A Book of Delights

There are stories that held you as a child; they probably hold you even now. 

The Best Book in the World

When I was eight, my grandfather gave me a book for Christmas. I loved reading as a child and before and after that particular Christmas I was and have always been given books. But this book remains peerless in the lit-gift pantheon.  Its title was ‘The Box of Delights’. 

Masefield’s novel is beloved by many - doubly, triply, a hundred times so because of the 1984 dramatisation of the story by the BBC. Many of us late-thirty-/forty-somethings are still spellbound by its enchantment. And despite some voices today that decry the outdated technology and antique-synth soundtrack, I still see, hear and feel the production to be an absolute masterpiece of film.

But when I was given a hardback copy of the book - specially abridged to tie in with the TV drama, and with lustrous, glossy, full-colour plates – I was completely overwhelmed. How important it was to me: holding it and – oh! – opening those pages to reveal the picture of the Christmas Tree burgeoning with light and gifts, the glorious flight of Kay as he rides a chariot-wreath pulled by swarms of butterflies, and – best of all – the painting of Herne the Hunter deep in his Wild Wood, was a Christmas treat that has kept on giving for my whole life.

So when I lost it only two weeks after I had been given it, I was devastated. We lived in Scotland at the time and in that early January I had walked home from School with a little plastic bag containing The Book and my PE kit. Somewhere on the way home, I had put down the bag, maybe to do up a shoelace, or to talk to a friend, and I ploughed on homeward continuing my way into the very dark and the snow. 

My mum still remembers my serious distress. I can still feel it too. But I can also remember vividly staring out of the back window of our car as mum drove me back along the road I had come, and seeing poking out of a snowdrift - and almost completely covered - the plastic handles of the bag containing The Best Book in the Whole World.

We took the bag home. Snow had filled the bottom of the bag and had turned into icy water. The corners of the book had become mush, the cloth cover scuffed and worn. I was mortified by the state I had allowed it to become through my own negligence, but at least I had The Book. It had come home.

It was sacred to me; I can’t describe it in any other way. A  genuinely spiritual sacredness. It contained something which was absolutely, intensely Magic. I don’t mean ‘magic’ in the sense of ‘Oh what a magical story’ or ‘This story is about magic'; I mean something much more than that. 

The Box of Delights stands proud amongst those children’s novels that hold their readers in wintry thrall: Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe...yet unlike these books, its story rambles and meanders wildly through all kinds of implausibility and mythic reference, and reads more like a surreal improvisation by an overenthusiastic storyteller. This is why I love it above all other stories: it is massively flawed and at times quite off-putting to some (I would imagine) with its pages of seemingly pointless narrative asides, stories within stories that barely hang together, and its outlandish characters and settings that gel together about as smoothly as oil and water.

At its very depths though, in its very core, The Box of Delights taps into the roots of English Magic and Folklore. It shapes the ancient forest tales of the soil, it invokes spirits malign and fearsome and evokes the country’s bloody history; it sets up a mummers’-play-tribute to the rustic, to the eccentric, to the nostalgic. And to the lost.

What place does Arnold of Todi's lost Box of Delights have in the modern day? Whatever Masefield's motivations were for bringing old folklore bang up to date in the 1930s with flying automobiles, robbers and pistols, the clash between the old and the new is clear. The author seems to delight in overloading the story with other stories: the Green Man, Herne, the Lion and the Unicorn, the phoenix, Punch and Judy, the Trojan War...over and over and over, a palimpsest layering upon layering, until the weight of story has nigh quashed the real world.

Kay's modern slang 'I haven't a tosser to my kick' belies his true fascination with the fantastic when he 'frightfully' wants to see a Phoenix.  Except, he says, 'it doesn't exist'. (I do like to think that over this Christmas vacation, Kay managed to slough off his tougher schoolboy skin to becomes his true, wondering, eyes-wide-open self!) Masefield shows youth that what they can imagine, what they somehow just know was once real and true, is still an actuality: spin the stories, dig about a little deeper, and you'll find the truth.

The last lines of the book are almost too pat to be true after all this richness...'it was all a dream'! But it's not the totally duff anticlimax some say it is. A dream is exactly what it is. Like Shakespeare's dream-vision where myth and magic collide with the mundane to create something fresh and anew-formed:

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

Each one of us is part of the long line of Dreams that have formed our lineage; the stories that have made, and continue to make, our histories. Ramon Lully (aka Cole Hawlings) travels through time to be in all times: he shows that Story is told, retold, played out again and again, eternally refreshed and drawn upon.

As a child, I literally lost The Book . Then, for a time as a young adult, I lost sight of the book spiritually – I was reading other things, and the book stayed on the shelf, untouched for a while. But it was found again.  And now I read it every year at Christmas, in memory of my grandfather who gave me this gift all those years ago, and also in living memory of how such stories (and Story) can have a very special - transformational - place in all our lives.

Story is never lost. It holds us forever.