The manuscript for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase lay forgotten on a publisher’s windowsill for more than a year. Joan Aiken had started the book a decade earlier, as a young mother in the 1950s, when she was spurred on by a notion that came to her while chopping wood: that she should write a children’s story drawing on all the great dramatic 19th-century novels she had devoured growing up as a lonely home-schooled child. (She liked to say that her childhood home on the quaint, cobbled Mermaid Street in Rye, East Sussex, was haunted.)
Then disaster struck. Her husband died and it would be another ten years before she could complete her beloved story, get it to the publisher and then finally, in 1962, nudge it off that windowsill and out into the world.
I’m very glad she did. The novel, which when it came out was hailed as a “genuine small masterpiece … written … with obvious fond delight”, was one of my favourite books as a child. Or perhaps I just saw the 1989 film, probably best forgotten, starring Mel Smith and Stephanie Beacham as the scheming villains.
Details of the plot may have faded over time, but even the mere mention of that wonderful title conjured up the memory of a mood, an atmosphere, that never left me: that feeling of two little girls alone in an ice-bound, empty house, left to fend for themselves against the wolves that howled and prowled outside.
Rereading it now, I am relieved to find it’s even better than I remembered. The story takes place “in a period of English history that never happened” — during the fictional reign of James III. Hordes of wolves “driven by severe winters” and “grown savage and reckless from hunger” have found a route from mainland Europe into Britain — through a recently completed Channel tunnel — where they stalk the fields and forests, terrorising anyone who dares leave the safety of their city.
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Bonnie Green is rattling around Willoughby Chase, the grand country pile she calls home, awaiting the arrival of her orphaned cousin, Sylvia. Bonnie’s parents are about to depart on a long ocean voyage to warmer climes to aid her ailing mother’s health, and the two girls are to be looked after by Miss Slighcarp, a strict governess. Never a good sign.
Is there a more thrilling train ride in literature than poor, nervous Sylvia’s overnight journey to Willoughby Chase? “She woke suddenly […] to find that the train had stopped with a jerk.”
“Wolves on the line, most likely,” explains her creepy carriage companion.
“A sad and sinister howling now arose beyond the windows, and Sylvia, pressing her face against the dark pane, saw that they were passing through a thickly wooded region where snow lay deep on the ground. Across this white carpet she could just discern a ragged multitude pouring, out of which arose, from time to time, this terrible cry.”
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Before we know it a wolf has crashed through the train window, been stabbed to death with a piece of glass and tossed back out, to the snarling, yelping disappointment of the rest of the pack — and we haven’t even reached chapter three.
From there the plot follows the girls’ reversal of fortune as the wicked Miss Slighcarp sacks the servants, sells the furniture and sends the girls to a grim workhouse while she schemes to disinherit them and steal Willoughby Chase for herself. With the help of Simon, the goose boy, they embark on a journey to reclaim their rights and restore the moral order — ideally before becoming “wolf porridge”.
Aiken loved Dickens and his snow prints are all around, in characters such as the cruel workhouse boss, Mrs Brisket, and the duped lawyer, Gripe, and also in the wider themes of precarious finances and the plight of the dispossessed. The glittering, deftly drawn world of ice-skate chases and secret passageways, however, is all Aiken’s own.
The first publisher to receive the book thought it too frightening and — sacrilege! — asked her to take out the wolves. She refused and demanded it back.
Indeed, I found myself wanting more wolves. They slink back into the shadows as the focus moves to the real predator of the piece: the greedy, snarling Miss Slighcarp.
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This is a children’s classic that has aged well. In my 60th-anniversary edition there is a glossary telling new readers the meaning of old-fashioned terms such as “antimacassar”, “blunderbuss” and “fowling piece” for new readers. The country bumpkin dialect of a few characters along the way sounds like the alien language of another world, as indeed it is, but these quirks only add to its charm. There are none of the deeper, problematic issues of race or gender that have shortened the shelf life of other classics of that era.
I had no idea The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has a sequel, Black Hearts in Battersea; nor did I know there is a whole series of Wolves Chronicles which follows various characters’ adventures through this imagined period of English history. These stories now sit next in line on the reading pile. That’s the beauty of rereading, isn’t it? In returning to something old you discover something new.
