When Marnie Was There (27 page)

For an instant she fancied she saw someone – a little girl with long, fair hair – waving to her from one of the upper windows of The Marsh House. But there was no-one there. Only a curtain was blowing outwards and flapping in the wind. Scilla must have forgotten to shut the window. It was the end window – the window that had once been Marnie’s… She stood for a moment, watching the rain falling slantwise across the house and streaming in rivers down the window panes, wondering what it reminded her of. Then she remembered that, too.

Mrs Lindsay was just bringing in the tea things when Anna came in at the side door. She looked horrified when she saw her.

“For goodness’ sake!” she exclaimed. “You’re drenched! What
have
you been up to? Have you been outside in all this?”

“Yes,” said Anna, and she laughed. “But I’m inside now!”

“I should jolly well think you are,” said Mrs Lindsay, looking at the trail of rainwater and wet footprints on the floor. And – as she said to her husband later, she hadn’t the heart to scold her, she looked so absurdly happy.

“There was another thing,” Mrs Lindsay told him. “The children were talking about Marnie when she came in – they just can’t get over that story – and Matt was talking in his usual tactless way, saying something about it being sad for Anna, not having known her. And do you know what the child said? She said, ‘I did know her once.’ Quite
definitely, just like that. Well, so she did, of course – when she was very little. But it was funny – she actually laughed when she said it, just as if she really remembered her.”

As my mother is no longer here to tell you how she came to write about Marnie, I will tell you all I remember of the very beginnings of her story, and that summer holiday in a North Norfolk village.

Every year since I was a child, we spent our summer holidays in this village. Every day we would cross the salt marsh to our beach, an island of sandhills and marram grass. There we would bathe in the cold North Sea, then settle down in the hills for a picnic lunch. The same families used to come to the beach every day, like us. We each had our own pitch which we kept for many years – usually until a terrific storm washed the sandhill away into the sea. The children on the island used to gather together after lunch and go for walks along the beach, collecting driftwood to make a raft or digging channels and building dams to create pools, leaving the grown-ups to doze.

The year of Marnie was just the same, only I was grown up by then, and the children who gathered together to build sandcastles were the next generation of the same families.

One balmy evening, the sun glowing low in the sky, my mother was wandering home from the beach along the marsh path towards a small row of houses on the
other side of the creek. The square black Watch House was on the right, and near to it stood The Granary, a long low comfortable-looking house of soft red brick with a blue door and windows. Everything was very still, the tide was out and the creek was almost deserted. Only the great black-backed gulls continued their squawking.

My mother stopped halfway along the path to watch some ducks plodding around in the mud. When she looked back, The Granary seemed to have disappeared; to have melted into the background. It was several minutes before the low rays of the sun struck the brickwork, making the house reappear.

At the end of the path, she crossed some sand and began to paddle across the creek. There in an upper window of The Granary was a little girl, sitting having her long fair hair brushed. This was the beginning of Marnie.

My parents still went to the island every day. After a bathe they would struggle up the soft sand into the sandhills, and here my mother would mull over the characters of Marnie and Anna, jotting down notes in a little black pocket book with a hard cover. She had vivid memories of how she felt as a child, and Anna in particular, with her ‘ordinary’ look and feelings of being on the outside, was very much drawn from her own childhood.

At the end of that summer my parents returned home. My mother, still jotting down notes, had already filled several notebooks and the story was emerging. She
worked in a little shed in the garden, made comfortable with light and heat and nothing to distract her but birds or the occasional cat. Over the course of about eighteen months she progressed from notebooks to a clattering old typewriter, until the manuscript was finally ready to send to a publisher. My mother was delighted when the book was accepted, and her friend Peggy Fortnum agreed to illustrate it. But at the last minute she had to change the title from
Marnie
to
When Marnie Was There,
because Alfred Hitchcock was bringing out a film of that name just weeks before publication.

The book was a great success and was published in several languages. And in the summer of 1971, a BBC film crew came to the village to take photographs for the children’s programme
Jackanory.
My mother wasn’t able to be in Norfolk at that time, so my husband and I met the crew and showed them around. They auditioned many local girls and finally chose Marnie and Anna. I remember they dressed Marnie in a long white nightgown.

We had offered to help with the filming. So the first job they had for us was to get a couple of rowing dinghies – one to carry the director, and one to carry the photographer. I remember I had the photographer in my boat. As a fast-flowing spring tide was racing up the creek, I had to row like fury against it to keep the boat still for the photographer, who stood, precariously balanced, shooting Marnie at the edge of the creek with
the sun in ribbons on the surface of the water. At the end of the week, the film crew treated us to a delicious meal in a local restaurant. I heard later that the photographer had won an award for his photographs of Marnie.

Thirty years after the book was published, I heard how a Japanese man had recently arrived in the village looking for ‘Little Overton’. Many years before, as a young teenager, he had read
When Marnie Was There
in Japanese. The book had made a great impression on him and he very much wanted to see the place where the story was set.

It was the end of September and he had booked a tour from Japan to London for a few nights. He spoke very little English and he had no idea where ‘Little Overton’ was. All he had was a copy of the book as his guide. So he took the train to King’s Lynn, as Anna had done; and finally caught the bus that goes along the coast. The bus was full of people, who were all very kind – but no-one knew where ‘Little Overton’ was. At each stop the passengers got off until he was the only person left. He began to get rather anxious. Then as the bus turned the corner he saw the windmill.

“Stop, stop!” he said, “This must be it!” And he leapt off the bus. But the village wasn’t ‘Little Overton’, it was Burnham Overy.

He made his way to the pub. There the landlord assured him that he had found the right place, and took him down to the creek. He was thrilled to be there at last.
To see the tide rising, the boats swinging at anchor, the wild marsh and birds and the house that had been the start of it all.

That evening, while looking for somewhere to stay, he passed a house with a Japanese name. He met a lady there who could not only understand the story of his journey, but was also from the same place in Japan. She has since visited him there, taking him a photograph of my mother as a present.

Throughout her life my mother had strong ties with Norfolk. But since 1950 Burnham Overy in particular was special to her. So when she died in 1988, while on holiday, we arranged for her to be buried in the little churchyard of St Clement’s; in the village that had inspired her to write not just this story but also her other novels:
Charley, Meg and Maxie
and
The Summer Surprise.

D
EBORAH
S
HEPPARD

April 2002

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The second of four children of barrister parents, Joan G. Robinson spent her early childhood in Hampstead Garden Suburb. She went to seven schools, but passed no exams. Having always wanted to be an illustrator, she began with fourteen books for small children, and later moved on to older children’s fiction. She was married to artist and illustrator Richard G. Robinson, and became internationally renowned for her
Teddy Robinson
books, which she began illustrating and writing in 1953. Teddy Robinson was based on her daughter Deborah’s own teddy bear – she herself had never had a teddy bear as a child.

When Marnie Was There
was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1968. Joan’s fiction was always about girls who felt unloved – and she used to say of
When Marnie Was There,
“You can write books, but there’s only ever one book that’s really you.”

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1967
This edition published by HarperCollins
Children’s Books
in 2014

HarperCollins
Children’s Books
A division of HarperCollins
Publishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Joan G. Robinson 1967

Postscript copyright © Deborah Sheppard 2002

Illustrations by Peggy Fortnum

Cover illustration by Hamish Blakely
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Joan G. Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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