The Children's Book

The little old woman then said something surprising.

“If you—Miss Rosy Monster—can push the key to the floor from inside the house, we can slide under the door, where the step dips, and take with us a string, a rope, which we can tie to the key, so that you can pull it back to the inside, and open the door, and go out.”

Rosy was dumbfounded.

“Why should you want to help me to get out?”

“Well,” said another woman, “we could say practically that your legs are a great deal longer than ours when it comes to making our way home. Or you could say we don’t approve of locking people up and making them into toys. Or you could say both.” She added “Don’t cry. It makes us damp.”

Rosy said “Even if I get out, I don’t know where we are, or how to get out of this kitchen.”

“That’s as may be,” said the little man. “One thing at a time. First we get out, second we hide and hide—we are good at hiding, we can give you advice—then we work out the way home.”

“We must have come over the mountain.”

“Then we find the mountain, and cross it. Some advice, young monster. You will be dreadfully visible in a bright pink dress. Find yourself some clothes the colour of shadows and dead leaves before nightfall. And make yourself a satchel of food you can eat, and put in some oats for us. We can travel in this basket and hide amongst the bobbins of thread. Think what you will need on a journey. Something to cut and stab with. Something to drink from, for you and for us. Now go and find string, to make a rope to pull in the doorkey.”

Rosy did as he said, and they waited till nightfall and all went as they had planned.

How they made their dangerous way home over fells and fens, how the large child helped the small people, and how they helped her, must wait for another tale …

27

No child, it is said, has the same parents as any other. Tom’s parents had been younger and wilder than Robin’s parents would ever be. Harry had never known a family where there were not older children who seemed free and powerful, came and went mysteriously, were not confined to the nursery. The little ones experienced the family as a flock of creatures who moved in clutches and gaggles, shared nurseries and also feelings and opinions. Tom and Dorothy were old, and separate enough to have started thinking of their own futures, away from Todefright, full of tenuous hopes and fears, and in Dorothy’s case a rigorous and sometimes dispiriting ambition. Tom, at the end of 1900, was eighteen. His parents had a plan for his future—he was to sit matriculation exams in the autumn, and present himself as a candidate for a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, at the end of the year. They had engaged tutors—Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind. Beyond that they did not think very often about what was, or was not, going on in Tom’s head. Olive continued—at intervals—to elaborate the adventures underground, and Tom read them, feeling, as the year moved on, an increasing unease, almost a guilt, for being still so caught up in a tale. He had a fit of vehement anger when the journalist came, and was shown the secret books, even though everyone knew about them, they were not real secrets. He said you didn’t display that sort of private family thing to the public, as a kind of boasting. It wasn’t nice. Olive said she hadn’t intended to do it, it had just happened. They patched up the quarrel, but Tom glowered for two or three weeks.

Neither Humphry nor Olive really knew what subjects he was studying for matriculation. Humphry was away, much of the time, writing and lecturing. Olive sat in her study and scribbled. Violet made steak and kidney pie, and darned socks, and gave Tom biscuits and milk at bedtime when he looked tired. It occurred to both Toby and Joachim that Tom was possibly going to fail to matriculate. This was partly because he sometimes failed to turn up for lessons—he had gone for a long walk, had slept out in a tent, had forgotten, he was sorry. Joachim and Toby did not tell Humphry and Olive about these absences. They joined Tom on country walks and discussed Shakespeare and botany as they went.

Tom’s exam results in the autumn were, in a way, both odd and shocking. He gained a distinction in elementary botany, but failed general elementary science. He failed Latin, and scraped through in English. He passed elementary sound, heat and light, and failed maths, which Joachim could not understand. It was all somewhat embarrassing for the tutors. The tutors also felt that Humphry and Olive should have been more perturbed than they were by the patchiness of the results, by the evidence of Tom’s lack of interest or application. But they said, never mind, he can sit the exams again at the same time as the Cambridge exam. He will find a way to do it, said the parents, without any real evidence to justify this view.

In the months leading to the Cambridge exam Tom went out more and more, striding away in all weathers. He took his books to the Tree House. Dorothy, who was worried about him, didn’t know how often he opened them. What she did know was that he had made friends with the gamekeeper with whom he walked the woods, tracking down predators and poachers, looking for illicit snares and traps. The gamekeeper had been hostile at first— gamekeepers don’t like wandering children, or picnickers—but this one seemed to accept Tom as a serious apprentice. Tom showed Dorothy, one day, the gibbet on the black tarred wall of a forest hut. There they hung on nails, rows of dead beaked things, and things with sharp teeth opened in agony. Some were fresh—a staring owl, pinned by the wings, a broken-necked jay, a couple of stoats. Some had been rotted in wind and weather to no more than scraps of mouldered skin and the odd adhering bone, or tooth, or battered quill. Dorothy said it was horrible, and Tom said no, it was the way things really were, it was how the real world worked. Dorothy said lightly “Maybe really you’d rather be a gamekeeper?”

Tom said “Oh no, I’ve got to go to Cambridge, it’s expected, this is just—I like finding things out from Jake, I like knowing new things—like woodwork—”

The week before the Cambridge exams, Tom went out at night, not with Jake, but alone. He didn’t come back. Search parties set out—rather belatedly, as he’d been expected to return as he always did. He was found, unconscious, with a broken wrist and blood in his hair, in a shallow quarry. His ankle was still entangled in the wire snare he had caught it in, tracking poachers along the rim of the quarry, by moonlight. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days, and when he did, appeared a little crazed, and couldn’t remember what had happened to him. Violet brought him nourishing broth and fed him with a spoon. He lay bandaged among his pillows, staring mildly at the window and the sky.

It was, of course, quite impossible in the circumstances, that he should sit the Cambridge entrance examinations, or even, with a broken wrist, resit his failed matriculation exams.