Gristwood - The Story of Beatrix Potter

The Story of

Beatrix Potter

Beatrixs garden at Hill Top with a spade and rhubarb pots Peter Rabbit might recognise.

Benjamin and Peter Rabbit in front of Hill Top, from a greetings card by Beatrix Potter.

Sarah Gristwood

Beatrix Potter in 1936 with her two Pekingese, Chuleh and Tzusee.

A short, round little lady with a smiling rosy face and small bright blue twinkling eyes. I sensed great warmth but at the same time great reserve, even shyness. That is how a visitor to the village of Near Sawrey, in the Lake District, described Beatrix Potter in the later years of her life. The visitor was Ulla Hyde Parker, whose new-married husband was related to Beatrixs family, and so to Ulla this was not just the creator of Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin, but also Cousin Beatie.

She wore a thick brown tweed skirt of natural colour and a heavy knitted jersey, strong leather shoes and one could just glimpse the hand-knitted woollen stocking beneath her long, somewhat full skirt, Ulla recalled. A small black straw hat was held in place by a piece of elastic under the chin, just like a child would wear. Later in the day, the straw hat was replaced by a white muslin mob cap rheumatic fever in her girlhood had left Beatrix with a small bald patch. Another who visited in these years, the artist Josefina de Vasconcellos, was startled to find her wearing on her head a knitted tea cosy.

Beatrix and Ulla became friends, although she did not invite friendships She was always kind but closed up, and what lay behind other peoples exteriors did not seem to interest her. But one day, Cousin Beatie said: Come, I have something to show you, something very precious to me. The two walked through the heavy summers dew, through the meadow which lies below Castle Cottage, the house where Beatrix and her husband William Heelis spent all of their married life. Through the gate featured in The Tale of Tom Kitten, and up the narrow path between the fragrant flower beds to the door of the house at Hill Top farm.

We reached the front door, Ulla recalled, and as she placed the key in its lock she said, It is in here I go to be quiet and still with myself. I looked into the old front-room-cum-kitchen, completely furnished, every tiny item in its place. This is me, or words to that effect, she added, the deepest me, the part one has to be alone with. So you see, when Cousin Willie asked me to marry him I said yes, but I also said we cannot live here at Hill Top. We will live at Castle Cottage, as I must leave everything here as it is. So after I married I just locked the door and left.

The entrance hall at Hill Top doubles as a kitchen, with a stone-flagged floor and kitchen range identical to the one illustrated in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers . Paper covers the ceiling as well as the walls, and a collection of horse-brasses hangs above the fireplace.

From their earliest years Beatrix and her brother Bertram made collections of natural objects.

As Ulla walked in through the hall and into the front parlour the old house looked as if someone still lived there, except that the dust lay like a fine grey veil over everything. Cobwebs hung in the corners, above the faded floral carpet, the little upholstered chairs covered in faded flowered chintz. The cobwebs and the dust are now long gone, with the house in the care of the National Trust. Just seventy years since it first opened to the public, Hill Top is a place of pilgrimage for many thousands of visitors today. But everything else in Beatrixs sanctuary remains just as she wanted it.

Whenever I opened drawers and chests they were packed with wonderful things. One drawer had the most lovely old dolls in it, Ulla recalled. When World War II came, Beatrix let Ulla and her family stay at Hill Top, when Ullas husband need peace and quiet after a dreadful injury. Beatrix told them they were the first people to sleep in Tom Kittens house since she herself had left.

In the last summer of Beatrixs life, she spent hours arranging her treasures here the china (I am conceited about arranging china), the quilts, the curios. A square piano and the family Bible, her grandmothers warming pan, and a nit comb made for the dolls. Tiny bronze figures of characters from her books, pieces of her own embroidery, and the old oak furniture she used to collect from sales around the area. A dolls house with the very plaster plates of food which Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca stole in The Tale of Two Bad Mice; and a huge seventeenth-century oil painting of Noah and the flood. The National Trust staff found dozens of little notes stuck on the back of Beatrixs treasures, detailing how she came by each item, and often the price that she had paid.

The collection of curios Beatrix cherished at Hill Top range from bead bags to bronze figures of the characters she created. I have taken much pleasure in collecting some oddments, she wrote modestly.

The view from the New Room at Hill Top, where Beatrix did her writing.

Some of the things are valuable in themselves, some only because her work her fame has made them so. Beatrix once expressed her puzzlement that more people did not love and value the simple ordinary old things of everyday life. It is extraordinary how little people value old things if they are of little intrinsic value.

In the New Room, Beatrix wrote surrounded by great landscapes created by her painter brother Bertram. She collected old oak furniture like this early eighteenth century bureau.

House leeks cling to the roofs and ledges at Hill Top.

But if this is the home of an artist and, on old oak furniture, an expert it is also the secret treasure trove of (as Beatrix described herself once) a child who never grew up. Hill Top, Beatrix wrote, was a funny old house, that would amuse children very much. Thick walls, with rats nests and a childs clay marbles hidden in the gap between the two faces of stone. I never saw such a place for hide & seek.

She described Hill Top in an unpublished but amazingly detailed piece intended for the volume