Hearth of Meadowvalley, final novel
Illustration from the final Meadowvalley book of Winnie
Winnie the Wist solemnly follows a railway track past dead tree stumps and rusty pipes that drip black oil.
Created near the end of Winfields life, this previously mentioned book was Winfield’s final published novel - and a very hard to obtain one at that. Featuring a darker than ever story set many years after the original series’ events, Millie has long departed from Meadowvalley, leaving Winnie alone to explore and survive its deteriorated depths.
The book was released following Winfield’s loss of the rights of Millie Moonbeam to Liquid Laff Studio, and combined with his pre-existing dislike of the Winnie character, put all of his rage and frustrations on full display. It is a hard book to read as it so clearly is Winfield tormenting his own creation while mourning the loss of another. The world of Meadowvalley almost mirrors his own emotional state filled with oil and tar and railroad tracks, all of which symbolize Stencil Line - the owners of Liquid Laff - and their theft of something so creatively important and enriching to him. It is a depressing read, the death of the world Winfield so vibrantly wrote to life for years, and you can feel how depressed Winfield was writing it. Depressed with the world and unhappy with himself.
It is never explained why Millie is missing in the novel. Due to the nature of his hated contract he was forbidden from using the character and he could only mention Millie’s absence in a vague way. As follows:
“And although that strange and wonderful being had once been within this place, and of this particular place that being was no longer. The moonbeam which had blessed this valley with her light for so long had left it. The hearth of the valley had burnt out, there would be no one there to relight it as they had long ago. The silverfish of the valley had burrowed within every crevice, every root and every tree. It was a hollow place without her in it, everyone mourned the one they could not bring themselves to name.”
Here is another passage, this one in relation to Winnie.
“That awful little imp, Winnie the Wist, it quickly hopped from one foot to the next, each eye spinning and wondering we’re it’s friend, it’s sworn sister had gone. It stupidly danced and hopped about for decades within its home before one day it could wait no further and tumbled out the door to a much different, a much other Meadowvalley.”
Beyond the text’s clear resentment of Winnie this is where the story starts proper, Winnie tumbling into a new dead world and trying to find out what happened to her friend. As can be seen in the recovered illustration from the final novel, Winnie would mainly wander through this dead world over the course of the story. There was no magic, only monsters, natural disasters, and man made hazards. Eerily these man made elements never had a clear source as humans never appear or are alluded to in the story. All the pipes and tracks and oil spills are made to sound as if they manifested over time the way a weed overtakes a garden.