A fine cat, a very fine cat indeed
Juliet Townsend
A SLENDER REPUTATION: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Kathleen Hale Frederick Warne, £20, pp. 288 To those of us who grew up in the 1940s and Fifties, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, together with Babar and Edward Ardiz- zone's Little Tim, was part of the enduring iconography of childhood. The sinuous yet sensible hero of a dozen books, with his gentle wife, Grace, and their children, especially the naughty Tinkle, remain in one's mind for life. So do some of the idiosyncratic images — Blanche's wounded tail in 'a sling of corrugated cardboard and the end of a butterfly net', Orlando's 'world famous imitation of a ham', the aerial view of the animals on the farm, the parti- coloured Pansy's male/female fan dance.
I must have been one of thousands of children of my generation to have owned a marmalade cat named, with depressing lack of originality, Orlando. The real Orlando, on whom the stories were based, was actually called after a little red-headed boy on an Italian railway station. The books were written and illustrated by Kathleen Hale. A member of a long-lived family — her mother and brother both survived well into their nineties — she has produced her autobiography at the age of 97, while wait- ing for the cataract operation which would enable her to return to painting. One branch of her family descended from the sister of Bunyan. I dread to think what he would have made of his kinswoman's life, which has been conducted on far from puritanical lines.
Her childhood was in some ways reminis- cent of that of Beatrix Potter, whose work she admires. Solitary and rebellious CI systematically refused to be educated'), she was surrounded by animals, rabbits, hens, a white rat, which she sketched with pre- cocious skill from an early age. Never very Close to her brother or sister, with a mother incapable of expressing maternal love', she adored her father, who died young of gen- eral paralysis of the insane, and was to seek his replacement throughout her life. Later she was to write of Tinkle, whose character was modelled on her own, that it was thought that 'like some naughty children, he might be Artistic'. A perceptive art teacher saved her from an otherwise disas- trous school career by entering her for a scholarship to art college, and she was early set on an independent if precarious way of life and an unsentimental, pragmatic cast of mind more French than English.
After a strenuous spell in the Land Army in 1918, she moved with alacrity into the bohemian London of the Twenties and after a hand-to-mouth existence financing her painting by working as a debt collector and film extra, and even being forced to raise £5 by selling her hair like Jo in Little Women, she was offered a job as secretary to Augustus John, thus entering a 'fascinat- ing paradise of art and artists'. Her descrip- tion of the John ménage is one of the most enjoyable parts of the book. Although already in love with the artist Frank Potter, she was not impervious to her employer's notorious charm CI felt a frisson whenever he came into the room'), and found him 'delightfully bawdy', watching with amuse- ment the reaction of women introduced to him for the first time, to be greeted with the alarming opening gambit, 'I'd like to knock a baby out of you.' Although she remarks casually, 'once, out of curiosity, I allowed him to seduce me', Kathleen Hale's relationship with John seems to have remained for the most part on a teas- ing, jokey level: 'I have always found laugh- ter as good as a chastity belt', and she was devoted to his wife, Dorelia, with her 'calm, tolerance and humorous resignation'. The affair with Potter eventually petered out. Still searching for a father figure, she formed 'a great and loving friendship' with the 66-year-old Dr John Mclean who, deciding that the difference in their ages was too great, 'in order not to lose me . . . transferred me to Douglas [his sonr. It was an inauspicious start to a less than roman- tic courtship. 'I felt doomed . . . I fell in friendship — not in love', but the resulting marriage endured until Douglas's death over 40 years later, in spite of the fact that 'Douglas and I were by nature oil and vine- gar'. The first Orlando books were written for their two sons, and Kathleen Hale was to draw on sketchbooks dating back to her student days. The scene in Covent Garden market in Orlando Buys a Farm, for instance, was inspired by her experiences as a Land Girl, when she drove the vegetables to London to market each week. The French scenes in Orlando's Trip Abroad originated in sketches made when she was living with Frank Potter in Etaples, and the first book, Orlando the Marmalade Ca4 A Camping Holiday, was based on a holiday in Scotland with her children. Many friends are portrayed in the books, and some refer- ences had to be changed for fear of libel action.
The idyllic family portrayed in the Orlan- do books was in part an attempt to reinvent the happy, cosy childhood which the author had herself been denied. In the books written during the war, she deliberately emphasised the pleasures of a safe, secure family life in order to reassure children temporarily separated from their parents by the demands of evacuation or military service.
But it is the pictures rather than the stories which make the deepest impression and linger longest in the memory. Brilliant- ly conceived and full of movement, they were also technically extremely well pro- duced, Kathleen Hale learning how to do all her own lithography. The titles in the big format inspired by the Babar books and first produced by Country Life have now been reissued by Warne, and the Puffin paperbacks, which always alternated with them, are also still in production. It is by these books that Kathleen Hale, a very tal- ented artist, will be remembered. As her friend Cedric Morris put it, unfairly in view of Orlando's undoubted fertility, 'You have hung your slender reputation on the broad shoulders of a eunuch cat.'
To coincide with the publication of Kathleen Hale's autobiography, Frederick Warne have reissued Orlando's Silver Wedding, £12.99, pp. 32 Orlando the Marmalade Cat
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