Souvenirs

An interest in stories for children might seem a strange thing for adults. Many I know were first motivated by nostalgia, having read the stories as children themselves, and heard them serialised on the radio. Most members enjoy walking in the areas depicted in the books, some organised and some private. None of this was true for me since I hardly encountered Saville's books as a child despite being a prolific reader. My wife had read the early Lone Pines and introduced me to Rye and Shropshire and we collected a few others in those bookshop-tramping days. It was on the Suffolk coast, at Southwold, that we came across a poster advertising a Malcolm Saville Society weekend and realised that there are other collectors out there. We joined, and I wrote my first piece (1998) on Blakeney (which we knew well, combined with Two Fair Plaits set in London. I was 50 years old that year.


I studied a range of literature for children and young people, especially from 1930 onwards. I was in particular interested in the social history of the period, which underpins all of my writing. I was also a teacher and teacher trainer, and so committed to encourage children to become readers. I am reminded of this exchange involving Richard Adams, who wrote Watership Down.:

Desert Island Disks 1977 Richard Adams, Roy Plomley

RP: “Now, you’ve called it a children’s adventure story.”

RA: “I haven’t. There’s no such thing as a children’s story or a children’s book. I entirely agree with the great C. S. Lewis, who said a book not worth reading when you’re 60 is not worth reading when you’re 6. The point about Watership Down was that it was meant to exemplify my own ideas in treating the child reader as a potential adult. The book was not written with children in mind. It was written as a novel. But I knew that it was for my little girls, primarily it was written for their pleasure, and I deliberately incorporated demanding and difficult passages in it, which were intended to let the child reader get his teeth into something solid, and give him as it were a kind of dummy run over the kind of greater literature that he would encounter later on when he came to grips with some of the great novels of the world. And it’s very nice to find that this little idea of mine appears to have found favour not only with my own children but millions, literally millions of children all over the world.

Chronology of the Malcolm Saville Society and my involvement.

Easter Gathering were always difficult to fit in with work and foreign travel. Later on Jean's illness made attendance impossible. 

1994 preliminary meeting.
1995 items by Mark OH, Stephen Handy. NB appreciation of Steven Handy in 2004 by David Cook, and MOH on Richard Walker in 2004. Also item in 20th Anniversary Souvenir.
1996 Ludlow Gathering.
1997 Suffolk - Southwold Gathering.

1998 Rye.  The first Gathering Jean and I attended. It was in the Mermaid Inn, a hotel we knew quite well. I wrote my first article as a result of appeals for contributions for Acksherley. I don't have a 1999 Souvenir (Shropshire), to hand. . 2000 was in Whitby and I am likely to have remembered a trip on the steam railway. But we knew the area well, and the railway and perhaps decided that we knew it all. In that year I was breaking in a new and challenging job in Worcester University. Looking at the Souvenir now I see an excellent piece by Patrick Tubby on Wharram Percy. I was to write my own article on it a decade later

1999 Long Mynd
2000 Whitby
2001 Shropshire
2002 Ely
I am looking first through Souvenirs and see my first contribution was to the 2002 Ely Souvenir. It was I think the fact that we were in Ely persuaded me to read The Luck of Sallowby, a book i didn't know, and looked out a few topographical books which included the David and Charles book The Great Ouse about the canalisation of the river and other water channels down to Denver. Looking through the programme, I would today appreciate the visit to the Lucy Boston house of the Greene Howe books. The hotel was traditional and it appears that group meetings were in The Maltings. After the Denver trip, we stopped in Wood Hall which became Sallowby Manor in the book. We were welcomed by the owner and gave him a paperback copy of the book. Drinks at The Royal Standard took us to the location of the tearoom. Next day on the way home we called in at the Streatham Pumping Engine.

The Souvenir carried an excellent article by Peter Oates who had made The Luck of Sallowby his personal study. He described in great detail the flood of 1947. He pointed out connections with Dorothy Sayers' story The Nine Tailors about the peal of bells and found the source of one of the book illustrations. The same Souvenir has a piece which deserves reprinting by Jeremy Saville on Redshanks Warning. In brief, it tells of Saville family holidays in 1946-7 to East Runton near Sheringham where they stayed over the Post Office, 'in digs' as it were.

2003 Rye
2004 Shrewsbury
My piece They Changed Trains about the London to Shrewsbury rail route and the Through the Window book on it..

2005 Exeter
My item: Flying Saucers and Military Secrecy. This seems a fanciful connection until we read about Jon referring to a book by Adamski and Leslie with a footnote to a book by Leonard G Cramp called Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer (1954). UFOs were all the rage in the 1950s with citings galore. The editor of a local paper near us claimed to have talked to Venusians in Warminster, Wiltshire and writing The Warminster Mystery (he was quick replaced). That the Salisbury Plain was a pilgrimage centre for UFO spotters was mostly to do with army flares and RAF Harriers which could fly when stationary with searchlights. I had a sceptical interest in UFOs and had Adamsky's UFO spotting book from the early 1950s. I would have bought Cramp's book from the internet, and it must be still around though I haven't seen it for a decade. Saville's story calls the flying saucer a military secret and not an invasion of non-British visitors. I also discussed the works of Arthur C Clarke, including his early science fiction, and the ridiculous science fantasy books of W E Johns.

2006 Whitby. No item.
2007 Sussex The Wonderful Green Electric Trains from Victoria. The Brighton line was electrified in the 1930s and Saville would have joined the London train in Barcombe. He used this trip in The Fourth Key.
2008 Church Stretton
Item: Parents in Difficulties. A Church Stretton venue demanded an article on the early Lone Pine books. I looked at the story-lines from the perspectives of the parents. Father had gone to war, mother was coping alone in a strange place, a house without running water. Jasper Stirling was a widower with a teenage daughter and some mental health issues, and Uncle Micah seemed to have religious paranoia more suited to Cold Comfort Farm, but fortunately an understanding wife.

Thus it seems my first decade with the MS Society included four Souvenir items.
2009 Street, Somerset
I wrote for this on Spirit of the Place: Writing about England but wasn't able to attend. I hope I can be pardoned for forgetting what I wrote and am pleased to reread it now. We tend to use 'spirit of place' a little too much, and I note that my take on it was anything but romantic. We were in the middle of war, invasion was a fear on everyone's minds. By 1944-5 reconstruction was being dreamed of and children, as the new generation, we to be guardians of conservation. Saville's stories, and scrapbooks exhorted children not to allow the good things to be swept away, the animal habitats, the wild flowers, the farms. Those children are now pensioners and some of us at least have done our best to leave the place as good as possible for our grandchildren. I surveyed Saville's conservationist message, ending with words I am still happy with: "the spirit of place is more about people - how people relate to each other, treat each other and help each other". Personally I have a Scottish Highlander paternal grandmother, a Protestant grandfather of Scottish ancestry from Dublin, a maternal grandfather who seemed English but scratch deeper and you find Irish navvy ancestors, so his family were scattered among the coalmines of Nottingham. The spirit of England is multicultural and diverse, now added to by Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi families, and postwar Europeans like Poles and Italians. Saville's England is monocultural, romanticised, populated by farm labourers and such who have become fewer across my lifetime.

2010 Suffolk Coast.
I continued this thought the following year with Good People Working Together: the Lesson of Sea Witch Comes Home. This Southwold book is an oddity and I remember when first reading it, saying to my wife Jean "Saville didn't write this". I was wrong of course, as I didn't know his other series, but the book stands out from other Long Pine books as different. Only David appears in a story in which relationships are always fractured and arguments prevent proper communication which would have alerted to danger. On the positive side we see adults resisting criminality offering the book a positive end in spite of the maritime disaster.

2011 Rye. No item. Note Recollections of 1995 MOH etc p.34-42

2012 Shrewsbury.
Clunton and Clunbury, Clungenford and Clun are the quietest places under the sun makes Ida Gandy our guide through her book An Idler through the Shropshire Borders telling her story of being a doctor's wife in the area bringing up her young family in the 1930s, describing villages, railways and the local people. There are many Saville parallels.

2013 Richmond
For this Yorkshire Gathering, I visited Shap on the way home from Scotland, staying in the Shap Wells Hotel overnight and driving around next day. I had prepared for this by spending weeks with OS maps and trying to trace indications in the book Strangers at Snowfell which tells of a Professor working in a lonely village with spies after his secret formula, his son attempting to check his safety. The result of this was a map of Shap I produced showing the location of the farmhouse in which Prof Thornton stayed at Oddendale, on the long distance path. I put all this together in Shap - Cold War and Blizzards

2014, 20th anniversary of Society. Shropshire (Shrewsbury).
My item on Cwm Head House and the Tyleys was an afterthought after I met Julia one of the Tyley's daughters who gave me a copy for the society of the Cwn Head House details when the family left.. The price then was £8450.00. The main item I planned was Shropshire versus Hitler, a bringing together of some second world war details. Of course there were tanks and the Home Guard, but I detailed the ammunition dumps along the old Shropshire and Montgomery Light Railway and nearby the radio transmitter at Criggion.

2015 Devon (Torquay).
My item Dartmoor: Malcolm Saville, D F Bruce and M E Atkinson brought together three books, Saucers Over the Moor, The School on the Moor, and The House on the Moor. The first and third featured the same house, which we know as Kings Holt. I also have a description of the Princeton Railway. The Saville book Come to Devon also has a description of the history and topology of Dartmoor,

2016 Whitby
Saville and the Spirit of the North York Moors focused on place identifications. Spaunton and Ravenswyke come from near Kirkbymoorside 25 miles away. Suggestions are made about where Rosemary Court might have been in the yards and alleys. On Robin Hood's Bay, a link is made to Leo Walmsley whose father painted there and who himself wrote books about the village, calling it Bramblewick. The spy/painter who painted in RHB is called Mr Bramble at the end of the book when he is arrested, a detail not otherwise explainable. A section brought together details about the Lone Pine book Mystery Mine

2017 Brighton
This item covered two aspects of the story The Long Passage referring to the passage between the magnificent Pavilion and the Concert Hall. The first is the identification of Stunnngton with real life Storrington and Sullington, of which the real Sullington Manor Farm appears in the story. The second section concerns the Polish musicians who may hay influenced Saville's creative depiction of Alex Renislau. Stanislas Niedzielski (1905-75) was an itinerant pianist-performer who transported his grand piano, duly flatpacked in a trailer behind his car. He even took it over the channel via the Lymphne Air Ferry, which gave me my first clue to him You can hear him play on the internet. Witold Roman Lutoslawski (1913-94) was a tuneful composer in the 1950s until Stalin's death in 1953 but an avant garde thereafter, at which point as a teenager I fell in love with is music. Sir Andrezej Panufnik (1914-91) escaped his Polish communist minders to flee from Switzerland to Britain in 1954 eerily similarly to Renislau's escape a few year's earlier. These three offer a composite of where Renislau came from in the war, and of what he might have become.

2018 Shropshire.
Bearing in mind Mr Morton was a fighter pilot and Spitfire pilot, this item hopes to celebrate 80 years of Spitfire production and flying, starting in 1938 and makes a suggestion, based on historical precedents, of what a father-of-three in his 30s might have been doing flying a Spit when the average age of Spitfire pilots was around 20 years old.