Reading Olivia Fitzroy’s Stewart family books as a child, I was entranced by the Scottish Highlands. The end paper maps*, the unpronounceable place names, the marvellous wild country, the stalking and the fishing. And her characters are good, too — tall, volatile, tangle-haired Fiona first of course, and also glamorous, older brother Ninian, flaxen twins Jean and James, cousin Sandy, steadygoing friend Hugh. And later the mysterious, moody exiled Fergus.
Fiona glanced at him. The far-away look she knew so well was back in his eyes, his face stern and inscrutable.
“Can you see Taransay?” asked Jean, staring in the same direction.
“I can always see Taransay,” said Fergus.
Olivia Fitzroy (1921–1969) started writing tales for her sisters when she and her family were sequestered in Wester Ross during WWII. Orders to Poach was published by Collins in 1942. (Billy Collins was a family friend.) The Stewarts and Hugh are charged by their absent soldier father with maintaining the good health of their highland deer forest when the new tenant of Carrick House forbids any shooting and fishing.
Steer by the Stars (Collins) followed in 1944. We meet Fergus as the family spends a summer cruising the coastline in a motorboat, crossing the Minch and helping some illicit whisky distillers. The House in the Hills (Collins 1946) finds the Stewarts making a deserted croft habitable in the dead of winter and searching for a hidden cave in a magical fairy hill. Fergus appears and leaves in his usual mysterious way.
Re-reading these first three, it dawns on me that they would now be Young Adult books. Hugh and Ninian are in the army. Fiona has done a London Season. There is drinking and smoking and shaving and lipstick and nail varnish. Fergus is obviously a lot older, and fairly chugs his own whisky. Perhaps that’s why I will always prefer The Hill War (Collins 1950) where we step back in time. Fiona is 14 and the twins are 9. Fiona and Ninian have been at odds the whole summer. The final explosion sends Fiona off to hide in the hills together with faithful cousin Sandy, to wreck the rest of Ninian’s summer. In between scaring off his deer and swiping venison patties through the Lodge larder window at night, Fiona is successful and Ninian has to cry ‘pax’ when Jeannie goes missing.
Thereafter comes Wandering Star (Collins 1953), Fergus and Sandy in the South — Olivia feeling she’s exhausted her Highland background? But then The Island of Birds (Jonathan Cape 1954), back to Scotland. Just Fergus and the twins, sailing off to Fergus’ private island to protect a sea eagle’s nest. Next The Hunted Head (Jonathan Cape 1956) where Jamie gets a knock on the head and we return to 18th century Carrick and the counterparts to the contemporary Stewarts. The Battle of Culloden is over. Ninian is dead. Fiona, dressed as a boy, with her brother Jamie, must get an urgent message to Prince Charles Edward hiding in the hills. Win Wilson likes this one best and feels Olivia has hit her stride with historical fiction. And just before that, Wagons and Horses (Collins 1955) an outlier, based on Olivia’s year travelling with the Chipperfield Circus. This one not for me.
I think Collins did a poor production job for Olivia. Yes it began in wartime, but I see no attempt at uniformity of board colour or font, a mishmash of illustrators. William Showell, Shirley Hughes, Mary Gernat. Phyllida Lumsden for The House in the Hills where some of her work is really bad. Anne Bullen for Steer by the Stars, a complete waste of her special talent with only one pony drawing in the book.
Collins can’t even spell Olivia’s name consistently — is she Olivia Fitz Roy or Fitzroy? Just think of AR’s lovely, dependable dark green boards with the familiar dust jackets, year after year. Cape did a better job for Olivia with similar green boards for The Island of Birds and The Hunted Head. Raymond Sheppard’s drawings are strong, bold art in their own right.
Something else that Collins didn’t provide was a good editor. The long tramps, the exhaustively described lochs, corries, burns and woodlands are peerless but… too many. The narratives tend to sag in the middle, too. Olivia was 21 when she started writing. She didn’t have AR’s years of writing in many different disciplines to be able do her own pruning.
Olivia was not a best seller like AR. As far as I can see there is only one edition of most of her books. Wagons and Horses had a Children’s Book Club reprint in 1956. There was a Puffin Orders to Poach in 1956, and Fidra Books in Edinburgh have recently re-issued soft covers of Orders to Poach, Steer by the Stars and The House in the Hills. (Due to Covid they appear to be closed just now.)
What strikes me now is how subtle Olivia is, beyond her years in her characterizations and in the nuances of sibling relationships. We absorb, almost without noticing, that Sandy will follow Fiona to the ends of the earth; that Ninian knows timid Jeannie may need some quiet support when trolls might be near. The Young Adult aspect appears in Steer by the Stars with Hugh’s barely-spoken resentment of Fergus with Fiona. Hugh can be quite grown-up cynical too. “Generally the things one wants most don’t happen, or at anyrate not until one’s forgotten one wanted them,” he says.
Olivia’s characters are more introspective than many in other children’s contemporary fiction.
Fiona’s thoughts went ranging further and further as she knelt, wrapped in the rug, looking out onto the silver water. Quietness and emptiness and peace seemed to press upon the world, leaving her the only person in it. She found she was able to think more clearly about all the things that troubled and puzzled her ordinarily, she realized briefly and half-unconsciously, how much too much self and material things mattered to her, that somewhere, somehow, there was an answer and a meaning to so many things that seemed pointless, that the quietness and beauty of this night was more important than anything else.
Phew! Only Titty could come close to that in the Walker family. AR’s books must have been available to Olivia. There’s a lot of Nancy in Fiona. (Although Nancy would never have done all that cooking). Maybe the Oxus books too? I see a hint of Hull & Whitlock’s Maurice in Fergus. Conversely, here’s a nice coincidence in Orders to Poach (1942):
The loch water was as clear and cold as ice. Round the point a black bird bobbed in the water. “Northern Diver”, said Fiona. “There’s always one up here.”
(Great Northern? is 1947)
Today we may see the characters and activities of Olivia’s books as victims of their time. Readers could feel that the unintended elitism of the Stewarts is either outdated or offensive. An awful lot of lobsters and grouse, hooking, shooting and skinning. Maggie to cook meals, light lamps and lug hot water about the place. (To mitigate this it should be noted that the Stewart family has fallen on hard times. The stalking and fishing are for the pot.) Still, Ninian is an Old Etonian.
That being said, all of it was fine by me as a child. My father got so fed up with me galloping through all the books he bought for me, that he started daily rationing. Lovely, now, to find at the end of a House in the Hills chapter, his inimitable pencil ‘Not beyond here’.
*As an adult I spent a holiday in Poolewe, and immediately recognized all of Olivia’s landscape. Just as beguiling in reality.