"Penelope Rose Parfitt ... do you know ...
I believe you've got hold of a magic umbrella?"
When we meet Penelope she has been given five whole pounds from her father to spend on anything. Her father is far away working to restore the family fortunes. Penelope lives with a governess - Miss Pink, a housekeeper - Mrs Prewitt, her husband the gardener William Prewitt and her reclusive Uncle Everard.
What will Penelope buy with her five pounds?
"I don't like dolls anymore and I've got a workbox and my old bicycle's quite good enough, so please may I have an umbrella. ... After all her father had said to get what she wanted, and this was it. Why should she get what someone else, and Miss Pink at that, thought she ought to want?"
"How could she explain what she felt about umbrellas to Miss Pink? How could she make her understand the wonderful privateness of being under your own little green tent roof, for it must be green. How the handle would be young own little tree with spreading branches, a palmy oasis in some desolate desert, so that whenever you put up your umbrella in the park or in the road you could suddenly be an explorer, secret and alone, under your own tropical sky. How the rain might beat, and you be snug beneath; or how once it was up, you might be clinging to a parachute journeying upward to the moon."
Illustration from the original edition
Have you read the picture book
Billy's Bucket? Just like Billy, Penelope visits a shop. I like to think that she went to
James Smith and Son the famous London Umbrella shop, but she and Miss Pink go to a department store called Hargroves. But just like Billy and his plan to find a bucket, Penelope knows she will find the most perfect umbrella even though to everyone else they all look pretty much the same.
"Penelope had never seen so many umbrellas in her life. They hung from the ceiling, sprouted from the ground, and lay about in heaps on the tables. There were wide open ones, like bright tropical birds in flight, bunches of flower-like ones half open in gay umbrella stands, dumpy, perky ones peeping everywhere, and at the back, rows of stiff sombre ones like people in church."
Penelope does find the perfect umbrella in a container of discarded sale items and she names him Joseph.
A few days later, just like a scene from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911), Penelope, having been allowed to go to Kensington Gardens by herself, discovers a locked gate. Her beautiful new umbrella has sailed over the high wall having been swept up in a sudden gust of wind.
"She ran along the wall looking for a gap. She must get there quick, perhaps he'd be dragging in the mud or prickled by thorns. Oh, Joseph, Joseph!"
Luckily Penelope does find a way in and yes, she does find her precious umbrella, but she also makes a wonderful discovery. There is a beautiful garden behind this wall and:
"Then she saw the most extraordinary thing. It was a caterpillar house, as she called them, with a long glass passage leading from the gate to the front door, and someone was living in the caterpillar. ... It was the most lovely place to live in she'd ever seen! Bright curtains were drawn back along the sides, cream-coloured with crimson and pale-green flowers on them, and on the floor there was a rich and lovely red carpet."
The owner of this beautiful home is Miss Pellay and she is the person who tells Penelope her umbrella is magic and she explains how the magic works.
"Next time someone's very upset or angry with you, you must look at them very, very hard, without wavering or moving your eyes off them, and while you do it you must twiddle the gold band till it spins from left to right like the clock goes. And then ... "
I loved the nostalgic feeling I had when reading this book but even more than that I loved that the magic from the umbrella helped each of the people in Penelope's life and the wonderful happy ending simply made my romantic heart sing.
How could anyone resist beautiful expressive writing like this:
"the air smelt of chrysanthemums and frost."
"when suddenly, leaning rakishly at one end of a stand she found him. His head was cocked to one side and out of his bright, beady parrot's eye she could have sworn he winked at her."
"the covering of the umbrella itself was a rich shiny silk, just the right shade of bluey-green .... (and) at the end of each little spoke was a tiny ivory acorn, delicately and wonderfully carved with miniature cup and fairy fruit."
"the wind had blown a rift in the clouds, a fitful sun was shining now and all the panes of glass gleamed and shimmered and cast lovely beams of sunset light on the books and flowers and carpet."
It is interesting in this time when everyone seems to want a 'new book' to be reminded it is important not to lose sight of beautiful stories like Caterpillar Hall written over seventy years ago.
I have long had a fascination with stories about umbrellas. When I was very young I read a short story in a school reader anthology
Travelling On. The story was called The Chinese Umbrella by Dorothy Rowe. Later I read the same story in my own favourite book - The Youngest Omnibus.
I talk about this here. And of course, all children my age were fascinated by the Mary Poppins umbrella.
Anne Barrett (1911-1986) wrote seven books for children, which in addition to Caterpillar Hall included Stolen Summer (1951), The Dark Island (1952), The Journey of Johnny Rew (1954), Songberd’s Grove (1957), which was a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal, Sheila Burton: Dental Assistant (1956) and Midway (1967).
I read these words in one review of Caterpillar Hall:
- beautiful descriptions of lovely things and places
- an engaging young heroine, with whom I would like to play
- enough time travel magic to be interesting, without being stressful
- a very happy ending
Jon Appleton arranged for Caterpillar Hall to be republished because Jan Mark, one of his favourite authors, claimed it was her own favourite book. Read more about the reissue of Caterpillar Hall here. Caterpillar Hall was first published in 1950. Read this post from Jon Appleton about Caterpillar Hall. Read more here. I was so lucky to meet Jon Appleton in London recently and he generously gifted me a copy of Caterpillar Hall.
Jon produces a quarterly magazine which explores treasured books and authors from the past. It is such a delightful publication. I have been reading my way through the first three issues on loan from a friend.
So, I’ve been gathering together essays, articles and profiles from decades past by and about those pioneering creators. I’ve put them together in a little zine which is published quarterly – it’s called the gab, short for ‘the golden age bulletin’. The pieces speak to each other, conjuring the spirit of a fabulous children’s books conference in the 1970s, for example. I’m writing new pieces, too, surveying books and interviewing legends whose stories might otherwise be lost. And readers are beginning to send in contributions, too. I think of The Gab as a kind of publisher agnostic Puffin Post. Jon Appleton
I have previously talked about Jon Appleton and his teenage relationship with the Australian author Robin Klein.
While they are not exactly companion books all through Caterpillar Hall I kept thinking of my own favourite childhood books. Of course these are mostly not the covers of my copies:
