“I think so,” said Griselda. Dorothy said it went back to what Auntie Violet had said, about your real mother being the one who took care of you and fed you and so on. She had always known that Violet believed, in some way, that she was their real mother. She saw why, but she did not think of herself, or want to think of herself, as Violet’s daughter.
Griselda said that Clementine had heard her parents shouting at each other, and her mother weeping.
Tom said everyone’s parents shouted at each other, didn’t they? Dorothy remembered being with Tom on the landing, overhearing a violent parental argument. “I have always looked after your children,” one had yelled, and the other had said, “And I may say the same.” Tom and Dorothy both knew that parents in rage referred to the children as “your children.” It was never pleasant for children to overhear such things, it could not be, they had become objects, bones of contention.
Sometimes they played a game of “Who would you like for parents if you didn’t have your real ones?”
You wouldn’t want to play that game if you were Clementine.
Tom thought of his life, the woods, the garden, the books, the human voices, the presences of family in and out of the house, the wonderful movement from comfort to freedom and back.
“We are a happy family,” he said, vaguely and gently. “Have a bull’s-eye? Or a pink fizz?”
Charles asked Dorothy if she was really going to be a doctor, or was it just something she had said?
“I just said it, and saw it was true.”
“I should like to do something like that. I don’t know if I could face all the mess of people being sick, let alone having to carve them up. But I think one should try to do something to make things better. Your father understands that. Mine doesn’t.”
THE SHRUBBERY
HERE WAS ONCE A MOTHER, whose husband had gone on a long voyage, and had neither come back, nor sent any news, for a long time. Consequently, the family had fallen upon hard times, though they lived in a pleasant house in the country, with gardens and orchards. Mothers in stories, in general, are of two kinds. There are mothers who are warm, and devoted, and self-sacrificing, and resourceful and endlessly good-tempered and loving. Then there are the other kind, who are often not mothers, but only stepmothers, who are unkind, and proud, and love some children (their own) better than others, and treat children like kitchen-servants, and will not let them play, or dream. If you had to choose, the mother in this story is a good mother, not a bad stepmother. But she is not perfect, as real human beings are not perfect. She has so many children that they call her Mother Goose, or Old Shoe-Woman, when they are teasing. She does her very best for them. She darns their clothes and turns sheets sides-to-middle, and makes nourishing food out of inexpensive—no, let us say honestly—out of downright cheap things, carefully simmered, made tasty with herbs that cost nothing. She makes sure that those who go to school have waterproof shoes. She scrimps and saves so that each child has some little gift to open on his or her birthday or at Christmas. She has sat up all night sometimes, making a pretty blouse out of an old dress, or a furry toy out of an old jacket of her own, that has worn so bald that she cannot go out in it. And anyway she has nowhere to go to. She has no time for visiting, nor friends to visit.
Most of her children were good-natured and helpful. They had their tasks—polishing spoons, fetching milk, watering the herb garden. The little ones ran about the kitchen and the yard like a flock of goslings and were of course often in the way, or underfoot. But there was one—neither the smallest nor the biggest, but perhaps the largest of the very little ones who were not yet at school—who caused trouble. His name was Perkin, but nobody used his name. They called him Pig. This nickname had a kindly origin. One of his sisters, peering into the cradle when he had newly appeared amongst them, had observed that he was shiny, like an “icky pinky pig.” And everyone had laughed, and ever so lovingly, they had called him Pinky Pig, when he was a plump baby, and just Pig, when he began to run about independently.
I think we all know someone who has an embarrassing nickname that would have been better discarded or not thought up in the first place. Pig found his natural enough, when he was very little, and even had a toy piglet, made of pink flannel, from whom he would not be separated. He took an interest in pigs he met on walks, or on visits to farmyards. But as he got older, he noticed people using his name reproachfully or mockingly. “What a little pig,” they said, when he ate too fast. “What a grubby little pig,” they said when he got muddy, which he often did, because he liked playing in earth, uncovering roots, studying earthworms. So somewhere he began to think his name meant that he wasn’t liked, perhaps wasn’t loved.
I am not saying that his nickname made him a naughty boy. Naughty boys are born every moment, and all mothers know that naughtiness is like curly hair, or blue eyes—it just happens. Pig was in fact a pretty boy, with yellow curls and bright blue eyes, sparkling with mischief. But he was most ingeniously naughty.
He brought things into the house, and stored them in odd places. He made a nest of worms in the flour bin, and the worms suffocated, and the flour had to be thrown out. He fed a whole seed-cake to the birds on the lawn, and the children had to go without cake for tea. He got in amongst the canisters on the dresser and mixed lentils with tealeaves, mustard with sugar, peppercorns with raisins. “My own cooking,” he called this, and wailed most dolefully when Mother Goose spanked him, which she did to teach him a lesson, which he refused to learn. He came in from the garden covered with mud and made himself a nest amongst the clean laundry in the basket, where he fell asleep, looking innocent and charming, like the Babes in the Wood. All the clean bedclothes and towels and shirts had to be washed again and mangled again and dried again and ironed again. And then he fell over, carrying a jar of paintbrushes in water, and landed headfirst in the washed-again clothes and soaked them with painting-water. He hid things—he hid teaspoons in mouseholes, and buttons in drains, and scissors in the pickle-jar, and forgot where he had put them. His long-suffering mother—and she was long-suffering—said that having him in the house was like living with a boggart or a naughty imp. Once, when he cut up his new collar to make it look like lace, she called him a changeling. What was that? asked Pig. But he got no answer. He was always asking questions, that was another thing. What was the wind, and why was this beetle dead and this one wriggling, and who growed the grass, and who were the little people in the roots of the shrubbery, and why did pigs snuffle, and what tapped at his bedroom window at night and why did people have to sleep when they could be awake? He got no answers because his mother was exhausted, and because most of his questions were asked in a shrill voice when one of the other children was already talking and saying something sensible moreover, about school homework or holes in stockings.
He liked collecting things. He had a bag of dead insects and a bag of special twigs and a bag of glass marbles, and a bag of personal pebbles, which were the collection he most loved. He knew them all, their knobs and smooth surfaces and rough places. Most of all he loved a piece of white limestone with a hole running through it, a self-bored stone he had found in the shrubbery. He would put it to his eye and say he could see things through it that were invisible. He said he saw little women trotting about on the draining board. He said he saw his mother’s hair full of spiders spinning long threads to make her a veil. He said he saw a mouse holding out a hank of gold thread on the ends of its tiny paws, for another mouse to wind into a golden ball.
There came a day when Mother Goose was particularly tired, and particularly sad, for she had received a letter in the post, and thought it might be news of her husband, but found that it was after all a forgotten coal bill. She was making pastry, to make a big pie for the children’s supper, with a little meat eked out with a lot of
