Jessamy
Encyclopedia
Jessamy by Barbara Sleigh
is a children's book that sheds light on English life during World War I
through a time slip
narrative.
ed girl called Jessamy, age unstated but about nine to eleven, who lived with one aunt during school term and another during school holidays. Both aunts were superficially affectionate, but neither paid heed to her as a person. The book begins with her arrival unaccompanied by train, to find that her holiday aunt's uncongenial children had caught whooping cough
. Jessamy had to be farmed out for the summer to Miss Brindle, the childless caretaker
of an empty Victorian mansion: Posset Place.
Jessamy was taken aback by the old Miss Brindle, who was wary of children — "I daresay you won't mind being treated like a grown-up person. I don't know any other way," she was told (p. 14). Once Jessamy had reassured her — "I'll try not to be a menace" (p. 13) — she was allowed to explore the house and came across a schoolroom. She opened a large empty cupboard and saw three sets of old pencil marks on the door showing the heights of four children, one of them, appearing only in the first set, named Jessamy, like her. She was exhausted that night and went to bed, only to be woken by moonlight shining through her window. She put on a dressing gown
and stole back to the schoolroom with an electric torch. "Her bare feet seemed to take charge of her, almost as if they knew the way themselves" (p. 25).
This time she found clothes hanging in the cupboard and only the first set of pencil marks on the door. Beside them was a date: "July 23rd, 1914" (p. 25), precisely 43 years before, and two weeks before Britain would declare war
on Germany. A drip of hot wax on her hand signalled that her torch had turned into a candle.
Jessamy herself was puzzled: "'This is a dream, it must be!' she said. 'I'm sound asleep in the camp bed
really'" (p. 26). Jessamy had been reading Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden
(1911) on the train (p.7) and there was something secret about the way the holiday aunt and Jessamy stepped from a modern street into the walled garden round a house that Jessamy felt looked "half like a church, and half like a castle with those battlements
and stained glass windows and things" (p. 14).
Back in time, Jessamy found she had fallen from a tree the previous day and should be recovering in bed from concussion. She was thought to have suffered some memory loss, which happily accounted for some of her strange questions. She was found by a parlour maid, Matchett, who was up and in street clothes suspiciously late, and asked crossly what she was doing in the cupboard, "'I don't quite remember,' Jessamy heard herself say slowly. 'I think I was looking for something'" (p. 28).
Readers are also helped over the time slip by the dazzling improvement it brought in Jessamy's life. In the present, she was a brave, well-meaning and intelligent enough girl, but isolated and deprived of love and companionship, not to mention adventure, and wishing she were able to go to boarding school. In her 1914 state, most of those deficiencies were met: she found an aunt, the cook-housekeeper Mrs Rumbold, who loved her dearly, took her in hand and gave her things to do; she gained a true companion in the younger boy Kitto and an untrue one in his ill-disposed sister Fanny; and she could bridge two societies: below stairs with the staff, and above stairs in the schoolroom with the children of the family, who were orphaned like herself, and being raised by an older sister and a rich grandfather who owned a pharmaceutical factory (hence Posset
Place for the house).
The duality in the story continues, with Jessamy turning over in her present-day mind what was happening to her in a different life: "Quite suddenly Jessamy realised that she was very hungry. The faint rumble of her inside was reassuring. It belonged to the Jessamy of both worlds" (page 37).
for the large sum of £300. The eldest boy Harry, everybody's favourite, then returned from Oxford
, set upon joining the army instead of completing his final year, and burdened by debts. After a dreadful row and Harry's departure in the night, the book of hours was found to be missing. Mr Parkinson assumed Harry had stolen it, but Jessamy, Kitto and others were appalled at the accusation. Not so the parlour maid Matchett or her lover, William the groom.
Trust is a recurrent theme in the book. On arrival in the earlier Posset Place, Jessamy promised Matchett, who was up late at night, not to betray her love affair. Soon after, Fanny grudgingly thanked her for not revealing that her fall from the mulberry tree came about because Fanny had pushed her. Now she set about helping Fanny again, for Fanny had borrowed her elder sister's mother-of-pearl
penknife without asking, and left it in the tree house at the time of Jessamy's fall. Disobeying Mr Parkinson's orders to the children never to climb the tree again, Jessamy went up to retrieve the knife, but she was caught in the act. Again there was a row, and it looked as if Jessamy's escapade might cost Mrs Rumbold her job on the domestic staff. But Jessamy managed to slip the penknife to Kitto, and the danger to Mrs Rumbold passed when Fanny came clean about why Jessamy was up the forbidden tree. Returning to the schoolroom later, Jessamy went to the cupboard to see if Fanny's hat was there and she had returned from a walk. The door of the cupboard shut behind Jessamy and she found herself back in the present, still wearing her dressing gown and holding not a candle but her torch.
It was soon clear to Jessamy and Kitto that Harry did not even know the theft had occurred. They engineered a reconciliation between him and his grandfather, but the book of hours remained unfound. The children's suspicions fell on the Stubbinses. Jessamy cornered Mrs Stubbins into admitting, under a vow of secrecy, that her husband had stolen it, but she did not know where he had hidden it, and he was away at the war. The note he had written giving its whereabouts was with his will, in an envelope which Mrs Stubbins had promised not to open unless her husband should be killed. Jessamy, however, found the envelope tucked down the side of the pram, opened it and took out the note. She was seen doing this by Mrs Stubbins, who chased her, so that she was unable to read it. She managed to crumple the note and tuck it into the mouth of a tiger hearth rug in the drawing room, but Mrs Stubbins chased her up to the schoolroom, where Jessamy hid in the cupboard — and promptly returned to the present.
Back in the present a second time, it emerged that the paper boy Billy was the grandson of Stubbins the groom, who had after all died in the war. Furthermore, it emerged from remarks made by her holiday aunt that Jessamy's grandmother, whose name was Jessamy too, had lived as a child at Posset Place with an aunt who was on the staff. There was one more set of marks in the cupboard, September 10th, 1916, but Jessamy, to her sorrow, failed to slip back in time on that day. Later, Billy and Jessamy fixed a swing to an old bough of the mulberry tree, which broke off, revealing the book of hours hidden in a crack, just where the tree house had been. It was damp and discoloured, but Miss Brindle showed it to the house agent, who showed it to the owner of Posset Place. He was delighted to have it, for when the present-day Jessamy visited him at his request, he turned out to be the aged Kitto: "'You must forgive me, my dear,' he said, 'I'm afraid I may have been talking nonsense.... I almost thought I was talking to the other Jessamy, the one I used to know. You were so like her in the half dark'" (p. 157). Not long after, Kitto wrote to Jessamy offering to pay for her to go to boarding school, as she so much wanted to do (p. 159).
by Philippa Pearce
, the 1958 Carnegie Prize
winner, where the protagonist had dreamlike encounters at different points in time. Earlier there was Ronald Welch
's The Gauntlet (1951, back to the Welsh Marches
in the 14th century), and Hilda Lewis
's perennially popular The Ship that Flew (1939), which used time travel to convey characters to the age of Norse gods and heroes. In Alison Uttley
's A Traveller in Time (1939), the girl slipped back into the period when Queen Elizabeth I of England
had imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots in Derbyshire. Penelope Farmer
's Charlotte Sometimes (1969) was a darker, more complex novel about the way time slip (back to 1918) could threaten the main character's very identity.
Sleigh's approach in Jessamy was to slip her character from one thoroughly realistic situation into another. This produced a book that remains very immediate to its readers, allowing them to identify closely with Jessamy in either of her personae, one of whom, it emerges (p. 146), is the late grandmother of the other.
Jessamy appeared simultaneously in 1967 in the UK (London: Collins) and the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill). It remained popular for a quarter of a century, but it seems not to have been reprinted since 1993. Interest among those who read it as a child has helped to hike secondhand prices on both sides of the Atlantic, especially for the bound UK and US first editions, with twelve naturalistic line drawings by Philip Gough, a leading illustrator of the time.
The novel was translated into Swedish under the same title in 1975. A German translation, somewhat misleadingly entitled Der Spuk im alten Schrank (The ghost in the old cupboard), appeared in 1980.
Barbara Sleigh
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh was a well-known British children's writer and broadcaster.-Family and career:Barbara Sleigh was born in Birmingham, the daughter of the artist Bernard Sleigh and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both came from a Methodist background, but she was...
is a children's book that sheds light on English life during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
through a time slip
Time slip
A time slip is an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which a person, or group of people, travel through time via unknown means...
narrative.
The setting
The story is about an orphanOrphan
An orphan is a child permanently bereaved of or abandoned by his or her parents. In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents is called an orphan...
ed girl called Jessamy, age unstated but about nine to eleven, who lived with one aunt during school term and another during school holidays. Both aunts were superficially affectionate, but neither paid heed to her as a person. The book begins with her arrival unaccompanied by train, to find that her holiday aunt's uncongenial children had caught whooping cough
Pertussis
Pertussis, also known as whooping cough , is a highly contagious bacterial disease caused by Bordetella pertussis. Symptoms are initially mild, and then develop into severe coughing fits, which produce the namesake high-pitched "whoop" sound in infected babies and children when they inhale air...
. Jessamy had to be farmed out for the summer to Miss Brindle, the childless caretaker
Property caretaker
A Property caretaker is a person, group or organization that cares for real estate for trade or financial compensation, and sometimes as a barter for rent-free living accommodations...
of an empty Victorian mansion: Posset Place.
Jessamy was taken aback by the old Miss Brindle, who was wary of children — "I daresay you won't mind being treated like a grown-up person. I don't know any other way," she was told (p. 14). Once Jessamy had reassured her — "I'll try not to be a menace" (p. 13) — she was allowed to explore the house and came across a schoolroom. She opened a large empty cupboard and saw three sets of old pencil marks on the door showing the heights of four children, one of them, appearing only in the first set, named Jessamy, like her. She was exhausted that night and went to bed, only to be woken by moonlight shining through her window. She put on a dressing gown
Bathrobe
A bathrobe, dressing gown or housecoat is a robe. A bathrobe is usually made from towelling or other absorbent textile, and may be donned while the wearer's body is wet, serving both as a towel and an informal garment...
and stole back to the schoolroom with an electric torch. "Her bare feet seemed to take charge of her, almost as if they knew the way themselves" (p. 25).
This time she found clothes hanging in the cupboard and only the first set of pencil marks on the door. Beside them was a date: "July 23rd, 1914" (p. 25), precisely 43 years before, and two weeks before Britain would declare war
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
on Germany. A drip of hot wax on her hand signalled that her torch had turned into a candle.
The time slip
Sleigh takes great care with the join between the two narratives.Jessamy herself was puzzled: "'This is a dream, it must be!' she said. 'I'm sound asleep in the camp bed
Camp bed
A camp bed, or cot in North America, is a small portable, lightweight bed used in situations where larger permanent beds cannot be used. Camp beds are generally used by armies or government organizations....
really'" (p. 26). Jessamy had been reading Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was initially published in serial format starting in the autumn of 1910, and was first published in its entirety in 1911. It is now one of Burnett's most popular novels, and is considered to be a classic of English children's...
(1911) on the train (p.7) and there was something secret about the way the holiday aunt and Jessamy stepped from a modern street into the walled garden round a house that Jessamy felt looked "half like a church, and half like a castle with those battlements
Battlement
A battlement in defensive architecture, such as that of city walls or castles, comprises a parapet , in which portions have been cut out at intervals to allow the discharge of arrows or other missiles. These cut-out portions form crenels...
and stained glass windows and things" (p. 14).
Back in time, Jessamy found she had fallen from a tree the previous day and should be recovering in bed from concussion. She was thought to have suffered some memory loss, which happily accounted for some of her strange questions. She was found by a parlour maid, Matchett, who was up and in street clothes suspiciously late, and asked crossly what she was doing in the cupboard, "'I don't quite remember,' Jessamy heard herself say slowly. 'I think I was looking for something'" (p. 28).
Readers are also helped over the time slip by the dazzling improvement it brought in Jessamy's life. In the present, she was a brave, well-meaning and intelligent enough girl, but isolated and deprived of love and companionship, not to mention adventure, and wishing she were able to go to boarding school. In her 1914 state, most of those deficiencies were met: she found an aunt, the cook-housekeeper Mrs Rumbold, who loved her dearly, took her in hand and gave her things to do; she gained a true companion in the younger boy Kitto and an untrue one in his ill-disposed sister Fanny; and she could bridge two societies: below stairs with the staff, and above stairs in the schoolroom with the children of the family, who were orphaned like herself, and being raised by an older sister and a rich grandfather who owned a pharmaceutical factory (hence Posset
Posset
A posset was a British hot drink of milk curdled with wine or ale, often spiced, which was popular from medieval times to the 19th century...
Place for the house).
The duality in the story continues, with Jessamy turning over in her present-day mind what was happening to her in a different life: "Quite suddenly Jessamy realised that she was very hungry. The faint rumble of her inside was reassuring. It belonged to the Jessamy of both worlds" (page 37).
The theft
Against this new-found love, companionship, and contentment, Sleigh sets about outlining Jessamy's new worth. The grandfather Mr Parkinson, owner of Posset Place, took Jessamy, his grandson Kitto, and the groom William Stubbins to an auction, where he bought a medieval book of hoursBook of Hours
The book of hours was a devotional book popular in the later Middle Ages. It is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and...
for the large sum of £300. The eldest boy Harry, everybody's favourite, then returned from Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, set upon joining the army instead of completing his final year, and burdened by debts. After a dreadful row and Harry's departure in the night, the book of hours was found to be missing. Mr Parkinson assumed Harry had stolen it, but Jessamy, Kitto and others were appalled at the accusation. Not so the parlour maid Matchett or her lover, William the groom.
Trust is a recurrent theme in the book. On arrival in the earlier Posset Place, Jessamy promised Matchett, who was up late at night, not to betray her love affair. Soon after, Fanny grudgingly thanked her for not revealing that her fall from the mulberry tree came about because Fanny had pushed her. Now she set about helping Fanny again, for Fanny had borrowed her elder sister's mother-of-pearl
Nacre
Nacre , also known as mother of pearl, is an organic-inorganic composite material produced by some mollusks as an inner shell layer; it is also what makes up pearls. It is very strong, resilient, and iridescent....
penknife without asking, and left it in the tree house at the time of Jessamy's fall. Disobeying Mr Parkinson's orders to the children never to climb the tree again, Jessamy went up to retrieve the knife, but she was caught in the act. Again there was a row, and it looked as if Jessamy's escapade might cost Mrs Rumbold her job on the domestic staff. But Jessamy managed to slip the penknife to Kitto, and the danger to Mrs Rumbold passed when Fanny came clean about why Jessamy was up the forbidden tree. Returning to the schoolroom later, Jessamy went to the cupboard to see if Fanny's hat was there and she had returned from a walk. The door of the cupboard shut behind Jessamy and she found herself back in the present, still wearing her dressing gown and holding not a candle but her torch.
The aftermath
Back in the present, Jessamy had a second fall when the paper boy, Billy, opened the gate suddenly and knocked her over. But some of the improvement Jessamy had found in her 1914 life was matched in the present. She befriended Billy and told him her story, as if she were just making it up. She became fond of Miss Brindle, the caretaker, and helped her with the house. She enjoyed a seaside holiday with her aunt, despite her petulant cousins. But examining the second set of dated marks in the cupboard, from 1915, convinced Jessamy that if she were ever to get back to the other Posset Hall, it would have to be on August 14. She succeeded, picked up the strands, and became skilled at soothing Billy, the baby boy of Matchett, by then Mrs Stubbins with a husband away in the army. One day Jessamy and Kitto took along the baby in his pram when they went to deliver some magazines to a military hospital. There in a ward Jessamy found Harry, lying in bed with his arm amputated.It was soon clear to Jessamy and Kitto that Harry did not even know the theft had occurred. They engineered a reconciliation between him and his grandfather, but the book of hours remained unfound. The children's suspicions fell on the Stubbinses. Jessamy cornered Mrs Stubbins into admitting, under a vow of secrecy, that her husband had stolen it, but she did not know where he had hidden it, and he was away at the war. The note he had written giving its whereabouts was with his will, in an envelope which Mrs Stubbins had promised not to open unless her husband should be killed. Jessamy, however, found the envelope tucked down the side of the pram, opened it and took out the note. She was seen doing this by Mrs Stubbins, who chased her, so that she was unable to read it. She managed to crumple the note and tuck it into the mouth of a tiger hearth rug in the drawing room, but Mrs Stubbins chased her up to the schoolroom, where Jessamy hid in the cupboard — and promptly returned to the present.
Back in the present a second time, it emerged that the paper boy Billy was the grandson of Stubbins the groom, who had after all died in the war. Furthermore, it emerged from remarks made by her holiday aunt that Jessamy's grandmother, whose name was Jessamy too, had lived as a child at Posset Place with an aunt who was on the staff. There was one more set of marks in the cupboard, September 10th, 1916, but Jessamy, to her sorrow, failed to slip back in time on that day. Later, Billy and Jessamy fixed a swing to an old bough of the mulberry tree, which broke off, revealing the book of hours hidden in a crack, just where the tree house had been. It was damp and discoloured, but Miss Brindle showed it to the house agent, who showed it to the owner of Posset Place. He was delighted to have it, for when the present-day Jessamy visited him at his request, he turned out to be the aged Kitto: "'You must forgive me, my dear,' he said, 'I'm afraid I may have been talking nonsense.... I almost thought I was talking to the other Jessamy, the one I used to know. You were so like her in the half dark'" (p. 157). Not long after, Kitto wrote to Jessamy offering to pay for her to go to boarding school, as she so much wanted to do (p. 159).
Reception
Jessamy appeared in a period when several children's novelists were turning successfully to the device of a time slip as a framework. A notable example is Tom's Midnight GardenTom's Midnight Garden
Tom's Midnight Garden is a children's novel by Philippa Pearce. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1958, the year of its publication. It has been adapted for radio, television, the cinema, and the stage.-Plot summary:...
by Philippa Pearce
Philippa Pearce
Ann Philippa Pearce OBE was an English children's author.-Early life:The youngest of four children, Pearce was brought up in the Mill House in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire...
, the 1958 Carnegie Prize
Carnegie Prize
The Carnegie Prize is an international prize for artists, awarded by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.The prize should not be confused with the Carnegie Medal, which is awarded for children's literature....
winner, where the protagonist had dreamlike encounters at different points in time. Earlier there was Ronald Welch
Ronald Welch
Ronald Welch was the pseudonym of British writer Ronald Oliver Felton TD. He took the name from his wartime regiment. He was for many years Headmaster of Okehampton Grammar School in Devon....
's The Gauntlet (1951, back to the Welsh Marches
Welsh Marches
The Welsh Marches is a term which, in modern usage, denotes an imprecisely defined area along and around the border between England and Wales in the United Kingdom. The precise meaning of the term has varied at different periods...
in the 14th century), and Hilda Lewis
Hilda Lewis
Hilda Winifred Lewis was a British writer.She wrote a noted children's book, The Ship that Flew which concerns Norse mythology and time travel. It was republished in the Oxford Children's Modern Classics series in 1998. Several of her historical novels, e.g. I am Mary Tudor , received attention...
's perennially popular The Ship that Flew (1939), which used time travel to convey characters to the age of Norse gods and heroes. In Alison Uttley
Alison Uttley
Alison Uttley , née Alice Jane Taylor, was a prolific British writer of over 100 books. She is now best known for her children's series about Little Grey Rabbit, and Sam Pig....
's A Traveller in Time (1939), the girl slipped back into the period when Queen Elizabeth I of England
Elizabeth I of England
Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...
had imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots in Derbyshire. Penelope Farmer
Penelope Farmer
-Life:She was born as a fraternal twin in Westerham, Kent, on 14 June 1939 to Hugh Robert MacDonald and Penelope Boothby Farmer. After attending a boarding school, she read history at St Anne's College, Oxford and did postgraduate work at Bedford College, University of London.Information about...
's Charlotte Sometimes (1969) was a darker, more complex novel about the way time slip (back to 1918) could threaten the main character's very identity.
Sleigh's approach in Jessamy was to slip her character from one thoroughly realistic situation into another. This produced a book that remains very immediate to its readers, allowing them to identify closely with Jessamy in either of her personae, one of whom, it emerges (p. 146), is the late grandmother of the other.
Jessamy appeared simultaneously in 1967 in the UK (London: Collins) and the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill). It remained popular for a quarter of a century, but it seems not to have been reprinted since 1993. Interest among those who read it as a child has helped to hike secondhand prices on both sides of the Atlantic, especially for the bound UK and US first editions, with twelve naturalistic line drawings by Philip Gough, a leading illustrator of the time.
The novel was translated into Swedish under the same title in 1975. A German translation, somewhat misleadingly entitled Der Spuk im alten Schrank (The ghost in the old cupboard), appeared in 1980.
External sources
- Kirkus Reviews Retrieved 25 July 2011.
- Facebook discussion: Retrieved 26 March 2011.
- Synopsis/review: Retrieved 25 July 2011.