Puck of Pook's Hill (illustrated by Arthur Rackham)

Rudyard Kipling's PUCK OF POOK'S HILL appeared in 1906. Its prose "yarns" are placed in southeastern England, East Sussex, near "Batesman's," Kipling's home, which was set in an estate of 300 acres enlarged for maximum privacy. *** In the course of the story-telling, we learn from ancient fairy Puck himself that Pook's Hill means Puck's Hill. To two young children, Una and Dan, sister and brother, Puck conjures up or himself plays the parts of earlier inhabitants of Sussex. In non-chronological order of presentation we meet and hear (1) tales about Saxons before the Norman Conquest of 1066, (2) then of Normans becoming masters of Sussex. (3) A Danish longboat takes Norman knight Sir Richard Dalyngridge and his Saxon friend Hugh on a successful voyage for gold into west Africa. A powerful, magic sword is also introduced and plays a role. (4) We then move back in time to around the year 1100. (5) We next go even farther back -- to 4th Century Rome and the rise and fall of the fortunes of a young centurion named Parnesius. His family had been resident in Britain for over two centuries. Sent to Hadrian's wall, he and a Roman fellow Centurion Pertinax then become close to a Pictish prince north of the wall. As general Magnus Maximus takes up arms against the young Gratian, Emperor of the West, he strips the Wall of troops (6) while leaving Parnesius and Pertinax to hold off both Picts and invading Norsemen. (7) The children, under Puck's guidance, are then brought forward to the late 1400s for a tale of explorer Sebastian Cabot outwitting wily local Sussex cannon makers. (8) A bit later, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, myriads of fairies all around Britain panic. For these people of the Hills are suddenly regarded as forbidden Catholic "images." They succeed in persuading a seer woman to let her two sons, one blind, the other mute, row them to nearby France where humans, at least for a while, remain more welcoming of the Little People. (9) Finally, a Jewish physician and moneylender named Kadmiel tells how lack of gold forced King John to cede power to the barons and to the people of England at Runymede in 1215. We learn at last what happened to the large amount of gold brought back from Africa and hidden centuries earlier by a Norman knight and a Saxon noble. *** PUCK OF POOK'S HILL also contains 15 or so poems by Kipling. They function as a kind of chorus for the narratives. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that PUCK OF POOK'S HILL was the source of a beloved song that I first heard and memorized with no context around age 12 in Shreveport on a 33 1/3 rpm recording of Kipling's poems set to music. I speak of "A Smugglers' Song" which begins, "If You wake at midnight, and hear a horses's feet,/Don't go drawing back the blind or looking in the street." *** My edition of PUCK OF POOK'S HILL lacks a map of Sussex or southeastern England. Ditto glossary or end notes. Kipling limns his local landscape in loving detail with generous dollops of local speech patterns and vocabulary. One way or another you will therefore have to learn old Roman names for Sussex places, also the Weald (forest), the Downs, terminology relating to growing and processing hops, Bath Oliver (a cracker eaten with cheese) and such like. But all this is a small price to pay for imagining this loving recreation of England (and a bit of Scotland) down through the centuries. -OOO-