Beyond the hills — A Closer Reading

The Beckoning Hills and the River's Call

The novel's setting is established through a recurring contrast between the familiar river and forest and the mysterious hills beyond. The river is described as 'an everyday river' yet 'rushing swiftly to the sea and the open world,' a duality that mirrors the children's own conflict between safety and adventure. The hills are personified as 'shadowy, mystic' and 'unattainable,' their allure heightened by the legacy of Sir Walter Raleigh, who once inhabited the children's home. The narrative voice lingers on these descriptions, using long, flowing sentences that evoke a sense of longing. For instance, the children 'strained their eyes down the river or across the hills, simply wondering, wondering.' This repetition of 'wondering' emphasizes their passive yearning before they take action. The river and hills thus function as both physical and symbolic boundaries, their presence shaping the children's desires and decisions.

Decisions and Delays: The Pace of Adventure

As the children journey, the narrative pace slows to accommodate their internal deliberations. When offered a car ride, they refuse, feeling that 'cars belonged to the everyday world.' Their reasoning is presented in a series of short, hesitant sentences: 'Life, they began to think, was not as simply straightforward and easy as they had imagined it. There were decisions to be made. How curious that the difficulties should be kind of nice difficulties.' This passage captures the narrative's tendency to pause for introspection, even as the children are on the move. The pace quickens during exchanges of dialogue, such as the lively conversation about the roses and the Prior, where Nancy's speech is punctuated by dashes and interjections: 'not a scrap preachy or religious, 'cept in a nice way.' These shifts in pace—from contemplative to brisk—mirror the children's alternating moods of uncertainty and determination.

Recurring Motifs: Roses, Donkeys, and the Unknown

Several motifs recur in the excerpts, lending coherence to the narrative. The roses given by the 'Rose-Vicar' become a token of gratitude and connection, passed from the children to Dick and then to the Prior. The donkey, Ladybird-Modestine, is mentioned as a consideration in the children's decisions—'Imagine leaving her at an unknown stable'—highlighting their attachment to the familiar even as they seek the unknown. The phrase 'the Unknown' itself appears repeatedly, capitalized and almost mythologized, as the children's goal. The narrative voice treats these motifs with a blend of earnestness and gentle humor, as when Dick smells roses and asks, 'Is it my imagination?' and Mavis replies, 'No, it's real roses.' These details ground the children's adventure in tangible objects and relationships, preventing the story from becoming overly abstract.

Readers attentive to shifts in narrative pace will find that Jenkinson uses changes in sentence length and dialogue density to signal the children's emotional states. The novel rewards close attention to its recurring images—roses, the river, the hills—which accumulate meaning across chapters. The excerpts suggest a story that values the process of decision-making as much as the destination, making the journey itself the true adventure.

Maysel Jenkinson’s orphans always kept one eye past the hills, and I find myself doing the same, reaching for that old copy of Baseball Joe, champion of the league — Key Ideas to Explore when the roses need pruning and the donkey bray reminds me that games, too, hold their own quiet tests of nerve. Some wanderings come in gloves and long innings, not just Raleigh’s maps.