The Joy of the Snow: Week 1

True Locations & True Stories from Elizabeth Goudge's Childhood

West door of Wells Cathedral with a snow of white daisies in the grass in April. The city of Wells, UK was the birthplace of Elizabeth Goudge.

“(My) memories of Wells are mixed up with my gratitude that I was born when I was, and can remember the place in the days when the passage of the water cart, spraying cool refreshment in the dust of Chamberlain Street, was an earth-shaking event; as exciting as the passage down St Thomas's street of the lamplighter, and the sound of the muffin man's bell. We are probably better off without the white summer dust, yet I remember it gratefully. It could be so thick in the country lanes about Wells in high summer that the slow trot of the pony's feet, pulling a governess cart full of children to Wookey Hole for a picnic, could hardly be heard…”

🌿 Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow

Dedicating this article to my friend, Paula Banfield. May she now know the Lord’s love and peace completely.🌿

Visit to Wells: Goudge’s childhood city

For our first week of reading The Joy of the Snow, the autobiography of Elizabeth Goudge, we spent a good deal of time hearing about her childhood in Wells and summers in Guernsey. Today, I am going to take you on a mini trip to Wells to see it as it currently is, as I was just there for a visit in April 2025.

Goudge says in this first chapter that she was too afraid to return lest Wells be changed. I am sure she would find a few changes in modern Wells, however it is remarkably untouched, even with the rush of modernity about it.

An elderly friend of mine, Paula, who lived her whole life in Somerset near Wells wrote to me last summer (just before she passed away) to say that she had “so enjoyed reading A City of Bells and visiting Wells/Torminster which is so perfectly just as Elizabeth described. It is a gem lost in time. We all felt we would love to live there as it is so beautiful and peaceful.”

Join me for a look at my April visit to Wells, UK!

We will also look at some of the true stories Goudge included to The Joy of the Snow and where she wrote them in to her fiction…

Driving from the north into Wells you see the Cathedral over all. And right at the turn of the road is Goudge’s birthplace…

“…Quietness was complete in the countryside. If you stood and listened in the lanes in those days it was so still that you could hear a dog barking a mile off, and at times it could be complete in the streets of the city. And sound, when it came, was much the same as it had always been; children coming out of school, bells pealing, dogs barking, the baker's boy whistling, someone singing within a house at evening, the sound drifting through an open window. It had hardly changed for centuries… I only remember the changelessness of the place and the sense of safety that it gave, its only contacts with the outside world the few trains that slithered slowly and peacefully as earthworms through the valleys, stopping every ten minutes to pick up milk churns from under the lilac bushes on the station platforms, and to deposit in their place two sleepy passengers and a crate of hens…”

🌿 Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow

Tower House & Garden

This first description of Tower House reminds me of the hall at the Laurel in The Scent of Water: