Smoky House: Week 1

Devon Fairytales, Illustrations, Light, Food & Safety

Thatched cottage in Devon. Photo by Living in Devon

“In the village of Faraway everyone was happy, not only in the spring, but always, for Faraway is set in that part of England which is called the West Country, and that is a part of the world so beautiful that the people who live in it are always happy; and as happy people are always kind you could live in the village all your life long and never hear an angry voice or the sound of weeping. Children cried sometimes, if they fell down and hurt themselves, and sometimes grown-ups found it necessary to scold them for their good; but crying and scolding are soon over, they are not the same as weeping or anger, which can go on and on till they make the whole world wretched.

There was never either weeping or anger in Faraway, not even when people died, because though Faraway was a long way from the rest of the world it was very close to heaven, so the people in heaven seemed very near. Heaven is only round the corner in a country where you can pick wild flowers right up to Christmas, where the birds are always singing in the woods and where the hills are like green pudding basins turned upside-down..…”

🌿 Elizabeth Goudge, Smoky House

Welcome to our week 1 discussion for Smoky House!

When Goudge moved to Marldon, UK in 1939 shortly after her father’s death, she and her mother were navigating some very tricky the British nation was also in turmoil. War was declared in September, and it seems that Goudge wished to begin her wartime writing with a rousing encouragement for the children and child-like among her readers. She had come to the beautiful and peaceful countryside by the sea, but she remembered all of the those still in the cities of her country, those who were the greatest in need of encouragement. That is why she wrote a fairytale.

Smoky House is the first of Goudge’s three fairytales for children that are set in Devon. Later on Goudge would write the award-winning book, The Little White Horse, and then the reader favorite, Linnets & Valerians. But first, she wrote a fairy story about the Good People, the beauty of the Devon countryside, the goodness of light, food, music and safety, inside the strong walls of the ancient inn, Smoky House.

Today we will take a look at the first five chapters of Smoky House…

Illustration: Faraway by C Walter Hodges

“The village of Faraway lay in a sheltered valley between these round green hills. Its cottages were built of white washed stone and Thatched with golden straw, and they stood in gardens full of bushes of scarlet fuchsia and purple veronica. Smoky-House the village inn, was in the centre of the village, and close to it was the Church, with a tall tower from whose top you could gaze out over the round green hills, and see them dotted with sheep and cows so dwarfed by distance that they looked like toy animals out of a Noah's Ark, and see too the farms sheltering in the folds of the hills, and the ploughed fields of red earth that looked in the distance like fields of flowers…