Fell Farm Holiday by Marjorie Lloyd - and some thoughts on nostalgia

I must have picked this book up in a charity shop at some point and never read it – but now realising that it fits my #projectplaces requirements, I decided to give it a go. It’s a very quick read, just 153 short pages, but unfortunately everything it says could probably have been condensed into half that number.

Written in 1951, Fell Farm Holiday tells the story of the five Browne children’s summer in the Lake District. The children are very much 1950s middle class clichés – two sets of twins (one boy and one girl in each set, of course) plus ‘the infant’, 8 year old Sally. They have holidayed at High Tarn Farm every year, but their father is ‘away in India’ (no doubt pronounced “Indiarr”) and although the war has now been over for six years, it seems that Mother, who normally accompanies them to what was then Westmoreland, has been unable to get home since the war started. (‘Why not?’ is a question that is probably best left unanswered…I imagine her sitting on a veranda, enjoying a Gin and French…)

Surprise, surprise, Mr and Mrs Jenks are more than pleased to have the children to stay for the entire summer by themselves. The Jenks have no children of their own – if I were them I’d be horrified at the very thought of this bunch of gannets descending on me – but need I tell you that these jolly farmers not only relish the children’s company, but also have an immensely laissez faire approach to their in loco parentis situation? The children, aged between 15 and 8, are allowed to go wherever they like for as long as they like, with very few questions asked. I know things were different in the 1950s, I really do – but these children live in London,

‘We have no real home of our own you see…So war-time holidays had all been in London, at Aunt Gretchen’s flat…’

or are away at boarding school, they don’t live in the countryside, and certainly don’t spend every weekend climbing mountains.

Different chapters of the book are written by each of the four older children.  Pat, the older boy, predictably leads everything and tells everyone what to do, Kay, the oldest girl, is in charge of the food, Jan, the younger boy, is a keen birdwatcher, and Hyacinth is (according to her sister, all of two years older),

‘a funny little thing really….rather dreamy and impractical’ 

‘The infant’ Sally, although barred (by the others, not Mrs Jenks) from participating in their more extreme expeditions, is still required to take the bus, alone, to the ‘camp’ to bring along the things that her siblings have forgotten.

One of the good things about this book is that all the places mentioned in it are real. High Tarn Farm – now holiday cottages (http://www.higharnsidefarm.co.uk/) – is very near Skelwith Bridge, where my parents-in-law owned a little chalet for many years, and the author includes a map showing peaks like Coniston Old Man and Crinkle Crags. The book does give a flavour of what life was like in the Lakes seventy years ago, although how idealised that picture may be one can’t tell. Mr and Mrs Jenks don’t seem to have any money worries, even though they are very much hands-on farmers, not today’s burnt-out hedge fund managers or pop stars playing at cheese-making. 

The illustrations in my edition are very simple line drawings by Lloyd herself. I loved their pared-back style and the way in which the she uses so few strokes to covey the spirit of the book. The girls’ plaits, the boys’ long shorts, the little backpacks (‘our ruckers’), the hob-nailed walking boots that weighed a ton  – every picture really does tell a (very 1950s) story.

The worst things about Fell Farm Holiday, for me, are (i) that almost nothing happens, and in particular, (ii) that the children are perfect in every way. They never argue, fall out, or do anything worse than forgetting a compass. Pat is given to starting sentences with ‘As a family…’ – 

‘As a family, we don’t find much pleasure in staying in bed in the mornings…’  

‘One thing that our family prides itself on [amongst many…] is its goodness at getting up.’

This boy is 15. Sally never minds being left behind to do baking with the patient Mrs Jenks, Jan never seems to mind being told what to do by Pat, Kay is more than happy to do all the camp cooking.

Image of  Eskdale: Geograph_Britain_and_Ireland (c) Peter Smyly,  
licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

The main event in Fell Farm Holiday is a trip to survey and chart a path down Eskdale. This expedition is dreamt up by Pat, who naturally gives everyone else their orders. They are to be away, sleeping under the stars, for three nights, one of them at over 3,000 feet on Scawfell Pike. No-one really knows where they are, and they have no means of letting anyone know if they are in trouble. But needless to say, despite the weather going seriously off on their last day, they don’t get into real trouble, and soon they are back at the farm, once again stuffing themselves with ‘a gradely meal.’ Even when Sally announces that she had ‘an awfully exciting adventure’ on the way home from the ‘base camp’ after delivering supplies, and one wonders with anticipation what on earth might have happened to her alone on a country bus, the others never ask her what it was and so we never find out. What a let down!

The children also hitch lifts with gay abandon, and usually end up sitting in the open backs of carts or lorries, on one occasion on top of a stack of milk churns. When Pat and Kay are invited by another farmer to try rock climbing – with no experience whatsoever, no harnesses, no helmets nor indeed anything apart from a rope and five minutes’ pre-climb chat about belaying – all goes according to plan and they are up and down Dow Crag in no time. 

Image of  Dow Crag: Geograph_Britain_and_Ireland (c) Richard Webb,

licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

I have pondered on why I found this book disappointing, and I think the answer is that it reads as a poor imitation of a Famous Five story – at least in those, something happens, no matter how unlikely. I have looked at reviews on Goodreads, and see that many people have fond memories of reading the Fell Farm books as children, and that those same people still got great pleasure from re-reading them years later. In particular, many compared Fell Farm favourably with Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, which I have never had any desire to read, so maybe you either like this kind of thing or you don’t.

Another downside, for me, was that there was no sense of irony. E Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, for example, which I read quite recently, can be enjoyed as a straight adventure, but as adults we can also enjoy Oswald Bastable’s unintentionally hilarious remarks. Fell Farm Holiday reads to me almost like an old Girl Guide handbook – everyone needs to be encouraged to get out there, do things, and most of all, not be a woose. I do know people like that, and I suppose in a tiny way I do envy their gung-ho spirit, but I also know too much time in their presence would drive me to drink. Indeed, maybe that's exactly what's happened to Mrs Browne....

Fell Farm Holiday did, however, set me thinking about how our childhood memories, and our nostalgia for a happier time, may colour our views. In my own childhood I read and re-read Enid Blyton, Malcom Saville and Eve Garnett. My children enjoyed some of the Famous Five books, but when I tried reading Saville’s Three Pines series to them I quickly realised that it was terrible. I haven’t returned to the Family From One End Street yet; I always imagined that I’d love the Ruggles as much now as I did then, but maybe I won’t?  I need to dig those books out and see.

Fell Farm Holiday by Marjorie Lloyd was published by Penguin Books in 1951 and republished in 1953 and 1959. Second-hand copies are available online.