The Children's Book

In the winter of 1882, in Christmas week, Peter came down with croup, and died. In the same week, Thomas Wellwood was born.

In 1883 Olive Wellwood was seriously ill. Violet managed the little house. Karl Marx died. Attempts were made to explode local government offices, The Times newspaper and underground railways full of people coming from exhibitions in South Kensington. Basil took Humphry to his club, and told him very firmly that anarchism simply would not do. A Bank of England officer could not be seen hobnobbing with anarchists.

Humphry responded by taking his wife—to give her a change of air, he told Katharina—to Munich, where they had various secretive meetings with freethinkers and socialists. They visited the Alte Pinakothek, and were present at the opening of the Lowenbraukeller, complete with napkins and tablecloths, and the music of four military bands. Olive recovered sufficiently to dance at Fasching. Tom was left behind with Violet for the first, but not the last, time.

In 1884 the Fabian Society branched out of the Fellowship of the New Life. Humphry and Olive—now restored to a pale loveliness—joined. So did Toby, though his attendance was irregular. Olive knitted through the meetings, head bowed, clicking her needles.

Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn.

In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship—an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners’ children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.

Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.

In 1889 Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive’s early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming—or return—of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring. She took ideas from Toby’s ethnological books. She invented dangerous hidden elfin and dwarfish folks. She wrote Elfinia and the Forest Beasts, The Sandals of the Salamander, The Queen of the Ice Caverns, The Hidden Knife-Box People, The Boring Borehole, and The Shrubbery, or the Boy Who Vanished, which made her name, and earned her a considerable sum of money. She was now writing small books, and longer ones, as well as magazine stories.

The younger Wellwoods decided to move to the country, bought Todefright in a dilapidated state, renovated it, and settled there at the time of Florian’s birth, at midsummer 1892. In 1893 another girl was born and lived for a week.

It was in that year that Humphry Wellwood also began writing for the Press. He wrote a few articles for the Economist, under his own name. He also began a series of anonymous reports on dubious financial dealings, published in a satirical weekly called Midas. His pseudonym was The March Hare. He wrote about the Kaffir Circus and the activities of the Randlords, who dealt in South African gold. He took an interest in the new Westralian mines, some of which were as fictitious as Olive’s imagined Borehole. The Wellwood children played games in which they chased gnomes and great Worms through Jumpers Deep, Nourse Deep, Glen Deep, Rose Deep, Village Deep and Goldenhuis Deep, or through Bayley’s Reward, Bird-in-Hand, Empress of Coolgar-die, Faith, Hit or Miss, Just in Time, King Solomon’s, Nil Desperandum and The World’s Treasure. Tom had clear imaginations of many of these places. Rose Deep was glittering caverns of rosy quartz, with flushed rivers winding into the mountains. Nil Desperandum was black and slippery with sullen fires in hidden crevices, and funnels opening to the sky. He knew you could see the stars by daylight from the depths of mines, and tried to imagine how this would look in reality. Would the sky that held the visible stars be blue, or black, and why?

Basil Wellwood made money in the Kaffir Boom. He made suggestions for small investments to Humphry, who instead invested early, on principle, in bicycle shares. Upon the flotation of the Dunlop Tyre Company, Humphry suddenly found himself more than financially comfortable. He engaged a maths tutor, with a view to entering Tom for Eton. Toby was helping with the classics.

There was champagne at the 1895 Midsummer Party.

4

The Wellwoods’ Midsummer was a slightly movable feast. Humphry explained to Philip that midsummer day— that is, the longest day of the solar year—is in fact June 21st. But the European Feast of St. John is the evening of June 23rd leading to St. John’s Day on June 24th and that also is called Midsummer. “In practice,” said Humphry, who believed in talking to the young as though they were fellow men, “in practice, we have been somewhat eclectic with our own celebrations, choosing true midsummer, or St. John’s day, depending on the convenient day of the week for holding a party. Today is Friday 21st which is true midsummer, although midsummer eve was yesterday, and we shall be embarking on the declining days at dawn on Saturday, though still in advance of Europe… Saturday is full moon, so we will celebrate—if we are lucky with the weather—by the light of a waxing gibbous moon. ‘Gibbous’ is a good word,” said Humphry, who was a word-savourer. Philip had been alarmed at the number of words flying round the table that he had never before encountered. But he now had a mental image of a waxing gibbous disc, and his ever-active mind’s eye began to decorate a large bowl with waning gibbous, waxing gibbous, and truly circular discs. It could be interesting. Silver and gold on dark cobalt.

“Friday is a good day for friends to join us,” said Olive. “They are all gathering here for the weekend away from the city. We shall keep you very busy with preparations, Philip.”

“Good,” said Philip.

The household, family, staff and Philip, was set to frenzied work. Olive and Humphry had both already completed their writing stints, around dawn, before breakfast. The kitchen was full of smells of cooking, and no one was to have anything for lunch except bread and cheese, for the stove, and most of the crockery, were pre-empted. Philip was assigned to help with the decoration of the garden and orchard. He helped set up trestle tables on the lawn near the house, and then to arrange little cosy, or conspiratorial, groups of chairs in picturesque places. All chairs were requisitioned—wicker chairs, deckchairs, schoolroom chairs, the nursery rocking chair, cane and metal garden chairs. They were placed in arbours, in the clearing at the centre of the shrubbery, even in the orchard. Then the lanterns were swung from branches, and half-concealed in clumps of tall grasses and decorative thistles in the herbaceous borders. Philip was sent with Phyllis to hang lanterns in the orchard. It was an unkempt, raggedy place with moss and lichens on the twisted branches of old fruit-trees, and brambles snaking in from the wild and in places smothering everything. Some of the trees had odd structures in them made from planks and bits of rope. These were good places for illuminations, Phyllis said. She attached lanterns to ropes and sent Philip climbing up to the platforms. “These are old tree houses,” said Phyllis. “From when we were little. Even Hedda can get into these. We’ve got a much better one—out in the forest. But it’s a secret,” she added, doubtfully. Philip was picking up hard windfall apples. Phyllis told him to watch for wasps. “You get all sorts of worms in them, popping their little black heads out at you. It’s a horrible idea, biting into something wriggly—”