A talk given by Mary Cadogan at the 2000 Annual gathering

(First published in Nutwood Newsletter No. 39, Spring 2001)

Of course, it’s a great pleasure to be here again, talking to fellow-members. The last time I spoke to you all, three years ago, it was about Rupert as a Folk-Hero and Friend. I tried then to show ways in which Rupert had influenced my life, and also to suggest how the Rupert saga slots perfectly into at least eight different literary genres. Now that Rupert has moved triumphantly into the twenty-first century, I’ll be touching again today on his place in our extremely rich literary inheritance, but my main theme is more personal.

When John Beck invited me to speak again, a subject sprang readily to mind: it was Rupert: The Key piece in the Jig-Saw. I hope to be able to explain to you just why he is that key piece, and exactly what the jig-saw is.

Let me begin with a quotation not from Tourtel, Bestall, Cubie, Robinson or Harrold, but from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, with which I am sure most of you are familiar:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things’...

Probably all of us, first as teenagers and then as adults, have “put away childish things” which we or our peers or parents feel we have outgrown. In fact, I think we have to look very carefully at this process of putting away or growing out of so-called childish things. As adults we are under great pressure from society, sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, to discard the books, toys, games, interests and imaginative explorations of childhood, and it is my belief that we often abandon these prematurely or inappropriately.

Around forty years ago I realised, quite profoundly, that it is not a case of putting childhood discoveries and perceptions away, but of understanding these in the whole concept of our lives, and particularly of our adult lives. This in my view is what assuming real grown-up responsibility means. There is no schism between the world of childhood and the world of maturity: if we abandon preconceptions and look openly at both, each informs and enriches the other.

For some time before I began to realise the full significance of my childhood experiences, I felt that something was missing from my adult life. I was happy enough and interested in many things, but some insights seemed to get blocked. Things didn’t quite gel: life offered many joys and satisfactions, emotionally, spiritually and artistically -- but something in the mixed-up jig-saw puzzle that was my life seemed to be missing.

What was it? As soon as my interest in - I might even say my passion for - children’s literature was fully re-awakened, I knew what the missing ingredient was. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I can call it the sense of wonder, the magic that is perhaps always there, just under the surface of ordinary human experience but which, when we step out of childhood into adult life, we tend to lose.

The Rupert stories, like others by truly great children’s writers, for example Edith Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and P. L.Travers, point us towards this innocence, this open-ness, this acceptance of the power of the imagination; the kind of game or play which is a step into the unknown, which breaks down fear or inhibition. In her 1911 book The Secret Garden (which rather like the Rupert saga focuses on the reviving amid renewing aspects of nature) Frances Hodgson Burnett says that “Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing”. (By nothing I think she means everyday ordinary things.) And Pamela Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, in a 1975 book called About the Sleeping Beauty says that fairyland “intersects our mortal world at every point and at every second. The two of them together make one web woven fine”. So why I wonder do we try to separate and tear apart enchantment and everyday experience?

In classic children’s stories, magical adventures might arise at any moment from commonplace circumstances. For instance, Mary Poppins can casually pick up a plum painted on the pavement by a street artist and take a bite from it.

Similarly, and equally naturally, transformations abound in Rupert’s adventures. A shell or even a nut in Rupert’s hands can become the means of entering some enchanted world. And, again in the classic story telling tradition, Mary Tourtel, Alfred Bestall and Rupert’s present creators seem instinctively to understand the releasing, virtually magical, effects that interest in nature can have on child amid adult readers.

So, returning to my discovery of the key piece in my life, as a child I was an avid omnivorous reader - everything from nursery-rhymes, fairy-tales, high adventure, school stories, animal tales and myths and legends was grist to my literary mill. I am sure the same applies to many of you. Like a lot of children then, I was reading so-called teenage books, even adult novels, while still being able to enjoy stories of enchanted places and toys arid animals which magically came to full human - or superhuman - life. And of course Rupert was part of this mosaic of childhood reading, although he was not necessarily then a first favourite. I should explain that as a child, I knew him only from occasional looks at the Daily Express regular panels; I never owned or even saw a Rupert Annual, so Rupert and his associates were never in full colour but always in black and white for me then.

The real meaning and importance of the stories only became evident when, as an adult, I began to re-read, re-savour and absolutely relish Rupert’s aspirations and adventures. This happened when my daughter, Teresa, from the start of the 1960s became a fan of the Rupert Annuals and I read these with her.

I am sure that through being a parent, or having any other sustained relationship with young children, we become opened to to a new understanding of life and the amazing world in which we all live. Through my daughter’s discovery of Rupert I stumbled on that piece of the jig-saw which brought together so many jumbled parts of my life. An incomplete jig-saw, of course, can be meaningless - mere blobs of colour until some key part gives it shape, form and meaning. It may sound a sweeping claim, but Rupert was the key piece in that jig-saw. The stories, which suggest so much more than they literally say, let new air and light into my life and understanding. Suddenly childhood insights and discoveries had a fresh and deep relevance to adult experiences.

Joy in Rupert’s adventures led me to a rush of re-reading once familiar children’s stories, and to discovering books and delights that were previously unknown to me.

All this is perhaps symbolized by Rupert’s own experiences of magic sprouting from everyday things. In the well-known amid well trodden woods and meadows around his Nutwood home, he will suddenly encounter a rock, a tower or a waterfall that has sprung up like a mirage and which becomes the entrance to some astounding, fantastical world. A sea shell will open up into a vast and glittering cave. In a game of badminton, a shuttlecock will bring a nature sprite into Rupert’s ambience and, overall, there is the healing magic of the plants, the forests and everything about the natural world.

In every adventure, whether the setting is the glowing countryside in summer, snowy woods in winter, sparkling seascapes or vivid blue and white skies, there is a wonderful sense of freshness, of the ever-renewing power of nature. One can almost feel the dew on the grass, the sunlight dappling the shadows of the trees, the mist silvering the spiders’ webs, the rain washing every flower and leaf into almost luminous intensity. (Bestall’s nature-workers, the elves of autumn and the imps of spring, certainly work overtime behind the scenes of the stories to produce those appealing landscapes!)

Some of you may wonder why Rupert, rather than other fictional anthropomorphic animal heroes, has remained so strong a factor in my life and indeed been that key jig-saw piece. My childhood reading of other strip and panel characters gave me the joys of Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys in Rainbow, Teddy Tail of the Daily Mail, and the dog, penguin and rabbit trio of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred in the Daily Mirror. But these characters lacked Rupert’s “humanity” and the haunting air of enchantment that hangs over the stories from Mary Tourtel’s early adventures to those of the present day. Rupert has always lived in a more serious, three-dimensional world than other picture-strip animal heroes. Fictional bears in books, like Mary Plain and of course Winnie the Pooh, had great and lasting appeal but they seemed more like toys or pets come-to-life than Rupert who was a real “friend”. Also although the exploits of Pooh, in particular, had great charm they lacked the depth and fantastic sweep of our Nutwood hero’s activities.

This brings me to consideration of Rupert’s overall place in children’s literature. When I spoke here three years ago, Alan Murray suggested that Rupert and his chums had close affinities with Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. This is certainly true and, like Rupert, they embody constantly re-creative elements. The delights of the English countryside are as lovingly evoked as in Rupert’s adventures. There is too a similar sense of friendship and care between the main characters which reflects real life relationships of children playing in groups or gangs.

However, I am tempted to say that even The Wind in the Willows lacks the imaginative, fantastic elements which, in the Rupert context, are not only attractive but amazingly believable. (In saying this, though, I have to admit that The Wind in the Willows is pretty strong on fantasy when we consider that we read about and believe in the existence of a Toad who is an absolute speed-hog whose dangerous driving lands him in a dungeon designed for humans, from which he eventually escapes, successfully disguised as a washier woman. Toad would, I feel, have fitted well into one of Mary Tourtel’s way-out stories!)

In Nutwood Newsletter No.36 (Summer 2000) there is a most interesting article by Alan Murray and John Jones entitled Elves et al: Rupert‘s Elvish, Impish and Pippinish friends, in this Alan says, “the multifarious elves of Nutwood ... first awoke my imagination around 1960 and saved me from a childhood of relentlessly realistic fiction” - he goes on to say: “there is nothing wrong with .Just William, Biggies amid The Secret Seven but my imagination demanded, and still demands, more. ...“.

Our hunger for what Alan calls otherness has always been well served by Tourtel and Bestall who, it seems to me, are in a direct line of descent from the great traditional fairy story-spinners of the past. This unfortunately has rarely been recognised by critics and commentators outside of our Followers circle. Alan and John draw attention to the Rupert saga’s links with J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasies. One sees also connections with C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. particularly in Tourtel’s child-helpers and Bestall’s occasional instant transportations from one season to another, and in the goodness and dignity of many of the animal characters. In the last Christmas Special issue distributed with Nutwood Newsletter 34, Tourtel‘s Rupert in Drearnland is reprinted, amid Alan Murray (and the Followers’ Committee) and Roger Allen (of the Lewis Carroll Society) persuasively explore Rupert’s many connections with the Alice stories.

In fact, Mary Tourtel pinned her fairy-tale colours to the mast from the very beginning. Her first Rupert story in 1920, The Little Lost Bear, starts with Rupert and his parents and their woodland cottage. Here are immediate echoes of the archetypal story of The Three Bears Father Bear, Mother Bear and Baby Bear; only Goldilocks is missing. Rupert wanders off, gets into the hands of hostile forces and then is rescued and goes home again. With variations, this was Tourtel’s regular story-line in which the young son, the innocent abroad who seems least likely to succeed in any enterprise, always manages to do so. The fairy-tale thread on which she hung so many of her stories is aptly conveyed in the verse of another early episode Rupert Gets Captured, 1921):

• Come boys and girls, all you who like
  
• To read of Little Bear
  
• Begin today and you will find
  
• What he will do and dare.
  
• He goes out for a morning run
  
• Not meaning far to roam;
  
• How little does he know his fate
  
• Before he next sees home.
  

In this story Rupert is captured and imprisoned by the ogre Gruffenuff who eventually falls from his castle ramparts to his death rather like the giant falling from the cut-down beanstalk in Jack and the Beanstalk. Earlier the ogre has been fattening Rupert up in a cage so that he can be eaten: there are shades here of Hansel and Gretel and many other fairy tales.

Mary Tourtel’s first story, The Little Lost Bear, is well named. Rupert has been losing and finding himself ever since then at both ordinary and spiritual levels. As well as links with fairy-tale traditions, Tourtel established in this story an allegiance to the deeper worlds of Arthurian myth amid legend. This is expressed in the character of the Wise Old Goat who, recurring throughout the saga, is always distinguished, magical amid Merlin-esque.

In a 1925 story, Rupert and the Black Dwarf . echoes of Camelot are even stronger when Rupert amid Bill Badger seek that part of the forest where the Black Dwarf was metamorphosed into a twisted tree. Mary Tourtel writes (giving her verse full rein!):

• Thus was Merlin bound for ever by enchantment, so they say
  
• In an oak in Broceliande Forest in good King Arthur’s day.
  
• There are tales told by poets of nymphs and sprites who dwell
  
• Within the trees which children here ‘twould take too long to tell. (Sic!)
  

Fortunately she, Alfred Bestall and their successors have continued to tell these stories of enchamitinent amid discoveiy over all these eighty years of Rupert’s existence. They are the stuff of all our rustic, almost unconscious, roots. The unfailing inventiveness of Rupert’s creators in developing these fantasies and expressions of “otherness” within the safe and caring confines of Nutwood is to be marvelled at.

Several generations of children have now succumbed to their magic. Perhaps, like me, they too will find that Rupert is the key piece in the jig-saw of their lives which will be sometimes disturbing, frequently challenging but, one hopes, generally happy and rich in discovery

Nutwood Newsletter is the Journal of The Followers of Rupert who arrange regular meetings, talks and publications. Details of membership can be obtained from The Secretary, John Beck, 29 Mill Road, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 2RU