childhood

I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.

I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.

In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.

So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.

His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.

Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there is was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation an pornographic literature.”

In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”

The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”

Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.

If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:

“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!”
“We can’t be married, you fathead!”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.”
“Not allowed to? Why ever not?”
“Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.”
“Oh, Biff, what sort of things?”
“Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”

Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”

As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.

When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.

This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.

The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:

Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.

The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.

One of Stripling’s American reviewwers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”

The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.

A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:

Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].

Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.

At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.

That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.

It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.

In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is avaiable through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)

The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke)
Striplings
London: Faber and Faber, 1934
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934
Close of Play
London: Putnam, 1936
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936
Own Wilderness
London: Putnam, 1938
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938