Dorothy crouched down beside him. “Can you get up?”
“Aye, in a minute. Gimme a minute. I’m out o’ puff, as we say. Is the machine damaged?”
Dorothy inspected it. It was unharmed.
Philip lay in the disgusting and fascinating smell, and let his muscles go, one by one, so that the earth was holding up his limp body, and he could feel all its roughness, the squashed stalks, the knotty roots of trees, pebbles, the cool mould under. He closed his eyes and dozed for an instant.
He woke because Dorothy was shaking him.
“You
“I’m quite happy,” Philip said. “Here.”
Dorothy said, taking it in,
“I could have killed you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“If you want,” said Dorothy, speaking out what had been going round in her mind for some hours, “just to send a postcard to your mother, just to say you’re all right and not to worry, you know—I could get you one, and post it for you.”
Philip was silent. Things turned over in his mind. He frowned.
“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I wanted to help.”
She sat hunched, with her arms around her knees. “You didn’t. Upset me. An’ you’re right. I ought to write to our mum. If you do get me a card, I will write. And thank you.”
They rode back more soberly. Dorothy fetched a postcard and stamp from Olive’s bureau. Philip held the pen awkwardly and stared at the blank rectangle. Dorothy—not overlooking him—waited by the window. Once or twice he seemed to be about to set pen to postcard, but did not. Dorothy decided he might get on with it if she went away. When her hand was on the door-latch, Philip said “Promise you won’t read it?”
“I wouldn’t. Letters are private. Even postcards. I could get you an envelope to put it in, that would make it private. Would you like that?”
“Aye,” said Philip. He said “It’s partly I’m a bad speller.”
He wrote
Dorothy brought an envelope and Philip addressed it. He was grateful and also irritated, that Dorothy had noticed his duty and his need.
3
This was the Wellwoods’ third Midsummer Party. Their guests were socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and workingmen’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and the North and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more. The Wellwoods’ parties were not Fabian teas with solid cups and saucers and a frigid absence of entertainment. Nor were they political meetings, to discuss the London County Council,
The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. And there were many other children. There were large families, in which relations shifted subtly as new people were born—or indeed, died—and in which a child also had a group identity, as “one of the older ones” or “one of the younger ones.” The younger ones were often enslaved or ignored by the older ones, and were perennially indignant. The older ones resented being told to take the younger ones along, when they were planning dangerous escapades.
The parents—and the Wellwoods were no exception—found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with eight, or ten, or twelve children spread their love differently from the way in which they might have concentrated on a singleton or two infants. Love depended on the spaces between infants, on the health of the parents, on death, on the chances of which child survived an epidemic or an accident, and which did not. There were families in which the best-loved child had died, and remained the best-loved. There were families in which, apparently, the dead had disappeared without trace, and were not spoken of as realities. There were families in which an unborn child was dreaded and shrunk from, only to become, on emerging alive from blood and danger, the best-beloved after all.
Most of the parents of these favoured children had not themselves been so fortunate. If they had run wild, it was because they were neglected, or being hardened for life, and not because freedom was good for them.
Much of the freedom, both of parents and of children, depended on the careful work of servants, and of dedicated aunts, who had been old-fashioned sisters, in stricter days.
The Wellwoods appeared to be one of these open and pleasantly complicated families. Humphry Wellwood was the second son of a Quaker wool merchant, himself the younger brother of a Quaker banker. The family home was in the North of England, where Yorkshire meets Lancashire, south of Cumberland. Humphry was born in 1856 and his brother, Basil, was two years older. Basil was sent into an uncle’s broking business, in 1873, as a stockbroker’s clerk. He did well in the City, moving to an Anglo-German bank, Wildvogel & Quick, and marrying, in 1879, a Wildvogel daughter, Katharina, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven.
Humphry was a very bright schoolboy, and the masters at his Quaker school persuaded George Wellwood to
