For several years I have heard, and used, the quotation, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
For the longest time I thought William Faulkner said it. He said something else about the past. The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence.
And to prove we can easily get quotations and their attributions wrong, I thought that was “In the South, the past is not even past.” No, he wasn’t talking about the South then. He does have a great quote about Mississippi. To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. That is so true about fiction writing (and other matters), I want to stop there for a minute. It applies to just about anywhere you could write about—Dalton, GA or Southwestern Virginia, Maryland suburbs of D.C. or Los Angeles, CA. But I think Faulkner is getting at the need to see a place different from the norm that is not really different, only on the surface. Because people live there, and people are the same and yet different. A person in Mississippi is no less a person or human just because you want them to be. You are no less or more human than they.
However, I started this podcast with the quote about the past. That quotation is the first paragraph of L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. In July of 2026 I read that book in two days—a rare feat for me, as I am a slow reader (unless it’s something I have to read and end up skimming). In reading it fast I probably missed some of its nuance. This podcast is about that book; an analysis, a meditation, but not necessarily a recommendation because I make recommendations infrequently. I will address the book in a series of questions: why the quotation, what is the book about, what does it mean, why is it good or even important, and why I liked it
My first question is about the quotation. What does it have to do with the book? I don’t know that Hartley, who was British: His full name was Leslie Poles Hartley. He was born in 1896 and died in 1972. He attended Oxford (I won’t say of course), wrote several novels, is believed to be a homosexual, got out of military service in WWI due to a weak heart, was moderately Christian, and lived in literary circles and was moderately successful. He never married.
So, in 1952 and 53 he wrote a book about a young boy from middle class England who goes on summer holiday to the home of a very rich family because he is school friends with the youngest son. The middle class boy is called Leo Colston, Leo short for Lionel. The book is in first person, but that doesn’t begin to explore the whole narrative issue.
The quotation starts the book because it is all about memory, specifically of 1900 England. The Boer War is important to the book. Leo is about to turn twelve; this is very much a story about the transition from a child to a young person, and the key incident, or the climax, takes place on his birthday and serves to color and determine the rest of his life.
The inciting incident is that Leo (and he is an unreliable narrator in many ways, and Hartley gives him far more memory ability about events fifty years before than is believable, but that’s a fictional trope we just go with; Harper Lee does the same thing. Not only do writers who embody the minds of children give them more memories than they possibly could have had, they often have understanding a child simply would not have. Harper Lee does this but does it without drawing us out of the story; so does Hartley, generally. Leo really doesn’t understand much of anything. He definitely doesn’t understand social class much, or his mother’s feelings, or the Boer War, and he has no clue about sex or romance or even the basic facts of biology, which is a major part of the story.
Choosing the first person narrative always has strengths and weaknesses. The writer can really enter the mind of one person, but the others are going to be sphinxes, largely. That happens in The Go Between. The adults in the story do things that we can only guess at their motives. This behavior is mostly in regard to how they treat their son Marcus, young friend from school.
But I’m getting ahead. The first chapter, after the famous quotation that does and does not define the book, is Leo at the age of 64 or 65, finding an old box of things his mother, long gone, had kept. “When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered cardboard collar box.. .” He goes through the various pieces of his younger years but his main focus is the diary, which he started in his first year of “public school” (private) at the age of twelve.
I’ve always wondered why private schools are called public in England, or at least traditionally, as in the old books. So I asked the internet, ad of course got an AI answer, so we’ll go with it; In the UK, elite fee-paying institutions like Eton College are called "public schools" because they were historically open to the public—meaning students from anywhere could attend if they could pay—rather than being restricted to a local area, a specific church, or owned for private profit.
In other words, they are boarding schools, basically. Boarding schools are so incredibly cruel to me; parents rejecting their children so they can play and be rich. But in Leo’s case, this is a big honor. His father has died, leaving his mother with limited resources, and being able to go to a boarding school with richer boys. Leo is always conscious of his mother’s limited funds and tries not to ask for things.
But back to the first chapter. The diary is very important. It’s “frontispiece” or fly page was a zodiac, and Leo as the 64 year old uses the zodiac depiction as a springboard into his memory writing. The various characters that he will meet are symbolized in the characters. Specifically one, Marian, who is (ironically) going to be take over the beautiful Virgo, Virgin in Leo’s young mind. The archer and the water-bearer are seen as the two men in Marian’s life, so to speak.
Leo starts to read the diary, and he exposits a memory of the spring semester at the school. Some other boys find his diary and read it, noting that he used the word “vanquished” to describe an athletic victory over another boy’s school. This is considered pretentious and he is unmercifully teased and bullied about it, particularly by two older boys. He decides to cast a spell on them, and the two boys, definitely trouble makers, decide to walk around on a roof at the school and fall off, suffering concussions and other injuries. From this, Leo decides he has magical powers, probably also inspired by the zodiac. His idea of being magical, another symbol of his innocent youth but also the sense that children can have of being the center of the universe, follows throughout the story. He even brags about it, gets other kids to believe it, and tries to cast a spell later in the book to get what he wants.
Old Leo goes back to reviewing his diary after remembering his “magic career” and comes to the entries about staying at Brandham Hall, the home of his friend Marcus’ family. The Maudsleys don’t seem to own the home, but are renting it from Lord Trimingham, who is also visiting. He is a viscount with a long family heritage. He was an officer in the Boer War in South Africa, and has a disfiguring injury on his face. His Christian name (coming from the idea of christening, by the way) is Hugh (a name that seems to cause some trouble for Leo and Marian; she thinks he is saying “you” and "who” instead of “Hugh.” Obviously, as an aristocrat, the Maudsleys, who are rich but not in the “peerage” as the aristocrats were called, want an alliance through marriage. Hugh is in love with, r at least infatuated with, Marian, who is played by Julie Christie in the 1961 movie, and she was considered super hot in those days, and she was.
The Boer War is somewhat hard for us to understand today. Actually, we are talking about the second Boer war here; another one had taken place thirty years before. The Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa who had been there, by the 1890s, for over three hundred years. There was a gold rush in South Africa, lots of British came in, and bottom line, they decided to take over from the less wealthy and less-equipped Boers. It was sort of the colonists taking over the earlier colonists. This being the height of the British empire, the British was able to change South Africa to British rule and they put 100,000 Boers and “Afrikaaners” into concentration camps. In the camps 26,000 died, and then 20,000 Africans who might have helped them were also put in there and died. It was not a proud day in history for the British empire, and the sense from the book is that the war was controversial; Leo’s father was against it, and of course Hugh for it, which leads to a conflict in Leo’s mind, among others.
Hugh is a good guy for an aristocrat and ends up being friendly and kind to the young boy. Hugh asks Leo to carry a message to Marian about her leaving her prayer book in church, and calls Leo “Mercury,” little knowing the whole story. The Maudsley family is also, at least in Leo’s mind, very kind and generous with him. Because the story is told through Leo’s perception, we have to conclude from other evidence whether they really are fond of him or have other things in mind.
Early on in the vacation, Marcus gets sick, and since measles is a concern, he is quarantined for some days and Leo is left to his own devices. In his diary he records what happens, and the idea is that the older Leo is living through the holiday with the impetus of his diary from 1900. Mr. Maudsley, who comes across as operating on the sidelines but also kind, likes to go to a large thermometer and check the temperature everyday, which Leo records. Most days are very hot, there isn’t much rain, and the young people in the house spend some times at a swimming hole near a mill. It borders the property where a local farmer lives, named Ted Burgess. Ted is a manly man, athletic, nice looking, and generally he takes to Leo as well. We’ll come back to that. Later Leo tries to cast a spell over the weather, to control the heat for his own purposes.
Marcus and Marian have a brother named Denys. It’s not clear if he is older than Marian by a year or so or younger. He is a minor character. His, Mrs. Maudsley, doesn’t seem to pay him much attention and Denys likes to talk big to get attention. Mrs. Maudsley is mostly concerned about getting Marian married to a rich man, and Hugh is her target, of course, since he owns the house they are renting. Keep in mind that aristocrats at this time weren’t always rich and had to make marriages to get money if they wanted to keep their lands and houses, which look beautiful but were falling apart. This is the whole idea of Downtown Abbey. The Lord married the daughter of a rich New York capitalist, like Winston Churchill’s father did. (Yes, Churchill was half American.) Mrs. Maudsley is a more dominant character than her husband, who does put his foot down occasionally. Leo is somewhat afraid of her. She and Marian are having a battle of wills over Marian’s future.
There are other people who come and go in the house. This was common at the time; visitors would come for a period of time and just stay in the “country.” These characters really aren’t even named, which makes sense because a young boy would not really care about them.
Because his mother has limited resources, she did not buy Leo the right clothes for the trip, and his only suit of clothes is too hot for the 80s and 90s that the area is going through. Marian proposes to take Leo into town to buy a lighter suit of clothes, and she does. She buys him a green suit, and he gets dubbed Robin Hood. At first he likes it, and then he realizes that perhaps they are making fun of him. This discomfort becomes common for Leo. Is their kindness because the rich Maudsleys are generous, because they look down on him, because they want something, because they treat him like a funny pet, or because they really like and value him? On the surface, they are very good to him. He has the run of the estate when Marcus gets quarantined.
There is a bit of foreshadowing when Leo, strolling through a cathedral by himself, comes out into the sun and sees Marian talking to a man. She had told him to let her go shop by herself for a while and entertain himself. He doesn’t know the man or see him well. But we know Marian has her secrets and perhaps, is not to be trusted.
When the group of young people go to swim, or really just get in the water out of the heat, they see Ted Burgess, who can really swim, from a distance, and Denys goes to address him and treats him respectfully even though he is of a lower class. The next day, Leo goes exploring and comes upon Burgess’ farm. He sees a large stack of hay with a ladder beside it, and takes it upon himself to climb to the top and slide down. But there is an ax at the bottom and he cuts himself. Burgess comes out when he hears the cries, is mad at first, but then beings Leo into the house to bandage him. In the process he learns who Leo is and that he is staying at Brandham Hall. Burgess asks him to take a letter to Marian.
Of course, we know immediately what is going on—why would he be asking that if they weren’t carrying on—but Leo does not. He is Mercury (another Zodiac sign). He thus becomes The Go-Between for Marian and Ted. This action takes place over a couple of weeks, but it becomes more difficult when first Marcus gets better and when Marian and Ted come to expect it and put Leo in more and more suspicious situations in terms of Mrs. Maudsley. Marian, who is a brat, is particularly cruel and demanding, but Leo has a terrible crush on her and sees her as some type of goddess. Burgess is more understanding and realizes the position he is in, but doesn’t like it either when Leo tries to get out of being the messenger.
Although that is the growing conflict, a couple of other matters heighten or serve as counterpoint to that main flow of action. The townspeople and the manor people have a cricket match every year. Although it’s all meant for solidarity purposes, and there is tea and then a dinner and a sing-along afterward, this is more of a truce in the class wars than a real attempt at learning to appreciate each other. Denys, for instance, and Marcus, remind Leo who the manor people are versus the village people. Since I don’t understand cricket nor care to (the world cup was enough for me) I won’t get into this long sequence, but Leo has his big moment when he catches a ball that Ted Burgess has struck and that goes high in the air. He is the hero of the game, and the Brandham Hall manor folks win (this includes the servants as well as the lord/viscount and the Maudsleys). Afterward at the sing-along and concert, Ted sings a folk love song, while Marian, who is not supposed to even know him, accompanies; then Leo sings and steals the show (or says he does). Leo is not a reliable narrator in all regards; in a sense we are left to figure out where he is telling the truth or fudging the truth or totally off. But in his telling he brings the house down with two songs, a popular and then a religious one, again with Marian playing for him.
Another strain in the story is Leo’s confusion over the relationship between Ted, Marian, and Hugh. Hugh and Ted seem to be friendly. Towards the end, Hugh says he has talked Ted into joining the army to go to war. This may or may not be fully true. Marcus tells Leo the secret that Hugh and Marian are engaged and that it will be announced at a big upcoming ball. That is true, but. . . Marian is hardly happy about it or committed to Hugh. Leo asks Hugh why one of the viscount’s names is missing from the wall in the church; Hugh tells a story of how he was killed in a duel with a Frenchman over his wife. Leo begins to fear there will be a similar duel between the two men he looks up to, Hugh and Ted. Leo is curious about sex, which he calls “spooning.” What is it, what happens? Ted promises to tell him is he takes a message to Marian, but later he gets mad and refuses to. Leo is put into more and more awkward places in regard to Mrs. Maudsley and not telling her the truth, and being accused of ingratitude for their kindness. At one points he finds Ted in his farmhouse cleaning his gun, which is foreshadowing. At another point, Marian does not seal one of the letters and Leo looks at it, seeing it is clearly a love letter and not about “business” as Marian insists. His dissonance and confusion grows and grows but he has no way to come clean, confess, or make things right.
By the way, the messages are about where and when they are going to meet to, you know, spoon. That tends to happen in a “shack” or “outbuilding” in the back of the estate in a house where a shrub of nightshade, or belladonna, is growing.
It all comes to a head, and this is the spoiler, on Leo’s birthday, for which Marian has bought him a bicycle and Marcus has told him about it, making Leo even more indebted. Lines get crossed, lies get told, and Mrs. Maudsley figures it out, sort of. Marian has says she is visiting her old nanny in the village and is not at the party. A servant is sent to fetch her in a carriage, because a vicious storm has come up. The tensions rise, and Mrs. Maudsley is incensed the servant returns to say Marian has not visited the nanny that day. She grabs Leo and takes him out to the outbuilding.
Interesting, here is the last paragraph of that section and that part of Leo’s life:
Not a sound came from the forlorn row of huts, only the rain pattering on their battered roofs. I could not bear to aid her in her search and shrank back, crying. “No, you shall come,” she said, and seized my hand, and it was there we saw then, together on the ground, the Virgin and the Water Carrier, two bodies moving like one. I think I was more mystified than horrified; it was Mrs. Maudsley’s repeated screams that frightened me, and a shadow on the wall that opened and closed like an umbrella.
I remember very little more, but somehow it go through to me, while I was still at Brandham Hall, that Ted Burgess had gone home and shot himself.
The rest of the novel is a twelve-page epilogue about the rest of Leo’s life. First, he goes back to school about two months late after what is perhaps a nervous breakdown by what he has seen. The psychological shock of seeing the sexual act—two naked people, fully engaged in sex, looks to him like some kind of umbrella image shadow on the wall. People puzzle over this image, but I think the point is he doesn’t understand what he sees, and in a way, he never does. In the epilogue he confesses, obliquely, that he has never been with a woman.
Leo, like Hartley himself, does not go to battle in WWI but works in research. He is lonely man, scarred by the incident for life. It’s not just that he happened on a couple in the act; that happens to a lot of children, and it’s bad enough but not all children have far-reaching consequences. It was all the heightened tension around it: the social class conflict, Ted killing himself, Marian’s betrayal, Mrs. Maudsley’s hysterical reaction, his own overwrought innocence and imagination. The fact that he’s almost thirteen and think he has magic powers deepens this sense that Leo sees the world and his place in it. Being the messenger gave him power, in a way, but also exploited him as a powerless child. His exploiters are adults, rich, and powerful, and they had no sense that their use of him was so unfair. They see him as object, not person.
In the rest of the epilogue, sixty-four-year-old Leo goes to see Brandham Hall. It is now a girls’ school. He asks around and meets the grandson of Marian and Ted—all that sex they were having had to result in a pregnancy—who is now Lord Trimingham’s heir. Hugh of 1900 married Marian anyway and Ted’s son was their only offspring. Leo recognizes him as looking like Ted. It becomes clear rather quickly that the now Lord Trimingham knows what Leo knows and knows that Leo knows it. Leo asks about Marian. The heir says she lives in town, but he has little to do with his grandmother; in fact, he seems to resent her, as Leo portrays it.
Leo goes to meet Marian, whom now we see to be a duplicitous piece of work. I ended up hating her sorry but by the last page. Basically, she says, people like me, people come from all over to see me, and those who don’t just don’t get it. Ted and I were lovers, so what? He was weak to kill himself like that and not stand up to the shame. Hugh and I just went on living, no matter what people said.
She shows no remorse, just entitlement.
“Isn’t it rather dull for you, Marian,” I said, “to be living here alone? Wouldn’t you be happier in London?”
“Alone?” she said. “Alone, what do you mean? But people come I shoals. I almost have to turn them from the door, I’m quite a place of pilgrimage, I can tell you! Everybody knows about me, you see, they know what I’ve been through, and naturally they want to see me—just as you did.”
There is no reason to believe any of what she says is true, of course. She has not changed and has no remorse for betraying her fiance, hurting her family, leading to her lover’s death. She talks about her family as they were in 1900; “we were really a devoted family,” she repeats, even though her actions caused a permanent separation because her mother had to “move away.” (The implication is she is institutionalized.) Both of her brothers were killed in WWI. She doesn’t speak to her grandson and found her son and daughter-in-law dull. It is all about her.
The last section is priceless. Marian wants Leo to meet her grandson for lunch, and try to be a go-between for them. Leo leaves and stands in the street, thinking whether he should go meet the current viscount, with whom he had made a vague agreement to meet. He thinks about the depth of her self-deception, and yet he wants it to be true, and to relive that role. The last paragraph is him standing there, trying to decide what to do. Still profoundly affected by what happened in 1900, fifty-three years before.
*****
I like this book because I think it aptly describes what that period of innocence before understanding is like. Leo is such a child; has he ever grown up, really? I remember some of that feeling of “Can I call on some other force to help me get out of this predicament, to control adults, to get what I want?”
I like it because it shows the dark side of Downton Abbey. As much as I watch them, I get dreadfully tired of the romanticization of those 19th century manor houses, the rich, the servants, the clothes, the big hair, the mores, the condescension, the superiority toward the non-aristocrats.
I like it because it’s well written. Although it is about 1900, the prose is from the 1950s and clear, propelling, fresh, and human.
I like it because it is ambiguous. You read it and are not sure what Leo’s next step will be at the end. You wonder why he couldn’t get past the incident and have a happier life than he did. You wonder who the bad guys are, if anyone. Marian it’s easy to pick out, and we don’t know how she managed to get caught up with Ted in the first place. She is being pushed into a marriage for prestige and money; however, she would not have been happy as a farmer’s wife and it’s ludicrous to think so. Ted is caught in the middle of his love and lust, too, but he seems to care for Leo. He at least doesn’t buy him expensive presents to cover his tracks. Hugh—seemingly the good guy. They have no other children; Leo wonders if his wounds from the war are not confined to his face. Does he take advantage of the situation and marry Marian anyway? And Leo—he’s not a bad guy, but why did he never get past this?
I like it because it is structured well, and structure is more important to a novel than people want to believe.
I like it because it is portrayal of deception, self-deception, betrayal, exploitation, love, and selfishness.
Do I think it is important? It is not on the level of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, or Middlemarch, which I hope to read soon. It is not complex, really, with multiple subplots and philosophical discussions. It sort of introduces but skirts the issues of class and war, but it would have to—the narrator is speaking as a twelve-year old boy. That part is complicated, since the narrator is 64 but thinking like a child.
Does the book “live up to” its first line? My version: “They do things differently in past, so differently that it is a foreign country.” Is that a judgment, or just an observation, and how true is it? What was so different about 1900 versus 1953 for Leo? It was Leo’s past, not all past, perhaps. Is our own past a foreign country to us? What does the line even mean in the context of the whole novel?
I do think this would be a good book for readers’ groups that want to stay away from New York Times Bestseller lists or Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. I do think it is worth reading in a modern British lit class as a doorway to England in the 20th century. It opens itself to many questions and points of discussion.
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