboring houses where the Goudges lived were usually quite old and in one of them a little boy told how an old man in a "bath robe" tied at the waist with a rope had been coming to his room and teaching him a prayer which, when the child recited it for his mother, was the "Our Father" in Latin. The child had never even been to school and had never had any conscious exposure to Latin in any way!

A friend of Elizabeth's father named Edith Olivier was driving home one night near Salisbury and found herself proceeding down an avenue of giant megaliths which led her to an earthwork surrounding a temple. When she parked and climbed to the top of a hill, she saw a fair taking place in the village below, lit by flares and torches. Later she learned that the avenue of megaliths had disappeared years before and that the last annual fair in Avebury had taken place in 1850. In two other similar stories, other persons reported finding themselves driving through a long-vanished wood that no longer existed. An old man who lived on the particular moor where the mysterious wood sometimes appeared said, "I know the wood. I've been in it myself. But only once. You'll not see it again. It's only once in a lifetime."

Elizabeth Goudge mixes allusions to myth, legend, and the supernatural world into her fictional writing. It is a world of pagan imagery that permeates much of British literature and culture. She definitely believes in the existence of that "other world" and doesn't even deny the existence of the "fairy folk," but she is quick to note that the subconscious mind can play tricks on us and that it is sometimes hard to know exactly how to explain some inexplicable things that happen. While she is alert and sympathetic to supernatural phenomena and sympathetic to persons like the folk healers who were known as "white witches," she is entirely Christian in her beliefs and convictions and often writes upon Christian themes in general.. This book tends to show that she leans heavily toward a quite merciful concept of God.

The rest of this very readable book deals with less supernatural events than those of the ESP chapter, such as memories of Elizabeth's mother's and father's forebears from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, and London; and stories about what it was like living at Wells and Ely, where her father, Henry Leighton Goudge, was Principal and Vice Principal of the Theological Colleges, and at Oxford where he was Regius Professor of Divinity. There are passages about Miss Goudge's eventual vocation as a writer, her successes and failures, and about various other aspects of her life.

In this passage containing an unusual metaphor, she is describing the unchanging quietness of the past town of Wells, "its only contacts with the outside world the few trains that slithered slowly and peacefully as earthworms through the valleys, stopping every ten minutes to pick up milk churns from under the lilac bushes on the station platforms, and to deposit in their place two sleepy passengers and a crate of hens."

One wall of Tower House where she was born at Wells was attached to the very cathedral. "[It] had, as its name implies, a stone tower with little rooms like monastic cells leading from the spiral stone staircase. It was my parents' first married home and when they were there, young and agile, they would drag a mattress up to the highest of the little rooms, lay it on the stone floor and sleep there on hot summer nights. I can imagine them laughing together when the spiders ran over their faces, and listening to the bats squeaking. The garden was within high stone walls...."

I think the most precious memory that I've taken away from the book is the account of the death of Elizabeth's father, who was always very much a practical, down-to-earth, no- nonsense intellectual type of minister and teacher. While on his deathbed, surrounded by family members, he passed for awhile into unconsciousness and then revived for a few moments, just long enough to say to them, "Dear ones, love is all that matters."

Miss Goudge's autobiography has all the qualities that makes her fiction such a pleasure to read, vivid, interesting characters, marvellous descriptions of places, and lovely touches of humour. The earlier part of her life is described in the grteatest detail, her childhood in Wells, her teenage years in Ely, her twenties and thirties in oxford, where her father was Regius Professor of Theology. As in her novels, spirituality is very a very improtant part of the book, there are many accounts of religious and supernatural experiences, both her own and others, particularly those of her mother, whose life was blighted by illness and pain, but who remained gay and vivacious throughout her painful life, buoyed up by religious faith and indomitable courage. The humorous touches are wonderful, as when she describes the convoluted relationships on her father's side of the family, where there had been much intermarriage between cousins etc. One of her relatives once tried to sort out the family tree, but "on coming to the conclusion that he was his own uncle,he gave up in despair." If you have enjoyed reading miss Goudge's novels, you will want to read this too.