Rufus;

by Catherine Storr

Rufus

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Author Catherine Storr was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and went on to study English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She then went to medical school and worked part-time as a Senior Medical Officer in the Department of Psychological Medicine of the Middlesex Hospital from 1950 to 1963.

Her first book was published in 1940, but was not successful. It was not until the 1950s that her books became popular. She wrote mostly children's books as well as books for adults, plays, short stories, and adapted one of her novels into an opera libretto. She published more than 30 children's books, but is best known for Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf and Marianne Dreams, which was made into a television series and a film.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Children’s Home was about five miles from a market town called Ditchleigh, somewhere in England, anywhere in England. It was called Toft House, and Rachel and Rufus had lived there ever since he could remember.

I began reading this slim children’s story thinking it was largely about an orphaned child being bullied in a children’s home in the sixties. It was indeed about this, but it was also about much more: here was a young boy who’d never known his mother, and the absence he therefore felt grew to a yearning that even his older sister in the home couldn’t replace for him.

But when I discovered that the author was a trained psychiatrist – at one stage married to psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Anthony Storr (whose 1992 book Music and the Mind I liked but have still to finish) – I knew that there was more to this story than just a simple heart-warming tale, even one furnished with the expected happy ending.

Rufus is the little boy whose life we follow, opening with the Big Freeze of 1962-3, when the UK suffered a prolonged period of bitter cold, and then moving on through to when he’s about eleven or so and learns to not only stand up for himself but to be truly and authentically himself. His sister Rachel is five years older than he is but she at least remembers their parents, who’d died in a car accident. Rufus is eager for anything she can tell him about them but, as with the other couple of dozen children at Toft House, his imagination fills in colourful details, picturing adult visitors bringing him into their homes for short stays with a view to fostering or adopting. Then, he knows, he’ll be able to have the mother figure he so desperately lacks and needs.

But when Rachel gets adopted, leaving him behind, and Rufus comes more and more to the malign attention of his classmate Michael, the lad despairs and starts withdrawing even more. He secretly fashions a primitive female manikin after this second abandonment, but then comes the time when in history class at school he gets the chance to handle a genuine Bronze Age knife. Not only does he feel an instant connection with it but he associates it with vivid dreams he’s been having, dreams in which he lives in an extended family or community existing more than two millennia before.

Storr’s junior fiction is the type of novella that is enjoyable on several levels, able to be appreciated both by the child and the adult. It’s partly a fantasy, where an individual experiences an alternative life as well as the everyday kind, but it’s also a narrative with psychological depth, coming from an author who studied the workings of the mind. In particular, as I discovered, Storr was drawing the ideas of pædiatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who proposed concepts like the true self and false self, the parent who’d be “good enough”, and with his second wife he developed the notion of the Transitional Object.

What is a Transitional Object? It’s essentially a ‘comfort blanket’ – a soft toy or cloth or other item to which the child attaches significance. The item may be a physical substitute for a primary carer such as a mother but effectively it’s always available, despite the absence of the carer. The female manikin Rufus makes is just such a transitional object, one that as the child matures and becomes more aware of their individuality they may have less need of.

Academic Kimberley Reynolds notes that “Normally TOs are associated with infants and very small children, but in Storr’s fiction objects that function like TOs are used by older children at times of anxiety or transition, such as illness, bereavement, or profound neglect.” She adds that transitional objects “are both compensatory and part of the creative work of self-fashioning that children undertake through play, art, dreaming and day-dreaming;” and this is in fact what happens when Rufus purloins the ancient knife.

More than his manikin Rufus finds this blade is the means towards his learning to move from being a vulnerable, put-upon child to becoming self-reliant – and, like a true adult, responsible for his actions. But it’s also a key to his rich interior life in Ancient Britain, providing him with the stable foundations of a dreamed communal life in which he learns to become a young adult. Storr really knows her history: ‘toft’ for example is from an old Norse term for a homestead, while the knife as described is one of a type familiar to archaeologists: it has a curving, so-called falcata blade with a loop at the end of the tang, here covered with an ivory handle incised with crisscrossed lines. I can understand that Rufus, who loved history, might feel a connection to it: I certainly would.

This is a richer and profounder fiction than I first expected, made more convincing by the author’s insightful depiction of youngsters’ dialogues and conversations, whether between siblings of different ages and genders or between a bully and their victim. When one feels different – and Rufus feels different because of lacking parents, being little and appearing distinctive with his red hair – it does take a special kind of imaginative strength to stand up for oneself. Fortunately Storr makes it very easy to empathise with Rufus as well as to cheer him when he finds that inner strength.

This edition includes Peggy Fortnum's impressively effective line drawings, simple strokes expressing characters' emotions as well as the story's starkness; working hand in hand with Storr's narration they only enhance the reading experience.

[Krista the Krazy Kataloguer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure how I feel about this book, except that I found it extremely sad. Rufus and his older sister Rachel are orphans living in an English children's home. He feels incredibly lonely and isolated from others, and longs more than anything to have parents and a real home to belong to. The story gets strange when Rufus starts dreaming about an alternate life as a boy in a prehistoric tribal village, where he feels wanted and needed. When his teacher at school brings an ancient knife to class, Rufus finds that touching the knife triggers a return to that dream existence. The reader is left to wonder if he is really time traveling in his mind or if he is escaping into a fantasy world to avoid his problems in the present. Whichever the case, in the end, present-day Rufus learns something from his prehistoric existence that helps him to cope with his troubles.

I liked the writing and the characters and even the odd plot, but was overwhelmed with the sadness of Rufus' situation. I probably shouldn't have read it when I was feeling kinda down myself! I'd really like to know if other readers find it as depressing as I did. Recommended?

[Heather Tribe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rufus is a story about a boy who, orphaned along with his sister, is left behind at the orphanage when his sister finds herself adopted by a loving family who does not adopt him. He is then bullied by another boy and finds himself in a situation he feels he cannot escape from, until he is introduced to an ancient magic knife which transports his conscience to a time long ago. It is a coming-of-age story, and it is wonderful. I think the reason it is not well known is because it might’ve had a difficult time finding an audience. It has magic, but is too “old” for youngsters, and is too “young” for the older kids. It is a pity as it is an honest representation of the process in which bullies come into power over other kids, and I found it enlightening to have that experience through Rufus’s thoughts and meanderings. It is not a fast-paced read, but still I could not put it down.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved her better-known book, Marianne Dreams (also called The Magic Drawing Pencil) when I was young, though also found it disturbing. I stumbled on Rufus in an Oxfam shop in the UK, and thought it looked interesting. It’s a compelling read, and reminds me of Marianne Dreams in its use of the character’s dream life. This book is disturbing too, in that it doesn't sugar-coat the pain of not belonging, as Rufus loses both parents when he is young.

It is a coming of age story that is unusual, and I liked the message of learning to parent yourself (not an easy task). It also deals with bullying (I'm not crazy about the message that violence is the way to combat that challenge...).

In looking up Catherine Storr I discovered she trained as a doctor when it must have been challenging for women (she was born in 1913). “She began practicing as a psychiatrist in 1944 and worked at Middlesex Hospital in the 1950s and ’60s before becoming an editor at Penguin in 1966.” It makes sense that she had psychological training, given how she approaches her characters' stories.

[Lizzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strange, not at all what I expected. I am going to keep this one and read it again when I've forgotten.