Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

This is Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography, from the time she was inadvertently left at the wrong address by a stork lost in a snowstorm – according to her mother, whose gift for storytelling Rosemary obviously inherited! – to her 25^th year, when her first books were published. On the one hand, this is a particularly satisfying book: Rosemary Sutcliff had a wonderful gift for painting pictures with words. On the other hand it is the poignant account of a lonely childhood and of an intelligent and active mind in a handicapped body. In some ways, Rosemary Sutcliff’s childhood reminds me of Beatrix Potter’s – the isolation from others her own age (though for different reasons), the love for nature, and a talent for painting which developed much earlier than her literary skills.

Apart from the interest in the early life and influences on an author so many of us enjoy, this book has value from an educational perspective. Both in her early years, when her mother taught her, and later when she attended Miss Beck’s Academy (where she learned to read from "a tattered old volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales"), Rosemary Sutcliff’s education followed what we might today consider a "Charlotte Mason" pattern, and she throve on it. Interestingly, she later attended one of the PNEU schools: and (even more interestingly), she hated it! She did admit that it was mostly her own fault she did not do well at that school, but continued:

Miss Davies [the headmistress] was a nice, conscientious, well-meaning woman, and a properly qualified teacher, but she lacked the natural gift for teaching that Miss Beck had… and somewhere along the way, Miss Davies lost me all interest in learning anything at all. It wasn’t all her fault, far the larger share must have been mine, but it was partly her doing, all the same.

Does this account perhaps help to answer the question of why Charlotte Mason’s ideas went into decline in the years following her death? Was it, perhaps, that many teachers lost her vision for a "living education", and so the method she promoted simply degenerated into a "system" of textbooks and curriculum materials – the very thing she had sought to avoid? I don’t know the answer to this, but there is certainly food for thought here.

Teenagers and adults should enjoy this book, though it is not one I would give to younger children.

Copyright © Ruth Marshall 2001

On hearing the crowing of a cock, the first morning of holidays:

"…in that first dawn it would fall on my town-dulled ears as something very magical indeed, something to shiver at with delight and something stranger than mere delight. It was the perfect sound to enter through magic casements opening wide on perilous seas and fairylands forlorn. It was a sound with a bloom on it, like dew, and shaped like a fleur-de-lys. To this day, the sound of a cock crowing in the early morning, though one seldom hears it in this world of battery hens, is magical to me; an incredibly lonely sound, pricking the dawn with that sharp centre petalpoint-spearpoint of a fleur-de-lys. But to hear the bloom on it, you must be just back in the country, with your ears newly awakened from a long spell in town.

Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills

Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

On hearing the crowing of a cock, the first morning of holidays:

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