The Children's Book

Toby waited for a comment—from Tom, not Charles—and Tom said, thoughtfully, that he feared that was what he was, a dreamer. Toby Youlgreave looked at the darkening cottage window in the late afternoon, and said, almost to himself, that that was what they all were, living so pleasantly, dreamers. Have some treacle tart, he said, mocking himself gently. I made it specially for you two. How do we get out of dreamland? Hic labor, hoc opus est, he said.

Tom took the entrance exams, that July, in a kind of dream. Olive was worried for him, but he was himself unworried: maths was maths, Latin was Latin, he knew what he had to do as he knew how to throw a cricket ball or steer a bicycle. He wrote an essay on Keats—“My Favourite Poet”—for Marlowe, and an essay on “The Characteristics of the English” for Eton. Marlowe accepted him: Eton rejected him: both schools accepted Charles. It was faintly disturbing to Tom to be rejected. He was not used to it. Charles’s parents decided he would go to Eton. They bought him a new bicycle. Charles slid away, in some anxiety, to consult Joachim Susskind. He said it had to be against his principles to go to Eton. Susskind, surprisingly, encouraged him to go ahead. The world was imperfect, he said. One boy could not change it by refusing to be educated. He should go to Eton and learn to argue, and observe the ruling classes at their most absolute, and consider how to thwart their purposes. We must be wise as serpents, he said, quoting Jesus Christ, who was, he claimed, the first Anarchist, and not adding the corollary, harmless as doves, because he was still thinking of the propaganda of the Deed, and whether or not it was right to strike symbolic blows. Susskind was excited by the banishment of the Anarchist groups from the Socialist Second International, meeting that summer in London. The Anarchists refused political action. Susskind was not sure where he stood on this, either. Bakunin had said Germans made bad anarchists because they wanted simultaneously to be Masters and Slaves. There was a German kind of orderliness to Susskind’s anarchism, at war with a German liking for carrying things to extremes.

Both Tom and Dorothy had been reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, published a year ago. Grahame had given the book to Humphry: they had once been colleagues in the Bank of England, where Grahame still worked—he was grander than Humphry had been, and was already promoted to Acting Secretary of the Bank. Like Humphry he wrote for the Yellow Book and like Humphry busied himself bringing culture to the East End. He had published a work called Pagan Papers in 1893, a tribute to the goat-god Pan, with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley, which contained the stories of childhood which were continued in The Golden Age. Dorothy asked Tom if he thought going away to school would change him, like Edward in the book. Tom said, vaguely, of course things wouldn’t be the same, and suddenly, for the first time, focused his dreaming mind on what this new beginning was bringing to an end, on what he had done to himself by passing an exam. He was filled with fear and grief, which were impossible to impart to sharp Dorothy.

Olive, despite her preference for legend and fairytale, had herself published two books, that year, about imaginary children, written fast, and easily, and compulsively. Money had been needed because Humphry had had to “help out” with the confinement of Maid Marian in Manchester. He looked sidelong at Olive, before he asked for help, but he made no wild speeches of contrition, did not beat his breast, said, almost man to man, “She’s a good creature, you know. She’s got a good brain. She’s brave.” Olive said he should have thought of all that earlier, and Humphry said, with a kind of satyr-grin, that he had thought he had thought of it, but clearly not well enough. He was inviting Olive to grin with him. Much of his success as an errant husband lay in this whiskered grin of collusion—there were women out there whom, briefly, he couldn’t resist—but she, Olive, his wife, was the one he shared things with, the one to whom he spoke truthfully, from himself. She took a curious pleasure in the power of independence when she gave him a cheque to meet the Manchester bills. You did not so much mind being—conventionally—betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

Olive’s two stories were The Runaway and The Girl Who Walked a Long Way, and were based, in part, on the way Olive imagined the tale of Philip Warren and the tale of his sister Elsie. She had been able to use her own memories of escaping from the coalfield, and from the industrial smoke, to find oneself in the Garden of England amongst orchards full of apples, and gardens full of wholesome, clean vegetables. Her two characters were preadolescent children, escaping a cruel aunt and a drunken uncle. They settled, not in anywhere like Purchase, but in a farming community of orphan children and runaways like themselves. She had invented a kind of guru for this community, a Pied Piper who vaguely resembled Edward Carpenter in idealism and sandal-making. But she could not prevent this figure from being either domineering or sinister, and realised that this was because what children liked to read about was a world without adults, in which they themselves produced their food, and decided how to run things. So she replaced the Carpenter figure with a fourteen-year-old boy called Robin, who was camping in a derelict barn, and took in other fugitives. They called themselves the Outlaws, and learned how to pick mushrooms and berries, and entice runaway hens to lay eggs in their outhouse. She was rather pleased with this concept, and did not know whether to be annoyed or amused to find that Marian in Manchester had called her son Robin. She told Humphry that it was negligent—or invidious—of him to have two sons called Robin, and Humphry smiled his satyr-smile and said that only proved that he had little or nothing to do with Marian and her child, apart from making sure they had enough to live on. Olive didn’t point out that it was she who had made sure. They both knew that.

That summer, before Tom left home, they all went together, big children and tinies, and in-between Phyllis and Hedda, on a seaside holiday in a village called Selstrood, which had a wild beach that looked across the Channel to France, which was sometimes visible as a shadowy strip in the sky, and sometimes hidden in mist or cloud, and now and then a lit, creamy line of solid rock, just distinguishable from bright cloud and wavecrest. They took an old vicarage, furnished only with minimal wooden chairs and tables, and iron bedsteads, and they camped in the way the English like to camp. Tom and Dorothy, and Charles and Griselda who came with them, had workmanlike tents in the orchard. Violet hired a donkey cart, and drove the little ones along the quiet lanes. Olive wrote furiously. They had beach picnics, carrying hampers of delicious things through the sea-holly onto the washed sand. They swam. They visited Purchase House, of course, which was still shabby, but had a look of polish and darning and clean crockery, no doubt contrived by Elsie. Olive studied Philip and Elsie. Elsie noticed this, and Philip didn’t. He was learning his craft, and Benedict Fludd was still in a reasonable temper, and still producing work.

Other people came. Toby Youlgreave came, and lodged with Miss Dace in Winchelsea. He talked to Griselda about literature, and Charles confirmed his idea that Youlgreave’s secret other self was Olive Well-wood’s knight errant, or maybe something else. The Cain family came, and stayed in a comfortable inn, near Winchelsea. Prosper Cain was in need of rest and distraction. It was proving to be a horrible year at the Museum. The Director, Professor Middleton, had been found dead in June, with a laudanum bottle and a glass at his side. He was known to have taken laudanum regularly since he had had “brain fever” as an undergraduate, and a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. But most people, including Prosper, suspected that he had taken his life, in an excess of despair over battling scholars, soldiers and librarians. The campaign against the military presence in the Museum in the art newspapers had intensified: in July, at the time of Tom’s exams, the parliamentary debate on the Budget had produced scathing criticism of the management of the Museum, led by the socialist John Burns. Cain wanted to be able to forget all these things. He thought he might try to interest Benedict Fludd’s aimless daughters in finding places at the new Royal College of Art, formed from the old National Art Training School. Pomona was still just about a child, but Imogen was seventeen, and nobody seemed to care what happened to her. She didn’t talk to Julian, who was a year younger than she was, and in a mood for sauntering sardonically away on his own. Some of her embroidery was quite promising. Vapid, Prosper thought truthfully, but technically promising. He wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with Seraphita, and remembered the empty laudanum bottle.

•  •  •

There were many picnics on the beach, under umbrellas with bleached stripes, where Olive sat in a graceful swirl of muslin and a cotton sunhat, holding court, Prosper thought, as he became a courtier. He liked the free movement of the many Wellwoods, up and down the sand, in and out of the salt water, collecting things in nets and buckets, riding away on bicycles. He confided in Olive Wellwood as a figure of motherhood, but he knew that she