Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) preferred to be known simply under her initial E, due to her feeling that this at least gave the impression of her being a man, and therefore not being judged simply on the grounds of her gender. A political activist throughout her adult life, and a founding member of the Fabians, while born in South London she lived a peripatetic life from around four until her mid teens, when she settled for three years between 1872 and 1875 with her family (her father was a chemist) in Halstead Hall, close to Orpington, and now by Knockholt Station, deep in contemporary commuter belt country. The environs of Station House, their abode then, a relatively small residential house, reportedly served as the inspiration for one of her most famous works, `The Railway Children’ (1906). In a strange parallel with Frances Hodgson Barnett’s `The Secret Garden’, while the story of `Railway Children’ is set in Yorkshire, it seems memories of a Kent landscape inspired it. Knockholt at the time Nesbit lived there was under construction, with the line formally opening a year after she moved away, so she was able to play on the buildings being constructed for the new line.
A marriage to Hubert Bland aged only 17 which proved somewhat complex (he fathered children by a number of other women, including one of her own friends!) ended when he died in 1914. She remarried in 1917. During her life, she lived both in Eltham, from 1899 to 1920, which is in the historic boundaries of Kent – and from 1920 between Friston in East Sussex and Jesson, St Mary’s Bay, New Romney towards the very end of her life. She was a heavy smoker, and probably died of lung cancer. Her burial place was to finally be in Kent, in a grave with a simple wooden marker at the small village of St Mary in the Marsh close to New Romney.
Nesbit clearly had a deep emotional link with the landscape of Kent and the ways it was involved with her own memories and development. In two of her works, `Salome and the Head ‘ (1909) and `The Incredible Honeymoon’ (1916) she writes of holidaying with her children in the area around Yalding:
‘The Medway just above the Anchor (at Yalding, Kent) is a river of dreams. The grey and green of willows and alders mirror themselves in the still water in images hardly less solid-seeming than their living realities. There is pink loosestrife there, and meadow-sweet creamy and fragrant, forget-me-nots wet and blue, and a tangle of green weeds and leaves and stems that only botanists know the names of.’
‘If you go to Yalding you may stay at the George and be comfortable in a little village that owns a haunted churchyard, a fine church, and one of the most beautiful bridges in Europe.’
Her visits must have been around the time that the poet Edmund Blunden lived in the village. His work refers to haunting however of a somewhat different kind.
Her admiration for the works of William Morris, whose Red House in Blackheath was close to many of her own childhood haunts, and her commitment to Marxism testified to her strongly independent spirit, and is something that manifests itself in the books she wrote for children. One of the most representative, and sternly linked to Kent, is `The Wouldbegoods’ (1901). One of a series of stories involving the Bastable children, their antics while sent to a moated house ostensibly based on the moated Well Hall Pleasaunce (now partly a restaurant and bar) in Eltham have an underlying edginess to them. The story itself is hard to place, with references to Chatham, Maidstone (which seems close by in the stories, but which in real life is quite a distance from Eltham), and the Dover Road. In one chapter, `Bill’s Tombstone’, the children (Oswald, Dora, Dicky, Alice, Noel and H.O.) weed the garden of a `soldier’s widowed mother’ Mrs Simpkins, without her knowledge, only for her to burst from the house. `”Dratted little busybodies”, she said, It was indeed hard,’ the novel’s narrator continues, `but everyone in Kent says “dratted”.’ (`The Wouldbegoods’, Puffin Edition, 1958, 57) While well intending, they children had actually pulled up flowers, not weeds – an imposition they then compound by handing the poor lady a card given to a passing postman with what seems to be news about her son’s death in military action. Even more bizarrely, they then erect a small gravestone to him with a wooden cross, which they then show the beleaguered widow. While this is described in the book in benign ways, it comes across as almost tauntingly vexatious. Only on the son’s return, still alive, do the clouds lift. But the episode is as unsettling one, as is the malevolent tramp who traps the gang in a strange tower in another chapter, before they are liberated by a local farmer.
This disorienting sense of place is best illustrated by one of the final chapters about an attempt to become Canterbury Pilgrims by going to the city. For half the chapter, this seems to be where they have ended up, taken their by a young lady in her horse and carriage, but somewhat underwhelmed by the place they find:
`When we got to Canterbury it was much smaller than we expected, and the cathedral not much bigger than the church that is next to the Moat House. There seemed to be only one big street, but we supposed the rest of the city was hidden away somewhere.’ (Ibid, 234)
In fact, as the young lady taking them finally admits, this is not the real place, but a village she had pretended was the city. The narrator in a small addition at the end of the chapter acidly remarks that `Afterwards we went and saw the real Canterbury. It was very large. A disagreeable man showed us around the cathedral, and jawed all the time loud as it if wasn’t a church.’ (241) n Fe.apply(m