Anthology archaeology: how Henry Treece’s horror story became a children’s adventure

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

One of the pleasures of collecting Henry Treece is the constant probability of unearthing obscure material in published collections, a sort of anthology archaeology if you will. Whenever I browse second hand bookshops I make a point of checking poetry collections and compilations of children’s stories, just in case there’s a Treece contribution to be discovered. Most of the the time there’s not, of course, but just occasionally my stomach flips and a sale is assured. In this post I present an example from my collection, which led me in a bibliographic direction I had not anticipated.

This archaeology begins with The Big Book of Adventure Stories, published by Hamlyn for Galley Press in 1986, which I picked up in a charity shop some years ago. With its brightly coloured cover of sailing ships firing broadsides at one another, it looks exactly like the sort of book that might once have appeared under a Christmas tree for an adventure-hungry child. The 1986 volume appears to have been the last in a long-lived sequence of repackagings of earlier anthologies originally edited by Eric Duthie.

The first story in the collection is Treece’s “The Visitor”, which initially entered this particular publishing stream in Mystery and Adventure Stories for Boys (Odhams, 1962); material from that and Duthie’s Open-Air Adventure Stories for Boys (1965) was subsequently brought together in the much larger Big Book of Boys’ Adventure Stories (Hamlyn, 1977). The 1986 Galley Press volume was another, shorter selection from this material, with its copyright page explicitly recording 1962, 1965 and 1977 before giving 1986 as the date of the new edition. I have so far found no later edition in this particular sequence.

Reading “The Visitor” in this book I was struck by its rather bizarre setting and violent themes (more of which later) plus some internal inconsistencies in the writing and a weak ending. It turns out that these were caused by this children’s story being a heavily edited version of a story originally for adults that had been substantially rewritten for younger readers

As far as I have been able to determine, there were four printings of “The Visitor”:

  • Its first appearance in a prose anthology called English Story: Fifth Series in 1944;
  • A reprinting in the magazine Argosy in January 1946;
  • It then turns up in Treece’s first prose collection I Cannot Go Hunting Tomorrow, also in 1946;
  • Finally, the version published in Mystery and Adventure Stories for Boys in 1962, which was later recycled into the 1986 volume.

The first three of these occurrences are essentially the same story. There are small differences of punctuation and presentation, but the text remains remarkably stable. Then, in 1962, something dramatic happens. The basic plot remains intact: A teenage boy is left alone to look after the family farm while everybody else goes to market. Enjoying the responsibility, and sneaking a cigarette, he is suddenly confronted by a strange old man who forces his way into the farmhouse.

The visitor is a wonderfully unpleasant Treece creation: filthy, emaciated, unpredictable and repeatedly described in animal terms. There’s also a suggestion that he may in fact belong to a different time and place, in his archaic language and his rejection of paper currency and a demand for gold coins. He produces a homemade knife, demands food and money, terrorises the boy and orders him onto his knees. Eventually the boy knocks him down, but when he returns with water the old man has disappeared.

Even in the children’s version this is pretty dark stuff. But the original goes considerably further.

Some of the changes made in 1962 are simple sanitising. “Young swine” becomes “young brat”; “Damn you” becomes “Blast you”; and “God, how safe I felt!” becomes the rather more respectable “Heavens, how safe I felt!” The violence is also toned down. In the original, the boy stamps on the old man with his “heavy, steel-shod farm boots” and feels the metal tip grate against his shinbone. That detail disappears.

More strikingly, the visitor’s homemade knife loses some of its personality. In the original he proudly calls it a “belly-slitter, a real gut-nicker” and talks enthusiastically about “nice necks” opening under its blade. In the children’s version the knife remains, because the story needs it, but much of the sadistic relish has gone.

The biggest change, though, concerns Elsie Hodgson, the family’s “day-girl”. In the original story she is mentioned while the frightened boy imagines who might return to the farm and rescue him. Later, the visitor notices a flowered cotton overall belonging to her and becomes interested. The old man then launches into a distinctly disturbing fantasy about what a “nice girl” Elsie must be, the flowers she wears, and that she must be “A nice bit of girl for taking in the hay”.

At first this seems merely another part of his grotesque rambling, but its significance becomes clear only at the end. The following morning the boy goes with his father to the police station, carrying the visitor’s knife wrapped in brown paper. It has been found in the barn, covered in blood, beside Elsie Hodgson, “whose head was almost severed from her poor naked body.” And that is where the original story ends.

It is a brutal piece of writing, particularly because Treece has prepared us for it without making the connection explicit. The old man’s fascination with knives and necks, his interest in Elsie, and his strange mixture of sexual and violent imagery suddenly acquire a much darker meaning.

This sadistic darkness is already there in the very first version of the story in 1944, Argosy printed it unchanged in 1946, and Treece retained it when he collected the story later that year. But it could hardly survive in a boys’ adventure anthology. In the 1962 version Elsie effectively disappears. The earlier references to her are removed, as is the old man’s disturbing interest in the day-girl, and because Elsie has gone, the ending has to be rewritten completely. Instead of the boy carrying a blood-covered knife to the police station after Elsie’s murder, the Inspector produces the knife himself and tells him: “Another was not so lucky.”

The story then ends with a completely new sentence: “There was no more jeering at home”, referring to the fact that the boy’s family were sceptical of his account.

It is a fascinating shift, in which a rather nasty adult horror story has been turned into something much closer to a conventional children’s adventure: frightening things happen, the hero survives, and in the end the adults have to admit that he was telling the truth. What I find particularly interesting is that the 1944–46 text was so stable. Treece himself does not appear to have gradually softened or reshaped the story. For nearly twenty years “The Visitor” existed as a piece of adult fiction, complete with the swearing, the “gut-nicker”, the sexual menace and Elsie’s almost decapitated naked body. Only when it entered the world of children’s publishing did all of that disappear.

Whether Treece himself made the alterations for the 1962 anthology, or whether the editor Eric Duthie or somebody at Odhams did the work, I don’t yet know. But somebody went through the story very deliberately, deciding what could stay and what could not. Menace was acceptable. Violence, within limits, was acceptable. The knife could stay. The boy could still be forced onto his knees to kiss the old man’s feet. But the sexual threat, the sadistic language and Elsie Hodgson had to go.

By 1962, Treece was starting to become much better known as a writer of children’s stories and so this adaptation of an adult story is not so surprising. However, as far as I know “The Visitor” was a one-off and I am not aware of any other adaptations. But who knows – some additional anthology archaeology may turn up more examples.

The Celtic Tetralogy: publication dates versus historical chronology

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

In the first post on this blog I discussed how I had come (back) to Henry Treece via the unexpected discovery of his Celtic Tetralogy, which was re-issued by the publishers Savoy in the 1980s. This sequence of historical novels is slightly unusual in that the order in which the books were published is not the same as the order in which their stories unfold in time.

The first book to appear (and indeed Treece’s first novel) was The Dark Island in 1952. Then, in 1956, came both The Golden Strangers and The Great Captains. It was another two years before Red Queen, White Queen followed in 1958. You can see the order of publication, based on the copies in my own collection, in the image above.

Read chronologically, however the sequence runs from The Golden Strangers, about the coming of the Celts to Britain, through The Dark Island, centred on Caratacus and the Roman invasion, then Red Queen, White Queen, which revisits Roman Britain through the rising of Boudicca, and finally The Great Captains, Treece’s stripped-down, post-Roman Arthurian novel. Like this:

So Treece did not build the tetralogy in neat historical progression; he assembled it more obliquely, moving backwards into pre-Roman Britain and forwards into Arthurian Britain only after beginning in the thick of Rome’s collision with the native peoples of the islands.

That mismatch tells us something about Treece as a novelist. He was less interested in writing a tidy sequence than in exploring a long age of cultural conflict: invasion, resistance, collapse and reinvention. The books gain extra force when read in historical order, but their publication order shows how Treece discovered this imagined Britain in fragments, circling around the great breaks in its story rather than marching through them step by step. Indeed, his second novel, The Rebels (1953), which I will deal with in a later post, is set in the 19th century.

Those copies from my own collection are all first editions, though they vary in their condition, especially the dust jackets. Only one of them – The Dark Island – is signed:

I’ve not been able to track down the Patricia Chisholm to whom the book was inscribed – she’s certainly not an obvious literary figure. She may well have been a private acquaintance of Treece’s, quite possibly from his Humber/Lincolnshire circle. A quick search of online newspapers suggests that The Dark Island was published in the summer of that year, so this is an early signature.

Signed copies of Treece’s first novel are relatively rare – I’ve not seen one listed on AbeBooks for some time, and when they do appear they command relatively high prices (£100+). The American edition of The Dark Island appeared in 1953 and it has a much nicer cover than the British version, with it’s standardised Gollancz-Yellow dust jacket:

Regardless of the order that you read them in (and they are all stand-alone novels) the Celtic Tetralogy is a fine series of books dealing with a fascinating period in British history.

Coming (back) to Henry Treece

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

For those of us who were born in the 1960s, the name Henry Treece is a familiar one, even if, with the passage of time, we have forgotten it. Treece’s historical children’s novels regularly featured on junior school reading lists and in the offerings of book clubs such as the Puffin Club. That’s certainly how I first encountered this most British of writers, through an enjoyment of his Viking Trilogy – Viking’s Dawn, The Road to Miklagard, and Viking’s Sunset – three of the best books of the genre ever written, in my opinion.

As I grew older, these stories, and Treece’s name, faded from my memory, occasionally recalled as half-remembered fragments of school reading or the viking stories being a gateway into more adult books by Tolkien and Howard. Until one day, in the 1980s, I unexpectedly encountered Treece again, juxtaposed with one of my favourite fantasy authors, Michael Moorcock.

Moorcock had provided the introductions to new editions of four of Treece’s novels – his Celtic Tetralogy – published by Savoy Books. They are shown in the photo above and I’ll write a longer post about these in the future. For now it’s enough to know that I spotted them in the remainders pile in the book section of a local department store. Picking them up I was confused. These were not short, lightly framed stories for children, they were long, densely conceived adult novels. It was a revelation! I had no idea that Treece wrote for grown ups. I bought all four books, took them home, and read them.

So began my journey back to Henry Treece. Indeed, it was the start of a bit of an obsession with collecting his books and other publications. Forty years of collecting later it’s time to share this passion for Treece’s work, and the collection that I’ve accumulated over the years, with a wider audience. Because Henry Treece is, I feel, one of our most neglected writers. He’s remembered, if he’s recalled at all, as primarily a writer of fiction for kids. But there was so much more to him than that as I plan to show on this blog. As well as showcasing my own collection I’ll highlight the breadth of his work and how Treece influenced both his contemporaries and later authors.

If you’re a fan or a collector of Henry Treece I’d love to hear from you – comments are open, please do leave your thoughts. For now, though, I’ll leave the last word to Henry Treece himself, from his 1946 volume How I See Apocalypse, who defined himself as a writer:

“…who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter, and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety…”