Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

First published: 1980

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Family, love and romance, and the supernatural

Time of work: The 1970’s in the framing fiction; the 1870’s in the internal fiction

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: The Rocks, a harbor-side area of Sydney, Australia

Principal Characters:

• Lynette (Abigail) Kirk, a lonely girl of fourteen whose parents have separated
• Kathy Kirk, her mother, who runs an antique shop and who forgives her husband, who has run off with a younger woman
• Justine Crown, a next-door neighbor and mother of two small children
• Beatrice (Beatie) May Bow, a pale-faced, barefoot girl who watches children playing in The Rocks
• Judah Bow, Beatie’s older brother, a seaman of eighteen with whom Abigail falls in love
• Grandma Alice Tallisker, who possesses “The Gift” and heads the Bow family
• Dorcas “Dovey” Tallisker, the kind, lame cousin of Judah, to whom she is engaged

The Story

Read on one level, Playing Beatie Bow is an adventure story involving Lynette Kirk, a fourteen-year-old who, when ten, decided to take a “witch name”: She selected “Abigail.” With the aid of a talismanic piece of crochet work obtained from her mother’s antique shop, she is able to be in the same area in which she lives as it was a century earlier. On another level, however, the story is a comparison of ways of life: Abigail comes to understand the meaning of family relationships (especially where the nuclear family no longer exists), sees the changes in social conditions, and returns to the present a much more mature individual.

Abigail, who is called “a hot-headed rag of a girl” by her mother, has large teeth and is thin and flat-chested. She is self-conscious about her undeveloped figure, and she is morose because her father has gone to live with a woman younger than her mother; she becomes withdrawn from people and socializes principally with the young children of a neighbor, Justine Crown. While baby-sitting Vincent and Natalie, Abigail discovers an old piece of crochet work; unknown to her, this has the power to transport her back into the neighborhood of a hundred years earlier and in the company of a “furry girl” (Beatie Bow) whose name has been given to a children’s game.

In the Bow household, Abigail meets a rich assortment of working-class people who provide a stark contrast to the neighbors in her high-rise apartment. Granny Tallisker is the matriarch who keeps the family functioning with the assistance of Dovey, a dependable, hardworking girl, and Judah, a cousin and seaman with a keen interest in education and a well-developed sense of family responsibility, to whom Dovey is engaged to be married. In addition, she becomes acquainted with Samuel Bow, the father of Beatie and Judah, a cross-eyed veteran of the Crimean War who has irrational moments as a result of a severe head injury suffered during his military service.

Granny Tallisker tells Abigail that the family migrated from the Orkney Islands off Scotland and that “The Gift” (of clairvoyance and prophecy) that has been vouchsafed to the family, and which she senses is becoming attenuated, will be transmitted to a Stranger. She intimates that Abigail is that Stranger, the expected visitor from Elfland (that is, another time and place). Abigail notes that the time is precisely 5:30 p.m. on May 10, 1873.

Upstairs in the Bow household Abigail discovers Gilbert Samuel (Gibby) Bow, a mean nine-year-old who constantly talks of his imminent death and seeks sympathy and attention. Downstairs, Mr. Bow, normally placid, creates havoc when drunk on rum: He wrecks the family candy store on one occasion and sets fire to it on another. Both these family members enlarge Abigail’s understanding of the variety of human personalities, and when she is kidnapped by an agent of a harem, she is introduced to another aspect of life that was alien to her experience. Fortunately, she is saved by Judah. Judah’s learning, blond hair, impressive physique, and genial personality appeal to Abigail; “I love him,” she acknowledges. On one occasion, he takes her out in a dinghy to collect cockles and kisses her sensually. She responds in a manner new to her and recognizes that she has matured. When the house catches on fire, however, it is Dovey whom Judah rescues first. Abigail retrieves the piece of crochet and leaves the house; she walks down the street and back into the twentieth century.

Back in her family’s apartment, Abigail learns that her parents have reunited, her mother having forgiven her father for having an affair. They all go to Norway for three years while her father studies architecture. On their return, Abigail reads the Sydney newspapers of a century earlier and learns that Judah’s ship, The Brothers, had been lost with all crew members. While visiting her neighbors, the Crowns, she is introduced to Robert Judah Crown, Justine’s brother. Having overcome “the tender hurts of first love,” she realizes that she and Robert share a magical relationship. “The Gift” then passes to Natalie Crown.

Context

Ruth Park has written more than twenty children’s books, including the Muddle-Headed Wombat series, but Playing Beatie Bow is perhaps the best adaptation for younger readers of her concerns in fiction. Her first novels, written for adults—The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949)—gained their great strength from the author’s familiarity with slum life in Sydney and the verisimilitude of her depictions of people’s speech, actions, and environments. In Poor Man’s Orange, the action focuses on the life of an adolescent and her intimations of love through marriage; in The Witch’s Thorn (1951), set in New Zealand (where Park was born), Johnny Gow is the “witch’s thorn,” the person who is possessed of a special faculty (a “gift”) that allows him to affect the lives of others, including Bethell Jury, his illegitimate daughter, and a Maori boy who are in love, though quite unsuited by virtue of their ages. In fact, in her several adult novels, Ruth Park has almost always identified herself with the social underclass and shown the mysterious ways in which love is manifested, tested, and enabled to survive. After the death of her husband, the Australian fiction writer Darcy Niland, Ruth Park reared her family alone; this experience provided her with additional insights into the needs and workings of the modern family and has been reflected in her later work.

In general, Park’s writing is noteworthy for its social realism: families strained by idiosyncratic individualism, the necessity for mothers of broken families to go to work and for the children to supplement the family income, and the daily rigors of city life. Several readers and critics have observed a close affinity with the attitudes and sympathies of Charles Dickens: Both writers offer detailed, vivid descriptions of urban life, with its crowded and often unsafe and unsanitary conditions; both highlight the dangers of factory and unskilled work; both display sympathy for the exploited and impoverished who undergird the mercantile and commercial system. Both, too, have an ability to capture the speech and language of the Victorian age and the working class, and both authors infuse their writing with myriad details about society and culture.

Park’s principal characters are usually persons of pleasing traits, and her stories generally have happy endings. She is frequently (again, in a Dickensian fashion) sentimental and seldom lighthearted or humorous. In Playing Beatie Bow, Mr. Bow bears a likeness to Mr. Dick of David Copperfield (1849-1850), and Judah has much in common with Ham in the same novel, though Park’s characters are far from being mere imitations. The names of the principal families are of interest. “Crown” and “Kirk” (“kirk” is the Scottish word for church) suggest the bases for the early settlement of Australia; “Bow” suggests the yeomanry of England—the stalwart supporters of a social system that, ironically, often worked against their own interests. That is, all three families form the very foundation of the society of which they are part. Though Abigail’s short walk into the nineteenth century might recall a similar one in the Broadway musical Brigadoon (1947), her experience is educational rather than fanciful. Although Beatie Bow thinks that the twentieth century is Elfland, Abigail Kirk knows that the Victorian age was not.