POISON - A Once Upon A Time Story
Michiel Meewis for ARTICLE | 2013
Mary Poppins, Swallows & Amazons, The Railway Children, A Traveller in Time: the first half of the twentieth century was, and remains, a golden age in children's literature. Decades later, these books have become part of Britishness itself - stories passed between generations, rubbed soft with affection. Always a 'Once upon a time' at the start, always a 'happily ever after' to end - but what came in between was rarely as simple as it seemed.
From as far back as I can remember, I knew exactly what a children's author should look like. Their pictures were printed inside the dust jackets of every book we carted home from the Kerry County Library; motherly women with mild expressions and sensible tweeds, sat stiffly at tidy writing desks and squinting anxiously away from the camera. They had names like Enid and Elisabeth and Alison, and they lived in houses called Old Thatch or Hemmingford Grey (brick-and-timber houses that always had climbing flowers and white-painted gates), and they wrote with a kind of uniform, comfortingly bossy predictability - so that even when there wasn't a picture or author's note to be found, you felt certain you knew who you were dealing with. And you knew that you were safe.
Unless you stumbled across Beverley Nichols. On the outside, his books - The Tree That Sat Down, The Stream That Stood Still and The Magic Mountain - looked just as innocuously enchanting as all the others, with tiny figures wandering round washed-out watercolour landscapes. And inside there were all the familiar ingredients; wise grandmothers and wicked witches, talking animals and handsome princes. But the Nichols stories were different; designed, the publishers cautioned, 'to be enjoyed by children of nine years and older' (a warning guaranteed to attract a curious six-year-old like me.) At the end of each story, the villains were inevitably - if half-heartedly - dispatched; but they came back, again and again, devising nastier and deadlier plans each time - and revelling in being not just bad, but brutal. Nichols' heroes and heroines weren't just in mild spots of bother; if they weren't being turned into fish or viciously beaten, they were being tricked onto booby-trapped planes or lured to the edge of towering cliffs. And they were forever barely escaping poison, in one form or another - toad-spit, snake venom, ground-up vulture's claws. Reading them over today, it's startling how much sheer physical pain there is - how his characters bruise and bleed and choke; how, forced underwater, they struggle for breath, or have their skin worn raw from chains. It was the kind of dark children-in-peril story that would become commonplace, decades later, among more bloodthirsty writers like Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket. It wasn't what you expected, though, from someone called Beverley, who lived in a place called Merry Hall - another house with climbing flowers and white-painted gates. But then Beverley Nichols wasn't your average children's author. There was no benevolent, reassuring lady gazing out from the back of these books - because, unlike most of the genre's other writers at the time, Nichols was a man.
Make that a middle-aged man: Beverley Nichols was 47 when his first children's story, The Tree That Sat Down, was published, and in his fifties by the time the last volume in the trilogy appeared. Three decades earlier, he had exploded onto the London literary scene as a dazzlingly handsome Oxford student; he was a local celebrity before he'd even graduated, and a global one from the moment he published his autobiography (called 25, but written - with characteristic impatience - at the age of 24). Witty, elegant and unfailingly entertaining, he became a darling of the social circuit and was hailed as one of the brightest of the Bright Young Things. And for the next decade he sped around the world, mingling with presidents, film stars, and royalty, and dashing off a dizzying variety of prose - screenplays, revues, novels and endless newspaper pieces - all of which were calculated to maximise his public profile. He specialised in unpredictability; turning from courtroom reporting to religion, and from crime fiction to celebrity interviews - and then, just when everyone least expected it, retiring to the countryside and reinventing himself as a best-selling garden writer. But there was, it turned out, a monster in the shadows - the narrative of a controlling, monstrously alcoholic Edwardian father, whom Nichols tried to kill three times (once with ground-up painkillers, once with a lawnmower, and finally with a mix of sleeping pills and alcohol.) Their relationship was a horror story which he gleefully transformed into a parlour anecdote, the detail growing more crowd-pleasingly gory with every telling.
That dark, hardly-hidden side of Nichols' life seeped into everything he wrote; it even bloomed like a slow stain under the surface of his sweetly-wrapped children's stories. His villains got off on casual violence and intricately-plotted revenge, and spent their lives concealing their evil intentions under perfume clouds of flattery and charm. (One of the books' most regular, and most dangerous, forms of entrapment was a particularly modern one: Advertising.) And, in truth, the villains always seemed to be having a much better time of it than the heroes. Miss Smith, the 400-year old crone who stalked through each of his books, was a spectacularly-concocted blend of sociopath and painted glamour-puss: a vision of absolute loveliness - once she'd stuck her fake nose on, added fluttering eyelashes and a blonde wig, and tossed on the latest fashions. His contemporaries enjoyed the gleeful kick of malice, included just for grown-ups; the scarcely-veiled allusions to London's social scene, the notion of witches shopping at Woolworths' and living behind net curtains in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the ageing hostesses fancy-dressed as simpering Beaton ingénues.
Reviewing one of Nichols' first novels, The Spectator sniffed; "He wishes to gain reputation. He wishes to have written books." And writing children's novels was simply another short-lived means to 'gain reputation'. He had no particular affection for children; his nieces would remember him as distant at best, and oblivious at worst (although he deigned to include them in a dedication once, signed 'from their Wicked Uncle' ). And in the decades that followed, the one-time literary golden boy would abandon childrens' literature, and change tack again - writing a series of increasingly bitter, increasingly controversial titles. That series culminated in Father Figure, the sensationalist narrative of his relationship with the parent he loathed, and of his farcically doomed attempts to polish him off (a book which appeared a year after Miss Smith made her final, most enjoyably venomous appearance in The Wickedest Witch In The World.) It became a bestseller: and Beverley Nichols, parent-poisoner, rocketed back into the headlines.
It was a sour, stark note to end a career on. Yet Nichols was never arrested, or even investigated. It was just a children's story, after all - wasn't it? Surely someone would have known if it was real?
And when he is remembered today - if at all - it's for something gentler; for living in a house with climbing roses and a white-painted gate, and for writing now-faded books about gardens, and cats, and beautiful witches - witches whose satin slipper-clad footprints could wither grass, and whose nostrils, when angry, puffed with delicate trails of venomous smoke.
Michiel Meewis for ARTICLE | 2013
Written for Issue 2 of ARTICLE