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The
year is 1958, and I'm just shy of twelve years old... I've read
everything, regretting having returned a book to the twins next door, a
favourite Enid Blyton...
...There
was nothing else for it - I needed to have a look on my sister Jean's
bookshelf - we each had a bookshelf in our bedrooms, except that as the
weeks progressed and my collection of books grew, Dad made a set of
shelves and put them up on the wall so I had somewhere to keep all the
books I was buying with the money from my paper round.
The only book I could see on Jean's shelf that looked
remotely
interesting, was MARY WAKEFIELD by someone called MAZO DE LA ROCHE. It
was a hardback, with a pink dustjacket. I knew intuitively that it was
a romance, and that didn't trouble me one bit. I loved romances, and
was never afraid to pick up a Netta Muskett or a Jean Plaidy from the
two-bookcase library in my primary school. There were no romances in my
new school library, the library of the Crypt Greammar School - it was
an all-boys school and the school librarian, one of the prefects,
evidently didn't think that romantic fiction was appropriate reading
for the boys. I "borrowed" Mary Wakefield, checking with Jean that it
was all right to do so when she came home from work later that evening.
She had finished it, she said, and I was welcome to borrow it. In fact,
she said that she had loved it, and that gave me an idea for her
Christmas present for that year. I tried to find another Whiteoaks book
in one of the two branches of W H Smith in the city, but they had no
more hardbacks, only a couple of Pan Giants, one of which was YOUNG
RENNY, pictured above. In fact, when I got it home, I couldn't resist
reading YOUNG RENNY myself, although it was MARY WAKEFIELD that
originally got
me hooked on the Whiteoaks series. I ended up getting Jean the hardback
version of YOUNG RENNY that Christmas, from the larger of the two
Smiths branches in Gloucester.
I was familiar with Pan
Giants, of
course, and knew them to be the finest paperbacks available, with
stunningly realistic cover illustrations. Most of my Leslie Charteris
Saint books and a couple of my Angélique books were Pan Giants, also
THE WIND CANNOT READ and s few other film tie-in titles were also Pan
Giants, and they were my favourite books. I looked after them, kept
them in pristine condition, was careful not to crack the spines, etc.,
etc. MARY WAKEFIELD was about a young English governess hired by Ernest
Whiteoak to be a governess to his nephew and niece, Renny and Meg
Whiteoak, who were the children of Philip Whiteoak, Ernest's younger
brother, and his deceased wife Margaret Ramsay. MARY WAKEFIELD ends up
marrying Philip Whiteoak after almost all of the family have turned
against her. There were other titles in the series that preceded MARY
WHITEOAK in terms of sequence: THE BUILDING OF JALNA was the first book
in the series, and it tells how Captain Philip Whiteoak (Philip's
father) marries Adeline Court from Ireland, and the young married
couple are persuaded to buy some land and to settle in Ontario, and to
build Jalna, a huge family home in which they and their four children
and two grandchildren all live together under the one roof. This didn't
seem too strange to me - I was familiar with the concept of large
important families living together - the Royal Family, for example, and
landed gentry who lived in stately homes with their various offspring.
This series of books was about a large family all living together and
getting on, or not getting on with each other, and that was what made
the series so captivating for me. I can think of two other great family
sagas in English literature that are comparable with the WHITEOAKS -
they are the FORSYTE SAGA and the POLDARK saga. The latter two series
are considered giants of English literature, but WHITEOAKS, probably
because it
was written by a Canadian, and I can think of no other reason, is not.
I
have read all three series, and
although there are similarities in all three, for me, the stand-out
series is WHITEOAKS. Winston Graham's Poldark series was written after
WHITEOAKS, although Mazo de la Roche was still adding to her series in
the 1960s. Poldark spans at least three centuries, while Whitoaks only
covers one. But for me, Whiteoaks is by far
the best and most readable of the three series, and the Whiteoaks books
had a huge influence on the way I thought about life and love. I was
reading them at the height of my puberty, when I fell in love with
characters in books in the absence of having anyone to fall in love
with in real life. I had lost touch with all of the girls I had been in
love with at primary school, and attending an all-boys'
school as I did,
the opportunities to meet and fall in love with girls my age simply
didn't occur. Instead, I bought all the weekly titles I could
find like Romeo, Valentine etc., which had beautifully illustrated
comic strip stories about girls and boys falling in love; these titles
also contained pictures of pop stars and, later, as the new decade
began, traditional jazz artists - I peppered my bedroom walls with
photos of Acker Bilk, Chris Barber, Kenny Ball and so on, and then read
the comic strips and luxuriated in the fabulous drawings of beautiful
girls, and then, when it was bedtime, I would pick up my latest
Whiteoaks book and wallow in the magnificent characters created by Mazo
de la Roche.
If I discovered an author I really
liked, I would
go all out to get all of the books he or she had written, and so it was
with Whiteoaks. I collected the Pan Giants while Jean collected the
Macmillan hardbacks, with the pink, green or beige dustjackets. The Pan
Giants were cheaper, of course, well within my paper round limits.
Sometimes the travelling book salesman who supplied our comic annuals
(Lion, TIger and Commander for me, Girls Crystal, School Friend and
Coronet for Jean) would bring a new Whiteoaks book, which Mum would pay
a few pence to borrow for a week or two, and I would read it and wait
patiently for the paperback to be brought out so that I could have my
very own copy. I cannot tell you what a thrill it was to have those
Whiteoaks books with their absolutely stunning cover art depicting the
various characters that came and went to, and lived at, Jalna. Renny,
as depicted on
the front of the Pan Giant version, was exactly as I had pictured him,
and so it was with more or less all of the wonderful characters that
Mazo de la Roche had created for me. The Whiteoaks saga was romantic
fiction, but it was not romantic in the style of Barbara Cartland. It
was romantic in that the people in it were real people who fell in and
out of love with each other, sometimes causing pain and hurt to
siblings, but the series taught me so much about life and love. I
learned about the consequences of a "one night stand" when Maurice
Vaughn, who was supposed to marry Meg Whiteoak, made love to an
intinerant village girl and produced a foundling baby who was left on
his parents' doorstep; this was the baby whom Renny named Pheasant, and
the girl who later captured Piers's heart, then broke it by having a
brief affaire with Piers's elder brother Eden.
I
hated Eden for what he'd done, for after Renny, Piers was my favourite
character in the entire series, and Pheasant my favourite female
character, a girl I could fall in love with (and did). The series
therefore warned me of the consequences of such relationships, and it
was whilst reading the Whiteoaks saga that I made the most solemn
resolutions of my life - that I would never make love to a girl before
my marriage, and that I would never, ever cheat on my wife under any
circumstances. Whiteoaks made me a better person in that respect.
Almost all of the characters in the Whiteoaks series are flawed, some
seriously, others less so. Renny has affaires with ladies throughout
the series, but from memory, he doesn't cheat on anyone. Piers does
nothing wrong
whatsoever except to maybe control Pheasant to a certain extent. And so
these two remain my favourite characters, along with Pheasant. Mary
Wakefield, Renny and Meg's governess, is also pretty faultless, and the
book is a firm favourite. I always thought that YOUNG RENNY was my
favourite book in the series, but I think that may have been heavily
influenced by the cover artwork of the Pan Giant version, my copy of
which I still have. In re-reading these wonderful books over the past
few weeks, I have discovered that I know very little about what happens
in the pages of WHITEOAKS, the middle book of the series, in which Meg
is finally married to Maurice Vaughan, and they have a baby, Patience;
Piers and Pheasant are madly, deeply in love with each other, the grand
matriarch, Adeline, dies at the age of one hundred and one; and
everyone is wondering to whom she has left her considerable fortune.
Renny and PIers are men who survive the Great War, although Piers was
too young to serve, of course, and it is that period and the 1920s that
remain my favourites in the series.
There
are so many brilliant characters in the Whiteoaks, and there are
sixteen wonderful
books in which they get to live out their very real and realistic lives
in a province of Canada that seems like another world to me. I love the
Whiteoaks saga, I love the characters, and what happens to them. Few
people nowadays who were born after the baby boomer years, would have
even heard of this series - they're still in print, some of the titles,
but it's far easier to go on Ebay and buy secondhand copies of those
beautiful Giant Pans and equally collectable Macmillan hardbacks. Each
title will set you back about £7.00, sometimes less, sometimes as much
as £9.00, but they're really good - not pure romance, but with elements
of romantic fiction in them all. I treasure my set, which contains many
Giant Pans and many Macmillans. I wish Macmillan/Pan would resurrect
them and set them before a whole new audience. This series is
historical fiction at its absolute best! And it helped to make me the
man I am today... reading about what others do wrong helps you not to
make the same mistakes yourself. My role models in the late 1950s were
Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Tarzan of the Apes. Maybe I was something
of a puritan in those days - but there were people I looked up to in
the Whiteoaks saga - Renny was frightened of women and treated them
rather badly, but apart from that he was my favourite Whiteoaks
character; Piers Whiteoak did nothing wrong but never quite understood
little Pheasant, although in their later years they got along famously
and were perfect role models for the rest of the family. And oh! Those
Pan Giant covers!
The
small print: Books
Monthly, now well into its 24th
year on the web,
is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul
Norman. You can contact me here.
If you wish to submit something for publication in the magazine, let me
remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this
publication. If you want to send me something to review, contact me via
email at paulenorman1@gmail.com and I'll let you know where to send it.
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c
o n t e n t s:
The Front Page
Children's
Books
Fiction
books
Fantasy
& Science Fiction
Nonfiction
Books
Nostalgia
The Silent Three
The Four Marys
Growing
up in the 1950s
Living with Skipper
Pen
and
Sword Books
Sundays with Tarzan
The Back Page
Email
me
This
is the reading order of the Whiteoaks books:
- The
Building of Jalna
- Morning
at Jalna
- Mary
Wakefield
- Young
Renny
- Whiteoak
Heritage
- The
Whiteoak Brothers
- Jalna
- Whiteoaks
- Finch's
Fortune
- The
Master of Jalna
- Whiteoak
Harvest
- Wakefield's
Course
- Return
to Jalna
- Renny's
Daughter
- Variable
Winds at Jalna
- Centenary at Jalna
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