The Tale of Oat Cake Crag - By Susan Wittig Albert Page 0,3

go down a treat, with perhaps a cheering bit of ham and cheese between two slices of buttered bread, and one (or two) scones. Yes, indeed. There was nothing like a bite of something to make a bird fit to tackle whatever challenges might come his way.

I’m sure you would like to follow the Professor and find out what the badger knows about this alien airborne creature. But if you don’t mind, we will catch up to the owl later. Instead, we will go over to Hill Top Farm, where Miss Beatrix Potter has just come indoors from an afternoon in the garden and is about to put the kettle on to boil for her own cup of tea.

2

Miss Potter Takes the Case

Beatrix Potter took off her gardening gloves and her woolen jacket and hat and hung them on the peg behind the door, then slipped her feet out of the wooden-soled pattens she wore outdoors and into the softer shoes she commonly wore in the house. The pattens, handmade for her by a cobbler in Hawkshead, were the traditional footwear of farmwives in the Lakes. Beatrix loved to wear them, not just because they were practical, but because they symbolized her commitment to the garden, the farm, and the farmer’s way of life.

She had spent the afternoon in the garden, planting lilacs and rhododendrons and a red fuchsia, which she had bought from a nursery in Windermere. The plants should probably have gone into the ground in late fall, but she hadn’t been able to get down from London. Her parents—her father was nearly eighty and her mother in her seventies—had a large house there, and required her attention. The more she wanted to get away, the more they found they needed her.

But finally Beatrix had put her foot down. She told her parents that she wanted to spend a few quiet days to herself, in order to work out ideas for her next book, The Tale of Mr. Tod, the latest book in a series that had begun some ten years before, with The Tale of Peter Rabbit. This was partly true, although she had another reason (a more intensely personal and secret reason) for coming to the farm just now. A reason that—

But never mind: we’ll get to that later. Suffice it for now to say that Beatrix always loved coming to Hill Top, which she had come to think of as her home in the six years she had owned the farm. It was all very beautiful and dear to her—the green meadows and woodlands and gardens and orchard and house and barn and all the animals—and she longed for it when she had to go back to dirty, sooty, smoky London, where she invariably came down with a stuffy cold the minute she stepped off the train.

Mr. and Mrs. Potter, I am sorry to say, did not happily let their only daughter go, and this departure, like every other one, seemed to precipitate a great crisis. Her mother simply couldn’t understand what she saw in the sleepy little village of Near Sawrey. “But there is no society there, Beatrix!” Mrs. Potter complained (although “no society” was exactly what Beatrix wanted). And her father thought the farm a silly burden for a woman and the house itself “exceedingly plain and severe,” without electric lights or a telephone.

Mr. Potter was very right. Hill Top was plain and severe—and still is, as you can see for yourself when you visit there, for the National Trust (to whom Beatrix donated Hill Top Farm) keeps the old farmhouse just as it was during Beatrix’s time. The outside is still plastered with a pebbly mortar and painted with the gray limewash that is traditional in the area. The eight-over-eight windows still march symmetrically across the front of the house, which also features a peaked porch constructed of blue slate from a local quarry. The steep roof is covered with the same blue slate, and the chimneys still wear those peaked slate caps that always reminded Beatrix of schoolboys lined up in a row.

Beatrix herself had made many changes, although none that altered the traditional style of the house and farm. When she bought the place in 1905, it had required quite a lot of fixing. To satisfy the needs of the barnyard animals—cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and ducks—she repaired the barn, the dairy, and the fences. To accommodate the Jennings family (Mr. and Mrs. Jennings cared for the farm and the