Beginning with Beowulf (1953)
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sutcliff_spaceThis brief essay about Sutcliff’s childhood appeared in the February 1953 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, which you can read here. Sutcliff’s reminiscences about her early reading and Miss Beck’s Academy are also found in her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, as you can see here.
The Hunt Breakfast
Rosemary Sutcliff is the young English author of The Queen Elizabeth Story and The Armourer’s House (Oxford). Because we share the children’s delight in both books we asked Miss Sutcliff what her own childhood-reading background was. “Beginning with Beowulf” was her answer.
BEGINNING WITH BEOWULF
At nine years old, I was quite unable to read the simplest sentence, which, as I have pointed out to her since, was largely my Mother’s fault for reading aloud too well. I was very ill when I was small, and as a result spent several years more or less on my back; and because of that, my Mother read to me far more than most mothers read to most children. Her choice of books was unusual; and from the age of five I was reared on Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, on Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Lord Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, and other strong meats including two fat and fascinating books of Father’s: Myths of Greece and Rome and Hero Myths and Legends of the British Race. And in this last was the story of Beowulf, which I demanded most often and loved better than all beside.
Some children’s books I did have: Hans Andersen, of course, and several of Beatrix Potter’s small gems; and I still remember (though its name is gone from me) an enchanting story about a camel who wore shoes too tight for him and said “Oosh!” at every step. But these, much-loved though they were, were the outer circle of our reading, whose centre was Dickens and Beowulf.
Suddenly my Mother decided it was time I learned to read, and produced a book for the purpose. It was called The Rosy-Faced Family Next Door, and it was a mistake! What had I, who had sailed with Amyas Leigh against the Armada, who had shared in the stage triumphs of the Crummelses and in Beowulf’s battle with the marsh-fiend Grendel, to do with this disgusting family, or with their equally disgusting cats who sat on mats? I decided not to learn to read at all, as the best way of avoiding them and their kind. My own family coaxed and reasoned and scolded, but without result, since my Mother never quite had the hardness of heart to refuse to read to me any more.
When I was nine, we moved to a house in the Royal Dockyard at Chatham (we were always moving, for my Father was a sailor); and at Chatham I went to a little dame school, the last of its kind, I should think, in the world. Miss Amelia Beck was eighty-six when I went to her. She had been teaching the children of the Dockyard and the Barracks all her life, and her proudest boast was that she had, in their young days, smacked nearly all the present senior officers of the fighting services. But I doubt if it was true, for she very seldom smacked. She was as gentle as her name, with a warm understanding of children; and we loved her dearly, for though she was growing a little vague, we mostly learnt our lessons to avoid hurting her. We sat, eight or ten of us, varying in age from five to eleven, round an ink-stained table with the initials of dead-and-gone Admirals carved on the legs, and wrote on slates with squeaky slate pencils which some of us ate a good deal of, though I never liked the taste myself. We had no mid-morning break, but were given five minutes every now and then to throng to the window to see the Beauties of Nature – a tree bursting into leaf, a dog being exercised or soldiers drilling on the Lines. They were all Beauties of Nature to Miss Beck, and the hand of God was in all of them.
But Christmas provides my clearest memories of Miss Beck’s Academy. The last day of the Christmas term; carols sung round the piano with faded green silk behind its trellis-work back; the whole house in a snowstorm of cards from old pupils, half the world away. (And woe betide the old pupil who forgot!) There were exciting things to eat, and Miss Beck herself, wearing her hat and with a wonderful shawl round her shoulders, announcing herself as the Duchess of Devonshire and giving away the prizes. A prize for everyone, so that no one should be hurt. Mine – it was the only prize I ever won at school, and I still have it – was The Cuckoo Clock.
Oh yes, by that time competition with other children had done the trick when all else failed, and I was reading easily. I liked The Cuckoo Clock; it was the beginning of my discovery of children’s books, and I read many after that, though within a year my tastes were reaching out to Rider Haggard and John Buchan.
But still, as I look back to my childhood’s reading, it is Beowulf who leaps first and most vividly to my mind.
The Hunt Breakfast
Rosemary Sutcliff is the young English author of The Queen Elizabeth Story and The Armourer’s House (Oxford). Because we share the children’s delight in both books we asked Miss Sutcliff what her own childhood-reading background was. “Beginning with Beowulf” was her answer.
BEGINNING WITH BEOWULF
At nine years old, I was quite unable to read the simplest sentence, which, as I have pointed out to her since, was largely my Mother’s fault for reading aloud too well. I was very ill when I was small, and as a result spent several years more or less on my back; and because of that, my Mother read to me far more than most mothers read to most children. Her choice of books was unusual; and from the age of five I was reared on Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, on Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Lord Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, and other strong meats including two fat and fascinating books of Father’s: Myths of Greece and Rome and Hero Myths and Legends of the British Race. And in this last was the story of Beowulf, which I demanded most often and loved better than all beside.
Some children’s books I did have: Hans Andersen, of course, and several of Beatrix Potter’s small gems; and I still remember (though its name is gone from me) an enchanting story about a camel who wore shoes too tight for him and said “Oosh!” at every step. But these, much-loved though they were, were the outer circle of our reading, whose centre was Dickens and Beowulf.
Suddenly my Mother decided it was time I learned to read, and produced a book for the purpose. It was called The Rosy-Faced Family Next Door, and it was a mistake! What had I, who had sailed with Amyas Leigh against the Armada, who had shared in the stage triumphs of the Crummelses and in Beowulf’s battle with the marsh-fiend Grendel, to do with this disgusting family, or with their equally disgusting cats who sat on mats? I decided not to learn to read at all, as the best way of avoiding them and their kind. My own family coaxed and reasoned and scolded, but without result, since my Mother never quite had the hardness of heart to refuse to read to me any more.
When I was nine, we moved to a house in the Royal Dockyard at Chatham (we were always moving, for my Father was a sailor); and at Chatham I went to a little dame school, the last of its kind, I should think, in the world. Miss Amelia Beck was eighty-six when I went to her. She had been teaching the children of the Dockyard and the Barracks all her life, and her proudest boast was that she had, in their young days, smacked nearly all the present senior officers of the fighting services. But I doubt if it was true, for she very seldom smacked. She was as gentle as her name, with a warm understanding of children; and we loved her dearly, for though she was growing a little vague, we mostly learnt our lessons to avoid hurting her. We sat, eight or ten of us, varying in age from five to eleven, round an ink-stained table with the initials of dead-and-gone Admirals carved on the legs, and wrote on slates with squeaky slate pencils which some of us ate a good deal of, though I never liked the taste myself. We had no mid-morning break, but were given five minutes every now and then to throng to the window to see the Beauties of Nature – a tree bursting into leaf, a dog being exercised or soldiers drilling on the Lines. They were all Beauties of Nature to Miss Beck, and the hand of God was in all of them.
But Christmas provides my clearest memories of Miss Beck’s Academy. The last day of the Christmas term; carols sung round the piano with faded green silk behind its trellis-work back; the whole house in a snowstorm of cards from old pupils, half the world away. (And woe betide the old pupil who forgot!) There were exciting things to eat, and Miss Beck herself, wearing her hat and with a wonderful shawl round her shoulders, announcing herself as the Duchess of Devonshire and giving away the prizes. A prize for everyone, so that no one should be hurt. Mine – it was the only prize I ever won at school, and I still have it – was The Cuckoo Clock.
Oh yes, by that time competition with other children had done the trick when all else failed, and I was reading easily. I liked The Cuckoo Clock; it was the beginning of my discovery of children’s books, and I read many after that, though within a year my tastes were reaching out to Rider Haggard and John Buchan.
But still, as I look back to my childhood’s reading, it is Beowulf who leaps first and most vividly to my mind.
