I bought this late last year and it sat in my to read pile. My metaphorical to read pile, as it was “shelved” on the floor under a table along with a host of other books a bit too large to fit on an actual shelf. Doing a much-needed dusting under there earlier this year I pulled out the books which I was yet to read and made them a priority, and so I finally got around to reading this one.
My Eileen Soper
While the book is indeed about Eileen Soper’s garden it is, understandably, about Eileen Soper just as much.
Eileen Soper has been part of my life for a number of years, probably thirty or more, ever since I started reading the Famous Five. I had a mix of Fives, some Hodder & Stoughton hardbacks (a few even had dust jackets), 70s Knight paperbacks and a few 90s paperbacks purchased to fill in the gaps. The hardbacks were illustrated by Eileen Soper. The Knights by Betty Maxey, and the 90s ones were not illustrated at all.
It didn’t, in the end, matter which editions I read, as the Five in my head were fleshed-out, coloured-in versions of what Eileen Soper drew. I associate her version of the Five so strongly with the books that my brain imagines illustrations based on the text and I am often convinced that I’ve seen a drawing of a scene that is entirely unillustrated.
That is all to say that Eileen Soper holds a special place in my heart as she was an important part of my childhood reading. And so I went into reading this book with a mild sense of trepidation. I have read the odd little thing here and there about Eileen Soper, things that perhaps didn’t paint her in the most flattering light.
The real Eileen Soper
Duff-Hart Davis doesn’t shy away from recounting the honest and sometimes unflattering depiction of Eileen Soper in this book.
His book begins with the last weeks of Soper’s life – in 1989, as she was admitted to hospital – and Soper asking a friend to check on the house, warning him to not disturb the mice that were nesting in her slippers.
That sounds rather sweet if you don’t think too much about it. The reality, not so much. The friend found the gardens wildly over-grown, plants beginning to invade the roof and windows, a door half-blocked by a fallen tree. Inside the house was full to the brim – although Hart-Davis never uses the word hoarder that’s clearly what Soper was. A room containing thousands of jam jars. Rooms full of correspondence – first drafts of letters already sent, and the replies. Receipts, financial papers dating back fifty years, drawings, paintings, notes, lists… rooms so full you could barely get inside them. Eileen and her sister unable to be discharged home as the house was uninhabitable.
A sad ending to the life of such a talented illustrator, surely. One positive, as Hart-Davis notes, was that it meant a great deal of Eileen’s work – and that of her father – was able to be retrieved.
Like with many fictional stories the book then jumps back to the very beginning and Hart-Davis starts with Eileen’s birth in 1905, and from there outlines her life and slowly reveals how and why Eileen’s story ends the way it does.
A difficult woman
I can’t believe that I just headed this section with a difficult woman as I usually hate that phrase. It’s so often used to demean a woman who is outspoken and stands up for herself. Yet in this case it seems… sort of apt. Soper definitely did say and do exactly what she wanted to, and mostly that was to steer clear of other people.
I’d seen it mentioned before that Eileen and her sister were pretty germ-phobic and this is covered in the book as it’s part of the reason that the pair of them ended up so cut off from any friends they had. They didn’t like public transport or public places and as they got older they couldn’t tolerate visitors at home. Human visitors, that is. The birds and the mice were welcome despite the inconveniences they caused. I can only assume they were not aware of the germs and illnesses that wild animals could cause!
What’s quite funny is that Soper (at least once) called Enid Blyton a menace as she demanded footling changes in drawings that were already adequate. Yet Soper, who published a handful of nature books herself, went quite wild when one of her books was printed in a shade of blue which she didn’t like, and nearly called off the entire publication.
The section on Blyton is sadly, brief, though this is perhaps not surprising as Soper referred to her work for the author as hack-work and a chore. That made me feel a bit sad, actually. Her drawings are so lively and captured the characters so well, it’s a shame to think they meant nothing to her.
Blyton and Soper corresponded over the years, always polite, but never overly friendly. As the book remarks their letters remained formal Dear Miss Blyton… Sincerely Yours… and Dear Miss Soper, Yours…
There’s also a mistake as no matter how many times I read it this bit doesn’t make sense:
in 1944, with [Blyton writing] twenty-two new titles, Eileen illustrated no less than six of them, including her first ‘Fives’ book, Five Run Away Together.
Five Run Away Together is the third Famous Five book, and Soper illustrated them all. The sentences before that quote list Eileen’s first books for Blyton – three readers and I’ll Tell You a Story (all 1942) and then Merry Story Book, Polly Piglet and The Toys Come to Life (all 1943). It seems that list is missing Come to the Circus, and more importantly Five on a Treasure Island (1942) and Five Go Adventuring Again (1943). Easy to make mistakes with lesser-known works, but with the Fives?
Of course, this was written in 1991, meaning Hart-Davis was very unlikely to be doing his research online – there was certainly no Cave of Books to consult! The book also came out around a year after Soper’s death so perhaps was done rather quickly – though there’s no other obvious errors or signs of haste. In fact it’s a very detailed book, full of quotes directly from Eileen’s correspondances with friends, fellow nature-lovers and publishers. It is also full of illustrations
Soper’s work
As mentioned at the start of the post, Soper’s hoarding extended to her catalogue of illustrations – many done simply for pleasure. A selection of these have been reproduced in the book. I say selection – there must be hundreds. There is barely a page without a drawing of some kind – some have several. And yet this is probably still just a fraction of the amount she produced in her life.
They are all beautiful and add a great deal to the book – showing us rather than just telling us about her forays into badger-watching, the deer who began to live in the garden and the birds which visited the garden and the house.
There is also a map of Wildings, drawn by Soper herself which covers two pages at the start of the book. I referred back to this quite a few times as new details about the garden cropped up as I read.
A sad ending
And of course, having written about Eileen’s life, the book progresses on until we reach the sad state of affairs covered in the first chapter.
Wildings, once a beautiful garden and nature sanctuary, ends up as an overgrown jungle. The house – nothing special, architecturally, but a family home built by Eileen’s father, crumbling under attack from the very garden that Eileen loved so much.
What’s worse is that Eileen willed the house and grounds to the RSPB – who then sold the house and a chunk of the garden to private owners who are now in the process of demolishing the house to build another. (The full Historic England report on the house can be seen here.)
I spent ages looking into it all, trying to find out if there was still an RSPB site there. It seems that there is, but no signposts or suggestion that it’s accessible to the public. If you enter 58 Harmer Green Lane into Google Maps the pin is a little further along the road. Here, though, is a pin directly on the house. The RSPB site is presumably some of the tree-filled area to the south and west of the house.
If anyone lives around that area, do feel free to have a nosy and let me know what you can see!
Stalking aside, this is a fascinating book and well-worth a read. I’ve left it too late to get the scanner out to show you some of the illustrations from inside, but I will try to add some soon.
I also feel that I will revisit the book as I noted some parallels between Soper and Blyton that are worth exploring.
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 
Fiona, I’m basically twice as old as you are and never expected what an impact EB and Soper’s illustrations would have on my life until now.
I was 10 years old when my best friend Katti from Braunschweig lent me her three older brothers’ hardcover copies from the German translations of the Famous Five (Fünf Freunde series published way back then by Blüchert Publishers).
I was 10 years old and life was never the same again. EB enhanced my imagination. I dreamt of exploring England and possibly the area where the FF adventures took place.
Before that my parents provided me for birthdays and Christmas with rather tame children’s books which received the Newberry Medal and Deutscher Jugendbuchpreis (German Juvenile Book prize). Yes, I did read them plus all the children’s books from our huge public library and my elementary school library (I don’t remember if my high school had a school library). But they just didn’t live up to EB’s books.
Birthday after birthday, Christmas after Christmas I was disappointed that among the 5 or 6 books which I received on each occasion there was only one Famous Five book or one Adventure series book. I loved Stuart Tresilian’s illustrations from the Adventure series as much as Eileen A. Soper’s FF illustrations. And just like you I imagined the looks of George, Anne, Julian, Dick and Tim the same way as they looked on Soper’s illustrations.
In the early to mid 1970’s Bertelsmann publishers took over the Famous Five series from Blüchert Verlag and soon after made the unfortunate decision to replace the iconic Soper illustrations with very ugly and modernized illustrations by German illustrator Wolfgang Hennecke. Now the FF wore blue jeans instead of shorts and Tim, the dog, looked very ugly. I refused to buy this new edition with Hennecke’s illustrations and kept searching for the old Soper editions.
In 1974 when I was 19 years old, I moved away from home, my parents got rid of all my children’s books within 2 weeks. When I returned to pick up my books, none were left. I never forgave them for that and immediately started searching for the FF series at flea markets, on black boards at elementary schools and those few 55 sequels that I still couldn’t find with Soper’s illustrations I searched in ads in little free newspapers.
By 1985 I had found the last 2 FF books by Brigitte Blobel and now had a total of 23 FF books, 21 of them with Soper’s illustrations.
In May 1981 on my very first trip to the UK (several more were following until 2019) I bought an old red hardcover book of the FF from the late 1940’s or early 1950’s. Comparing it at home with the German translation I noticed that the UK version had much more Soper illustrations than the German version.
I returned to the UK in 1987 and again in 1995. In 1995 I stayed for 11 days at a self-catered cottage in Polruan which is on the other side of Fowey, in-between is the Fowey River. Actually, I intended to find more books on Daphne DuMaurier’s life who had spent most of her life in Cornwall and lived outside of Fowey until 1988 when she died. That’s how I discovered a bookstore called Bookends of Fowey and became friendly with store owner Christine Alexander who later retired and moved to either the Canary Isles or to Teneriffa (I tend to mix them up). She sold several books on DDM’s life to me and then when I returned to the bookstore we started talking about EB and how very much I would love to see “Five on a Treasure Island” (1957) once more (the last time was in 1964 on German TV, before I even knew who EB was). Christine Alexander remembered that she had received an EB brochure from her distributor a few weeks ago, she found it and got me the phone number of Rank Screen Services who produced FOATI (1957).
I bought a 5 £ telephone card and from a telephone booth next to the King of Prussia Hotel and restaurant I called Rank Screen Services and after a second phone call one week later I received the filming locations at the Jurassic Coast in Dorset plus they sold me a VHS copy of FOATI for 200 £ (which was 400 German Marks at the time, but I didn’t care, for me it was worth every penny :)). Some things fortunately never change and FOATI was as magical to watch as it was way back in 1964.
Until 2002 when I immigrated to the US, Christine Alexander did do book search and sold dozens of red hardcover FF sequels, Barney & Miranda sequels, FFO & Dog sequels to me which she sent to Hamburg, Germany.
My third husband André spent 11 months working for his US employer in Uxbridge near London from March 2008 until end of January 2009. He wanted me to join him in the UK. My German passport was expired, I couldn’t leave the country. That’s why I spent months with preparing for the US citizenship test (100 questions on history and politics). At the end of July 2008 I received my US citizenship and US passport, so I could join him from 10th of August 2008 on until Christmas 2008. It was the best time of our lives. That late summer André found EBS for me on the Internet and also the EB Yahoo Group which I joined (later I also joined EBS, but used the Cave of Books already years before I joined them).
André even read the very first Famous Five book while we lived in Uxbridge, but as an adult it didn’t provide him with the magic that it still holds for me these days. He watched FOATI (1957) with me and enjoyed it.
André asked me where I would like to spend my birthday weekend in 2008 and I suggested Corfe Castle Village. By the time I arrived in Uxbridge, all hotels and B & B’s on the Isle of Purbeck were sold out for the entire month of August, but we found a hotel in Yeovil and drove on two days all the way from Yeovil to Corfe and the Jurassic Coast. On one day we drove to Wonwell Beach in Devon.
While I still lived in Uxbridge with André, he ordered the two “Adventurous Four” books for me and a few years later (maybe in 2015) I found a reasonably priced old copy of “The Secret Island”, one of my most cherished possessions.
In early November 2008 my German friend Ute came to visit us for a week in Uxbridge. We took her to the Cotswolds on the weekend. In Burton-on-the-Water we went inside a souvenir & bookstore where I found “The Story of my Life” by EB for a ridiculously low price of 30 £ (the store owner obviously had not checked amazon.co.uk where the book was listed with 60 £).
The red old hard cover books that I was able to collect thanks to Christine Alexander have much more Eileen A. Soper illustrations than all the old German FF hardcovers by Blüchert and Bertelsmann. Whenever I reread one of the FF books in German, I also open up the English original, just to admire the extra illustrations.
That’s why EB and Soper, Tresilian and Gilbert Dunlop mean so much to me.
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Wildings
Eileen Soper left the estate upon her death to the RSPB to keep as a wildlife nature reserve, however at some stage the RSPB sold off a quarter of the land to a private buyer where the original house and garage once stood.
The former site of the Soper family, Wildings, is approached along a narrow single lane with a canopy of trees that leads to the ungated entrance but flanked by trees on either side, inside, a large private new house and garage is currently being built.
The building site manager allowed me access to this site only to have a look round, to the south of the new house a dense row of trees and shrubs blocks the view to the original part of the garden, and to the east, there is a thick row of trees on a higher bank with a boundry metal fence between trees and building site, a large apple tree with a bat box tied to it’s trunk has fallen from the bank across the metal boundry fence, but the builder is unable to remove the tree until the a licenced bat group can check and remove it.
There is no public access to the remainder of Wildings, other than the RSPB who frequent the reserve and visit several times a year to check on the bat boxes, birds nests, wild life and the site camera traps within the nature reserve.
As I leave Wildings, I feel emotionally moved to have walked in the footsteps of the late Eileen Soper.
Tom
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Thank you for reporting back. It’s wonderful to hear that Eileen and Eva’s wildlife sanctuary still exists and is being looked after by the RSPB.
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