An Enchanted Place, by Jonathan Stedall

Author: Jonathan Stedall. Review by Andy Vivian.

Our Friend Jonathan Stedall is best known as a documentary maker. But after retiring he began writing. His first book was a spiritual autobiography, Where on Earth is Heaven?, followed by No Shore Too Far, poems after the death of his wife. This is his first fiction.

In An Enchanted Place, Jonathan offers an engaging cast of eccentric characters. They reside in the East Sussex village of Hartfield and are brought together to resist a bypass through the neighbouring Ashdown Forest. If you’re familiar with Winnie the Pooh you may recognise this place as the home of Christopher Robin and his animal friends, whose adventures take place there.

Stedall dedicates his book to AA Milne and with good reason: all his characters are based on Milne’s immortal creations. The Pooh character is an amateur philosopher called Bertie, who keeps bees and writes poetry. Piglet is a rather timid spinster called Peggy, a lollipop lady who suffers from eczema. Then there is Bunny, chair of the WI, who bears a strong resemblance to Milne’s bossy ringleader, Rabbit. Kanga translates into a rather brash incomer, Sheila, a single mother from Australia, and Roo becomes her five-year-old son, Joey. Sheila takes in a lodger – this is the Tigger character, an out-of-work actor known as Bouncer, to whom Bunny takes a dislike. Owl is a retired professor, simply called ‘the Professor’ and the grumpy major is Jonathan’s version of Eeyore.
It is on the interplay of these characters that the book is built. Bunny has a moral crisis when she realises that her attempt to exclude Bouncer was unforgivable. Peggy is emboldened to reveal a long-suppressed secret as the reason for her timidity. The major rediscovers that there is fun in life when his gloomy exterior is punctured by the young Joey. And the professor, diagnosed with a terminal illness, abandons his love of solitude. As each life is changed, the importance of human friendship becomes evident. The message is that our hope lies in love. 

The story is simply told, yet the ideas are deep. ‘Where do our thoughts come from?’ is one. Bertie tries to persuade the professor that thoughts may not originate in our brains: ‘What if the brain is more like a receiver of thoughts rather than their source – rather like a television set?’ It’s an idea that may appeal to some Quakers. The professor, being a materialist when it comes to human consciousness, is not convinced, and nor am I. But Bertie doesn’t give up and he gets a second chance when the professor asks him about life after death: ‘Do you just fall asleep and that’s it? No more dawns… no more breakfasts.’ Bertie answers with a warning about the limits of our imagination. He ends with this quote from Ronald Blythe’s The Circling Year. It had me thinking.

‘Our mistake has always been to have believed that our immortal life begins when our mortal life ends, when in fact these dual states of our being, the temporal and the eternal, run side by side from our birth’.

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