(++++) THE BEAUTIES AND THE CHARM

A Visit to Brambly Hedge: The Making of the World within the Hedgerow. By Jill Barklem. HarperCollins. $22.99. 

     Even readers who consider themselves thoroughly familiar with the works of Jill Barklem (1951-2017) and believe themselves experts in the world of Brambly Hedge that she created – and around which she built eight books from 1980 to 1994 – will find themselves drawn to A Visit to Brambly Hedge, because this wonderful combination of illustrations, background material, narrative and explanatory elements brings Barklem’s creativity to life with as much sensitivity as she herself brought to the imagined world of mice and other Brambly Hedge residents. 

     A great place to start here is toward the back of the book, with the chapter “How Brambly Hedge Began” and its followup, “What Happened Next.” Here readers not only receive insight into Barklem as a person, where she grew up, what her interests were, and how she came to conceptualize the Brambly Hedge world, but also find out something of the course of history where her books were concerned: “Although the first four books had been seen as suitable for children of four up, it quickly became apparent that teenagers and adults as well as small children appreciated and responded to Jill’s work.” This kind of crossover appeal is very rare, and having learned of it – and likely not being surprised by it now that Barklem’s work is so well-known – readers can go from the latter part of A Visit to Brambly Hedge to the earlier pages, and explore for themselves the elements that made Barklem’s stories so appealing to so many people. 

     A Visit to Brambly Hedge was originally published in 2000 as a 20^th-anniversary book (the first four Brambly Hedge books appeared in 1980). The new edition is very much welcome, especially in light of all the hustle and bustle and frantic scuttling-about with which life seems to be filled nowadays. The skittering nature of life was not really much different when Barklem created her Brambly Hedge series, but things seem different when seen through the admittedly somewhat rosy lens of nostalgia. And that was part of Barklem’s point even in the early days of her creativity: she knew the realities of Epping Forest, understood the differences between rural England and London – to which she traveled daily “in an overcrowded, rush-hour train” – and it was precisely the difference between mundane, fast-paced urban existence and the quietude of a spreading forest that led her to conceptualize and eventually create and flesh out the imaginary mice of Brambly Hedge and their homespun everyday adventures. 

     A Visit to Brambly Hedge gives “personality portraits” of many of Barklem’s characters, an inside look (through cutaways) at the lovely little homes in which they live, and some absolutely wonderful pages showcasing Barklem’s thought processes, such as her elaborate sketches and explanations of how a real-world mill works, which became the basis of the flour mill in Brambly Hedge. And again and again, A Visit to Brambly Hedge shows how determined Barklem was to keep the lives of the mice pleasant, largely uncomplaining, certainly not threatened by any sort of danger in any significant way – for instance, Dusty the miller does hard, tiring work, “but Dusty doesn’t mind because he knows that the mill provides much of what the mice need to survive the long winter months.” It is this sense of community spirit, of dedication to something beyond one’s own personal interests, that drives the Brambly Hedge stories and gives them the pleasant gloss of fairy-tale nostalgia that permeates them. At the same time, the stories possess a pseudo-realistic feel, thanks to Barklem’s genuine understanding of mouse anatomy (she carefully studied her own pet mouse, Daisy) and her determination to display her “view of the world as a place that can, and should be, friendly, loving and self-sustaining.” Of course that is a naïve worldview – perhaps even more so today than in Barklem’s lifetime – but A Visit to Brambly Hedge makes it inescapably clear that when pneumonia claimed Barklem at the age of 66, the real world lost access to an impossible-but-almost-real world in which the values of trust, community, mutual support, and the joys of simple pleasures insulate the inhabitants against the excesses of modern life. This is why the Brambly Hedge stories continue to speak (gently) to children today – and to adults who have not thoroughly lost their ability to connect with Barklem’s gently magical interpretation of quotidian values and the small pleasures of simply existing within a caring and supportive community.