The Children's Book

“Poor Vi. Not that it’s not a good way to go, when your time comes. But I had no idea hers had. She did not complain. Though it is doubtful I would have heard, if she had.”

This event also was not a story.

After Violet’s funeral, Humphry asked Phyllis into his office and gave her a box, containing Violet’s few pieces of jewellery: a jet necklace, a cameo, a small ring, with a polished bluejohn stone, which Phyllis put on. Humphry watched her in silence. He did not know what to say. Phyllis said

“You don’t need to tell me. I know. She was my real mother. Hedda found out. She likes finding things out. I don’t think I do. Nobody asked me.”

Humphry said “I’m sorry.”

Phyllis said “I think you should be. But it’s too late, isn’t it. I can look after the house, now.”

Her pretty face was like a china doll. She said

“I’d be glad if you’d sack Alma, and get a new kitchenmaid. She doesn’t like me, and won’t do anything I tell her.”

She said “Nobody asked her what she felt, when she was alive. Even I didn’t, because of knowing what I’d not been told.”

Humphry said, almost grumpily, “I asked her. I may have been at fault, but I did—care for her.”

“Yes. Well. It’s too late, now. For everything.”

•  •  •

Alma was sacked, and replaced by Tilly, who appreciated the finer points of Phyllis’s household- management.

Olive went back into her bedroom.

Humphry went to Manchester.

Life—for the living—went on. Leached of much of its colour, still where it had been full of movement.

Phyllis tended Olive. She could have said, and didn’t, that she knew Olive didn’t like her. Olive could not be sacked. But she could be made to be grateful for kindnesses she did not want. Phyllis persisted.

47

In February 1910 Richard Strauss’s Elektra was put on in Covent Garden. It is a drama of fated royal families stirring violently in bloody passion, matricide and revenge. Elektra took hatred to her bosom as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath.” The English critics were divided. The Times said the opera was “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature.” Shaw diagnosed anti-German hysteria. He said Elektra was “the highest achievement of the highest art.” “If the case against the fools and their money-changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.”

The English were reading novels about the invasion of England, and the invaders were Germans, men in steel helmets who bit into the globular world with iron teeth. There was the legendary William Le Queux, whose tales were serialised by Lord Northcliffe in the Daily Mail and hugely increased its circulation. He began with The Great War in England in 1897 which was published in 1894. In those nineteenth-century days the hypothetical invaders were French: they were driven back, with the help of Germany, when they besieged London.

In 1906 Le Queux wrote the Invasion of 1910, a futuristic tale of a German invasion of England’s green and pleasant land. The places of German landings, and German battles with the English, were changed, before publication, to suit the readership of the Daily Mail, to the places where Lord Northcliffe had most readers, who would feel the most poignant frisson of armchair terror. Among Le Queux’s innumerable other works was Spies of the Kaiser, published in 1909, a mock-factual series of descriptions of infiltrating Germans and dangerous new weapons. The Secret of the Silent Submarine. The Secret of Our New Gun. The German Plot against England. The Secret of the British Aeroplane. These plots were foiled by a “patriot to his core,” a pipe-smoking barrister, with excellent taste in furnishings. There were emotive illustrations, depicting, for instance, the “execution of von Beilstein” standing blindfold in the Horse Guards Parade, facing an execution squad of guardsmen in bearskin hats, a white-surpliced priest, and two solemn English policemen.

•  •  •

The Kaiser himself sat in his study on a stool in the shape of a horse’s saddle and wrote letters to his family, his uncle Edward, his cousin Nicholas in Russia, making and proposing many different treaties, against many different enemies. In September 1908, in concert with Colonel Stuart-Wortley, he had written in the Daily Telegraph on German—British relations. German diplomats toned down the passages about how unpopular Britain was in Germany.

The article claimed that William’s “large stock of patience is giving out… You English are mad, mad as March hares … my heart is set upon peace.” He claimed that he had sent his grandmother tips about how to win the Boer War and ended

Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas.

This article pleased no one. The English press were “sceptical, critical and grudging.” The Japanese were upset by the shrill remarks about the fleets in distant oceans. The Germans were furious with their Emperor; there was a political crisis, the Kaiser made a confused speech when honouring Graf Zeppelin with the Black Eagle for his airship, and there were calls for his abdication. He went away to go hunting in yellow leather boots, and gold spurs, wearing a cross of his own design—a combination of the Order of St. John and of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. He went to a fox cull with Max Furstenberg and killed 84 of the 134 slaughtered foxes. In the evening he was resplendent, with the Order of the Garter below his knee, the ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle across his chest, and round his neck the Spanish Golden Fleece. He had signed a letter to the English First Lord of the Admiralty about naval competition between Germany and England “by one who is proud to wear the British naval uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, which was conferred on him by the late Queen of blessed memory.”