later, with his sister Agnes, for Girl Guides. He drew on American Native woodcraft and British military camaraderie, as well as Kim and Mowgli. There was a camp at Hollesley Bay Colony on the East Coast, visited by Beatrice Webb in 1905, where broken-down men were to be put together again. She went also to a Salvation Army camp in Hadleigh Farm, where they collected released convicts, tramps, drunks and vagrants, fed them, helped them and preached at them. There was also an idea current amongst anxious social thinkers about the undeserving poor, which said that the “concentration” camps invented by the efficient British army in South Africa might be used to segregate—even, it was suggested, to sterilise or put down—the irredeemable, the hopeless, the dangerous.
• • •
Time passed at very different speeds for all these people, between 1901 and 1907, when one event changed all their lives. For some it ticked like metronomes, for others it lurched giddily, for some—the little ones—it still resembled space, boundless and sunlit, boundless and shining with snow and ice, always threatening impossible boredom, always offering corners to go round, long, long roads stretching ahead. There were measures for some —menstruation, exams, parties, camps, pay days, cheques in the post, deadlines, telegrams, crises in banks. And for others, day after similar day. Some bodies got older rapidly—the babies, the menopausal. Some appeared hardly to change at all, from year to year.
Ann Warren changed most, and felt time, paradoxically, as something hanging and slow. She was a neat baby, a brown baby, like a hazelnut, Frank Mallett said, presenting her with a woollen jacket and knitted boots. She learned to sit up, and sat where she was put, and looked around Marian Oakeshott’s cottage garden, seeing hollyhocks and marigolds she assumed were eternal. One day she stood up, and staggered from grass to border, crashing down amongst the delphiniums and knowing them now as an acrid smell as well as a blue series of towers. For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect. She learned language, and faces, Elsie and Marian, Tabitha and Robin, who pushed her over and kissed her better, his red hair blowing in the breeze. She learned to expect sweets from Patty Dace and Arthur Dobbin and Frank Mallett, who made her daisy chains. Marian Oakeshott said to Elsie, as they walked with their children along the Military Canal in the summer of 1903, that she thought Ann was a very clever child, a noticing child, a thinking child. “Like you,” said Marian to Elsie.
“Much good it has done me,” said Elsie to Marian, not denying that she was clever.
“It’s not too late,” said Marian. In 1903 Elsie was twenty-four. She would be twenty-eight in 1907, which is almost thirty, and was no longer “young.” She was already afraid in 1903 of being somehow solidified into resignation in 1907.
“It is too late,” she said to Marian, whom she had come to care for. “I done for myself having Ann, you know that. So I must sit in this Marsh and slave for these silly women. I made my own bed. Or at least, I put the mattress down.”
“I don’t ask Tabitha to look after Ann so that you can settle down in a Slough of Despond. What do you
Elsie wanted sex, but there was no one to offer it whom she would have touched, and Ann’s coming had made her wary. She wondered if Marian wanted sex. Once, thinking about desire, which she didn’t do for a good year and a bit after Ann’s birth, she had said to Mrs. Oakeshott “I expect you still miss him terribly.” And Marian had said “Who?” And Elsie had known, as Marian smoothly talked over her mistake, and said she missed him all the time— Elsie had known that Marian was in the same position as herself, that there was no Mr. Oakeshott, dead or alive. This made her feel less beholden—which was good for her—and protective, which was also good for her. She knew Marian knew she knew. She knew neither of them would ever mention her knowledge. She felt a kind of love for Marian’s courage and resourcefulness.
She said now, with her usual sharpness, “Girls from my class, mam, are not encouraged to
“I did want to make very small pots. Miniature pots. I still do sometimes, when Mr. Fludd and Philip are away. But then I squash them up again, almost all. It’s hard having Philip around. I know what a really good pot looks like, and I know his look like that and mine don’t mostly. They can exist or not, it don’t matter.”
“You’d be better off being a teacher than a sort of servant.”
“Hah! And how should I be qualified to do
“I shall teach you to qualify to be a teacher. I shall teach you—and two or three others—in the evenings. Once you’ve got some of the way, you can be a teaching assistant and go on to qualify. Then you’ll be able to choose where to work and earn wages. I still can’t fathom how the Fludds pay you.”
“They don’t, mostly. Philip does. He sells a few pots and he gives me some money. They give him some, sometimes, not regularly. What he really cares about is being able to buy clay and chemicals and fuel and things. But he sees me right.”
“You’re
“I’d like to try this teachering. I can bring Ann, can I?”
“That is my idea.”
Between 1902 and 1907 Tom Wellwood changed from being someone who was about to settle down to be a student, to being someone who had not settled down to be a student. In 1901, when Dorothy suddenly went to Munich, Tom was eighteen. In 1907, he was twenty-four, a young man, not a youth. He had gone through broken-out skin and new stubble on lip and cheek, his voice had rounded out, his gold hair thickened and coarsened. He had gone through believing he wanted to go to Cambridge with Julian and Charles, to knowing, without allowing himself to know he knew, that he must avoid this, that it would destroy him. During these five years he went on walking holidays with Toby Youlgreave, and sometimes with Julian, and sometimes with Joachim and Charles as well. These were supposed to be “reading” holidays, and Tom was supposed to be learning. He read a lot. He read books of woodcraft, and books of knightly romance, and books about the earth. He knew a lot of lyric poetry. He had interesting conversations with Toby about Shakespeare and Marlowe, but when he did finally get into a schoolroom with an exam script before him, he had the odd sensation that he did not know who he was, that there was nobody there capable of setting pen to paper. Some kind of automaton in his place wrote some pages of banal nonsense. He failed. He was more afraid of becoming unreal than of failing to progress in his education, but that, too, he did not put into words. He wrote things in the Tree House, and burned them, in case anyone found them. He became secretive. Most of what he felt he really was, was incommunicable to his companions who were striding or sauntering into the social world. He knew the woods. He watched the trees age and thicken and spread. He watched saplings struggle and take hold, he saw the keepers axing the rotten beeches. He wanted, but he did not know he wanted, to be like Ann, to stay in a world, in a time, where every day was an age, and every day resembled the one before. Some of the time, he lived in the old story. He found himself muttering and murmuring with his back to an oak where Tom Underground had faced a pack of wolves with a flaming brand, or running easily along tracks as though he was himself a wild creature, a wolf.
