to do it, no words to do it in. Nor did it seem necessary. I had some minor misgivings about the effect of the move, but no more, really, than today’s mother, well schooled in up-to-date anxieties, has about the effect of a new house on any young child. Elly showed no unusual attachment to places, and she had been away before. We had never tried to shelter her or hide her. She had always come with us when we visited; we had stayed with her overnight, a week, ten days, in many different houses. No new surroundings had ever upset her. Why should they? Her strange imperviousness protected her. Only a very few aspects of the environment seemed important to Elly, after all. It was not hard to keep them constant. A few special foods, a few routines that could not bear changing — and everywhere she went, we made sure there was a crib, to become her new citadel. Recently, in one of her frequent shifts, in which overnight a new routine would become a settled habit, she had taken to wanting a spread draped over her bed. Enclosed on all four sides and above, it made a fine redoubt. Ordinarily I would have tried to limit or modify such a tangible symbol of withdrawal, but now I fostered it. It would be handy for the coming move, for converting the unfamiliar atmosphere of a new house and country into the unchanging ambience of Elly’s inner world.
The logistics of the trip were minutely worked out. Every stage was planned to minimize disruption, hesitation, delay — the normal hazards of travel. It had become second nature to think ahead, so that movement could be sure and firm, environment smooth and orderly. The reason that my husband had gone before us was to find and make ready a house for seven — the six of us and Jill, the young girl who was to help out; a house which, whatever chaos it might otherwise present, must provide in good order a separate room and a crib for Elly.
Kind friends drove us one hundred and eighty miles to meet the transatlantic plane. We flew alone; the girl was not expected for another month. The trip went well. Elly let no unfamiliar substance pass her lips, but it was possible this once to give her a pill, artfully concealed in a Hershey kiss, and under her spread, dramamined and doped, she accepted the unfamiliar bedding down beside me in the plane seat. The three older children rose to the occasion, cheerfully enjoyed their dinners, brought me what I needed so I never had to leave Elly’s side. No plans miscarried; no emergencies arose. David was at London Airport to meet us and decanted us into a rented car. Ten hours after we left Boston we arrived in the new English house, where Elly, exhausted like the rest of us from the strange night which had lasted only five hours as we flew against the earth’s rotation, settled serenely into the old white iron hospital crib that David had picked up secondhand. The slot was still there at the foot to hold the fever chart — for Elly, whose illness was so deep and who never had a fever.
The pink spread worked its magic. Nothing had changed. Elly settled in the new crib and began to rock, back and forth, back and forth. At home she had moved her crib all round the room with her rocking; finally we had nailed strips of wood on the floor and boxed it in. It made more noise here, very much more. The floor shook with the impact of the iron. Soon, however, Elly was asleep and the crashing stopped.
Things went well for the next week. There was the usual chaos of unpacking and settling in, and the beginning of a long apprenticeship in a difficult and unrewarding art — shopping in England. There was no one, as yet, to leave Elly with, so she came with me as she had at home. The new sights and sounds brought no visible reaction. She seemed undisturbed.
There were minor difficulties. The Danish Salami looked Italian but didn’t taste it, and Elly refused it. There were no hot dogs. She would not drink the delicious English apple juice. The foods Elly would taste were as rigidly self-limited as all the other elements of her world and the elimination of any of them was immediately felt. She had drunk no milk for months; with apple juice gone, she was down to water. But she had turned against foods before and it had passed. Lean, pale, she was tough and resistant, ineluctably healthy. Elly was adjusting to England at least as well as we were. We felt we had come off very well.
Then one day she was healthy no longer. Suddenly, without warning, she whimpered, vomited, relaxed, and in ten minutes vomited again. No one is surprised, though, when a small child throws up, especially after a change of food and water. I patted her, sat by her crib, and waited. Not long; almost at once she was gagging and coughing, her empty stomach convulsed, trying to bring up what was by now only saliva and a little bile. It passed and she lay down exhausted.
This went on for five days. Elly ate nothing and drank nothing. At first she played a little between attacks, but soon she was too weak for that. She had no reserves of fat. Her flesh melted before our eyes. Her new lightness as I lifted her took my breath away. Under her pale skin her ribs and joints showed like those of the children on famine posters. Oddly enough, she did not take refuge in her crib. It was, perhaps, her rigid sense of propriety that told her that she could not spend the day in a place reserved for sleep. Instead, like the old Prince Bolkonski, gathering her weakness for the effort, she would drag herself from one room to another, there to collapse on a bed or rug, passive until the fit seized her and she threw up again.
Strangers in a strange land, we didn’t even have our National Health cards. But though we as yet had no official existence, the doctor came an hour after we called him. In blessed England, the land of socialized medicine and impersonal bureaucratic care, the doctor came daily, unasked, as a matter of course. But the affliction was as mysterious to him as to us. Elly had no fever, no looseness of the bowels, no signs of infection — only the continued, meaningless revolt of the empty stomach, preceded by the same whimpering and followed by the exhausted resignation of the mute. The doctor feared dehydration, but she would not lick the sweets he gave her and refused the water. Without words there was no way to explain to her that she was sick, that water would make her better. A child without speech is as unreachable as a sick animal. I forced a spoonful of water down to be vomited up again, and waited. These were quiet days and I could work on the house. Elly made no demands and there was nothing to do for her.
On the sixth day the vomiting stopped. Elly drank half a glass of water and ate a lollipop. (It hadn’t been easy to find it. Later on she ate British sweets readily enough, but at first they were the wrong shape. ) She sat up. Next day we carried her downstairs to the kitchen. Shakily but without hesitation she led me to the refrigerator. She took my hand and put it on the door handle. When I had opened the door she took my wrist with her firm, feathery touch and moved it to take out an egg.
Elly had not had an egg for more than two years — half her lifetime. Eggs were not on her list of edible substances. As far as I knew she knew nothing about them, for cooking, like so much else that was human, did not interest her — she watched it, if at all, with unseeing eyes. I took out the egg in some astonishment. To the innocent eye it is by no means obvious that an egg is food; someone who had never seen one would find it scarcely more promising than an oyster. But Elly, it developed, knew all about this egg, including how she wanted it cooked (scrambled) and what pan to use, all of which she indicated with her delicate light grip. She requested six eggs in the hour, and she spent the next week sitting in the kitchen,eating eggs by dozens. She couldn’t, of course, have chosen a better convalescent food. In a week she was well.
But she was curiously changed. There was, for one thing, no more need to worry about how to muffle the crashing of her crib. For years that rhythmic rocking had been a part of Elly; in a life of limited activities it was, if nothing else, one of the few things she did. She had been too weak to rock during her illness. She never rocked again.
She was cheerful enough inside. But though at home she had ranged the neighbourhood, barefoot through the roughest brush, now she would not voluntarily set foot outside the house. Active as ever indoors, her movements out of doors were no longer free and open; she did not run or jump, but squatted in one place and dug in the sand or played with pebbles — and that only as long as someone stayed with her. She would no longer walk with us on our small excursions round the neighbourhood. We would coax her along a few steps — only a few, for she would whimper and then, if we persisted, cry. We would carry her for twenty feet or so, put her down, and coax a few more steps out of her, and thus, picking her up and putting her down, maintain the fiction of a walk. It was only a fiction. But we dared not let her seem to herself to succeed in regressing to her babyhood.
These changes were permanent. Although we were able, with tact and care and many weeks, to get her to walk normally again, not once while we were in England did she step over the threshold of her own accord, and even since we have returned to her familiar ranging-grounds here at home, she has not moved alone out of sight of the house.
We began to wonder about the meaning of that sudden illness that had no ascertainable cause, only consequences. Could this be what a traumatic experience was — mysterious phrase, plucked out of the sophisticated air we breathe, not really understood? Was the trip a psychic trauma, unexpressed and for Elly inexpressible, internalized, and manifesting itself the only way it could, in physical symptoms? Elly had seemed to take the move serenely. But we had failed to imagine what it must be like for a child of four to leave her home behind without a word of explanation. For a week or so it seems a visit like any other. But as the days pass and
