The book that started me off

The Brontës started it all. 

Freestyle roleplaying, fluff writing, imagi-nations, fan fiction, and my own love of toy soldiers and gaming. 

Blame them for this blog.

The real culprit is the late Pauline Clarke, whose other books I really should read sometime. But I've never quite been able to get over this one. It remains, far and away, my favorite children's novel.

With Armies in Plastic Waterloo figures.

It also got me into blogging. I idly googled it several years ago and turned up the Man of Tin blog; Mark continues to be inspired by the Brontë "juvenilia," their earliest writings about their brother's toy soldiers, and uses them in his own small imagi-nations games. I followed Mark's blog and became increasingly involved with his "light" style of gaming, in part because I was, at the same time, running simple games for kids at work. We introduced each other to some of the modern fiction inspired by the Brontës' shared world or "paracosm," Clarke's being the first. (Its original British title is The Twelve and the Genii.)

Because the soldiers were hand-made from wood, they were individual, and the children could tell each apart and give it a name and character. Branwell and Charlotte chose Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, while Emily and Anne eventually named theirs after Arctic explorers Parry and Ross. Other characters received quirky names like Butter Crashey and Stumps; Bonaparte was renamed to Sneaky. They spent their formative years creating a shared universe for their characters, creating an entire alternate history in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought several decades ahead of schedule. The soldiers sailed to Ashanti in Africa (then being explored by the British, though not conquered until 1873 by Wolseley); fought the French and the Ashanti; founded cities and ultimately countries; fought wars, held elections, crowned kings; published histories and magazines actually written, in scale, by the children:

They may be too small to read, but Amazon has made
Branwell's writings available as an ebook.

That's the background. The story goes like this.

8-year-old Max Morley and his family have just moved to a house in the Yorkshire countryside not far from Haworth, the home of the Brontës as children. He discovers a set of twelve century-old wooden toy soldiers in the attic.

At about the same time, his family stores in the attic artifacts brought from West Africa by their great-grandparents, who were missionaries to the Ashanti. The artifacts are a stool purported to be a throne, a model canoe, and a drum.

This will all be relevant to the story, I promise. The drum first, because Max sets up the soldiers and plays it for them to march to. To his surprise, they literally come alive before his eyes and, well, march - for a handful of seconds before turning wooden again.

Max is a cautious, mature lad. He experiments with the soldiers and the drum, and while the rest of the family is out, gets them to open up to him. To his surprise, they claim to have been to Ashanti, which is why they recognize the drum. Their leader, Butter Crashey, aged 140, proposes to explore the house under Max's protection. Max, enchanted, agrees.

Max doesn't play with the soldiers, as such. He follows them as they do what toy soldiers would do (I can't help thinking that the makers of Toy Story read this book at some point, because the opening sequence with the green army men is almost this chapter writ on the screen). They climb down a stairwell on a rope (a ball of string tied up by Max); wade through a carpet like high grass; swarm up a curtain cord like the rope of a ship; march up and down on a piano to play music; eat some of Max's food; and are accidentally scattered when the rest of the family return. One, Stumps, is lost in the confusion.

Max subconsciously guides the soldiers, almost without realizing. When he finds Stumps the next night, he rescues the small soldier literally by thinking about it. Wouldn't it be nice if Stumps would climb the creeper that goes up by his window, Max imagines, instead of just grabbing him up and carrying him back to the attic - and as he does so, Stumps runs for the creeper. By this time, Max has recognized his responsibility for the soldiers, and accepted their title of "genius" for his imaginative role. They explain that they were long ago guided by four other Genii - Brannii, Tallii, Emmii, and Annii...

Max, the soldiers, and the three Ashanti treasures. A golden version
of this stool was the sacred throne of the Ashanti, and precipitated the
final war there when an idiot English diplomat demanded to sit on it.

I find it difficult to capture the sheer charm of this book. There is simply so much to unpack.

The adult supporting character who teaches the children about the Brontës is himself an authority on them; he is a parson, of the same parish that Patrick Brontë held sway over during the Brontes' childhood, and like Patrick Brontë has three daughters and a son. He points out that the soldiers, all individuals, yet take on aspects of their "creators." Branwell's own Sneaky is mischievous and moody, but was the first to wake; Charlotte's Duke of Wellington is the strong, silent heroic type she loved in her stories; Gravey is unhappy and easily bullied, like Emily. He also counterpoints the religious parallels of the story - at one point the Twelves are guided on their journey by a "pillar of fire" - a bicycle lamp. In an afterward, American author Katherine Paterson (known for the religious themes in her books) notes these especially; Branwell in his stories depicts himself and his sisters as giant gods from the Twelves' point of view, and Max's ability to guide the soldiers via his own thoughts is akin to God's omniscience. One wonders what the Reverend Patrick Brontë might have thought of his children's self-identification. 

"Max thought he would like to protect all the creatures, and wondered who did. His duty now was to protect Stumps."

There is an element of "imagi-nations" and fan-fiction that prefigures that of the 21st century. I can only imagine what the real Duke of Wellington would have thought of the Brontës' version of him - though in their stories he remains conqueror of Napoleon, he also becomes conqueror of Africa. Perhaps they were inspired by his conquest of India? 

There is also discussion of the joy of play:

"And there are two more letters, one saying that there will always be wars while human nature is what it is, and why shouldn't boys play with soldiers?"

'Boys will be boys,' it says, 'and girls will join them in such military games, whether they are Branwell Brontë  and his sisters, or the children who buy lead or bright plastic soldiers today. Battle, struggle and adventure against enemies are part of the pattern of living, it seems, and much as we all now hate war, they look as if they will go on being. Until men are perfect in humanity they will fight.'" This seemed a solemn letter and there was a pause.

This is interesting given the bloody adventures the soldiers once had (which they repeat with relish to Max) and the ones they go on under his direction. As a child, this guided my own play in the garden - to an extent, because I was a pretty literal thinker and it wasn't until adulthood that I read the original stories and really grasped how the Brontë children created the world that their soldiers lived in.

In the soldiers' own dialogue, Clarke quotes Branwell's own descriptions of the soldiers, for example in a sequence where Butter Crashey, their leader, describes their characteristics to the eager, curious Max. He speaks here with Branwell's voice, reflecting his and their "genesis" in Branwell's own writing.

Branwell's first story about the soldiers, The History of the Young Men, written when he was not quite thirteen, contains all the gruesome violence and fantastic impossibility you might expect of a modern bad-fanfic writer, the sort to be mocked by fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 today. The soldiers (all thirteen of them) defeat in pitched battle, indeed outright massacre, a Dutch garrison of 400 on Ascension Island, at a cost of seven dead to themselves. You can hear the boyish glee as Branwell describes the slaughter (of women and children). They later defeat an Ashanti army of 13,000.

Straight out of a "Boy's Own" imagination.

Six of the dead are next made alive again by Cheeky the surgeon. A bit of magical thinking here, yet the seventh is still missing and cannot be found. Real life, I suspect, took a hand here, in the same way that real objects come to life in the minds of the Twelves and their Genii. (For example, Stumps describes the curved plumbing trap beneath the kitchen sink, where he shelters, as a "great white creeper, in the crook of which he was safe"). When Frederick dies permanently, he is replaced by Stumps, who was found again. They are mysteriously described as "two people in one," and Branwell's notes indicate that names and characters of several of the soldiers were simply changed. Stumps is a viewpoint character and Max's own favorite because of his mysterious background, and because he is used to getting lost and found again.

Many stories of this nature, of course, focus on the secret of magic, tiny people, or both. Katherine Paterson compares this book to Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White, in which Lilliputians are discovered by a child in 1940s Britain, and notes that because the protagonist is less responsible than Max, and nearly gets the Lilliputians discovered or lost, her story is funnier and scarier. A modern classic along these lines is The Indian in the Cupboard, in which plastic figures come to life; their "owner," Omri, learns very quickly that the figures are real, historical people who can die if he is not careful, but his friend Patrick never quite gets this, treats them as toys regularly, and nearly gets them or himself killed more than once. This series is sometimes terrifying, and becomes more "adult" as it goes on.

The Return of the Twelves is different in that the Twelves are regarded in-universe as toys. They are still people, of course, but Max subconsciously plays with them, and their inherent nature as creations of creative literary minds is always at the fore of the story. It is magical realism that differentiates this story from most "tiny people" stories - it's more about the power of imagination to make things real, perhaps in the same vein as The Velveteen Rabbit.

As the Twelves explore Max's home, then set out across the wide world (read: a few miles of country to Haworth), the world around them so small and innocuous to Max and his siblings becomes vast and adventurous. A small but burbling creek becomes a vast river; a field of wheat is a jungle or forest; a roller-skate becomes a gun-carriage; a piece of string becomes a rope; a bag of marbles becomes cannon balls (which are hurled at a large, brown furry monster which turns out to be friendly and leads the Twelves through its underground lair - a rabbit); tiny chicken feathers become ostrich plumes for decorating hats.

Twelves on the march through a field.

Unlike in similar stories, the Twelves never see or recognize these for what they are. Part of the charm of stories like The Littles by John Peterson, The Borrowers by Mary Norton, and some "mouse world" books and films like The Rescuers and Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers are that they display great ingenuity in using human castoffs to make vehicles, homes, furniture, and all sorts of equipment. I loved all of these as a child for this very reason. The difference between them and the Twelves is that the Twelves are from a world of their own, and they see everything not as what it is, but as what it actually would be to them. They are people, measured against themselves rather than the normal-size humans of the story, who to them are monsters in the fantastic and awesome sense of the word.

There is great inspirational value in this book, not just for wargaming but roleplaying too. It's taught me to see almost anything I look at as a seed for adventure. RPGs like Mouse Guard and Army Ants in which animal characters have their own societies and weapons, but live in a world scaled for much bigger creatures, have incredible potential scope. I can develop stories for these games just by going outside and lying down - and children do just that in this book, glimpsing through the grass the forever adventurous Twelves.