Mr. Toad, Carl Jung, and me

The first time I saw Cornwall and west Devon was when my husband and I were on our honeymoon. I'd been to England before, but not this far southwest. I'd liked what I had seen on earlier trips, mainly Surrey and London, but neither of those places reflected my soul the way the landscape of the West Country did. Instantly, I knew I was in the land of my imagination.

Coming into Tavistock, we drove down a steep hill from Heathfield and Simon's childhood home, Heathcot, skimming along in a virtual valley between ancient hedgerows topped by an over-arching alley of leafy trees. I knew at once that this landscape--green, ancient, defined by the gnarled trunks and branches of numberless trees--was the one in my head, and had been all my life.

I attributed that to the books I was read as a small child. Chief among them was a 1930s copy of Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame that had been my mother's book when she was a child. I had a lot of those. Most had 1930s art-deco illustrations. But Wind in the Willows didn't. Its illustrations were lush and full of color and line and busy-ness, very unlike the art deco drawings in other books, usually just black lines and one vibrant spot color. I had the version illustrated by Paul Bransom, I think, rather than the more famous Arthur Rackham versions. But I can't be certain, simply because those books disappeared decades ago, doubtless in one of my accountant mother's intensive garbage-reduction programmes after I had left home. But this is the sort of illustration in my mind:

I wonder if Mole, running away from nameless fears, was as influential in my childhood as Toad's brashness. I rather think so, actually. (Illustration by Bransom from Wiki Commons)

I think it was more than the childhood story books that lodged the landscape of the West Country firmly in my mind, though. I think it was the racial memory described by Carl Jung, posited in my subconscious--memories, feelings and ideas that I inherited from my ancestors. I've always thought that, and now that I've been doing the family genealogy, and have found out one ancestor is interred in Exeter Cathedral and another at St. Clement's near Powderham Castle*, I am more convinced than ever that my attraction to the southwest England landscape and books like Wind in the Willows pre-exists anything American publishers of the 1920s and 1930s were about.

St. Keyne Holy Well, one of the very few photos in our personal collection of woodlands in Southwest England. (Photo by S.P. Tiley.)

And yet, neither I nor my husband photograph woodlands very often. We tend to photograph Dartmoor and beaches and quaint houses in charming villages like Mousehole (the pronunciation of which, I might add, I knew long before my then-new husband tried to trick me with it; racial memory there, too, perhaps.) Maybe it's because we don't need to photograph Mr. Toad's woodlands; Simon grew up in them in Tavistock, and I brought them with me at the very core of my being to my current incarnation on earth. We both know them very well indeed.

* Never fear. Like all families, I have at least as many horse thieves in my family tree as highly placed nobles. I even have an impoverished Canadian Indian and a feckless Irish-American Southern jockey. Mixed bag, to say the least. Or in short, I'm an America-bred, Irish-citizen England-resident mutt.