THE recent release of the film Arriettyby Studio Ghibli is a reminder of writer Mary Norton's genius – even for names. The minute eponymous heroine is the daughter of Pod and Homily, members of a family of Borrowers which includes Aunt Lupy and Uncle Hendreary along with branches such as the Overmantels and the Harpsichords and poor Eggletina whose mysterious fate is used as a caution to dampen Arrietty's curiousity.
The restless child is aware that there is a world beyond her precarious life, balanced as it is on the availability of human detritus (the Overmantels had to move once the morning-room in their house was no longer used for breakfast). Arrietty’s search, her daring and its consequences for all the Borrowers provide the plots and the almost palpable tension (well, if you’re anything from five- to 14-years-old!) of a sequence of five novels.
Even my interview with Mary Norton as she was writing her last book in 1974 did not answer the question of who could not only invent such a community with all its little tendrils into other landscapes, but also create such magic from it? We met at her Queen Anne house near Rosscarbery where she admitted to uncertainty about the value of her own work, and to depending on that vital 200 words a day so that there was never a blank page in the typewriter. But now, nearly 20 years after her death in England, I wondered not only about the delicate splendour of her gifts but about the grouping in one small region of west Cork of Norton and her friend Erik Haugaard and his family.
It was an invitation to the opening of an exhibition of the paintings of Damaris Lysaght at Haugaard’s Studio, The Quay, Ballydehob which brought them both to the forefront of my mind. The studio must be the old storehouse, seen beyond the railway bridge and at the extremity of the village quay. This is the property transformed by Erik Christian Haugaard and his wife the American writer Myrna Seld when they settled there in the mid 1970s.
Here was another interview, retrieved to remind me of Erik's career as a writer of Danish birth, American education, Canadian Air Force service in the second World War and a succession of awards for his novels written with a tough respect for young adults from the 1960s to his death in 2009. He never lost his Viking features; to see him on a summer evening at the West Cork Chamber Music festival as he looked westward over the sea from the terraces of Bantry House was to think of his first novel Hakon of Rogen's Saga, to imagine the tug of a sail and the tilt of a board under his feet. Among his many stories for young readers the most critically acclaimed was The Little Fishes(1967) but the work for which he may be most widely praised and remembered is his vast and dedicated translation of the work of Hans Christian Andersen.
Meeting by accident at The Morris Arms in Leap, the Haugaards and Mary Norton became good friends. Always self-deprecating, she introduced herself as “a children’s writer” as if recognition was unexpected. But Erik’s son Marco, now of the department of political science and sociology at NUI Galway, had by then read all her books in Danish; she was already a presence on the shelves at The Old Store in Ballydehob. With the writer Wolf Mankowitz living at Ahakista, this little quartet still seems an extraordinary confluence of literary genius penned in the headlands of Roaring Water Bay. Before she and her second husband Lionel Bonsey moved to the Old Rectory at Kilcoe, Norton lived in a house as quaint as anything in her own novels, deep in a quarry glen and hidden by mounds of slate. Visiting them there I was introduced to a lifestyle of heroic drinking; gin and game pie were always on the menu, offered enthusiastically by Lionel but more tentatively (and wisely, although I can vouch for the game pie) by Mary. Perhaps she was always tentative; extremely short-sighted from her childhood in Leighton Buzzard she never quite saw the bigger picture, always instead the precise detail of what was small and unobserved.
From this particular she chiselled out those little people, whose furtive and alarm-ridden environment must have been influenced also by the sudden war-time destruction of her 12-year long life in a Portuguese estate with her first husband and their children. It is no surprise to find that her short-sightedness was inherited by her son, the late Robert Norton, a typographer whose font designs were adapted for Microsoft type systems and whose last venture was the publication of small editions of classic material under the imprint Parsimony Press.
Read with an adult eye, her last book, Are All the Giants Dead?(1975) sharpens the oblique social commentary informing all Mary Norton's work. She noticed the decline of the old properties of the upper-middle classes and gentry which in her childhood had been stuffed with grandfather clocks and harpsichords and ghost-stories. She felt that world was ending, her books were its elegy. Mary Norton died in England in 1992, but not before Jack –of-the-Beanstalk complains, in Are All the Giants Dead?of too many kings, all with a single beautiful daughter and not enough princes to go round. The surprises, wit and amiable ironies of this marvellous fable do not disguise the suspicion that, by 1975, the creator of The Borrowerswas just a little bit tired of fairytale as a genre, even though she had contributed such a brilliantly original strand to it herself.