The Children's Book

She didn’t like Olive. She decided to send her into Service. That way, she would not need feeding, and could send back some of her earnings.

Olive went first to be a housemaid for the owner of a vegetable shop in Doncaster. She wore a black stuff uniform and a heavy pinafore, and an ungainly starched cap like a helmet. Her legs were too thin for the black cotton stockings which hung in folds round her ankles. She was an object of disgust to herself, and her employer felt her presence as baleful. She was sent back to Auntie Ada, and said not to give satisfaction. Auntie Ada bent her over her own sharp knees and beat her with a hairbrush.

She was sent off again, after consultation with the minister at the Chapel, to be maid of all work to two maiden lady schoolteachers in Conisborough. The Misses Bean had a bookcase full of books, and were genteel. Olive had to pretend to be two maids—a scullery maid enveloped in a mob cap and a thick apron, a parlour maid who brought tea in a starched lacy crown and a frilly apron, with a bib. She hated these clothes. When she looked at her face in the mirror in the morning she imagined a lady, in a ball-gown and a coronet sort of thing. She was growing prettier, and could see it.

If Olive had been nicer, or more pliable, or more pathetic, the Misses Bean would have discovered that she had been made to give up a scholarship, and might even have lent her some books, or sent her out to lectures or evening classes. But she continued to look haughty and baleful, and they continued timidly to criticise her ironing, or darning, or silver-polishing. There was a day of hideous embarrassment for all three of them when Olive came into the breakfast-room and said she would have to give notice, as she believed she was dying.

“Dying of what?” asked Miss Hesther Bean.

“Of an issue of blood,” said Olive, quoting the Bible, cramped by her first period, bleeding profusely, completely uninformed. The Misses Bean could not bring themselves to explain. They sent for next-door’s Cook, who explained, roughly, not kindly, and showed Olive how to cut up, and wash, strips of old sheets.

She told herself stories. She had told stories to Violet, when they were little. “There was a green cow and it would not go into its shed, no matter how hard it got hit. It would not, because it didn’t want to, and they got dogs to bark at it, and they got ropes to pull it, and, and, and, they put hay for it in its shed, but it would not.” “Why wouldn’t it, Olive?”

“I dunno,” said Olive, whose vision of the cow’s extremity was clear, but who saw no reasonable outcome.

She lived in two stories when she was in Service. One was conventional enough. There was once a noble lady who had been stolen from, or had to flee, her true home, and was living in disguise, in hiding, as a kitchen maid. Riddling the ashes, after all, was what such heroines had to do, they were all smeared and bleared with ash on the path to their epiphany in ball dress and jewelled slippers. There was need of a prince, and she looked for him, as maidens did in folk-magic, swimming out of the darkness behind her candlelit face in the mirror (she was going to be beautiful, that was something, the ugly duckling was qualified to be a swan, the ash- girl to be a bride). Only there was no substance to the shadow. There were words. Handsome, dark, dangerous, wild (she read romances). But no solidity. He was faceless. And worse, he did nothing, so there was no story, only the significant ash-riddling. Once she found a real little jewelled pin in the ashes, hot gold, with tiny blue stones and enamelled leaves. She took it out, and hid it behind a brick in the wall of the backyard. It was a talisman. But the magic it would work was not yet brewed.

The other story was, as storytelling, more satisfactory. Once (only once) Peter and Lucy had taken their children by train to the seaside, to Filey, where they had taken lodgings for a week, and played and paddled in the great sandy bay. Filey had been clean. The sea had been vast. You went down a steep hill, and into a tunnel under the promenade and the road, and you came out on the blowing soft sand, beyond which was the hard, wet sand, with its rippled surface and its pools of salt water. She began to tell herself a story of a boy, Peter Piper, imprisoned in an orphanage, a boy alone in the world, with no one to love, and no one who loved him. And this boy formed a plan, which he carried out with meticulous patience, to escape at night and walk to the sea, away from the soot and the sludge and the sulphur. This tale was as precise in the telling as the other was loose and vague. Everything had to be imagined, and worked through—the staircase in the orphanage, the bolt on the inner door of it, the great locks on the outer, the stolen key that released them, the oil that silenced the grinding of the mechanism.

Step by step, literally, as Olive Grimwith performed her household tasks, Peter Piper marched into liberty, along long city roads with lurking beggars and coal-delivery men, onto a highway, through villages (not real villages, she knew the names of none, but villages with greens, and ducks, and geese, and shops with jangling bells on springs over the door). Peter developed blisters, and Olive limped across the Beans’ kitchen. Peter was hungry, and turned aside into a field, where a kindly shepherd gave him a sandwich—no—gave him cheese, and an apple—delicious, crumbly cheese and a hard, sweet apple—her mouth watered.

There were pursuers, of course—the authorities, the master to whom Peter was to be apprenticed—Peter lay hidden in a ditch and saw their boots go past—

It was in fact Violet who suggested, one Christmas, when Olive was on a brief visit to Auntie Ada and her family, that perhaps they should run away.

Violet was covered with bruises which Olive had only half-noticed. Her mind on Peter Piper, and the road to the seashore, she asked Violet where they should run to.

“London, I should think,” said Violet. “We could get work of some sort there. I’ve saved up enough for one train ticket. We’ll have to take the money for the other out of her purse.”

And so they came to be in the audience of Humphry Wellwood’s English Literature lectures, dressed in blouses, skirts and hats made by Violet, who had found a good job in a dressmaking shop, and had found work for Olive, too, in plain-sewing, nothing fancy.

Violet had thought this might be a good place to find, as she put it to herself, a step up and out.

Olive found Humphry, and the rhythms of Shakespeare and Swift, Milton and Bunyan, which she thought she had craved all her life without knowing it.

They stepped up, and out.

Whilst Olive wrote her stories, Violet instructed the smaller children on the lawn. It was a hot, bright day. The servants were finishing clearing the end of the party. Violet was settled in a sagging wicker armchair, her workbasket beside her, darning socks, pulled neatly over a wooden mushroom, which had been painted like a fly-agaric, scarlet with white warts. Phyllis, Hedda and Florian were doing “nature study” with a collection of flowers and leaves they had collected. Tom and Dorothy, Griselda and Charles, were lying around on the lawn, half-reading, half-listening, half-making desultory conversation. Tom was supposed to be doing his Latin. Robin slumbered under a sunshade in his perambulator. A cuckoo called, from the orchard. Violet told them to listen.

“In June he changed tune,” she said.

“Cuck,” cried the cuckoo abbreviated.

Violet told about cuckoos.

“They make no nests. They borrow. They lay their eggs secretly in other birds’ nests, among the other eggs. The mother cuckoo picks the foster mother carefully. She lays her eggs when the foster mother is fetching food.