The Children's Book

of the Nursery. Charles/Karl went to Germany and went from Munich to Ascona, where he watched the wilder German young ladies dancing naked, argued about vegetarianism, and realised that anarchy was impossible. A bomb was thrown that year at the King of Spain and his English bride on their wedding day, killing twenty people. Charles/Karl was appalled, both by the hatred and despair that had caused the deed, and by the random waste of life. In January 1905 on Bloody Sunday the Russian troops had massacred the workers, who had come to petition the Czar, and in February the cruel Grand Duke Sergei was exploded in his carriage by a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary. Charles/Karl made his decision, and enrolled at the London School of Economics to work under Graham Wallas and J. A. Hobson on the causes and structures of poverty. He knew he could not kill anyone, and had come to believe that that was not the way. So he too joined the Fabian Society, and went to the camps.

Julian Cain was also doing postgraduate work, trying to define a subject for a thesis on English Pastoral, in literature and art. He too went along to the Fabians, with younger men like Rupert Brooke and James Strachey.

The fiery Wells published a strange fiction, In the Days of the Comet, in which, in some immediate future to come, the magnetic field of a passing comet completely changed the sexual nature of the human race, which became simultaneously promiscuous without guilt, rational and ready to bring up children at the expense of the state in communal nurseries. The books that were loved, however, were still written for children. E. Nesbit published The Railway Children, in which the children’s father was imprisoned, wrongly, and had connections with the Russian liberals. She published, also, The Story of the Amulet, the first book in which children were able—after finding an amulet in an odds and ends shop —to visit the remote past. The remote past, and the English earth, came hauntingly and solidly to life in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, set in Sussex, full of fairytales and magic from under the hill.

Humphry was sadly amused and pleased by the final rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who, looking pale, transparent and somehow mechanical, was given back his command in the French army.

Olive was writing. She was writing the play, in collaboration with August Steyning. They had tried this plot, and that, Elves and changelings, Grimm and Lady Wilde. And one day, Olive had raided the cupboard, and carried the books containing the endless Underground tale over to Nutcracker Cottage. She said, hesitantly, that of course it was long, far too long, but it contained things … Steyning would see …

He was alight with excitement. Here was what they needed. Mines, shadows, a journey, supernatural beings, a good Queen and a bad Queen, a travelling crew of magical creatures, the Gathorn … She had written it as though she had had his own staging skills—his use of lighting—in mind. And Anselm Stern and Wolfgang would be integral to the special effects, the making of the world. They wrote, and talked, and rewrote, all through 1906.

At the end of that year Tom went to the woods, and found that a gamekeeper had chopped down the Tree House. They were public woods, and he had thought the man was his friend. But there was the Tree House, hacked into a heap of logs and spars—even including those branches of the tree which had supported and concealed it. The contents—the little stove, his writings, such as they were, Dorothy’s outgrown collection of rabbit bones and bird bones and dried skins—all this had been taken. As had his blanket-bag, his mug, his knives. His wooden stool was chopped into chunks alongside the log pile.

Tom had a few very simple beliefs, one of which was that we should not be attached to things. Other creatures were not. He had taken to wearing the same clothes until they wore out—though Violet grabbed them, washed them, and returned them, at intervals. He saw that these chopped things were not possessions, they were—or had been—parts of himself.

He had no one to tell. He thought of going to London, to tell Dorothy, and then thought, how would that help? He didn’t know whether she had come to the Tree House since he told her about the vixen, which he had regretted, as though he had betrayed either the vixen or himself.

He stood very still, for a long time, like a man at a graveside, looking from pale plank to brown bracken to moss on the branches.

A shadow went over the sun, and it was cold. Tom turned round, and wandered into the wood.

40

In February 1907, Hedda Wellwood was seventeen. She was again at home in Todefright, having left Bedales School with a reasonable, but not scintillating, set of exam passes. She did not know what to do, and both Humphry and Olive were too preoccupied to help her. Humphry was deeply, and deliciously, embroiled in the crisis in the Fabian Society, brought on by the imperious ambition of H. G. Wells. He was also in love with the telephone—one had been installed in the offices of the Fabian Society, and he was seriously thinking of installing a private line in Todefright. Women were now a quarter of the Fabian membership, and Humphry suggested to Hedda that she attend meetings of the Nursery, which was more revolutionary and anarchical than its parent group. Olive, writing as she had never written—and writing in collaboration with Steyning and the Sterns—said vaguely that she had supposed Hedda would be applying to Newnham, or the LSE. Hedda frowned, and said she had a right to a bit of time to think. Violet said that she could make herself useful whilst she was thinking, like Phyllis. Hedda put on her coat and hat and said she was going up to London to see some friends.

Hedda’s friends were workers devoted to Votes for Women. She had discovered the Women’s Social and Political Union, and went to their new headquarters in Clements’ Inn, off the Strand, where she helped with letter- writing, poster-making and fund-raising. Olive, like many successful women at that time, despite her Fabian membership, did not pay much attention to the agitation for the Vote, though, unlike Beatrice Webb, she had never been silly enough to support the petitions against the Vote organised by Mrs. Humphry Ward and other ladies. Dorothy, Griselda and Florence wanted women to be able to study and work as they chose, but did not see the Vote as representing an automatic open gate to intellectual and financial freedom. Hedda was named for an Ibsen heroine whose savage life was sacrificed to meaninglessness. She had a capacity for indignation, and, as was later to be discovered, by her and by others, for rage. The women agitators knew who they were, and knew what mattered. This mattered to Hedda.

The WSPU had organised marches on Parliament in 1906, when it was learned that there was nothing in the King’s Speech about female enfranchisement. One hundred women invaded the House of Commons, and fought, with umbrellas and boots, to gain admittance to the Chamber. They were fought back by the police—with considerable roughness—and carried away dishevelled, leaving a trail of hatpins, hairpins and bonnets. Ten women were arrested, and refused to pay fines. They were imprisoned. When they came out, they were feasted by the other women. Hedda was intensely moved by all this. Here was something that mattered, a fight, a cause, a way to make oneself into a single-minded speeding arrow.

At first, she only helped in the office. On February 9th, 1907, the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies organised a mass march from a Parliament of Women to the Houses of Parliament. There was a large gathering of women, composed of forty suffrage societies, including many who had come from the North and the Midlands. There were many fashionable ladies, in landaus and motor cars. They were dressed in black and carried banners.