The Children's Book

his hour of need. It is a pity, said Steyning, that we can’t make the ferns and trees in the coal come magically to life again. He drew the back wall of the stage as he saw it—he drew it in charcoal, he rubbed in the coal dust to make his effects. The backcloth was a stratified black and grey series of ledges, going diagonally down. He discussed with Anselm Stern the possibilities of making animated creatures and tiny folk dance and run along the ledges. Stern said a puppetmaster could stand behind and move many, successively. They could appear and disappear. Steyning drew ferns and dragonflies with his charcoal, grey in grey. Olive said that the plants in the coalface did sometimes come to life—or death—they exhaled the gases of arrested decay. This was the horror called Choke Damp which killed quite suddenly. Dampf, yes, said Anselm. I know of that. And then, said Olive, there is White Damp, which is said to smell of sweet flowers—of violets—in fact it is carbon monoxide. And the third, and worst, is Fire Damp—which also comes from the decaying ancient vegetables—it comes seeping from the rocks or hissing out from fissures.

She stopped, remembering bad things.

Steyning was drawing. A demon made of flowers, a demon made of twisting ropes, a fiery devil with a flaming crown on a flaming mane. “I could make those,” said Wolfgang.

“There is the Fireman,” said Olive. “The miner in soaked white linen, who holds up a long rod with a candle, to burn off the Fire Damp.”

“It is like a ballet,” said Wolfgang.

“Life-size puppets,” said August. “And a real man, a dancer, in wet white linen—All the same, I should like the flowers to come to life.”

“There must be,” said August Steyning, “a heroine. At the beginning, you have the White Elf Queen, and at the end, the Queen of the Shadows—we need a female lead.” He considered Olive’s story as she had summarised it for him.

“You have this very good character—the Silf—who gets unwound from spider-webs and then doesn’t do much. I think in the play we’ll unwind her much earlier—almost immediately after Thomas enters the mine—and then she can go with him, as part of the Company. I like the Gathorn. I see him as a kind of underground Puck, or goodfellow? A trickster, but helpful. And I like the creamy salamander, which Anselm and Wolfgang can make so that it can run along the shelves and into holes in the tunnels. But we do need a female lead. A young woman. Can you write her in?”

She was a sylph, said Olive. One of the Paracelsian four elementals—sylphs in the air, gnomes in the earth, undines in water, salamanders in fire.

“The creamy salamander could glow with real light when danger is near,” said Wolfgang.

“She’d be terrified of going deeper,” said Olive, beginning to imagine. “She’d need to get back to the air.”

“Splendid. Work on her. Give her things to do. Make her quarrel with Thomas. Make her faint in the underground atmosphere.”

The end was easy to choreograph. Olive had never reached the end of the tale in Tom’s book, which was constructed to be endless. The end was the meeting with the Queen of the Shadows, spinning her complex spider-webs in the deepest pit. They had a long and satisfying argument about whether she could be played by the same actress, and decided against it. She would have an entourage of bats, and whiskery sharp-toothed gnomes, and rats. They had another satisfactory argument about whether the rats should be actors or marionettes and decided they should be both. Tom’s shadow would appear. He would be under the spell of the Shadow Queen and he would not want to go up to the air and be reattached to Tom. Olive said she could not see her way out of the narrative impasse, since the shadow was in fact in a better state running independently in the dark. Ah, said August, but that is where the Silf comes in. She describes the upper air to him, and colours and grass and trees.

“There must be magic,” said Anselm Stern. “For the Finale. You can’t come to an ending on an argument.”

“This,” said August Steyning, “is where the coal-ball and the flowers come in. Can you, Herren Stern, make me a black knot of roots and leaves that can be made to burst open and let free an amazement of silk flowers and threads? And,” he said, getting carried away, “the coal-ball and the silver bough would emit light, light would be in the darkness.”

Wolfgang said that in Peter Pan they had wanted to use a large magnifying glass for the fairy in the glass and had failed. But he thought it could be done. The Peter Pan people had wanted to diminish a human being. He wanted to magnify a coal-ball. It was easier.

“In the light,” said August, “the dark queen’s face is a queasy grey-green, in the light.”

Olive was worrying about the shadow. She had an idea. He could make a bargain—like Persephone—and be allowed to return underground in the white snowy months. Among the roots, he would journey, said Anselm Stern. Myths have a habit of winding themselves round us. And the Silf would come to visit him, underground, among the black diamonds and the veins of ore.

August was drawing the Silf, a thin, fine thing with white hair standing up and blown about as if by the wind.

They had been inventing this world, in this way, for months. But, unlike Olive’s usual tale-telling, it needed to be made solid, it needed wings and flats, costumes and shoes, lighting and trap-doors and flying machines and wind machines and hiding-places for those who pulled the strings. August found money, and Olive persuaded Basil and Katharina Well-wood to invest. There came the day when they sat in the crimson velvet seats in the auditorium in the Elysium, and watched auditions, for Elven Queens, for rats and Gathorns, for the Silf and for Tom.

It was only at this point that Olive realised that August Steyning intended to cast a woman as Tom.

She was, in those days, slightly drunken, very tense with the excitement of collaboration. Writing stories, writing books, is fiercely solitary, even if done by housewives in snatched moments at the edge of the diningtable. She had come a very long way, from Goldthorpe in the Yorkshire coalfield to this gilt and velvet palace with the laughing and serious companions with whom she worked. She loved them all, and fought them fiercely when they appeared to misconstrue a narrative thread, or to take possession of her people and change them unacceptably. For she had lived with these shadows in that solitude, and had loved and hated and watched them do as they did, unconstrained.

She was not really a playwright. The auditions taught her that. A true playwright makes up people who can be inhabited by actors. A storyteller makes shadow people in the head, autonomous and complete.

The worst thing about the auditions—apart from the visceral shock of seeing Tom as a woman—was bad acting, wrong “interpretations.” Simpering misses making the sharp Silf sugary in dulcet tones. Gathorns who were neither lithe nor clever but playing for laughs and self-admiring. Queens of Shadows like society ladies, intoning. Rats who were too ratty, which was difficult, in principle. There was also the opposite problem—good actors, who twisted her people, the Elf Queen, the loblolly (who was only a voice attached to a jelly-serpent and lights).

But the worst