Moray Williams’s most celebrated books, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse (1938) and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat (1942), take place in an imaginary location corresponding to somewhere in Northern Europe, an alternative Switzerland full of forests, mountains, woodcutters and itinerant toymakers who carve playthings lovingly from the wood of the trees that surround them. The Little Wooden Horse’s there-and-back-again journey takes him through industrial landscapes as well as rural ones, canal barges, cargo ships and coalmines as well as palaces and bourgeois houses, but it is coded as being set in the recent past; there are no trains or aeroplanes in it, and the toymaker who makes the Little Wooden Horse seems startled by the challenge posed to his trade by the mass-produced metal toys which were pretty well ubiquitous by 1938, when the book was first published. Gobbolino’s quest for a permanent home occupies a fairy tale panorama populated by witches, hobgoblins, knights and dragons, as well as more everyday beings: orphans, mayors, pedlars and farmers. The little cat’s quest for an ‘ordinary’ human family to take him in is represented as particularly difficult in a world with so many magical events and beings in it, where everyone thinks they know what to expect from a witch’s cat, and everyone assumes that Gobbolino is one of them – the prejudice is even consolidated in the book’s title (Gobbolino is never really a witch’s cat because he hasn’t got the looks or talent).
Adventures of Puffin, by contrast, takes place in contemporary Britain, beginning in the West Country of England – perhaps on Lundy Island, which is famous for puffins[1] – and taking in New York and London as well as the largest ship in the world, the recently-completed Queen Mary (launched in 1936), and the Coronation Scot express train (which ran for the first time in 1937). There are some terrifying mermaids, but the bulk of Puffin’s adventures have him confronting real-world perils. It’s as if the year of crisis 1939 found Moray Williams unable to tear her imagination away from the here and now; and the book’s double subject – marginalisation and helping outcasts and the homeless – could hardly have been more current. It’s a book about being lost, befriended, betrayed, and in a hurry. Those themes would have resonated with many of its readers, sometimes painfully so, and perhaps that’s why it never quite achieved the popularity of The Little Wooden Horse and Gobbolino.[2]
The most striking feature of the book is its concentration on time, above all on being out of time. Its central character, a puffin called Puffin, finds himself at odds with mating season in his puffinry when he fails to find a mate – the only puffin not to have done so. He then comes across an egg, which fails to hatch when the other eggs do; Puffin’s meticulous care of the egg prevents him from following his fellow puffins when they return to their life at sea after the nesting season is over. He refuses to believe that the egg is no longer viable – that it has remained unhatched for far too long, and must therefore be lifeless – until he meets a lost toy called the Little Wo, and realises that he can no longer put off the time when he must help the toy find its owner. The quest for the Little Wo’s owner involves numerous occasions when the toy and his friend Puffin are trapped in some form of prison, prevented for extended periods from pursuing their journey – first in a mermaid’s cave, then in a coastguard’s cottage, where the Little Wo is tied to a baby’s wrist and Puffin is incarcerated in a bird cage. By the time they reach the location where the Little Wo was lost – a seaside town – it is out of season, and the family who lost him has long gone. The pair catch a train in the hope that it will take them to the family’s home in London, but fail to consult the timetable to ascertain its direction of travel, and find themselves trapped again in the cargo hold of a ship which is taking the train to America. Once in the United States they are imprisoned once more, this time in a capitalist contract whereby Puffin must sing his signature song and the Little Wo must perform magic tricks for an indefinite period – possibly for ever – without hope of release. Their eventual escape takes them back to the coastguard and his family, and eventually to London, where they narrowly escape being imprisoned for a fourth and final time in London Zoo. Each imprisonment in the book delays the pair’s journey for weeks or months, so that when the Little Wo finally finds his owner, Puffin returns to the puffinry to find that the nesting season is over again, and that he has again failed to choose a mate or fertilise an egg. The sheer consistency with which this theme is developed in the narrative confirms, I think, the extraordinary craftsmanship Moray Williams brings to her books for children, as noted in my post on The Little Wooden Horse. But it also confirms the extent to which this novel in particular represents a direct response to the year of peril, 1939, in which it was written.
The most striking sign that the book is a work of its time is its use of a highly topical incident as one of its central plot devices. Puffin and Little Wo conceal themselves in a train, as I said before, but it’s not just any train; it’s the ‘very paragon of trains’, which the Little Wo chooses in preference to the ordinary train that would (presumably) have taken them to London, their intended destination (p. 137). ‘Look at that one!’ the toy cries when he catches sight of it at the station. ‘Did you ever in all your life see such a glorious, such a magnificent train as the one that is standing over there?’ Puffin has not – in fact, Puffin has never even seen a train before – and so he agrees to board the vehicle in question, little knowing that it is the Coronation Scot, which is about to be taken to New York for display at the New York World Fair. The actual Coronation Scot was loaded on board the SS Belpamela at Southampton on 23 January 1939, and was described in a contemporary newsreel as ‘the pride of Britain’s railways, fast and silent and up-to-date’, sent to the United States to ‘show them what we can do in the way of modern transport’. The vehicle represents modernity itself, with the speed, efficiency and sleek art deco aesthetics that embodied the concept at the end of the decade. In the book, however, the train is out of time, for all its modernity. It is travelling not on its usual route between London and Glasgow but across the sea to an exhibition in the most famous of American cities – a departure from its timetable that directly interferes with the plans and hopes of Puffin and the Little Wo. In fact, the real Coronation Scot went on to embody the rupture of time that takes place on the outbreak of war, since hostilities between Britain and Germany meant that it could not be brought back to Britain until 1943. In the meantime, it served as an ‘Ambassador of British railways and as an example of British craftsmanship and technical achievement’ when it was shown for a second time at the New York World Fair of 1940. By that time part of its duties would be to remind neutral America of the ‘ties and contacts […] which have so long bound us in mutual interest’, as Lord Stamp of Shortlands put it in a contemporary pamphlet. Presumably Lord Stamp hoped it might also help to persuade the United States to throw in its lot with the train’s engineers and country, abandoning neutrality and recognising the need to be ‘belligerent’ against the Nazi menace. Adventures of Puffin may have had a similar ambassadorial purpose, since Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse saw equal success in Britain and America, a feat which Puffin’s publishers no doubt hoped to replicate with its adventurous successor.[3]
War is never mentioned in Moray Williams’s book, but its presence is everywhere if you look for it. The lost toy called the Little Wo, in particular, could be said to represent the innocent victims of war, people about whom Moray Williams would have known a great deal thanks to her father’s work as County Director for the Red Cross in Hampshire. Three years before the book was published, farmland at Moray Williams’s Hampshire home – a dilapidated mansion called North Stoneham – was chosen as the site for a camp for Basque refugee children from the Spanish Civil War;[4] in other words, war in Europe swept up on the shore of Ursula’s childhood home at the very moment when her marriage to a pilot took her away from Stoneham to a suburban flat in Hampton, exiling her from the countryside she loved. Ursula’s brother Alan, a communist, was inspired by the plight of the Basque refugees to write a pamphlet calling for insurrection which got him rusticated from the University of Cambridge. Like the refugees the Little Wo is a forced migrant, swept away from his child owner and banished from his home by the sea of circumstance. His strangely curtailed name seems to indicate the broken threads that tied him to the past; we’re told specifically at one point that ‘Wo’ is not a version of ‘Woe’ (p. 133), and readers of Moray Williams’s famous book of 1938 might well have noted its broken allusion to the book’s protagonist, the Little Wooden Horse. The Little Wo, however, doesn’t have a fixed species. While the illustrations by Mary Shillabeer suggest he is a dog, the book never names him as such, and from his first emergence from the sea he comes across as more or less anonymous as well as homeless and alone:
Out of the melting froth something crept and crawled, so wet it might have been made of the sea. […] The little creature was not a bird, it was not a seal, it was certainly not a mermaid – it was like nothing [Puffin] had ever seen before (p. 23).
We know only that the Little Wo has a name and that he’s made of cotton, with button eyes (p. 48), woolly ears and a tail ‘which had been darned several times over’ (p. 56). He cannot remember where his home is, and even his child owner has no name – he is only ever ‘Himself’. Everywhere he goes the toy seeks to endear himself to the local population, accepting them eagerly as his well-wishers and benefactors, despite the fact that they regularly prove to have malevolent designs on him. At the same time, from the first his chief characteristics are those of loyalty – first to Himself, then to Puffin, then to his real or apparent friends – along with courage (although he is often frightened), forgetfulness and naivety. By the end of the book, when he finally remembers the location of his home, these characteristics make him seem like the ideal candidate for a soldier, perhaps part of the worldwide movement preparing to protect their homes from the rise of fascism. On spotting the house where Himself lives, he promptly jumps out of a speeding plane with a parachute on his back – like a paratrooper or a pilot escaping a damaged aircraft – and sets off towards the building in question, ‘Confident as a marching army’ (p. 188), singing martial songs and ‘with a thousand imaginary drums beating in his ears’ (p. 189). The last Puffin sees of him is looking out of the house’s nursery window, waving to his avian friend and protector while preparing to reassure Himself (who is not at home) that his broken family has been reunited against all odds. There could hardly be a more comforting message for child readers in wartime – especially if those readers had been forcefully parted from their families and homes, like the Basque refugees. Reunion may still be possible, the book insists, and it happens here after many trials and adventures, though we are never shown the reunion itself. Every child who has been separated from their loved ones will need to imagine it for themselves.
The emphasis on technology in Moray Williams’s book also invokes the rapid approach of war, when innovative and skilfully-used technology might prove the difference between victory and defeat. Ursula’s husband Peter was an ex-RAF pilot who worked as a technician at the Hawker factory in Kingston, where the famous Hawker Hurricane fighter planes were built between 1936 and 1944. A major character in the novel is a young pilot who aims to break the record for crossing the Atlantic, and who befriends Puffin and the Little Wo at the seaside town where the toy was lost in the summer. The young man’s friendliness towards the friendless pair enables them to enter a grand hotel from which they have previously been barred, and they later accompany him on his record-breaking flight from New York to England. The pilot’s plane crashes on the English coast after breaking the record, but he goes on to build a second, improved model of the smashed plane – called the Butterfly as if in homage to the well-known Moth series of planes built by de Havilland, though the name also invokes the beauty and vulnerability of planes in the 1930s[5] – and it’s from the new aircraft that the Little Wo finally spots his long-lost home. The pilot’s attempt to break the record identifies speed and technological innovation as the key qualities of modern times, but his willingness to use them in the service of others – he is unconcerned with fame or the trappings of fame and does his best to avoid them – endows him with the additional qualities of empathy, selflessness and loyalty required by prospective defenders of freedom. The series of coincidences that ensure the book’s modest heroes meet up on three occasions with their pilot friend imply, too, that he is in some sense a man of his time, one whose ability to master time by flying swiftly somehow extends itself to a mastery of good timing.
The pilot’s personal modesty extends to his family background, since his mother lives in a ‘pleasant country cottage’ with a ‘homely parlour’ and expresses effusive gratitude to Puffin for ‘saving her son’s life on the rocks’ after the crash (pp. 163-4). In fact the young man is a human double of the book’s two central characters, with Puffin’s ability to fly, the Little Wo’s attachment to home, and the courage and ingenuity of both, so that his presence in Moray Williams’s novel helps to link the two small animals – one real, one a toy – to the human population of his country. He confirms the link between himself and his nonhuman friends when he tells the Little Wo that he understands his impatience to get back to his owner: ‘I know just how you feel,’ he tells him, since ‘I felt like that myself out there in the States waiting for the Butterfly to be ready’ (p. 164). The Little Wo’s urgency to get home and the pilot’s urgency to break the record in flying to England both pay homage to the love of your place of birth, and to a stubborn willingness to overcome the various forms of peril that threaten to sever you from that place for ever; in the final stage of the crossing a storm brings down the pilot’s plane, but between them the three friends show characteristic resilience in surviving the catastrophe and making it back to the people and localities they love. In Moray Williams’s world, in other words, technological innovation can supplement rather than obscure the attachment to place, family and the ordinary. As the wife of a pilot and technician she was well qualified to recognise the capacity of these things to coexist.
Another element of the book that betrays its origins in the shadow of war is its setting on the English coast. The coast is where families go for holidays, where seabirds nest, where climbers brave the cliffs (Puffin and little Wo are rescued from a peregrine’s nest by a young climber, the Coastguard’s son), and where fishermen earn their living (Puffin salutes the fishermen of his home region as he flies back to his puffinry at the end of the book: ‘where are fishermen like the fishermen of the West Country?’, p. 194). But the seashore is also a place of deadly danger. The sea that washes against its rocks and sands contains perils of every description, from the tide that sweeps the Little Wo away from Himself to the peregrine that snatches him from the waves as food for its young, from the whirlpools between its boulders and the cuttlefish in its caves to the mermaids that haunt its waters, who imprison the Little Wo in their submarine palace. The Coastguard – another key character in the book – reinforces our sense of the dangers that plague the coast, since his job is to protect his fellow humans against them. The Coastguard’s world collides with the young pilot’s when the first Butterfly crashes near the Coastguard’s cottage, and the incident reinforces the point that both key human characters earn their living by courting danger, perched on the borderline between life and death along with their families. The Coastguard’s cottage (with his wife and children in it) stands close to the rocks on which boats and planes come to grief, while the pilot’s mother is keenly conscious of the deadliness of her son’s trade as an airman. Their familiarity with peril marks them out as fully prepared for the global conflict whose approach everyone was predicting in 1939.
Animals too, on the coast, exist on a fulcrum between life and death. Puffin’s Egg may or may not be alive as he waits for it to hatch; many people, including the mermaids, assume that it’s ‘addled’. Small creatures like Puffin and the Little Wo live in constant danger from predators such as cuttlefish and peregrine falcons. The falcons live in danger from human nest robbers such as the young climber. A fox Puffin meets in a field when he journeys inland is in danger from the hounds that chase it. Inhabitants of the coast and its adjacent landscapes and seascapes – Puffin’s world, in other words – resemble tightrope walkers or mountaineers, teetering precariously between survival and destruction.
Puffin’s particular stretch of coast is made up of granite cliffs, impregnable bastions like the White Cliffs of Dover but also vertiginous precipices marking the end of one element and the start of another. The writer-artist Mervyn Peake wrote of 1939 as a cliff over which the world hung poised to drop:
O heart-beats – you are rattling dice –
My rattling dice
Proclaim the edge of precipice
At whose hid boulders stands a soundless sea –
These dice
Endanger me,
And spice
My days with hazards of futurity.[6]
In fact, the period immediately before the Second World War is often described in prose and verse, both then and now, as a precipice or cliff, and Peake’s poem perfectly summarizes – mixed metaphors and all – the intense consciousness at the time that multiple threats were coming to a head, and that the momentum of the world was now too strong to prevent its losing its balance and taking the plunge onto the rocks below. Moray Williams would have been as conscious of this momentum as anyone in Britain. Her husband Peter volunteered as an ARP warden in 1938, and his work as well as her father’s was shaped by conflict, which brought the need for both Hawker Hurricane fighters and emergency accommodation for refugees. Making her protagonist a seabird, who lives his life on the deadly margin between land and sea, means that Moray Williams’s novel conveys almost as well as Peake’s poem the strange tensions that governed this particular moment in global history. And her protagonist shares with his world a set of internal tensions that make him the perfect embodiment of the time in which she was writing.
In personality, Puffin is poised between one set of traits and another, a quality that makes him one of Moray Williams’s most complex creations. He is plump, short and clownish to look at but also a daring bird of action, who can fly low enough to ‘buzz’ other birds (as a pilot might ‘buzz’ his friends on an airfield) or leap from a plane on a sudden impulse to follow and protect the parachuting Little Wo. He lives alone in his clifftop burrow, but also longs for a companion (‘either a kind and pretty little sweetheart puffin […] or a brave, sturdy brother puffin’, p. 10) and a child. He is ‘honest’ (p. 9), but he is also prepared to be mildly dishonest when it suits him; for instance, he hides away the abandoned egg he has found for several hours before putting up a sign advertising its whereabouts to anyone who might be looking for it (pp. 9-11). He cares passionately for the Egg but forgets to sit on it. He is quite often bad tempered (for instance, he pushes a young puffin off a ledge for cheeking him, pp. 15-16) but also kind-hearted (he takes the Little Wo to his burrow as soon as he finds him on the shore, and even transfers his attention from the Egg for a while as he tends to his visitor’s needs). He is a homebird, satisfied to stay behind and wait for the Egg to hatch while the other puffins fly off to sea, but also a courageous traveller, willing to accompany the Little Wo to the ends of the earth to help him track down his human family. He is sometimes self-deprecating but also takes pleasure in fame – at least for a while – when his signature song makes him a star in America. He has limited experience but also a great deal of ingenuity, finding ways to escape from the very different prisons of the mermaids’ palace and the Coastguard’s cottage, outwitting a pack of hounds, and mimicking the voice of a zookeeper to help his friend slip out of a cage in London Zoo. He gets frustrated at times by the Little Wo’s endless naivety, but loves him and misses him badly when he’s gone. At every stage of his adventures, it’s his best characteristics that direct his actions, so that he always teeters in the right direction, but he sometimes feels shame for having been tempted to do the opposite. Puffin comes across, in fact, as a thoroughly ordinary person, but one who is capable of doing extraordinary things, which makes him the perfect hero for a time when everyday life has somehow got tangled up with the frightening, the difficult and the strange.
Puffin’s two-sidedness extends from his personality to his identity. Both he and the Little Wo continually fluctuate, so to speak, between one mode of being and another. Moray Williams represents Puffin both as a puffin and as a kind of miniature human, while the Little Wo – like the Little Wooden Horse – comes across as both a toy and a very small person. They can talk to human beings, like the animals in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, but are also bound like them to their nonhuman identities, in this case as a bird and a toy. Puffin has wings and can fly, while the Little Wo has cotton paws which can get worn out by excessive scrambling among the rocks; at the same time, the two friends are able to hold hands when running away from their many pursuers, and Puffin can row a boat when the need arises. Puffin sings his signature song in English, and the song becomes a hit, first among the passengers on the Queen Mary, then among the citizens of New York; but he can also be barred from an English hotel because (as the porter says) ‘This isn’t a Natural History Museum’ (p. 128) – in other words, because he’s an animal. He and the Little Wo can be admitted as guests to the hotel dining room, thanks to their friend the pilot, but can also slip away unnoticed by scuttling under the dining room tables like the bird and dog they resemble.
Their unsettled identities get them in trouble repeatedly during their travels. The Little Wo, for instance – who seeks to ingratiate himself with everyone and believes everything he’s told – thinks the mermaids, Puffin’s neighbours, are delightful, and allows them to replace his small darned tail with the tail of a merdog, which gives him a third identity, that of a mythological creature, to supplement the two he already has. This means (as Puffin is well aware) that the Little Wo will never again be able to leave the sea and find his family, which means in turn that Puffin must find a way to rescue him by offering the mermaids something better in exchange for the stolen tail. He finds this object of trade in his own brightly-coloured rainbow beak, the part of his body that gives him the nickname he most dislikes, ‘sea-parrot’ (a name that proves prophetic when he ‘parrots’ the voice of a zookeeper). As soon as he gives the mermaids his beak, they give back the Little Wo’s tail and take away the fishtail, but Puffin is left with a ‘funny little stump’ and the feeling that a crucial part of him is missing. Fortunately, a puffin’s beak grows back soon after it’s been shed [https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.2620]; this happens annually after the breeding season, as Moray Williams may have known, since this is exactly when it happens in the book. Puffins, in other words, have shapeshifting built into their bodies, which means that our hero’s repeated transitions in the first part of the book – between animal and person, between a rainbow-beaked sea-parrot and an anonymous black-and-white bird with a stump on its face – do him no real damage.
But his dual nature becomes problematic when he first meets human people. On being taken back to the Coastguard’s cottage by his cliff-climbing son, both Puffin and the Little Wo are treated from the first as nonhuman entities: Puffin is put in a parrot’s cage and the Little Wo is tied by a thread, like a rattle, to the baby’s wrist. This treatment becomes disturbing when we realise that the Coastguard and his family can talk to both creatures as if they were fellow human beings, learning their back stories and enjoying Puffin’s rendition of the song that later makes him famous. In other words, they make a conscious choice to treat the pair as inferiors rather than equals, selecting from among their characteristics the ones that identify them as lower than themselves in that man-made hierarchy of species, the Great Chain of Being. Puffin’s response to the Little Wo, by contrast, was wholly generous, welcoming him into his burrow like a long-lost son or brother. The Coastguard and his family, on the other hand, never rise above their perception of their small captives as possessions to be disposed of as they wish, despite their articulacy and obvious intelligence. The Little Wo is eventually freed from the thread that ties him to the baby, because he can climb back into the cradle by himself and always does; but Puffin is never permitted to fly free, and there is never any question of the Little Wo being allowed to continue his quest for the child who lost him.
This becomes clear when the Coastguard’s son and the Little Wo become unexpected celebrities. Word soon gets round that a toy has been found by the son in a falcon’s nest, and a letter arrives from London inviting the boy and the famous toy to come and be interviewed by the papers. The Little Wo is delighted, because London is close to his old home, but Puffin overhears the Coastguard telling his wife that the toy will never be restored to its owner; he is wanted by a Museum, perhaps a Museum of Natural History, and ‘will be [kept] there for ever and ever’ to be gawped at by strangers (p. 92). The toy’s urgent search for Himself will come to an end, and he will be condemned to total stasis, frozen in time – or out of time – in perpetuity. The former migrant will no longer be a person in transit, with a rich identity and a variegated history, but stuck in a glass case in a fixed position, his life artificially reduced to a single moment that defines him for the rest of his existence. The parallel with refugees is painfully obvious: a group of people whose lives are all too often reduced to a single word (‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’), which is used to define them, the rest of their histories forgotten or ignored in the hostility and even fear that word can provoke.
As it happens, Puffin could be said to have a personal reason to resist the objectification of living creatures, whether birds or playthings or human migrants. Moray Williams drew inspiration for her hero from an old glass case full of stuffed seabirds in her childhood home, North Stoneham, a crumbling Palladian mansion not far from Southampton. She saw the case again on returning to the house in November 1938, not long before it was due to be demolished. Prominent among the seabirds was a puffin, its colourful beak standing out from among the dusty blacks and whites of the gulls, murres, razorbills and gannets. Improbably, Puffin seems to share Ursula’s knowledge of glass display cases, taxidermy, and the museums that encourage both:
A museum! He had heard puffins speak of them before. Museums were full of glass cases, sealed, and filled with stuffed puffins, who were there for ever and ever. They would never fish nor fly again. It was worse, far worse, than being in a parrot’s cage in a pleasant kitchen with the waves breaking on the rocks outside. When he thought of the Little Wo shut in one of these ca[s]es for ever, in the artificial nest of a stuffed peregrine, with two stuffed peregrine children, and behind him a painted sky and a pastel sea, with school-children and other interested people staring at him all day long, Puffin closed his eyes. He simply could not bear it. (p. 92)
The perils that have faced the pair so far in their adventures shrink to insignificance beside this fate of being fixed for all time in rigid stillness, part of a simulated ‘natural’ environment crudely reproduced, for the benefit of city-dwellers, by means of a wholly unnatural process. That the toy might be reduced to this condition after being betrayed by a couple who claim to love him – the Coastguard and his wife – speaks to the problems that arise from lack of empathy. As Puffin points out to the Little Wo, an absence of fellow-feeling is not so much a matter of cruelty as of thoughtlessness: ‘They are ignorant, that’s all. And they don’t understand us; it isn’t their fault. If they had understood us they would have set us free long ago, and who knows if you wouldn’t have been at home by now and I back in my shabby little burrow’ (p. 93).
Puffin’s own sense of empathy is best displayed, of course, in his response to the Little Wo, who is stuffed by his very nature, just like an animal in a museum display case, but is treated by Puffin as if he were capable of every kind of feeling. On first meeting him, Puffin examines his ‘little cotton body, stuffed, and limp where the stuffing was soaked and lumpy from the sea’ (p. 25), but instead of dismissing him as an inanimate, cast-off object seeks instead to understand his history: ‘he gently asked the Little Wo where he came from, and what he was doing in the sea all alone at that time of day’ (p. 24). He ignores the toy’s disparaging remarks about Puffin’s beloved coast (for the Little Wo it’s a ‘dreadful barren shore’, p. 25), and recognises instead that his new friend has been ‘greatly loved’, that he is small and helpless, and that he can be readily accommodated in his burrow. And he goes on to adapt his own story and circumstances to the migrant’s needs: ‘With a little arrangement, they slept very comfortably with the Egg between them, and for the first time since he found it Puffin forgot to wonder whether by the morning it would be hatched’ (p. 26). Puffin’s sense of time has begun to synch with that of his visitor, rather than the Egg, and not long afterwards the seabird becomes a migrant himself, voluntarily taking to sea in a home-made boat in a bid to give the toy’s story a happy ending.
Puffin’s narrative involves several moments when people without empathy or ‘understanding’ manage to acquire it. Puffin himself gets more empathetic. In building his boat, for instance, he begins by rejecting the help offered by various animals in his neighbourhood, then quickly realises he cannot manage on his own and finds ways to cajole them into forgiving him for his initial rudeness. The porter who at first bars Puffin and the Little Wo from the grand hotel later becomes decidedly helpful to them. The Coastguard and his family are reunited with Puffin and the Little Wo when the two small heroes ask them for help in rescuing the airman after his crash, and at this point the humans beg forgiveness for their earlier betrayal of their nonhuman visitors. But there are also two more incidents when human lack of empathy nearly ruins the adventurers. At London Zoo Puffin is again identified as an animal rather than a person when a little boy grabs him by the neck, thinking he has escaped from his enclosure, after which he is chased through the zoo by a swarm of keepers, and only escapes by confirming once and for all his human credentials (as I mentioned, he mimics a keeper’s voice with perfect accuracy). The most disturbing instance of lack of empathy, though, happens in America, where Puffin is almost trapped in time by the operations of capitalism. Having made his name by singing his song about puffins, whose most memorable line perfectly captures the American Dream (‘there’s nuffin’ that a puffin cannot do!’), Puffin is persuaded to sign a ‘paper’ which he cannot read; only later does he find he has signed a legal contract with a music-hall owner, ‘which bound [him] to stay with the show till it came to an end, and it might go on for years and years’ (p. 147). Capitalism, it would seem, has the disruption and control of time built into its mechanisms, surreptitiously passing ownership of a person’s daily labour from themselves to someone else without their consent, and thereafter imposing the new owner’s timetable on the labourer for as long as the contract remains in effect. In Adventures of Puffin, as in The Little Wooden Horse, showmanship is the trade in which this clandestine transference of ownership manifests itself most visibly. The Little Wooden Horse breaks himself to bits performing for gold in a travelling circus, while Puffin and the Little Wo find themselves trapped within the narrow confines of the music hall, having been ‘brought up’ (in Puffin’s case) ‘to the beauty and freedom of the sea’ (p. 147). Capitalism makes objects of living creatures, placing them in metaphorical glass cases to be gawped at by anyone willing and able to pay money for the privilege and keeping them there without hope of release. Luckily Puffin and the Little Wo find a way to break the contract: their friend the English pilot comes to watch the show, and on seeing him they promptly jump into his pockets, where with his help they evade the scrutiny of the journalists and showbiz personnel who come looking for them. The pilot is not concerned with distinctions between species or with other kinds of boundaries and borders; he walks the two friends through the door of the music hall, just as he had earlier walked them through the door of the swanky hotel in an English seaside town, in defiance of social rules and contracts. Later he invites them to fly home with him to England on his plane, broaching the vaster threshold or border of the Atlantic Ocean. In the process he renders the money they earned at the music hall immaterial, since they no longer need to pay for their passage – this being the major motivation for their having agreed to become performers in the first place. Empathy frees the two small heroes from the grip of capitalism, just as empathy saves the pilot’s life, when Puffin fetches the Coastguard to rescue the young man after his plane has crashed. For Moray Williams, understanding or fellow feeling offers a modest but essential counter-narrative to the various forms of hostility, indifference and oppression that have brought the world to the brink of war.
The pilot’s conduct in the music hall confirms his status as a human double for his two small friends. When Puffin and the Little Wo dive into his pockets he distracts reporters’ attention by repeating Puffin’s words from an incident earlier in the story. At one point in their adventures the modest heroes meet a fox and get caught up in the hunt that is chasing him (it’s worth mentioning here that foxhunts take place in winter, between November and March or April, so this is another temporal marker in the text; if the friends had met the fox a few weeks earlier they would never have encountered the hunt). The Little Wo finds himself substituted for the fox as quarry for the ravening hounds, and Puffin saves the toy by telling him to dive into a rabbit’s burrow (much as he later dives into the pilot’s pocket) while he sits at the entrance and distracts the dogs with breezy conversation. As the hounds come up to ask if he has seen the little fugitive, Puffin refuses to inform them of his whereabouts, but also refuses to lie to them about it: ‘I can’t say, I’m sure,’ he says vaguely in response to their questions; ‘I really couldn’t tell you’; ‘I wouldn’t like to say, I’m sure’ (p. 114). The pilot repeats these words verbatim to the crowd of reporters looking for his friends at the music hall: ‘I can’t say, I’m sure’; ‘I really couldn’t tell you’; ‘I wouldn’t like to say, I’m sure’ (p. 150). The echo places him firmly in his friends’ camp, as a person who refuses to countenance hunting of any kind (in this case the intrusive tracking down of individuals by the paparazzi), but who also refuses to tell lies if he can avoid it. As with Puffin, his convictions are clear, his loyalties unwavering, and he maintains both in the face of a world that too readily readjusts its position in pursuit of profit, or in conformity with the dictates of a repressive ideology.
The innate similarity between the pilot and his two small friends reinforces another key theme of the book: bonds forged in defiance of difference. The most important of such bonds is the family bond, whereby people of different generations (and hence of different backgrounds and even cultures, each generation shaped by the different circumstances under which it grew up) support each other in an unbreakable unit held together by unwavering affection. As we’ve seen, Puffin treats the Little Wo as a family member – a child or a somewhat wayward younger brother – and he reaffirms the bond between them at the moment of parting, looking back at the toy as it waves from the nursery window and thinking to himself, as often before, ‘Funny, faithful, happy Little Wo’ (p. 191). The phrase implies that the toy has found his happy ending against all odds; and when Puffin’s own happy ending follows, it is equally the outcome of unwavering faithfulness to the idea of a happy home and a loving family.
In both Puffin’s and the Little Wo’s case, the family and the home are non-traditional ones – the traditional nuclear family having been placed under intolerable strain in 1939 by the conditions of war and worldwide migration. The Little Wo has forged his strongest bond with a creature who is not even of the same species – Himself – which may explain why he finds it so easy to bond with Puffin, as well as with the many other beings he meets on his adventures. Puffin, by contrast, forges his deepest bond with his own species in the form of the Egg, and afterwards with the Little Wo, who can almost (but not quite) be equated with the puffin chick into which he hoped the Egg would hatch, or with the puffin companion he longed for. In the end, however, he gains an actual puffin companion. Having been out of temporal step with the rest of his community since the beginning of the book, it seems inevitable that he should remain out of step in the final chapter; and sure enough, when he gets home to his humble burrow he finds that his fellow puffins have left their breeding grounds for a second time, and that the season is over. On this occasion, however, someone is waiting for him: a flightless puffling who has hatched after all the rest and been left behind when the others flew off to sea. Washed up on Puffin’s clifftop by the sea of circumstance – like a second Egg or another Little Wo – the puffling is adopted by the friendly seabird, as promptly and completely as he adopted the toy. But for this new castaway no other home calls to him; no shadow of another parting stands between them, as Dickens might have put it.[7]
The puffling is no more the seabird’s son, of course, than the Little Wo was, but fits more neatly into Puffin’s narrative. That it is a narrative, carefully constructed by Puffin to suit his needs, is confirmed by another detail about this ending, which is that Puffin manages to persuade himself that the chick has emerged from his beloved Egg, bringing his story to the neatest of conclusions. The Egg came into Puffin’s life as a creature out of time, like the Little Wo and Puffin himself, and Puffin has remained convinced from first to last that being out of time can have a positive outcome. An Egg might hatch, Puffin believes, long after it should have started to rot. A toy might find a faithful friend long after he has been seemingly lost for ever. A puffling might find an adoptive parent long after it has been left to starve by its biological parents. Understanding arises from a willingness to embrace the unfortunate, the abandoned and the unconventional, and Puffin has both these qualities in spades: that is, understanding or empathy, and a willingness to take unfortunate strangers to heart, however inconvenient this may prove to himself. Puffin, then, is a creature perfectly suited to a time out of joint, just as the principal humans in the story – the Coastguard and the pilot – are perfectly suited to the defence of the realm that will soon be necessary.
One peculiarity of Puffin’s series of unconventional families is that they contain no mothers – this despite the fact that Moray Williams was a mother when she wrote it. Nuclear families like the Coastguard’s, the pilot’s and Moray Williams’s have a mother at the centre of them, but the Egg has no visible mother and neither does the Little Wo when Puffin finds him or the puffling he adopts in the final chapter. When he realises that the Egg is motherless, the seabird does all he can to fill the role himself:
For the rest of the day he sat on the Egg, as he had seen the mother puffins do, but he was awkward at it. He rolled from one side to the other; he fell into a doze and fell off it. he found it most uncomfortable, and in some strange way he felt that the Egg was uncomfortable too. It did not like to be sat on, at any rate by Puffin. (p. 18)
So he seeks out a better mother for the Egg, first approaching the mermaids, who assure him of their maternal credentials in such glowing terms that the seabird becomes unsettled – after all, ‘Every puffin knows that a mermaid’s promises are not to be trusted, and the more solemnly they promise the more treacherous are their hearts’ (p. 20) – and backs off, earning himself their everlasting enmity. Later the Little Wo takes on the task of finding a mother for the Egg, and his choice of candidates for the position includes a cow, several rabbits, foxes, voles, and a kindly seal. When the seal gets stuck in Puffin’s burrow and has to be rescued before returning to her own family, the two friends give up the chase, and from this point onwards the need for a mother is never mentioned again. Puffin pronounces the Egg unviable and commits himself wholly to the Little Wo; and when in the end he decides that the Egg has indeed hatched and produced the puffling, a whole year after he left it to fend for itself, the little bird’s lack of a mother is never brought up. In times of need the only requisite for a family is whether or not it can provide a safe, loving and supportive environment for its members; the Little Wo knows this when he seeks a mother figure among all the many species that frequent the coast, refusing to confine himself to puffins or even birds. Puffin provides this environment for each of his chosen small companions, just as they provide much-needed companionship for Puffin.
The seabird’s easy adoption of a traditionally female role (though he doesn’t fulfil all of its functions with equal success) stands at the heart of what I take to be the novel’s key achievement. In it, Moray Williams succeeds in providing her young readers with an alternative model of masculinity: one which is nurturing, consistently and practically focused on the needs of others, empathetic, and unconditionally loving of its smaller, weaker companions. Even the Little Wo’s brief transformation into a kind of soldier as he marches in triumph towards his long-lost owner’s home has as its object not the conquest of a neighbouring nation but the peaceful reclamation of his own. At a time when a mood of violent militancy gripped the world, Moray Williams’s alternative vision of men, presented to a new generation of men (her own children were boys), offered up the possibility of a very different future. That this is the function of her narrative seems to be confirmed by the final paragraph of the last chapter, in which Puffin sits down with the puffling on the edge of the cliff, looking out across the ocean, and tells him the story of his adventures. Having finished his story, the seabird goes on to tell a further story of renewed community and the complete realignment of disjointed timelines:
And when, his adventures told, they sat quietly in the moonlight, he began the tale of all the wonderful things they were going to do together in the days ahead, when nobody would be lonely any longer and the Puffins came back to the Puffinry. (p. 198)
Moray Williams does not show us the Puffins’ return; we are asked only to imagine it, just as we were earlier asked to imagine the Little Wo’s reunion with Himself. She leaves her child readers, in other words, looking to the ‘days ahead’, but substitutes for the fearful prognosis of war a visionary glimpse of a time when loneliness will be banished, both for those like Puffin who have wandered far away from their homes and for those like the puffling who have been cast out and left behind. Immediately before this final sentence, she describes the ‘rainbow colours’ fading out of the granite cliffs; the rainbow being a symbol of hope in Genesis, as well as an echo of Puffin’s own rainbow beak, which he gave away to the mermaids but grew back while he was living with the Coastguard’s family. The rainbow colours may go dark, but they will return, Moray Williams assures us, with all they represented in her lifetime, and all they have represented since. It’s an ending that speaks to our own time as powerfully, I think, as it spoke to hers.
NOTES
[1] Lundy Island seems the most likely location for Puffin’s puffinry, because it is made of granite, unlike (for instance) the limestone cliffs at Purbeck. Moray Williams identifies Puffin’s cliffs as in the ‘West Country’ and of ‘granite’: Adventures of Puffin (London: Harrap, 1939), p. 194. All quotations are from this edition.
[2] Not that it didn’t do well. Colin Davison tells us that ‘By Christmas 1939 Adventures of Puffin had sold almost 2000 copies in less than two months, almost matching the early success of Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse’: Davison, Through the Magic Door: Ursula Moray Williams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse (Newcastle: Northumbria Press, 2011), p. 72. It never made it into paperback, however, which meant that it remains forever a product of its time.
[3] For the success of Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse see Davison, Through the Magic Door, pp. 60-62.
[4] See Davison, Through the Magic Door, p. 54.
[5] The picture of the plane provided by the book’s illustrator, Mary Shillabeer, looks less like a record-breaking single-pilot plane than a transport plane, the de Havilland Albatross, which was built between 1938 and 1939. Interestingly, a well-known photo of the Coronation Scot, taken in January 1939, shows it with an Albatross flying overhead. Could Shillabeer have based her plane on this one?
[6] ‘O Heart-Beats’, Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems, ed. R. W. Maslen, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 52.
[7] That’s a reference to the final sentence of Great Expectations (1860-1861), in the revised version of 1868: ‘I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of the tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.’