THE INNOCENT EYE

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Publication Date	2016-01-01
Authors	Meta Mayne Reid, Ruth Baker

Abstract

Meta Hopkins was the elder daughter of parents from Co. Londonderry who had taken up farming in Yorkshire. Her Irish parentage grew to be a source of pride. From her mother she heard so many fascinating tales about Ireland that it became a sort o?Tirnan Og to which, she was sure, they would one day return. They did, and Meta met and married ‘the Irish husband of whom I had dreamed in the Yorkshire garden. ’ He was Dr E Mayne Reid, a scion of the same family as the famous Captain Mayne Reid, author of the stirring adventure stories that had thrilled a previous generation of readers. Meta came to love the Northern Irish countryside, and from it came the settings for her children ‘s novels. Her formative years, however, were spent in Yorkshire and are the subject of an unpublished autobiography of childhood entitled The Innocent Eye. It traces the development of the young mind which was to find fulfilment in the writing of twenty-three children’s novels and a considerable output of poetry. It is probably as a children’s author that Meta will be best remembered, so what sort of child was she? She describes herself as ‘solemn, lonely and headstrong, full of fancies which puzzled my parents’. At school she was regarded as a rebel Irish girl, with her Yorkshire/ Londonderry accent. For her, ‘Lists and neat boxes of knowledge were no good at all; I was all for the glorious flowers of fancy, without the hard roots of fact.’ At home she rummaged among old Strand magazines in the attic, ‘getting my first taste of the great Russians, of Kipling and Nesbit, Marie Corelli and Hall Caine. ’ She was a voracious reader from the age of five. Books meant as much to her as people: ‘They cast a new light on ordinary things, weaving together fact and fable.’ This intriguing blend of fantasy and reality drew her to the novels of E Nesbit and isa feature of her own books. Kipling was her god, followed by Tennyson and Longfellow, and Jane Eyre was a favourite classic. Her mother’s bedtime reading veered between Tennyson, metrical psalms and parts of the New Testament about the Day of Judgment, which terrified the imaginative child. As a family they never became integrated within the community, and this she regretted. (In those days the classes didn’t mix and the Hopkins farmed the largest acreage in the district.) Her mother’s warm, open nature contrasted oddly with her father’s cold aloofness. The hoped-for son never materialised, and ‘two daughters were a very poor substitute for sons’. The house was spartan. ‘Perhaps it was the remoteness of our inconvenient convenience that made us ultra modest in the matter of hygiene: be prudish about your person, ignore sex, be proud of your class and your race, and be as meek as Charles Wesley’s humble worm as far as your creator was concerned.’ It was a ‘narrow and introvert d family life*, enlivened by h r mother’s stories of the old house in the Diamond at Coler ine where she had been brought up; smuggling on Magilligan Strand; Fenian troubles; the uncle who killed Cushy Glen the footpad; terror of the district; and the great uncle who took part in the ‘98 Rebellion. Meta dedicated her book The Two Rebels to his memory: * Uncle James, who after the ‘98 fled with his fiddle to America.’ Another novel, The Glen Beyond the Door, is inscribed, ‘For my own planter people in their own glen under the mountain. ’ Thus, from her remarkable mother the young Meta imbibed social history without knowing it and developed a strong sense of, and empathy with, the past. On her father’s side there were holidays at the family farm near Limavady, climbing Keady Mountain and riding in a jaunting car. Games of make-believe were firmly interwoven with the solid structure of everyday life, lIt was ingrained in me ? as perhaps in most children?to tell my parents just as little as possible… They never seemed to realise what was important and what was not… My world was completely sensuous and immediate. I without trying to see/ Indeed, so strong were her powers of observation and memory that she could recall a flower once seen as a child in the most minute detail when she thought of it again as a middle-aged woman. Without any conscious effort, her mind soaked up visual impressions like blotting paper. She describes her lifelong love affair with places’, some of them providing the springboard for a plot, such as the well at Scrabo which yielded up five full-length tales, and the ring fort of Staigue, inspiration of three others. ‘I hate towns and my kingfishers never catch fire until my characters get into the Irish countryside.’ In her last years it was to the lake at Hillsborough that she was drawn as by a magnet. She wrote as a child ? for the school magazine, and 4 little paragraphs about scenes in the Leeds streets on the way to school. Her mother took her to see a well-known journalist on a provincial paper. ‘What do you really want to do?’ he asked. ‘Write,’ she said, i’m going to write.’ She saw this as a watershed ? the real end of her

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