The Children's Book

finished. You’ve hurt me, you bummer. Really hurt. I’ll see you never forget it. I think you might like to get sent away, and I don’t think you should get anything you like. So I’ll stay mum, and make sure you pay—this hurts, I’ll hurt you, make no mistake.” He cuffed Tom about the ears; rhythmically, several times, so that Tom’s head was a box of pain.

“Come and see me after school tomorrow. Think about it. Bring me the black cane, after school tomorrow. Don’t forget, now, will you? And you can get the oil off my dressing-gown first thing tomorrow.”

The next morning, Hunter waited in vain for his butt. He sent scouts out to look for him—he was probably shaking somewhere, in some hidey-hole, paralysed with terror, he had no guts. He wasn’t found by class-time, and was marked absent in the register. He did not appear to receive his beating after school. He was not in the dorm at night. Hunter sent Fitch down to search the cellars, but he was not there.

•  •  •

The next day, the headmaster asked the whole school if anyone had seen Wellwood. Hunter had shown his bruise and cut to the Head, saying curtly that Wellwood had caused it, by throwing a hot lamp, when he was caught reading after lights out. The Head said the boy was probably hiding. In his mind was a sick memory of an earlier beautiful boy, swollen-faced and no longer beautiful, hanging from a hook in the coal-cellar. He told Hunter to set about finding Wellwood. He instituted a search of the grounds. After another two days, he called in the police, and telegraphed Humphry Wellwood.

Humphry and Olive got on a train, and went North. Humphry was partly annoyed to be missing a deadline for the Evening Standard. Olive was trying to hold on to several story-threads, from The Outlaws to Tom Underground. At the same time, exactly, as they experienced normal continuing irritation, they found themselves, somewhere else, alien, frozen by fear, staring at raw shapes through the window of smoke, steam, looming vegetables.

When they arrived at Marlowe Tom was still lost. Humphry counted the days during which Tom had been missing and he himself had not been informed. He expressed indignation. Olive said Tom’s letters had been perfectly placid. With hindsight, too placid, not like Tom at all. They met Hunter, who assessed them insolently, curtly displayed his bruise and cut. Olive asked him how he had come by it. Hunter explained that Tom had been using a lamp to read a heap of nonsense in the dark, and had thrown the lamp at him, when discovered. A hot lamp is dangerous, said Hunter. He stared coolly, and apparently unperturbed.

Olive suggested, when Hunter had gone away, that it might be worth talking to Julian Cain, who knew Tom outside school, and might be in his confidence.

Julian was fetched, and said he knew nothing. He said, under questioning, that he thought Tom was finding it hard to settle in. He said cautiously, to Humphry, that Jonson’s was famous for discipline, and newbutts—new boys, that was—sometimes found it hard, at first. Humphry understood the unspoken message, but it did not help. There was no sign of Tom, and after a few days in an inn, Humphry and Olive went home again, to their other children, and to wait in case Tom got in touch, which he did not.

Todefright became terrible. Phyllis cried a lot, and got smacked frequently. Humphry drank whisky, and talked to the police. Olive walked. She walked from end to end of the house, as a woman in labour walks, to use the contracting muscles to distract body and mind from the pain. After three weeks, walking, walking, occasionally sinking into the nearest chair and pulling at her fingernails and hair, she took some of Humphry’s whisky, and then some more. At first late at night, and then, in small slugs, in the evening, and then in the day, still walking, walking. After six weeks, her bright black hair was dull and bushy, and her eyes—though she did not weep—were puffed by whisky.

Violet managed everything. Meals, letters to editors, the little children, who had not been told, though Violet knew Hedda knew perfectly well what was going on, although she did not know what Hedda thought or felt about it.

Dorothy went out. She didn’t go to stay with Griselda, or to any of her lessons. She went out into the country and disappeared. It was odd that neither Humphry nor Olive noticed her absence, though they might have been supposed to be anxious about their other children.

Dorothy went to the Tree House, which was still well camouflaged by autumn foliage and bracken turning gold. She sat quietly on the edge of one of the bracken beds, and waited. After six weeks, she found a chipped pottery mug, and some mouldy crumbs, just inside the door. She began to stalk the Tree House, creeping up on it from behind, not approaching down paths, and by this method she was able, one day, to go in and find the ragged boy curled like an unborn child in the heather nest, with worn shoe soles, a filthy jacket several sizes too large, a satchel she recognised, a shock of long, dusty hair, full of all sorts of things, living and very dead.

Dorothy said “I knew you’d come here. I think I’d have known if you were dead. I thought you weren’t.”

Tom made a scratching, snuffling noise.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Helping a gamekeeper,” said Tom. It was all the answer she, or anyone, ever got. It was like and unlike one of Olive’s tales of fugitives. It took Dorothy two more days to persuade him to walk back with her to Todefright. She never, ever told Olive that she had known for two days where he was, without saying anything, for she would never have been forgiven.

When Olive saw ragged Tom she had to rush into the cloakroom to be violently and unromantically sick. She came back, her face white as plaster, and put her arms around her boy, who smelled of unspeakable things, and whose skin had no bloom. He stiffened, and instinctively pushed her away. She said “Where have you been?” She said “We were sick with worry.” Tom did not reply. Olive put her arms again round his hunched, unresponsive shoulders and said “You will never go back there again.” Olive wanted to tell him, in pain and grief and rage, what the days of waiting and not knowing had been like, and knew that his own state was too bad for her to burden him with hers. She had been there before, when the pit flooded, when the fire damp puffed its venom. She had waited and grimly known she was waiting in vain, had almost longed for certainty to replace the agony of uncertainty. Something in her—because of those earlier waits—had known Tom would never be seen again. And now he was here, alien and grubby. She said “My poor boy.” She said to Violet “He must have a bath, and his own clothes.” She said to Tom “You can tell me all about it, in your own good time.”

But he never told her about it. Olive suspected that he was telling Dorothy, and interrogated Dorothy. Dorothy said, quite truthfully, that she knew nothing except that Tom had been helping a gamekeeper. Olive did not really believe that this was all that Dorothy knew. Tom said one thing, after a week or so. “I haven’t got the story.” Olive said “Never mind. I have a copy. Don’t worry. I know all about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” said Tom, and went and shut himself in his bedroom.

Olive felt shut out. Tom was part of her, and she was part of Tom, and the evil boy, Hunter, had severed the connection. She was angry with Tom, because of the waiting she had done, and his unawareness of the waiting. She was not given to introspection. She had “been through” something bad, and she dealt with it in her usual way, writing a children’s story of an innocent boy set upon by bullies at school, and bravely defying them. She made a Gothic horror out of the neo-Gothic turrets of Marlowe and included a heartfelt appeal for schools to become kinder and more civilised places. Innocence should not be regimented and brutalised, like recruits to an army. We should care for our young,