The Juniper Tree Read online

  THE JUNIPER TREE

  Barbara Comyns

  Barbara Comyns was born in 1909 and brought up in rural Warwickshire where she began writing and illustrating stories at the age of ten. She was one of six children. Her novel Sisters by a River records her childhood. Her first painful marriage broke down in 1935. Ten years later she married Richard Comyns Carr. Then began her flow of idiosyncratic novels, described as ‘pictures painted on glass’. She died in 1992.

  Margaret Drabble, born in 1939, read English at Cambridge. She has published seventeen novels, most recently The Sea Lady (2006), biographies of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995) and a memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet (2009). She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

  The Juniper Tree

  The Juniper Tree

  Barbara Comyns

  FOREWORD BY MARGARET DRABBLE

  CAPUCHIN CLASSICS

  LONDON

  The Juniper Tree

  © by Barbara Comyns 1985

  First published in 1985

  This edition published by Capuchin Classics 2011

  Reprinted 2012

  Capuchin Classics

  128 Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH

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  Châtelaine of Capuchin Classics: Emma Howard

  ISBN: 978 1 907429 19 4

  eISBN: 978 1 907429 57 6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

  ‘My mother she killed me,

  My father he ate me,

  My sister, little Marlinchen,

  Gathered together my bones,

  Tied them in a silken handkerchief,

  Laid them beneath the juniper tree,

  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird I am.’

  FOREWORD

  The novels of Barbara Comyns are strange and unsettling, and her career was unorthodox. She was never a mainstream writer, though her fiction has in recent years been described as a foreshadowing of the Magic Realism that became fashionable in England in the 1970s and 1980s, long after she first began to publish. The Juniper Tree, which appeared in 1985, is one of her most successful, confident and curious productions. It has the clear pure narrative quality of a fable, but also shows a humanity and maturity not always evident in her earlier stories. It is an outstanding achievement by a woman in her late seventies, written after a mysterious silence of eighteen years.

  Barbara Comyns Carr, née Bayley, (1907–1992) took her penname from her second husband, a Foreign Office employee whom she married in 1945. Her first publication was a memoir, Sisters by a River (1947), which was garnered from a collection of sketches and essays written in somewhat faux-naif Daisy Ashford style spelling and describes her highly eccentric childhood in a decaying old house in rural Warwickshire with a deaf mother, a demanding grandmother, and a hard-drinking father. She was the fourth of six children in a downwardly mobile middle class family, and the misfortunes of the poverty-stricken genteel, taking refuge in artistic Bohemia and in unskilled modelling or housekeeping jobs, provided one of her staple themes. Her first novel,Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950), a lively account of her reckless and feckless first marriage to an unsuccessful artist, was followed by several more titles, including her best-known, The Vet’s Daughter (1959), which features a scene of levitation.

  Her second husband’s close association with Kim Philby, exposed as one of the Cambridge spies in the early sixties, led to the couple’s flight to Spain where they lived in semi-exile for nearly twenty years. It was on their return to England, and in particular to a home in Richmond, that Comyns was moved to write The Juniper Tree, inspired in part by a very strong sense of the spirit of place, and perhaps encouraged by the reprinting of some of her early work by Virago Press. This powerful contemporary fable is based on a well known German fairy story collected by the brothers Grimm, which she herself described as ‘too macabre for adult reading’. It has all the power of the original, in which a young wife longs for a child ‘as red as blood and as white as snow’ but dies at his birth, leaving him to fall to the care of a stepmother who prefers, in the time-honoured way, the interests of her own daughter Marlene. She murders the boy and feeds his flesh in a stew to his unwitting father, but little Marlene his half-sister gathers his bones and buries them under the juniper tree, wrapped in a silken scarf. The secret is betrayed by a bird which flies out of the tree, singing

  My mother she killed me

  My father, he ate me

  My sister little Marlinchen

  Gathered together my bones

  Tied them in a silken handkerchief,

  Laid them beneath the juniper tree,

  Kywitt, kywitt,

  What a beautiful bird I am.

  The Freudian content of this tale is striking, and wicked stepmothers (this one is killed by a falling millstone) are an essential part of the stuff of fairy stories, as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1978) and Marina Warner’s 1994 study From the Beast to the Blonde so clearly illustrated.

  What is truly remarkable about Comyns’s version is her insight into the stepmother’s role, and her compassionate twentieth century version of the deadly millstone. (This is in stark contrast to the cool heartlessness of the tone and plots of some of her early novels.) The stepmother narrator of this version, who lives to tell her own tale, is a rounded character, a single mother surviving in the multicultural London of the 1980s, maternal, affectionate, hard-working and enterprising, whose life connects by chance with the beautiful, generous, calm, blonde German wife Gertrude and her English husband Bernard. Comyns’s adaptation of the Grimm plot is both ingenious and creative, and her portrayal of London as she rediscovered it on her return from her long absence in Spain has a clear-eyed freshness and sharpness. She sees with the eyes of wonder, but not with the eyes of innocence.

  She uses many of the types and tropes of the traditional fairy tale - Bella the scarred heroine; the hunchback godmother; the black coal merchant stepfather; the wicked fairy, the carved bear; the thieving magpie; the drops of scarlet blood on snow - but she weaves them into a realistic narrative that gives the reader a vivid sense of daily London life. She knows the world of bedsitters and playgrounds, of parks and junk shops and antique shops, of drunken parties in Bayswater and stately dinners in Richmond, of Spanish au pair girls and Italian waiters and illegal immigrants. And, in her seventies, she writes with authenticity about this richly peopled landscape, and writes from the point of view of a much younger woman, confronted with the choices and decisions of a single mother who (like the wicked stepmother in the Grimms’ tale) is programmed to prefer the rights of her own child. The complexities of her fatherless dark child Marline’s relationship with the red-and-white son of Gertrude and Bernard are skilfully suggested, and although the narrative has a clear line, it does not simplify. It resonates and expands.

  Comyns’s use of colour in her prose is striking, and no doubt reflects an aspect of her early training at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and subsequent years spent scratching a living by drawing cartoons for an animation studio and working as an artist’s model. She was attracted to colour, to exotic fabrics and designs, to the periwinkles and blue berries in Gertrude’s Richmond garden, to the simple images of a child’s picture book, to a startling scarlet refrigerator. Yet there is nothing childlike in this story of two small children and their mothers. This is a sophisticated account
of adult emotions, recorded without sentimentality, and without any conventional preconceptions of how life ought to be lived. It has its shadows as well as its brightness. It is a strange tale that rings strangely true, with an unexpected ending that startles, surprises, and in its way forgives.

  Margaret Drabble

  Chapter One

  Quite soon after I left Richmond station I turned into a quiet street where the snow was almost undisturbed and, climbing higher, I came to a road that appeared to be deserted. Then I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statue, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow. She turned and went into her house before I could offer to help. I didn’t like to knock on her door. It was a very private-looking one, painted bottle-green and with heavy brass fittings. Facing the wrought-iron gate was a carved bear with sad stone eyes and snow on its back. It appeared to be late Victorian sculpture but the house was much older, Georgian most likely. I thought I saw a dim figure pass by one of the windows and I hurriedly turned away and walked further up the hill towards the park gates, forgetting that I’d come to Richmond in search of work, not to walk in the snowy park among the deer.

  I spent over an hour there. It was a long time since I’d walked in clean snow and smelt its delicate northern smell, a smell so faint it is impossible to describe. Children were tobogganing and sliding down a small hill near the gates. Some had real toboggans and others large trays or pieces of wood. The children were shouting and yelling happily and several dogs were joining in and there was a great holiday feeling although it was a Monday morning in the middle of winter. I noticed a greyhound shivering although it wore a coat, and holding its lead was the beautiful statuesque woman I had already seen that morning. She was intently watching the children rejoicing in the snow, and because of the holiday atmosphere I was brave enough to approach her, even forgetting to turn the scarred side of my face away as I spoke to her. I asked after her injured hand, which was covered by a brightly coloured mitten. She smiled and said the cut wasn’t serious in spite of the blood; it was a very clean cut. From the way she spoke I could tell she was foreign, perhaps German. A small boy came running up to us and slipped his bare hand into her warm mittened one for a moment as if to collect its warmth, then ran after his friends. I asked her if he was her son, he had the same colouring, but she said, ‘No, I like to watch the children playing but have none of my own,’ and the happiness left her face and I knew I’d said something wrong. She may have had a child and he had died. We parted and I hurried towards the park entrance and the interview I was so late for.

  As soon as I saw the shop I knew I wouldn’t be happy working there. It was the cleanest antique shop I’d ever seen, indeed there was a feather duster in its owner’s hand and she was flicking away at a glass-topped display table. About half of the gleaming furniture was reproduction and the rest well-cared-for antique, quite valuable. The china and glass were in very good condition too, but mostly not to my taste, Dresden figures and Crown Derby dinner services. Miss Murray, the owner, laid down the feather duster and as she came towards me I saw that she was a humpback with a Spanish black shawl carefully arranged around her shoulders and half covering her crisp white blouse. She was very neatly dressed and her tiny feet were enclosed in high-heeled pointed shoes. I felt that she was a perfectionist as a kind of disguise to hide her back, which was not really very noticeable. I told her that I was not a customer and we had already talked to each other on the telephone.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I remember. You telephoned in answer to my advertisement,’ she said nervously, peering at my face. ‘Miss Bella Winter, that was your name, and you said you wouldn’t be able to work on Saturdays because of your child. Well, I’ve been thinking, Miss Winter. It wouldn’t do at all, just a five-day week. Saturday is a very busy day for me,’ and her eyes darted away from my scarred face, then flashed back. It was obvious she didn’t want any more deformities in her clean little shop.

  Tears came to my eyes as I backed away from her and made for the door. It wasn’t only her reaction to my scar, but my feet were wet and cold and I suddenly felt weak with hunger. Miss Murray, carefully arranging her shawl, darted in front of me and stood as if guarding the door. ‘Don’t go, Miss Winter,’ she said urgently. ‘You look so cold and I’m sure you would like a cup of coffee. I’m just about to make one. And your shoes. Take them off and dry them by the fire; but remember to put them on again if a customer comes. Now, I was thinking. I have this friend who has a little shop the other side of the river, nothing like this I’m afraid. She wants someone to look after the shop while she runs a stall in some antique market. Would you care to work in Twickenham? It’s not Richmond, of course.’

  Within a week I was living and working in Twickenham. My two-year-old daughter Marline, but usually called Tommy, spent her days in a small municipal nursery just across the Green, where seagulls circled and dedicated people exercised their dogs in all weathers. Saturdays were no problem either because Tommy stayed in the shop with me, quietly playing with the contents of a box marked ‘Everything in this box twenty pence’. Behind the shop there was a large kitchen-dining-room with an antique dresser covered in china which was for sale. Everything in the house was for sale except our beds and a few oddments we brought with us. Upstairs there were two quite attractive rooms, but neglected and shabby. There was a wash-place, no bathroom but plenty of hot water. It was far the best home I’d lived in since Tommy was born.

  The antique shop was called ‘Mary Meadows Antiques’ after its owner and was the kind of shop that passers-by often stopped to look in. The early Victorian windows were a pretty shape and the jumble of treasures displayed were more carefully arranged than they appeared to be and there were usually one or two bargains to attract people into the shop. The price of nearly everything for sale was clearly marked. Every morning I slightly changed the window and on Saturday I’d display the things that Mary Meadows hadn’t sold in the antique market. I’d worked in several antique shops before but Mary’s was the one that appealed to me most, partly because I had more responsibility and Mary was so easy to work with. It was almost as if the shop belonged to me because she only came round about twice a week unless she had something to deliver. She travelled about a lot in her long grey van, picking up this or that at country sales. Quite often she sold things to other dealers before they even appeared in the shop or antique market.

  To begin with I never did any buying but combed through the stuff that was brought to the shop by customers and dealers, and if anything seemed suitable made an appointment for Mary to see it. Some of the customers, particularly old ladies, were rather a trial with their reproduction brass objects which they assured me had been in their family for years, brass-handled hearth brushes with very little brush, umbrella handles, odd hand-painted china cups, small watercolours, usually of flowers or landscapes, useless bits of embroidery and ugly brooches without pins. I tried to be patient with the people who displayed these objects which they thought so valuable, because sometimes they returned with a really good print or engraving (‘Sorry, it’s only a print’), pretty lustre jugs and mugs and occasionally something almost valuable. I was glad we didn’t go in for art nouveau or art deco because neither of us cared for it and it wouldn’t have suited the shop. Mary did occasionally buy it to sell to other dealers but not for display.

  Mary was small, with curly black hair nearly as curly as Tommy’s. Her teeth were small and pointed rather as an animal’s, indeed she resembled an animal with her delicate boned face with its merry expression, perhaps a squirrel. She was a darter, darting into the shop with her arms filled with parcels, often wrapped in newspaper. She would pour out a few half-finished sentences, laugh, wave to an acquaintance passing the window, rush to the door and with the handle in h
er little paw-like hand, she would give last minute instructions: ‘Think it has a haircrack; reduce the price if you have to. Richard should call, or is he Roger? You know, the man with the huge ears. And the accountant! I’d forgotten him. Oh, and the Bristol glass walking sticks,’ and she’d be gone.

  On Mondays the shop was supposed to be closed, but if anyone came knocking at the door I let them in and sometimes did a little business. Otherwise I amused myself by painting the living-room-kitchen white and putting a golden carpet on the floor. A cheap carpet made from remnants sewn together and supposed to be washable. I made curtains on an Edwardian sewing-machine all decorated in mother-of-pearl I found in the shop, then sold it for twenty-five pounds although it only had one tubby little bobbin which had to be constantly re-wound with cotton.

  Sundays were more or less devoted to Tommy. It was the only day I could give her my full attention. We found a small park tucked away in the back streets, where we could feed the ducks in the stream and roll a large multi-coloured ball down the grassy slopes. At home we’d eat a large lunch, look at silly programmes on television and play with a large Noah’s ark I’d bought in a sale. There were dolls too and books; she loved books but the ark was her favourite toy.

  When I was a child, just before my father left us, he gave me a large doll. She had rather an ugly face and stiff hair you couldn’t brush, but I loved her. I held her in my arms all night and rubbed her plain face with cold cream. One hand was burnt away, black and brown and horrible. Sometimes I thought my mother had had something to do with it. One night I couldn’t find her and lay crying and empty armed in bed, but the next morning there she was, sitting in my chair at the breakfast table. I rushed to put my arms around her but it was a wooden box I was holding, with only her legs, arms and head coming out. The square shoulders were very broad and frightening. I threw her to the ground, then, screaming, tried to hold her in my arms again, splinters scratching me from the rough wood. Besides fright I felt a fearful anger, alternately kicking the poor doll, then touching her with careful hands. Eventually my mother had enough of the ‘joke’ and the doll was banished to the kitchen cupboard. Sometimes I would open the door and look at this Frankenstein monster of a doll with its burnt arm, sitting all square amongst the preserving jars, and weep.