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The ship slipped its moorings, we drifted quite free
Thanks to everyone for the music. It will be put to good use, although I am hoping not tonight.
Today I walked into Lexington Center to retrieve a bunch of books by Jill Paton Walsh from Cary Library, which was probably a terrible idea from the perspective of avoiding heatstroke, although I'm sure it was good for my cardiovascular system. The first thing I did when I could breathe again, of course, was re-read Birdy and the Ghosties (1989) for the first time in eighteen years.
She looked once, and she saw the boat clear empty; the bench with nothing on it but scratched paint and bright drops of salt water.
Then she looked twice, and she saw three horrible ghosties sitting there, riding in the boat with them, face to face.
There was a craggy great man ghostie, with crevices of slime in his flesh, covered in sea-valves and clothed in rotting strands of weed. And beside him sat a woman ghostie hinged and scaled like a crawfish, with dozens of tentacles, waving. And between them sat a child ghostie, covered in greasy black feathers like a cormorant, and clutching a bleeding and rotting fish in its claws.
(This is your brain on early influences.)
When her father the ferryman asks what she sees, though, Birdy doesn't want to frighten him:
So she said, "Oh, Papajack, dear father, there's a king and a queen and a prince with us! There's a king with a wise face, and a bright crown, wrapped up in a cloak of sea-blue; and a queen with a kind face, and sun-gold, sand-gold hair, wearing a dress of sea-green; and their child is a boy of about my age, with black, black hair, and he's sitting between them, smiling."
And so the ghosties have become, by the time Birdy's father lets them off at the island that wasn't there when the ferry set out: "We get stuck with how people see us . . . And some people do have the horrors!" The real grace of the story is not the retelling or the looking twice, but the lingering crossing of the worlds.
What I didn't realize in elementary school was that the sequel, Matthew and the Sea Singer (1992), is a riff on the Mermaid of Zennor. Rescued by Birdy from an uncaring orphan master, Matthew turns out to have a voice so angelically beautiful, even the gulls and the cormorants settle down to listen when he sings the hymn on Sundays in Zennor church: which is how he attracts the attention of the seal-queen, "a strange sort of sea creature, a half-and-half kind of thing, mostly like a seal, though some would have called her a selkie, and some would have called her a mermaid." She claims Matthew as her own, because she has nothing like him under the sea; she will return him only if one of her own children can be taught to sing as beautifully, which is how Birdy ends up with a saltwater-filled wheelbarrow full of seal-child named Pagan, who sleeps in her mother's washtub and splashes around in the church font during lessons. Eventually he gets the idea of singing rather than mewing like a seabird or barking like a seal or hushing and grating like pebbles in the drag of a wave, but the results are not quite what anyone expected:
Whatever you were afraid of in the world, that song made you think of it. He made fishermen think of drowning, he made women think of hungry children, and larders bare, and farmers of rainstorms at haytime, and children of parents vanished, and parents of lost children, and the parson of losing his hearing, and Birdy of losing her sight. His song sounded of shipwreck and loss and ruin . . . but you couldn't deny it was beautiful. It was as beautiful as great tempests on stormy waters, or the love of the living for the dead.
Naturally, neither of these books are in print anymore. Used book store time, I think.
Today I walked into Lexington Center to retrieve a bunch of books by Jill Paton Walsh from Cary Library, which was probably a terrible idea from the perspective of avoiding heatstroke, although I'm sure it was good for my cardiovascular system. The first thing I did when I could breathe again, of course, was re-read Birdy and the Ghosties (1989) for the first time in eighteen years.
She looked once, and she saw the boat clear empty; the bench with nothing on it but scratched paint and bright drops of salt water.
Then she looked twice, and she saw three horrible ghosties sitting there, riding in the boat with them, face to face.
There was a craggy great man ghostie, with crevices of slime in his flesh, covered in sea-valves and clothed in rotting strands of weed. And beside him sat a woman ghostie hinged and scaled like a crawfish, with dozens of tentacles, waving. And between them sat a child ghostie, covered in greasy black feathers like a cormorant, and clutching a bleeding and rotting fish in its claws.
(This is your brain on early influences.)
When her father the ferryman asks what she sees, though, Birdy doesn't want to frighten him:
So she said, "Oh, Papajack, dear father, there's a king and a queen and a prince with us! There's a king with a wise face, and a bright crown, wrapped up in a cloak of sea-blue; and a queen with a kind face, and sun-gold, sand-gold hair, wearing a dress of sea-green; and their child is a boy of about my age, with black, black hair, and he's sitting between them, smiling."
And so the ghosties have become, by the time Birdy's father lets them off at the island that wasn't there when the ferry set out: "We get stuck with how people see us . . . And some people do have the horrors!" The real grace of the story is not the retelling or the looking twice, but the lingering crossing of the worlds.
What I didn't realize in elementary school was that the sequel, Matthew and the Sea Singer (1992), is a riff on the Mermaid of Zennor. Rescued by Birdy from an uncaring orphan master, Matthew turns out to have a voice so angelically beautiful, even the gulls and the cormorants settle down to listen when he sings the hymn on Sundays in Zennor church: which is how he attracts the attention of the seal-queen, "a strange sort of sea creature, a half-and-half kind of thing, mostly like a seal, though some would have called her a selkie, and some would have called her a mermaid." She claims Matthew as her own, because she has nothing like him under the sea; she will return him only if one of her own children can be taught to sing as beautifully, which is how Birdy ends up with a saltwater-filled wheelbarrow full of seal-child named Pagan, who sleeps in her mother's washtub and splashes around in the church font during lessons. Eventually he gets the idea of singing rather than mewing like a seabird or barking like a seal or hushing and grating like pebbles in the drag of a wave, but the results are not quite what anyone expected:
Whatever you were afraid of in the world, that song made you think of it. He made fishermen think of drowning, he made women think of hungry children, and larders bare, and farmers of rainstorms at haytime, and children of parents vanished, and parents of lost children, and the parson of losing his hearing, and Birdy of losing her sight. His song sounded of shipwreck and loss and ruin . . . but you couldn't deny it was beautiful. It was as beautiful as great tempests on stormy waters, or the love of the living for the dead.
Naturally, neither of these books are in print anymore. Used book store time, I think.
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Nine
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What really told me how much time had passed: I remembered the books as bigger, the usual oversize of children's picture books. They are about the size of trade paperbacks, only hardbound in that stiff, laminated-cover style. I was much smaller the last time I held these.
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Let's see. Sovay would have been about ten or so. Maybe even in there, choosing Birdy and the Ghosties. What a cool, eerie thought.
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We did move to Lexington when I was ten, but I read Jill Paton Walsh at my no-longer-extant elementary school library; I never found the books anywhere else, because I could never recover their names!
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Most of my formative childhood books were either from the Cambridge Public Library or my elementary school, but I've been very happy to discover they exist elsewhere!*
* Except for The Valley of Song, which I have to request from a different library every time. Someday I will find an affordable copy in a used book store that doesn't know what it's got and I'll be very happy.
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Wonderful.
(This is your brain on early influences.)
I can so see it!
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If you can find these books in your local library, I do recommend them.
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I feel like I owe it some sort of stylistic debt even at this distance (Yes. I have a pot. May I see your kettle? Is it black?).
*hugs* Thank you for sharing these.
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I had the double-glassed experience of reading words I had forgotten were in my head, so that I recognized each sentence instantly and remembered how I had interpreted them when I was small, but they read differently now.
I feel like I owe it some sort of stylistic debt even at this distance
Yes. I don't know if it's parallel evolution, but I can see some of the ways I think about language (including pause and punctuation) in her style: "hinged and scaled like a crawfish . . . as great tempests on stormy waters, or the love of the living for the dead."
I didn't even copy out all the passages that struck me. They're very beautifully written stories, both of them.
Thank you for sharing these.
You're welcome. Let's hope we can both find good copies, because I really don't want to end up stealing from libraries at my time of life.