The Children's Book

hauled in with a thick belt. She produced a truss of needles and bobbins, told him to stand still, and took in a pleat on each side over his hips, sewing fast and precisely. “I know how young folk are, they are ashamed to look odd and hate things not fitting right. This is only makeshift, but it’ll hold for the duration. You’ll forget they’re too big, this way. One thing less to bother yourself about.” She put one hand on each of his hips and turned him round like a mannequin. She gave him a stout pair of new socks, but none of the shoes she had brought fitted, and he had to put on his old dirty boots—after she had given them a brush over. A tweed jacket with leather trim completed the outfit. She even gave him a clean handkerchief. And a pocket-comb, made from white bone, with which she tugged at his hair before inserting it into his jacket pocket. There was no mirror in Birch Cottage, so he couldn’t look at her handiwork. He wriggled; the underwear bothered him. Violet ran her fingers round inside his waistband, and straightened him. She rolled his old dirty clothes into a bundle. “I’m not stealing them, young man, they’ll come back darned and laundered.”

“Thank you, mam,” said Philip.

“If you want anything at all, I’m the one. Remember that. There’s a nightshirt on your bed, and a pot under it, and a toothbrush by the pump. I’ll give you matches and a candle when you come back. You’ll sleep deep in the good Kent air.”

Supper was ready in the dining-hall. The table was laid with pretty earthenware plates and mugs, glazed in yellow, with a border of black-eyed daisies. Robin and Florian had been put to bed, but Hedda, who was five, was still there, as they ate early. Olive summoned Philip to sit at her side, and said he was handsome. Humphry Wellwood nodded to him from the other end of the table. He was a tall, thin man, with a fox-red beard, neatly trimmed, pale blue eyes and a dark brown velvet jacket.

There was cauliflower soup, followed by a lamb stew, and a vegetable and pumpkin pie for the vegetarians (Olive, Violet, Phyllis and Hedda). Philip took two bowls of soup. Prosper Cain’s fruitcake was a long time away; he had two weeks of near-starvation and a lifetime of perpetual hunger to feed. He had supposed Mr. Wellwood, who worked in the Bank of England, would be like the factory owners in the Potteries, stiff, grand and condescending. But Humphry told the children what was clearly an instalment in a running tale of secret naughtiness amongst the bank clerks in the depths of the Bank, who kept tethered bull terriers attached to the legs of their desks, and divided sides of meat from Smithfield before going home for the weekend. Phyllis and Hedda shuddered dramatically. Humphry recounted a jape in which one young man had tied the laces of another man’s boots to his high desk-stool. Dorothy said that wasn’t really funny, and Humphry agreed immediately, saying with half-mock sadness that the poor young creatures were confined in the shadows with no outlet for their animal energies. They are like the Nibelungen, said Humphry, they go to the bullion-vaults to stare at the machines that weigh the gold sovereigns—like half-human creatures that swallow the good coins and spit out the light ones into copper vessels. Tom said they had seen an amazing candlestick which Major Cain had said might be made out of melted-down gold coins. With dragons on it, and little men, and monkeys. Philip had made some wondrous drawings of it. Everyone looked at Philip, who stared into his soup. Humphry said, as though he really meant it, that he should like to see the drawings. Violet said, don’t embarrass the poor lad, which embarrassed him.

From time to time, during the meal, Olive turned gracefully and impulsively towards Philip, and urged him to tell her all about himself. She elicited, slowly, the information that his dad was dead in a kiln accident, and that his mam worked at painting china. He had worked himself, carrying full saggars to the kilns. Yes, he had sisters, four. Brothers, asked Phyllis. Two, both dead, said Philip. And a sister, dead.

And he had felt he had to get away? said Olive. He must have been unhappy. The work must have been hard, and maybe people weren’t kind to him.

Philip thought of his mam, and found his eyes, to his horror, hot and wet.

Olive said he didn’t need to tell them, they understood. Everyone stared at him with warmth and sympathy. “It weren’t,” he said. “It weren’t…” His voice was unsteady.

“We shall see you have somewhere to live, and work to do,” said Olive, her voice full of gold.

Dorothy asked rather abruptly if Philip could ride a bicycle.

He said no, but he’d seen them, and thought they must be real exciting, and wished he could try one.

Dorothy said “We’ll show you tomorrow. We’ve got new ones. There’ll be time to show you, before the party. We can ride in the woods.”

She had a rather fierce little face, not pretty, and looked cross most of the time. He did not wonder why. Exhaustion was overcoming him. Olive asked him two or three more probing questions about the ill-treatment she was convinced he had undergone. He answered monosyllabically, spooning blancmange into his mouth. This time he was rescued by Violet, who said the boy was dead on his feet and she proposed to find him a candle and see him to his bed.

Violet said “You mustn’t mind my sister. She’s a storyteller. She’s making up stories for you. I don’t mean lies, I mean stories. It’s her way. She’s fitting you in.” Philip said

“She’s been—so very kind. You all have.”

“We have our beliefs,” said Violet. “About what the world should be like. And some of us have experience—like yours—of what it shouldn’t be.”

The moon was caught in the branches of the trees round the cottage. He was solaced by learning the lines of the network of twigs, which was both random and ordered. He didn’t point this out to Violet, but thanked her again, as he took his candle, and made his way into his cottage. He feared she might try to kiss him goodnight—he could not predict what these people would do—but she simply stood, and watched him take his candle up the ladder.

“Sleep tight,” she called.

“Thank you,” he said, yet again.

And then he was alone, with a brave candle, in a cottage. This was what he had wanted, or part of it. There was a nightshirt, laid out on the clean sheets of the wooden bed that was temporarily his. He looked out of the window, and there were the branches, lit by the moon on a dark blue, cloudless sky, with their fish-shaped leaves overlapping, and just trembling. He translated the shapes into a glaze, and puzzled over it briefly. It was too much. He wanted to cry out, or to weep, or, he understood, to touch his body—his body washed clean—as he had only ever been able to do furtively, in dirty places. He must not leave marks, that would be shameful. He finally contrived a safety-pad of the handkerchief he had been given or lent. He could rinse it, subsequently, under the pump.

He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy.

Then he lay still, listening to the sounds in the silence. An owl called. Another owl answered. A big branch creaked. Things rustled. The pump below dripped in the stone sink. How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.

The next day, they prepared the Midsummer Party. Violet gave Philip a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, and told him he was co-opted to make