The Children's Book

“D’you want to make a pot? I’ve been teaching i’ th’ camp—it’s amazing how people’s aptitudes vary—I think you would throw a good pot, with a bit of practice. You’ve got good, strong, solid hands. With good nerves and tendons and things in the fingers, I should think.”

So Dorothy sat down at the wheel, and Philip stood by her and made it move, and centred the clay for her. He showed her how to feel its texture, how to find a speed, how to hold the wall steady as it rose between her fingers like a cool, wet, living creature. Two or three vessels slumped and flailed, and then, suddenly, easily, she had a rhythm, a fat-bellied pot rose, widened, narrowed, and was cast off by Philip.

“Told you,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. You have to see wi’ your fingertips. Sometimes I think it’s done wi’ the whole body. The rhythm an’ all. And the mind.”

Dorothy thought of her future. Pulling blood-covered curled human beings out of another woman, making them breathe, cutting the cord. Cutting into flesh with scalpels. The only person she knew who understood the glamour and the terror of work was Philip. They didn’t bother each other. They didn’t know each other. But they understood some of the same things. She felt better for having come. She had not exactly set out to see Philip, but it turned out to be what she meant to do.

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Griselda Wellwood and Florence Cain found themselves in the Mermaid Inn without their families. So they sat down and talked to each other, over a cup of tea and plate of scones. Griselda talked about the interesting aspects of the camp play or pageant, of the way it explored and exhibited so many unexpected talents, in such new cooperative ways. But she sounded a little wistful, and a little discontented. Florence did not say much at all, until Griselda had run out of commentary. She bit her sandwiches sharply and looked faintly disapproving.

“We are all so good at playing, nowadays,” she said. “Like children.”

“Oh, I think it’s more than play. They are artists, Mr. Steyning, my aunt, Herr Stern and his son Wolfgang.”

“It may not be play for them, but it is for most of the camp people. Physical exercises, creative snipping with scissors, fancy dress and so on. You wonder where the real world really is.”

“You do,” said Griselda. “I agree, about that. My brother worries a lot about the poor. He is thinking of going to the LSE to study statistics. He has always been bothered about what was real. He doesn’t want the life my father planned for him.”

“And what life did they plan for you?” said Florence. “As a woman?”

“Oh, they hoped I would go to dances and make a good match. I went to the dances, and was bored stiff by all the eligible young men, and now I don’t know where I am. The future seems very long, don’t you think? It is different for women. There’s this huge thing coming—getting married—all the lace veils and stuff, as Mrs. Elton said—and then what? Choosing patterns, and menus, and telling servants what to do, and worrying that they won’t or can’t do it. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t plan a future without making a decision about all that—which is hard to do, in the abstract.”

“Do you think—if a woman marries—there can be any other future than what you just said?”

“I want to think. Just as much as Charles does, but no one cares what I want to think about, as they do with him, whether they are for or against what he thinks is important.”

“I want to think, too,” said Florence, slowly. “I want a life of my own, that I choose. I want to be someone, not someone’s wife. But I don’t know much about the someone I want to be.”

“Nor do I. Dorothy does. She’s got a vocation. She’s got her future all planned out, general science exams, medical exams, surgical exams, a place in a hospital. It’s like an iron corset, I think, but she seems to need it. I think she is prepared to give up on the marriage thing. I don’t know that I would be. It would seem unnatural. But surely so does not thinking.”

“Some women do both.”

Florence had just agreed to marry Geraint Fludd. She felt a violent need not to confess this to Griselda Wellwood. Once it was out in the open, this engagement, it would become a different kind of fact.

“Not many women do both.”

Florence said “Do you remember, the day we went to Todefright for Midsummer, and everyone—our age—had to say what they want to do in life? And both you and I said we would go to university. To Newnham College, or somewhere like that. I’ve gone on thinking about that. What do you feel?”

“I feel a lot of incompatible things. I feel I must think or I’ll go mad. And then I think of those colleges full of women—knitting, I imagine them, and flower-arranging, and drinking cocoa. And I think, is it like taking the veil, which is an idea that’s always given me the horrors. Unhealthy, part of me says. And then, part of me says it all is secretly exciting. New. Doing things women haven’t done, aren’t expected to do. Things brothers take for granted—look at Julian and Charles. One would be a new kind of human being—”

“It’s not the same as Dorothy being a doctor.”

“It’s very clear what a doctor is. I’ve been talking to Toby Youlgreave. I’m going to do some hard work, and try to go there. Find out what I am.”

“I started on my matriculation and stopped,” said Florence. “I shouldn’t have. Would Mr. Youlgreave take me on? I know my father would be positively pleased—”

“It would be wonderful,” said Griselda, sincerely.

Florence was in a turmoil. She had promised herself to Geraint, and she was now promising herself to years of study. She did not think Newnham College would care for married students. She wished to disturb her father, at some ferocious girlish level, and felt—she was not really thinking—that the engagement would do that.

And yet—like Griselda, she did want to think. And she did see her future as, perhaps, the choice between thinking and sex.

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