Summary: The books we read as a child are central to the formation of our political instincts and outlook. Kieran Wilson takes us to the world of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge stories, arguing that they offer glimpses of Tory utopia to kindle the conservative imagination of young and old alike.
Why am I a Tory? Sometimes, on frosty winter evenings when the fire burns low and the ice lolls about pleasantly and sleepily at the bottom of my glass, I catch myself asking this question. And when I do, I find I am not asking myself why I support a certain political party or subscribe to a certain set of philosophical propositions. My question is far more psychologically probing than that, for, as far as I can tell, I was not argued into my Toryism, nor did I come by it by reading Burke, Johnson, Oakeshott or Scruton, as important as these luminaries have been in shaping the preexisting raw matter of my conservative impulses.
My Toryism is pre-ideological and instinctual, bubbling up in my boyhood from some font hidden deep in my character. It belongs, in its beginnings at least, to the realm of imagination, of affection, of aesthetic delight. It is not a system of ideas but an assortment of loves, love of place and past, of tradition and hierarchy, of beauty and right order. These things have I loved far longer than I have been able to give an account of my love for them.
Where, then, does my Toryism come from? Before my daughter was born, I would vainly ponder this question until the fire was cold and my glass was empty, and I would shuffle off to bed no nearer the answer than when I had first begun pondering. But since I became a father and assumed the ancient and venerable mantle of bedtime-story reader, I think I’m closer to solving the puzzle: my Toryism comes, at least in part, from the books I read as a child.
Yes, I am persuaded that The Wind in the Willows, with its tender evocation of the ordered beauty of nature, along with kids’ histories of Canada, with their watercolour sketches of Tecumseh, Brock, and Secord daring all for hearth and country, have done more make me a Tory than whole oceans of ink poured out in the cause of political theory ever could. In other words, I owe my Toryism, not to Edmund Burke, but to Mr Toad.
One of the great joys of fatherhood has been rediscovering some of these formative books with my daughter. They offer up fragmentary glimpses of the Tory ideal, partial visions, almost, of Tory utopia, a perfect world in which Tory principles, given free rein, beget imaginary societies in harmony with themselves and the world around them.
A series of children’s books that falls into this category is the Brambly Hedge series by the late Jill Barklem. The eight Brambly Hedge stories follow the lives and adventures of a community of hedgerow mice through the turnings of the seasons and the adventures and celebrations that punctuate their lives. These are not merely stories to be read; they are whole imaginative worlds to lose oneself in. The pastel pageantry of her rich watercolour illustrations – the detailed cross-sections of the mice’s homes are my favourite – earns Barklem a place in the foremost rank of children’s illustrators alongside E.H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter. My pen cannot hope to do these illustrations justice; the reader will just have to discover them for herself.
The world of Brambly Hedge is confessedly utopian. As Barklem writes in her introduction to the omnibus edition, “Brambly Hedge is my ideal world,” whose inhabitants belong to “a loving and caring society.” I submit that Brambly Hedge is in fact a Tory utopia, an ideal embodiment of Tory principles in an imagined setting. I propose in what follows to attempt a sort of anthropological (musological?) study of this utopia, to emphasise some of the main Tory themes in Barklem’s stories and to commend them to a budding generation of Tory readers – and their parents to boot. What follows is not a manifesto, nor yet a practical guide to building one’s own Tory utopia, but a simple reflection on a series of stories that I have come to love and that have stirred my imagination even at the decrepit age of thirty.
First, a word in defence of utopia. The Tory is nothing if not a practical person, and descriptions of ideal worlds however charming might not at first commend themselves to her consideration. A utopia is famously both a good place (eu-topia) and no place at all (ou-topia). Precisely because a utopia has no real existence, it is a useful venue for the human mind to play as it will, to propose theories and pursue them to their logical conclusions, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it might be.
Ideal worlds are instructive not merely as thought experiments, but as objects for the will to strive for. They form our tastes, indeed our innermost desires, as much as they provide a sandbox for the intellect to sport about in. We see the good of the utopian vision before our mind’s eye and we yearn for it. And even if we acknowledge the impossibility of attaining our ideal world, we may still be content that we have contributed something towards recreating an imperfect simulacrum of it in the imperfect world in which we find ourselves. It is in this spirit, then, that I invite you to join me in the world of Brambly Hedge.
Brambly Hedge is a community at peace with itself and at peace with its past. Countless generations of mice have lived in the cottages of the hedgerow that runs along the banks of the millstream, and their collective wisdom has been treasured up in traditional customs and rituals that each generation passes on to the next.
The mice are comfortable in their environment, and its natural rhythms give shape to their understanding of the passage of time. The cycle of seedtime and harvest, midsummer and midwinter, intertwines with the patterns of birth and marriage, youth and maturity (there is no death in this Arcadia) of the mice’s lives. Theirs is a ritual year, marked by festivals during which their communal memory is expressed and reinforced in song and story. The mice even have a kind of natural religion complete with grace at meals, wedding ceremonies, and quasi-baptismal liturgies. These rites are solemnised by the Old Vole, who acts as a kind of parish priest, though whether it is his oldness or his being a vole that especially qualifies him for the cure of souls is never quite made clear.
Mice at harvest.
The effect of the mice’s reverence for the past and their common ritual life is an organic social harmony. Each mouse knows herself to be part of a whole that, while deeply rooted in place, transcends the present moment to embrace the dead, the living, and the unborn. Within this whole, its parts – the individuals and families of Brambly Hedge – retain their integrity in their distinctive roles, from Lord and Lady Woodmouse, who superintend the affairs of the mice from their ancestral fastness, to Basil, the perpetually sozzled keeper of the hedgerow cellars, to the children who help their parents with their daily tasks.
The politics of Brambly Hedge reflect this harmony. Brambly Hedge is governed, loosely speaking, with benevolent hereditary paternalism by a duumvirate of mice, Lord Woodmouse and his father-in-law Mr Apple, the warden of the Store Stump. They preside over the affairs of the hedgerow, convene the mice, and coordinate their collective action, but they also take their share in the common labour. The doors of Lord Woodmouse’s hereditary seat, the Old Oak Palace, are flung wide to his subjects, and his kitchen and halls are ever ready to accommodate their merrymaking. If there is a hierarchy among the mice, it is a hierarchy without hubris.
The Old Oak Palace, the ancestral seat of Lord Woodmouse and the venue for the mice’s annual Midwinter celebration.
This is not noblesse oblige, for that would imply an extrinsic relationship between a distinct class of commons and an elite who condescends to do them favours. There is no such distinction between the leaders of Brambly Hedge and the community they lead; their relation is as natural and unmediated as the relation of head to body. Barklem paints, in essence, the perfect picture of an idealised pre- or early-modern village, with its close collaboration between the lettered and hereditary leadership and the ordinary householders. Readers of Eamon Duffy’s sensitive descriptions of village life in Tudor England will see more than a little of Morebath in Brambly Hedge.
The economy of Brambly Hedge embodies principles that, while they would curl the toes and upset the digestion of the libertarian right, exemplify the Tory ideal of a harmonious relation between the parts of the community and the whole. Food, gathered by the common efforts of the mice, is deposited in the Store Stump to be distributed, under the kindly eye of old Mr Apple, to each family without payment to furnish their tables. The private kitchens of Brambly Hedge supply in turn the round of feasts and festivals that lend rhythm and order to the hedgerow’s common life. Housing, too, is provided from the community’s shared stock: cottages left empty by the passing of one generation are given as needed to newly-formed families.
The interior of the Store Stump, from which the hedgerow kitchens are supplied.
In the economy of Brambly Hedge, there is an organic and reciprocal relationship between the private lives of households and the public life of the community as a whole. The community supplies the needs and respects the integrity of the household, and the household in turn acknowledges its obligations to and enriches the life of the community.
What the libertarian rightist might condemn as rank rodent dirigisme is anything but. The economy of Brambly Hedge is in no sense directed by an abstract “state” because no such thing as a state could possibly exist in the narrow sphere of the hedgerow’s common life. Indeed, the binary of a state- versus a market-directed economy simply breaks down: if the community is too small for anything like a state to exist, it is also too tight-knit to allow the needs of its members to be met or not according to the mere whims of supply and demand. Free from the cold indifference of the market and the cack-handed concern of the state, the economy of Brambly Hedge is just that, the nomos of the oikos, the law of the household, the practical expression of shared affection and common interest in a hyper-local setting.
It is perhaps this aspect of Brambly Hedge that seems to us most fantastical, not least because it depends upon a social cohesion that no longer exists in Canada. Such economies may still limp along in the very smallest towns, and can perhaps still be found, like huddled groups of dispossessed noble emigres, in little enclaves in cities. But how could such an arrangement, which depends on friendship and trust between a handful of households, be implemented in a country of 40 million people? Here, again, the value of utopia is in offering us, not a model to be replicated, but an ideal to strive for.
The economic system of Brambly Hedge springs naturally from the community’s shared identity, its sense of itself as a community, and it is sustained by the bonds of neighbourly love. We could do worse in cultivating this Tory ideal than by investing our time and treasure in the “little platoons” (to pinch a phrase from Burke) – our churches, clubs, Legion and Oddfellows halls – that approximate the affectionate reciprocity of Brambly Hedge in the midst of the unfeeling anonymity that otherwise characterises our collective life. More than this, we might advocate – and vote for politicians who advocate – for the renewal of our common national identity against the centrifugal forces of left and right that seek to undermine it.
I am conscious that the picture I have painted of the utopian vision of Brambly Hedge may seem rather more sterile and static than the stories themselves. I own my limitations, and I can recommend only one way to supply the defects of my description: read the stories for yourselves and, more importantly if you wish to raise up a new generation of Tories, read them to your little ones. You will be glad you did, and your Tory imagination will thank you for it.
Images in this article are taken from The Complete Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem (London: HarperCollins, 2011) and are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review under section 29.1 of the Copyright Act.