Goldengrove by Jill Paton Walsh

First published: 1972

Type of work: Psychological realism

Themes: Coming-of-age, emotions, and love and romance

Time of work: The 1920’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: St. Ives, on the coast of Cornwall, England

Principal Characters:

• Madge, an intelligent and sensitive fifteen-year-old girl
• Paul, a year younger than Madge
• Gran, grandmother of Madge and Paul, whose home is Goldengrove
• Professor Ashton, a professor of English who was blinded in the war and whose wife has left him

The Story

Madge and Paul travel in separate carriages on the same train to St. Ives, where they will spend a short vacation with their grandmother at her house, called Goldengrove. They vacation there together every summer, but this year they are arriving later than usual (it is September), and they are both irritated by parents who seem not to want the two cousins to spend this intimate time together. The children are growing up, and, as the lateness of the year and the allusion in the book’s title indicate, an elegiac mood tempers this year’s activities. Change is inevitable, and childhood must end. For the first time, the two children must sleep in separate rooms. Amy has replaced Mrs. Arthur as Gran’s helper around the house. Fewer strawberries can be found at this time of the year than in August, when the children usually visit Gran. Down on the beach, the children feel strange, as if someone were watching them, but they decide to stay there and paint an old boat they find rotting and stuck in the sand anyway.

A man sits on the cliff overlooking the cove. This is Ralph Ashton, the English professor who has rented Gran’s small cottage. Madge and Paul decide to turn the tables on him by sneaking up to where he sits and watching him. They discover that he is blind. Madge is filled with remorse, but Paul has little time for sympathy. The two go fishing with their friend, the old fisherman Jeremy, in his boat, the Amulet. Jeremy takes the boat to shore when he notices that the weather will not hold, and on their way in he informs the children that the French boats always refuse to leave the deep water, even in bad weather.

Paul and Madge begin to scrape the old boat to prepare it for painting, but Paul cuts himself. When they return to Goldengrove, they find Gran with a visitor, Professor Ashton. Impulsively, Madge offers to spend the afternoon with the professor, reading to him. Paul goes fishing; Madge reads to the professor. She reads from William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1935), a book of literary criticism— not the most exciting reading for a fifteen-year-old but gratifying because she is helping the blind man. As a result, she begins to drift apart from Paul, who wants to continue to play on the beach, to go fishing and swimming as they have done every year before.

Madge returns to the cottage to read to Professor Ashton, but he now asks her to read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Madge begins to think of herself as Jane Eyre to Ashton’s Mr. Rochester. Her interest in and sympathy for Professor Ashton increase when Gran tells her that he lost his sight “fighting in the war” and that his wife has left him. She even tries to read Ashton’s manuscript, a book on the novels of Jane Austen.

Paul accompanies Madge and Ashton on a walk along the cliffs when an unpleasant occurrence takes place. Teasing a small lizard, Paul accidentally rouses a snake from beneath a hot rock. The snake prepares to bite Madge, but Paul snatches it behind the head and tosses it to the rocks below the cliff. Paul declares that the snake was a viper and deadly poisonous; Ashton speculates that it was only a harmless grass snake. The two exchange words, and Madge learns how painful consciousness can be. She can no longer be the innocent child; instead, she sees the jealous edge to the males’ voices and realizes that Ashton’s blindness unmans him. Back in Goldengrove, Madge feigns blindness to experience something of Ashton’s condition, but Paul tricks her into entering the lumber room, where she is completely disoriented and screams. The scream brings Amy and Gran. Paul is sent to bed without supper, although all three females sneak food to him without knowledge of each other’s doing the same. Gran ruminates on the process of growing through and past puberty.

Madge spends more and more time with Ashton while Paul plays by the sea. Three days before Madge is to leave St. Ives, Paul asks Jeremy to take him and Madge to the lighthouse at Godrevy, but when he cannot find her, Paul goes alone with Jeremy. Madge and Paul had hoped for years to visit Godrevy together, but Madge must now settle for Paul’s account of it when he returns. The two walk by the sea as Paul describes the lighthouse and its nearby garden, but before he can finish his story they come across a drowned man washed up by the sea. When Madge next visits Ashton, he asks her to read from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), and she reads the passage in which Alice and a fawn wander through the wood of no names; then she must read again from Seven Types of Ambuiguity.

The crisis follows. Gran has contacted Madge’s mother to suggest that the time has come for Madge to know that Paul is her brother, not her cousin. Accordingly, Madge receives a letter from her mother telling her the actual situation. Madge also learns that her father is alive, not lost in the war, as she always believed. She feels betrayed and decides not to leave St. Ives. Gran demurs, and Madge runs to Ashton to tell him she will stay with him always; however, he proves to be hard and cynical in his rebuff of her. She runs to the beach, where the storm has uncovered the ruined boat that Paul has been painting. Madge takes it into the sea, but the bottom is rotten and will not hold. Madge nearly drowns. Her convalescence stretches into the autumn, and she sees the golden leaves fall from Goldengrove’s trees.

Context

Along with A Parcel of Patterns (1985), Goldengrove and its sequel, Unleaving (1976), are the most lyrical and challenging books that Jill Paton Walsh has written. Her prose is graceful and intense, moving into the characters’ (especially Madge’s) sensibility and thoughts easily. She does not divide the book into conventional chapters. Instead, the story moves from scene to scene with cuts between scenes, somewhat like the cinema. Like the cinema, too, the book is fresh with visual and aural imagery. It echoes with the sounds of the sea and the colors of the autumn landscape: Goldengrove has a sparse yet brisk quality reminiscent of its people and place. Paton Walsh has returned to the Cornish coast in five short stories that retell folk legends of this region, Five Tides (1986).

Paton Walsh is perhaps best known as a historical novelist for young readers. She has written about World War II (The Dolphin Crossing, 1967, and Fireweed, 1969), the ancient Roman Empire (The Emperor’s Winding Sheet, 1974), Victorian England (The Butty Boy, 1975, and The Chance Child, 1978), and other periods. Goldengrove is set sometime not long after World War I. As in all of her best books, Paton Walsh uses historical settings to examine timeless themes. Although place is of central importance in the book, it, too, is timeless. Change is the keynote in Goldengrove, yet the sea and the lighthouse seem permanent. In this Paton Walsh is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, who created a similar sense in To the Lighthouse (1927). Hopes, aspirations, longing—these things do not alter.

Goldengrove is as good a young adult novel as there is. The book does not condescend to attract young readers by appealing to the world they know. This is a book to place alongside the best of writers, such as Alan Garner and William Mayne. It takes its readers to a place untouched by television, automobiles, and rock concerts. It offers its readers a closely observed account of childhood passing into adolescence and then adolescence working toward maturity. Its characterization, its poetic prose, and its symbolic richness ensure that it will be read and appreciated for a long time.