Imperialist Fantasy: Clifford Mills, Where the Rainbow Ends (1912)

This blog is called The City of Lost Books, and has concentrated on quite a few little-known texts in recent months: the fantastic novels of Margaret Irwin; the only novel by the modernist art critic Herbert Read; William Morris’s brilliant last romance The Water of the Wondrous Isles. Few books, however, can have been more justly neglected than Clifford Mills’s Where the Rainbow Ends (1912), and few books can have been more popular before they fell into oblivion. Based on a ‘fairy play’ co-written by Clifford Mills and John Reginald Owen (writing as John Ramsey) and first produced in 1911 with music by Roger Quilter, the book was a bestseller from its publication in 1912 to the 1950s. For forty years or so the play was as much a staple of Christmas in Britain as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), on which it was partly based. Princess Elizabeth went to see it at Christmas in 1937, when she was eleven. Being a blatant piece of British imperialist propaganda, however, it didn’t survive the sixties, and had more or less vanished from sight by the time I read the book version at the age of seven or eight, in my grandmother’s Salford flat in 1970.[1]

The book made a huge impression on me, not least because it made me profoundly uncomfortable. This was not because of its imperialist, militaristic propaganda – I was rather enthusiastic about things military at the age of seven – but because of its penchant for sadistic violence. Mills’s delight in subjecting her child protagonists to extreme mental and physical torments was obvious to me, and the deaths of her villains were unusually gruesome. Most dreadful of all, there was a boy in it who expressed his willingness to be transformed into a monster, in an episode that haunted my nightmares for several years. Another book I read at my grandmother’s flat was the Penguin translation of Homer’s Odyssey, its cover carefully protected with a transparent plastic dustjacket, and although that story too had people being magicked into beasts they didn’t consent to their transformation, and were in any case restored to human shape soon afterwards by the wily Odysseus. Mills’s doomed boy, by contrast, actively chooses his metamorphosis, and remains stubbornly committed to becoming a monster on the last occasion we see him. Through him Where the Rainbow Ends introduced me to a kind of fantasy I hadn’t encountered anywhere else, in which children’s behaviour could be as horribly punished as the wickedness of adults, and the bed you made for yourself was very much the one you lay in. Again, children had been punished with transformation in other books I knew, most notably Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who became a dragon because he refused to fit in. But Eustace learned his lesson in the process, whereas the boy in Where the Rainbow Ends learned nothing at all. This couldn’t happen, I thought, in books for children, and I dwelt on it with morbid fascination when Clifford Mills showed me that it could.

One of the things I liked about the book was that it did a good job of representing the pain of being separated from one’s family. The story begins with two middle-class English children who have lost their parents in a shipwreck six months before, and who are now being looked after by an abusive aunt and uncle, aided and abetted by a houseful of nasty servants, formerly the servants of the children’s beloved Cousin Matthew, also recently deceased. The children, Rosamond and Crispian, have been separated from their parents for several years – two in the case of Rosamond, four in Crispian’s – because the parents stayed behind in India when the children went to boarding school in England; it was on the journey from India to England that their Mother and Father were drowned. I can’t remember if I had yet gone to boarding school when I was staying at my Grandmother’s, but I certainly started a few weeks after turning seven, and the idea of long-term separation from one’s parents would have been familiar to me in any case from the fact that my older brother started there a year before I did. The British Empire, it seems, was built on the principle of separating children from their parents, and trained the children in question to respond by cultivating a sense of plucky independence underpinned by strict adherence to certain rules.

One such rule was the hackneyed notion that boys don’t cry, and Mills’s novel begins with Crispian breaking this rule, as I myself had done on many occasions. I appreciated this touch of honesty on the part of the author, though not the response of Crispian’s sister: Rosamond overhears him sobbing for their mother, and forces herself not to intervene for fear of shaming him (‘Boys’ tears, she told herself, were not to be seen – except by Mothers – sometimes’, p. 10).[2] Suddenly, however, she thinks of a way to cheer him up, which is by consulting a book Cousin Matthew used to read to them at bedtime. This is the ‘Rainbow Book’, and it is introduced into Mills’s story in the very first sentence: ‘Rosamond had suddenly remembered the “Rainbow Book”, and this is how it happened’ (p. 9). That sentence involves a double act of magic, first in adopting a tone which implies that everyone knows about the ‘Rainbow Book’, and secondly in giving that book the same title as the book we’re reading. The ‘Rainbow Book’ is Where the Rainbow Ends, and mentions a land where all lost loved ones can be found again; it also includes detailed instructions on how to get there. This made me think that perhaps the book by Clifford Mills called Where the Rainbow Ends might contain similar instructions; that it might in fact be some kind of guidebook. The title retains something of the glamour of this promise for me even now. And of course the book is meant as a guidebook, giving clear instructions on how to attain the pluck of its central characters, although one is unlikely to get much chance to show that pluck in a similar context.

One way of achieving pluck, Mills suggests, is to harbour suitable ambitions. In the case of middle-class boys like Crispian, the best ambition is to join the Navy and become an Admiral; in the case of girls like Rosamond it is to get married. Crispian’s ambition sets him apart from the wayward boys in Peter Pan who want to be pirates (remember how John is gently mocked for his imperialist sentiments?); he is clearly meant to be exactly the sort of material the British forces need as naval cadets and future officers. Rosamond, on the other hand, is pretty much like Wendy, but with an added spirit of adventure which makes her the motivating force behind all the book’s important moments. Not only is she the one who remembers the existence of the book called Where the Rainbow Ends, but she also decides to go and find the land described in it, then inspires her brother to come along as back-up. She later locates the magic carpet of Faith which will take them on their journey; and summoning the genie of the carpet is simple for her, since she has read The Arabian Nights. So is giving him instructions (though perhaps she has learned this from having had servants all her life); and when he offers each of the children two wishes, as genies do, she uses hers with impressive effectiveness. The first wish makes her Uncle and Aunt start their dinner all over again so that she and Crispian will have time to prepare for their travels. Her second wish summons Saint George to act as the children’s bodyguard on their adventure. Much later on, Rosamond thinks nothing of plunging into the Dragon Wood by herself to rescue a younger girl; and later still she is the one who thinks of the way to defeat the Dragon army, sewing the flag that will claim their Castle for England and summon Saint George (who has the unfortunate trait of being unable to appear anywhere except where the cross of Saint George is flying). This, then, is one of the book’s few redeeming features: it has a resourceful and active heroine, which makes it an excellent counterbalance gender-wise for Peter and Wendy, where most of the physical action is given over to Peter and Captain Hook. Along with C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a few others, it’s one of the books that trained me as a child to accept a girl as principal protagonist, something my male friends and some of the books I read had a tendency to drum out of me.

I’ve mentioned the play Peter Pan a couple of times, as well as the novel that followed, Peter and Wendy, which was first published in 1911, the year before the novelization of Where the Rainbow Ends. The fact that the second novel followed so closely on the first is probably not a coincidence, since Mills’s play had followed the pattern of Peter Pan from the beginning, above all in its efforts to accommodate special effects and character types of the sort that Barrie’s play had made hugely popular with spectators of all ages. Peter Pan involves flying, of course, and Crispian, Rosamond and their two companions – Crispian’s school friend Jim Blunders and his little sister Betty, whom Crispian summons with his own two wishes – not only get to fly on Faith’s magic carpet but are later carried off to captivity (like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz) by the winged henchmen of the principal villain. Peter Pan has a cheeky, wayward flying boy in a leading role, and his place is taken in Where the Rainbow Ends by the fairy Will o’the Wisp, who is in love with the Lake King’s Daughter and dances very nicely with her, but whose most important function is to inform the children’s parents that Rosamond and Crispian are on their way to rescue them. Peter Pan has pirates, where Mills’s play has dragons. Peter Pan has incompetent adults – Mr Darling and his dark double, James Hook – while Where the Rainbow’s End has villains who are both incompetent and sadistic, Uncle Joseph and Aunt Matilda, neither of whom have Captain Hook’s redeeming qualities. The villains in both get eaten (more on that later). Peter Pan contains a dog called Nana, always played by a human actor; Where the Rainbow Ends has a lion cub called Cubby, also played by a human, who seems to subsist on a kind of tonic called Colonial Mixture, composed in ‘Equal parts of Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Iron mixed with Indian and South African Steel’ (p. 19). The small print on the label also says that the tonic is ‘Poison to Traitors’ (p. 205), which means that when Uncle Joseph drinks it the effect is much like the effect on Tinkerbell of drinking Peter’s medicine in Barrie’s play. In other words, it’s fatal, and in Mills’s play there is no one to clap their hands and bring him back to life. So the play goes one better than Peter Pan in every department by ensuring that there are no ambiguities at all; the heroes are totally heroic, the villains utterly villainous (indeed it’s implied that the Dragon King is the devil himself), and the destruction of the villains is correspondingly spectacular and hideous. These differences help to point up the relative complexity of Barrie’s play, whose purported hero, Peter, is pompous and merciless, its villain conflicted, and their respective fates (from an adult’s point of view, at least) more or less equally painful.

What Mills’s play has which has no equivalent in Peter Pan is the patron saint of England, a certain Saint George, whose presence in it for forty years provided a role for the current male heart-throb of the English stage. Saint George has something of Aragorn’s modesty about him; when Rosamond wishes for him he first appears in the garb of a pilgrim, evoking that much-loved Christian romance The Pilgrim’s Progress, and informs the children he is rather out of fashion these days, having stopped fighting with Saint Denis of France some time ago and taken to galloping around instead ‘with my true brothers [the patron saints of] Scotland, Ireland, Wales and kindred kind beyond the seas’ (p. 71), doing deeds of valour for the needy colonies. Meanwhile he has been neglected at home, and is inclined to blame this on the honorific people have saddled him with, ‘Saint’, since ‘a halo is such a misty unsoldierly decoration’ (p. 72). Rosamond and the other children, however, find him ‘ripping’ (p. 67), and he wins their hearts by telling them the story of the Battle of Agincourt, a victory over the French which was actually sponsored by his friend Saint Crispian (Crispian’s namesake), but which Saint George observed from the sidelines with great interest. Saint George’s connection with Agincourt aligns him, of course, with Shakespeare’s King Henry V, who was given to yelling the names of Saint George and Saints Crispin and Crispian as he charged across the bloody fields of France. Mills has him talk Shakespearean English, too; he is constantly breaking into the rhythms of blank verse. ‘Dear English maid,’ he tells Rosamond as he prepares to leave in a flash of lightning (I don’t remember any lightning in Peter Pan!), ‘No foe of yours that is not foe of mine. No dangers yours that are not shared by me. No wrong of yours that I will not redress’ (p. 74). Heady stuff, when addressed to a girl of eleven or twelve, and guaranteed to supply her with a substantial dose of extra pluck. I found it thrilling, too, at the age of seven, though I don’t remember being filled with anything much like patriotism by Saint George’s flashy appearances and disappearances. I thought of him as a superhero, as no doubt did the many generations of boys who thrilled to the adventures of the patron saints in Richard Johnson’s perennial nursery classic, The Seven Champions of Christendom (1597).

Unfortunately, reviving Saint George and his red cross flag has had a tendency, historically speaking, to involve large doses of racism; and Mills’s novel is not exempt. Not for nothing does Saint George change Henry V’s battle cry from ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George’ to ‘God for George, England and the Right’ (p. 74). The genie, for instance, is ‘of Ethiopian darkness, but not at all repulsive looking’ (p. 51), while a French merchant called Bertrand who offers to buy the defunct Cousin Matthews’s effects is said to have a shrewd eye for a bargain because ‘his great-great-grandmother had been a Jewess’ (p. 79). Despite these racist throwaway remarks both the merchant and the genie are clearly meant to be attractive figures, though the genie’s principal charm is his obedience (he is the children’s ‘faithful friend’, p. 94), which is particularly unsettling when he refers to himself as a ‘slave’ (p. 51). Bertrand, on the other hand, is both gallant and courageous, and has nothing but contempt for the treachery to family and nation shown by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Matilda. His function in the play, in fact, is to point up their nastiness, since even his foreignness and suspect ancestry cannot blind him to their perfidy. The presence in the novel of these two characters amply confirms Mills’s quasi-fascistic views, as does her assumption that England’s glory depends exclusively on its military victories, ‘Crecy and Poictiers, […] Waterloo and Trafalgar’ (p. 224), and her certainty that the pirate-poet Sir Walter Raleigh was the ‘pattern of chivalry’ (p. 49) because he only sank Spanish ships. Her views on class are equally repugnant. The sole working-class character in the book, the page boy William, is an insufferable sneak who delights in taunting Crispian and Rosamond on their penniless state since the death of their parents. Sometimes it’s worth reminding oneself of fantasy’s potential to sow the seeds of fascism, and of how enthusiastically the British were capable of embracing fascistic ideas well before the rise of Nazism.

The literary virtues of Where the Rainbow Ends are of a piece with its moral and ideological vices. Foremost among these is its capacity for building dramatic tension in each of its three constituent parts. The first ‘act’ of the novel sees the children informed by their wicked Uncle and Aunt that their schooldays are over for lack of funds and that their beloved Cousin Matthew’s library will be sold to pay their bills, and with it the guidebook to ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’ as well as the magic carpet that might have taken them there. It is then a race against time to use the carpet before Uncle Joseph, Aunt Matilda and the page boy William can hold them back. The second ‘act’ sees them confronting the dangers of Dragon Wood, their chief obstacle here being their friend little Betty Blunders, who is clearly designed to embody all the female failings Mills has banished from the lively personage of her heroine, Rosamond. Betty ignores the advice of the guidebook by entering Dragon Wood at nightfall in pursuit of the alluring Will o’the Wisp, just at the point when the monsters and beasts are waking up. Although she is quickly rescued by the boys, the presence of those beasts and monsters ensures that the rest of the night – and of the book’s second ‘act’ – is as full of terrors as a night can be. The third ‘act’ begins with the capture of the children by flying dragons and their incarceration in the Dragon King’s Castle, where they are due to be executed at any moment. Escape involves the rapid sewing of an English flag by Rosamond – who has had the good sense to bring along her sewing kit – and its hoisting by the boys on the Castle flagpole, a deed that brings Saint George to the rescue in the usual flash of lightning, with predictable results. The Dragon King is transfixed by the Saint’s doughty blade, and the rest of the dragons are hurled howling into a bottomless abyss, like Milton’s fallen angels. Fortunately at this point in the story not a single dragon seems to remember that it can fly, so they all perish. The way is therefore cleared for the children to press on to the place Where the Rainbow Ends, where Rosamond and Crispian’s parents are waiting, having survived their shipwreck after all. The children find their way to the correct location without any difficulty, despite having dropped their precious guidebook in the lake when the Dragons seized them. Their reunion with their parents is suitably moving, and caused seven-year-old me to break the injunction not to cry every time I read it.

Another redeeming feature of the novel (if it has any) is its clear sense that the British Empire is in steep decline. Saint George no longer lives on English soil, but spends his time overseas because the Colonies are more interested in him than his countrymen are. The older generation of English patriots are similarly located elsewhere, unable to make their way back from distant parts to their homeland; Rosamond’s parents Captain and Mrs Carey spend the whole novel loitering in ragged clothes on a distant shore, like Prospero and Miranda on their desert island, persecuted by a witch out of Macbeth and a fairy out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the unreliable Will o’the Wisp) as well as the constant threat of dragonish assaults straight out of Milton. Mrs Carey has even become a legend or fantasy herself, being referred to by Will as Mother Vera – Mother Truth – which effectively makes her Mother Carey, a sailor’s legend who is referred to by (among others) Charles Kingsley in The Water Babies (1862-3) and John Masefield in Salt Water Ballads (1902). England, then, is always elsewhere in this novel, a little like Narnia in the Narnian Chronicles, and its identity is always under threat of erasure. Captain and Mrs Carey have been replaced in the household by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Matilda, who regard the English flag as ‘That Jingo bogey – that pretty bit of bunting – that child’s plaything’ (p. 119), and whose only concern is to cheat their nephew and niece out of their inheritance. Meanwhile the heraldic Lion of England is represented in this novel by a half-grown lion cub, Cubby, and the next generation of English human beings (as embodied in the page boy William and the indolent youth known only as the Slacker) threatens to follow the children’s uncle and aunt into self-obsession and indifference to the national interest.

The most striking representation of this tendency can be found in the Dragon Wood, a place where everything that is inimical to imperial orderliness resides. It is full of foreign beasts, a category from which Cubby is excluded despite being a lion (he is a specifically English lion, we are told (p. 18)). There is a black leopard which injures Crispian and Blunders, a pack of hyenas whose voices Crispian remembers from his time in India, and miscellaneous other carnivores. The Wood has supernatural creatures in it, too, including Will o’the Wisp, who is always ‘mislead[ing] night wanderers, laughing at their harm’, like Shakespeare’s Puck, and a bunch of nastier elves and gnomes who are given to pinching errant strangers black and blue like the false fairies in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Worse still, it is a place of metamorphosis, where a person’s identity is constantly on the verge of getting compromised. One of the trees in it was once a ‘high-born Dragon’ who dared to eat the Dragon King’s food and was punished for this by being transformed into a stump with arms, which is constantly hungry for the flesh of passers by. Another monster is the thing that gave me nightmares:

Out of the reeds a loathsome creature, half man, half worm was crawling, slowly dragging its flabby useless limbs along the ground. Its face was ashen, its worm-shaped head hairless. It had a great, gaping, loose-lipped mouth and its eyes, that were for ever turning restlessly from side to side, shone like arc lamps. Lamps they were indeed, that warned others of the deadly trail of slime it left as it crawled – slime that clogged the feet of those who encountered it [–] but to the creature itself they gave no light, for it was blind. Slowly it dragged itself from the marsh and entered the thicket while the boys stood transfixed with horror. (p. 171)

Crispian recognizes this creature, too – he calls it ‘a Slitherslime’ – and there is a dreadful revelation to come about it. After its disappearance into a thicket the two naval cadets meet another boy who seems to live in the Dragon Wood, unharmed by its monstrous denizens. The boy is English, and like Crispian and Blunders once set off to find a lost loved one – his sister – in the place Where the Rainbow Ends; but he got distracted by the pleasures of the Woods, where one can get endless supplies of tasty fruit, spend one’s time fishing in well-stocked trout streams, and watch the gnomes playing cricket (p. 177). Now he lives there in permanent indolence, protected by the toll he pays the Dragon King, which involves passing on to him unopened all the letters he gets from his mother (delivered by passing pilgrims on their way to Heart’s Content), and wearing on his breast the Dragon King’s crest in place of the cross of Saint George.

Worst of all, he is degenerating physically. Already ‘round-shouldered and walk[ing] with a slouch’, he has a ‘livid’ face (p. 172), and the end of this degenerative process, he tells Blunders, is to become the slug-like creature they have just encountered, which helpfully reappears to underline the horror of this fate just as the boy makes reference to it: ‘For a moment in hideous helplessness it turned its restless worm-like head with the blazing, sightless eyes towards the boys, then, with a horrible whimper of distress it slithered off into the marshes’ (p. 180). Horrified by this vision, Blunders automatically repeats Nelson’s famous slogan from the Battle of Trafalgar – ‘England expects every man to do his duty’ (p. 182) – and at once the Dragon Light that protects the indolent youth begins to grow dim. The boy promptly swears to stay in the Wood for ever, the Dragon Light rekindles, and away he flees through the trees ‘laughing and crying hysterically’ (p. 183), never to be seen again.

The curious thing about this episode is that it sets up an indolent version of England as the antithesis of the cadets’ beloved imperial power. The indolent youth – known as the Slacker – introduces himself as an English subject, enjoys peculiarly English pursuits such as fishing and cricket, and offers the cadets fruit that look ‘just like ordinary English apples’ (p. 179). The decay of England lurks in the inner spaces of English national identity, like a maggot in a healthy core, just as the Slacker’s sluggish future form is foreshadowed in the round-shouldered debility of his body; only a subtle shift of emphasis in one’s clichéd fantasies of the ideal English existence is needed for England to become a breeding ground of the Dragon’s minions. If being English is a fantasy, as its association here with Shakespeare’s plays, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost suggests, then an alternative fantasy could easily supplant it, and this play is filled with alternative fantasies, many of them derived from the very same sources that supplied material for the fantasies of imperial England.

The nastiest of these fantasies by far are those of Uncle Joseph and Aunt Matilda, which are both greedy and sadistic. At the beginning of the novel Aunt Matilda wears a ‘cruel smile’ as she tells Crispian he can no longer go to the naval college he has been attending, then forbids him to wear his cadet’s uniform the following day: ‘Aunt Matilda knew that this would hurt Cris. She knew that a naval boy loves his uniform, not so much for the look of it but because it is a uniform of noble traditions and a thing to live up to and be proud of and it did hurt Cris horribly to be told in that cold and heartless fashion not to wear it again’ (p. 30). Uncle Joseph is even worse. When he finds the children gone from his house on a quest to find their parents – which would deprive him of the family home he has feloniously inherited with the help of his expertise as a lawyer – he chases after them armed with a whip which he plans to use to ‘tickle them with for running away’, after tying their hands and feet with rope and gagging their ‘pretty mouths’ (pp. 122-3). Fortunately Saint George removes the whip from him before he can use it, but Uncle Joseph later succeeds in catching Rosamond, whereupon he ties her to the Enchanted Tree, gags her, and leaves her alone in the Dragon Wood to be eaten by hyenas. As he abandons her to her fate he can’t resist a final gloat: ‘“What a pity, isn’t it?” he said […] “Brother Crispian is in the wood and you can’t call to him to come and rescue you, and I’m afraid when he does pass this way you won’t be here, hyenas are so fond of little children”’ (p. 193). Later still the hyenas come after Uncle Joseph and Aunt Matilda instead, and the lawyer climbs a tree to escape their jaws, leaving his sister on the ground in her impractical evening gown to be devoured with ‘piercing […] shrieks’ (p. 202) – though fortunately off stage, both in the play and in the novel. He doesn’t escape his own fate long, however. Overcome with hunger he finds Cubby’s bottle of Colonial Mixture in his pocket and proceeds to drink the contents, having failed to read the small print on the label (‘Poison to Traitors’). He has no time to feel much more than the first pangs of this poison before the hyenas come back for him, having made short work of his sister’s bony body. Like the Slacker he is destroyed by what he consumes to sustain him, trapped into the very fate he sacrificed his family ties to evade.

Set up in opposition to Uncle Andrew’s fantasies of selfishness, torture and material gain, the fantasy of England restored to imperial glory is all about emotional reunions with lost relatives; as I said before, the final scene of the novel had a tendency to reduce my seven-year-old self to a tearstained wreck. There’s something disturbing, though, about this final vision, as well as about the story that leads up to it. This ending asserts that not only can the British Empire be buttressed by affectionate young patriots, but that death itself can be overcome; and this not in the form of a life to come but through resurrection in this world – or so it seems. The scene begins with a reunion between a nameless English mother and her lost ‘little one’ on the beach Where the Rainbow Ends. Carried to the blessed location by an English ship, then ferried ashore by the boast of ‘faith and Hope’, the woman suddenly sees her infant rushing towards her:

and, seeing the little one, sinks to her knees and with eyes that almost fear to believe looks into the little face she has for so long seen only in her dreams. Scarce daring to breathe, her yearning fingers glide over the golden curls to the white brow upon which they cluster. Wistfully her hungry gaze meets again the laughing look of dear blue eyes; she longs, yet fears to kiss the smiling roguish baby lips raised to hers, lest, as in those cruel dreams which so long have mocked her grief, she will wake to find her poor arms empty.

But upon the child’s face is no sorrow, no surprise. Closer it nestles into the dear, remembered arms.

‘Mummy,’ the little one coaxes, ‘Mummy darling – now – tell again the story of little ten toes.’ (p. 248)

The reunion is clearly not meant to be subjected to rigorous theological analysis, but the implication is, I think, that the mother in this scene is alive, that she has taken a journey analogous to that accomplished by Rosamond and Crispian in their quest to find their parents, and that when she has reached the place Where the Rainbow Ends she has been reunited with a child she had lost – presumably to death, since she has not seen it except in dreams for an extended period. What happens next? The last we see of the mother and child is an image of them running up the golden sands in jubilation; but a little later we witness the reunion of Rosamond and Crispian with their lost loved ones, Captain and Mrs Carey, on the same beach; and shortly afterwards all four surviving members of the Carey family are on Hope’s boat again, with the Blunders siblings, heading towards the English ship by which the Carey parents were earlier rescued from the Witch’s Cove where they were wrecked – a ship now ‘bound for England’ (p. 254). Moments later Saint George manifests himself at the stern of the boat, duly accompanied by the English national flag:

He was coming with them back to the dear land to which they were sailing; to fight once more the dragons that sought his country’s downfall – coming back, not to be lifeless stone in cold cathedral, but to live henceforth and for ever in the hearts of children of his race. (p. 255)

Of course, we are to understand that Captain and Mrs Carey were never really dead, they were merely shipwrecked on their way home from India; their deaths were a dreadful illusion which their children had been forced to live with for several months. But what of the nameless mother reunited with her dead child? The place Where the Rainbow Ends promises to restore ‘all lost loved ones’ to their relatives – that was the promise made by the book in the opening chapter. There was no mention there of the golden shore being in the afterlife, and in the final chapter there seems to be no prohibition on taking your recovered lost loved ones back to England along with the equally lost and recovered patron saint of England. The distinction between the saint in stone and the saint in living flesh reinforces the assumption; if you have sufficient faith in God and your country (which are here more or less the same thing, thanks to the happy accident of the country’s flag happening to be the emblem of the Christian faith), your lost loved ones will come back to life, whether they were dead or merely missing, and all will be well not just for a while but in fact ‘for ever’. That’s an irresponsibly massive pledge to make in a play for children. It also seems to make nonsense of an earlier passage in the novel where Uncle Joseph realizes he is about to die without benefit of patriotism, and hence alone:

Not one of a vast brotherhood who, though separated by continents, feels still bound and upheld by a thousand ties of national hopes and ambitions; not as the humblest patriot, who dying in a distant land, feels yet around and about him like a royal mantle those best traditions of his country he has given his life to uphold. (p. 204)

The final chapter holds out the possibility that those who die as part of the ‘vast brotherhood’ of patriots can be brought back from the dead. This investment of the nation with powers of resurrection beyond the divine is perhaps the most grandiose assertion about national identity I have ever encountered. God barely rates a mention in Where the Rainbow Ends; his place is almost entirely ceded to England, presumably because the name of God, like the title of saint, may be felt by many patriotic Englishmen to be no more than ‘a misty unsoldierly decoration’ (p. 72). The unsettling nature of Mills’s fantasy, then, is not just about its sadism; it’s also about the claims it makes on the reader’s world. Children reading a book like this are being encouraged to apply its assertions about the country Where the Rainbow Ends to their own ‘race’ in particular (there are no French, Jewish or African lost people, it seems, on the golden beach). They are being encouraged to think that the dead can be brought back to life through nationalistic fervour. It’s hardly inaccurate to describe a sentiment like this as fascistic, and to describe Mills’s book as engaging in a deeply irresponsible use of the strategies of fantasy.

Philip French once suggested in The Observer that the Christian writer C. S. Lewis might have been influenced by Where the Rainbow Ends when he wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).[3] Given what I’ve just said about the book’s theology, one might imagine this would be improbable; but in fact there’s every sign that the book had a strong influence on Lewis – but not, I think, on the first of the Narnian chronicles. Certainly there are a lion and four children in both Where the Rainbow Ends and The Lion, but I can’t see much more to link them apart from a common zeal for battle and the presence in both of a wicked witch. Much closer, though, is the link between Mills’s book and The Magician’s Nephew (1955). Both involve a quest for the recovery of a parent, taken on by a boy and girl with the help of friends. Both contain tempting apples (the Slacker offers one to the cadets, Digory is offered one by Queen Jadis) and moments of exhilarating flight, on a winged horse in Lewis’s novel, a magic carpet in Mills’s. The apple in The Magician’s Nephew gets replanted in England and so becomes the English apple which is mimicked by the Slacker’s fruit. Meanwhile Digory’s father is away in India, and makes his way home at the end of the story against all odds, like Captain and Mrs Carey. But the most obvious link between the books is the wicked uncle. Uncle Joseph lives with his sister, exactly like Lewis’s Uncle Andrew, although Uncle Andrew’s sister Letitia (Aunty Lettie) is much nicer (and tougher) than Aunt Matilda. Both uncles are tall and thin, and given to wearing top hats, which like the rest of their clothing get subjected to appalling wear and tear – Uncle Andrew’s by his adventures in company with Jadis, the witch-queen of Charn, and Uncle Joseph’s by his underground journey in company with the devilish Dragon-King, during which his garments are ‘considerably damaged’ by ‘sparks and lava dust’ (p. 115). Both uncles have a singular contempt for children (remember Uncle Andrew’s willingness to use Digory and Polly for his experiments in magic). Both have a commercial side to their personalities, with Uncle Joseph scheming to deprive his niece and nephew of their inheritance – ‘Riverdale and the fortune that accompanied it’ (p. 199) – while Uncle Andrew devises grander projects to do with the newly-created land of Narnia: ‘Bring a few scraps of old iron here, bury ’em, and up they come as brand new railway engines, battleships, anything you please. They’ll cost nothing, and I can sell ’em at full prices in England. I shall be a millionaire’ (p. 103).[4] Finally, both uncles meet their doom at the hands, or rather paws, of savage animals. As we’ve seen, Uncle Joseph is first poisoned by drinking the tonic of an English lion cub then eaten by hyenas; while Uncle Andrew is first frightened half to death by a fully-grown lion, then pursued across the Narnian landscape by a crowd of baying beasts, which he thinks are hungry for his blood. Andrew is lucky enough to be mistaken; his death is only symbolic, and being less wicked than his prototype he is allowed to repent of his wickedness and become ‘a nicer and less selfish old man than he had ever been before’ in the final pages of Lewis’s novel (p. 171). His transformation can be taken to begin at the moment when the animals plant him in the earth of Narnia, mistaking him for a kind of tree. Unlike Mills’s Enchanted Tree, which started out as a dragon and retains a dragon’s hunger, Uncle Andrew’s planting eventually bears fruit in repentance and personal reform, which he carries back with him from Narnia very much as Digory carries back the fruit that will heal his dying mother.

Uncle Andrew’s reprieve can be read as a kind of symbolic reprieve for Where the Rainbow Ends, which is transformed by Lewis from a piece of imperialist propaganda to a creation myth for an Edenic secondary world. Lewis’s concern in the Narnian chronicles with revitalizing religious faith in the Britain of the 1950s is balanced in The Magician’s Nephew by an anti-imperialist spirit which runs more or less counter to the politics of Mills’s play and book. Lewis pits the Empress Jadis of Charn and her minor-league disciple, Uncle Andrew, against the lion Aslan, who raises ordinary London Cabbies to the status of kings but insists on their remembering how to ‘use a spade and a plough and raise food out of the earth’ (p. 129) and how to treat their subjects as they would wish to be treated themselves. The newly-crowned King Frank is exclusively concerned with protecting Narnia against its enemies rather than expanding its borders – though the assumption that he deserves ‘natural’ authority over both talking animals and his wife, Queen Helen, will annoy most modern readers. Lewis endows his main female character, Polly, with something of Rosamond’s force of personality, though on the whole women are relegated to a secondary position in his narrative compared with that of Mills; even the quest for the healing apple is Digory’s rather than Polly’s, though elsewhere in Lewis’s work he was happy enough to include girls among his principal questers (Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Jill in The Silver Chair).

At the same time, here as elsewhere Lewis takes it for granted that the fantastic genre he writes in is in some sense a feminine one. Uncle Andrew has inherited what magic talents he has from his godmother, Mrs Lefay, whose name suggests an association both with fairy tales and Arthurian legend. She it was who bequeathed her godson a box from Atlantis containing dust from another world (Philip Pullman took note), which he uses to manufacture the rings that convey the child protagonists, Digory and Polly, to Charn and Narnia. Uncle Andrew, however, has learned nothing from this about the potency of female storytelling. When Digory points out that Mrs Le Fay’s gift suggests that ‘all the old fairy tales are more or less true’ (p. 28), and that one of the things that happens in fairy stories is that wicked people like Uncle Andrew get their come-uppance, his uncle retorts that such notions are no more than ‘Old wives’ tales’ and that Digory only believes them because he was ‘brought up among women’ (p. 29). One of the women Lewis himself got his ideas from was Clifford Mills, and this makes me wonder how many other better remembered writers owe a debt to her unsettling fantasy of death reversed, treason savagely punished, and imperial degeneration temporarily halted.

Where the Rainbow Ends has a place in the history of British fantasy, and I think it’s best not to forget it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel. Fantasies can be damaging, it reminds us, as well as enriching; and even damaging fantasies can sometimes have unexpectedly enriching effects. Where the Rainbow Ends shaped me to a certain extent as well as Lewis, and it’s crucial to analyse that shaping process if we are not to be controlled by it. I can’t honestly, however, recommend that you read the book for yourself.

Notes

[1] Clifford Mills was Emilie Clifford (née Bennet, married Harold Mills Clifford in 1889), who adopted a variant of her husband’s name when writing. Besides Where the Rainbow Ends she wrote two other successful plays, The Basker (1916) and The Luck of the Navy (1919), both of which were performed on Broadway. The Luck of the Navy was filmed twice, in 1927 and 1938.

[2] Clifford Mills, Where the Rainbow Ends (London: Forgotten Books, 2015); all references are to this facsimile edition.

[3] Philip French, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – review’, The Observer, Sunday 11 December 2005.

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (London etc.: William Collins and Sons, 1989). All references are to this edition.