The Children's Book

“Bellows,” said Steyning. “Of course. Straws in the wind. A small tourbillon, leaving nothing.”

“And I shall be a Wolf-man,” said Wolfgang. “Someone has brought a coat of fur and a fox with some paws, and I was going to use them for Allerleirauh, but I shall make me a wire Beast, with a hot red tongue and a how-do-you-say, zuckender Schwantz, and great tearing nails.”

“Twitching tail. Claws,” said Steyning.

“Ja, claws. I shall be killed with a sword.”

“Our heroine doesn’t have a sword. She is a girl, not a woman.”

“Why?”

“Because she has been promised to my sister Hedda, and because my sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with it.”

“Cold iron,” said Steyning. “Those who go out against the Good People, or the Pharisees, must go armed with cold iron. She takes a kitchen knife.”

“I wouldn’t like to face Hedda with a kitchen knife,” said Tom.

Olive thought the final adversary should be a metal man, a machine-man. A suit of armour, said Steyning. Tom remembered the night-black rider in Gareth and Lynette. He recited, and Olive joined in

High on a night-black horse, in night-black arms

With white breast-bone and barren ribs of Death

And crowned with fleshless laughter—

Wolfgang liked that. A helmet which was a skull, a skeleton which was a carapace. Ah, said Tom, but there is a twist. Inside there is a blooming boy. With a bright fresh face. Nothing bad. A part for Robin, said Olive. Florian can be the stolen changeling. Leon can move the Death figure, said Wolfgang. He’s no good at making, but he is good moving.

Geraint enjoyed planning, he enjoyed finding the right person for a job, he was, in his City form, as good at compromise and consultation, as in his Marsh form of sulky boy he had been inept and sulky. He met an army quartermaster from Lydd in a pub near Old Romney, and arranged to borrow a number of tents and some cooking equipment, which amazed everyone. He drew up an agenda, a timetable. Gymnastic exercises and dance movements after breakfast. Excursions to churches. Classes in embroidery, silversmithing, ceramics, theatre design, acting. A lecture at the end of most afternoons before the evening meal.

Benedict Fludd had to give one of the first lectures—so that all the aspiring potters could learn first principles from him. He would speak in the Tithe Barn, and Philip would sit at the wheel on the platform beside him, to demonstrate wedging, and fritting, and pulling, and building, and centring, and the rhythm of the wheel. Later they would return, and demonstrate painting and glazing. And at the very end of the camp they would examine the pots that had been made, and choose which were fit to be fired, and fire the great bottle kiln, for which the wood was being collected. At a much later stage in the planning, during an idle conversation with Wolfgang Stern, Geraint conceived the wild idea of dismantling the fairy tower—which itself bore an odd resemblance to a bottle kiln or oast-house—and carrying it through the lanes to add to the firing. Wolfgang said his fabricated audience—a mixture of sagging or rigid scarecrows and stuffed dolls, softly representing smiling women, with pink painted cheeks, or men in blazers and boaters—could rise up and pull it all down, and run through the landscape. The best drama, Wolfgang said, would be, if they put the Puppen in the fire door. It would be an amazement. But I do not know that I could support to burn so much careful work.

Burn the failures, said Geraint. There always are some.

Prosper Cain, and Florence, and Imogen were in the Mermaid Inn, in Rye. Geraint came to drive them over to Benedict Fludd’s lecture. Geraint supposed, as the rest of his family supposed, that Imogen would then go on to Purchase House with his family. Over breakfast, Imogen had said, in a thick, swallowed voice,

“You do understand. I’m not going back.”

“We understand. Florence needs you. I shall explain.”

When Imogen had gone to fetch her hat, Florence said

“I wish you would not say I need Imogen. I don’t. She may need me.”

“She doesn’t wish to return home.”

“I know that. You consider all her wishes. There was no suggestion, when she came, that she would be here for ever.”

“Oh, Florence.” He looked a little helplessly at his rigid, rigorous daughter. “She won’t be here for ever. She must find a way to make a living, and a home for herself.”

“I’m sure her mother wants to see her,” said Florence, who was sure of nothing of the kind. She said with passion

“I wish we could go back to Italy, to Florence. I don’t want to spend my summers in dingy Dungeness where I have nothing to do.”

Prosper Cain was about to put his arm round his daughter, who had been born in Florence, when Imogen returned with her hat, which was very pretty, huge-brimmed, covered with artlessly artful feathery flowers.

The Cains arrived at the Tithe Barn when the audience for the lecture was largely assembled. There was a raised platform at one end, on which stood a lectern, and next to the lectern a potter’s wheel, and a table on which bowls, jars, models, stood, some perfect and gleaming with intricate design, some pale and matt, with unfired glaze, one or two blown into strange hobbling or deliquescent shapes by misfirings.

Benedict Fludd and Philip came on together, to mild applause. Philip was cleanly clothed as an apprentice, in a linen overall, his bush of hair smoothed down. Fludd was wearing a kind of overall- robe, in midnight-blue, with gold piping, streaked with clay stains, including a ghostly handprint. His full Victorian beard also had clay in it. He wore small, round spectacles, which gave him the air of a scientific eccentric. He stood quite still, staring out at the audience, checking, and then began to speak. His family was in a row—Seraphita in floating embroidery, Pomona in innocent muslin, Elsie in a round shiny black straw hat, fastidious Florence in brown linen, Prosper Cain in a summer suit, and Imogen, under her flowers. He nodded to them, and began to speak.

“Potters, like gravediggers, are marked by clay. We work with the cold stuff of Earth, which we refine by beating and mixing, form with our fingers and the movement of our feet and then submit to the hazards of the furnace. We take the mould we are made of and mould it to the forms our minds see inside our skulls—always remembering that earth is earth, and will take only those forms proper to its nature. I hope to show you that those forms are infinitely more extensive than most people may imagine—though not infinite, as earth is not infinite. We