The Children's Book

26

A family, and a human being inside a family, put together a picture of their past in voluntary and involuntary ways, carefully constructed, arbitrarily dictated. A mother remembers one particular summer gathering on a lawn, with iced lemonade in a jug, and everyone smiling—as she puts in the album the one photograph where everyone is smiling, and keeps the scowling faces of the unsuccessful snapshots hidden in a box. A child remembers one scramble over the Downs, or zigzag trot through the woods, out of many, many forgotten ones, and shapes his identity round it. “I remember when I saw the yaffle.” And the memory changes when he is twelve, and fourteen, and twenty, and forty, and eighty, and perhaps never at any of those points represented precisely anything that really happened. Odd things persist for inexplicable reasons. A pair of shoes that never quite fitted. A party dress in which a girl always felt awkward, though the photographs are pretty enough. One violent quarrel of many arising from the unjust division of a cake, or the desperately disappointing decision not to go to the seaside. There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers. A red leather belt. A dark pantry full of obscene and lovely jars.

And there are public memories, which make markers. They were all Victorians, and then in January 1901, the little old woman, the Widow at Windsor, the Queen and Empress died. All Europe was full of her family, whose private follies and conceits and quarrels shaped the lives of all other families. When she began to fail, her German grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm, cut short the celebrations of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Prussian Crown, and got into his special train to cross the Channel. No notice, he said, should be taken of him in his capacity as Emperor. He came merely as a grandson. His own people felt he should have respected their hostility to the war against the Boers. His aunt by marriage, Princess Alexandra of Wales, who hated Hohenzollerns, felt he should keep away. The Channel was brilliantly sunny and furiously stormy. The Prince of Wales, dressed in a Prussian uniform, met his nephew at Victoria. Deathbeds, like weddings, create dramas, both comic and terrible. The Kaiser took over this deathbed. He sat beside his grandmother, propping her up with his one good arm, with her doctor on her other side. “She softly passed away in my arms,” he said. He made himself the hero of the funeral procession too. He rode beside the new King on a huge white horse. In Windsor the horses pulling the gun-carriage with the coffin came to a standstill. William leapt down from his pale horse, and reharnessed them. They moved smoothly away. The English crowd cheered the German Kaiser. His yacht, Hohenzollern, was now moored in the Solent, and the royal families celebrated his birthday on 27th January. He seemed reluctant to go home. He proposed an alliance of the two Teutonic nations, the British guarding the seas, the Germans the land, so that “not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission, and the nations would, in time, come to see the necessity of reducing their armaments.”

The Prince of Wales carried out his own family rebellion, and let it be known that he proposed to reign as King Edward. Victoria and Albert had named him Albert Edward, but he chose to follow the six earlier English Edwards. “There is only one Albert,” he said in his Accession Speech “by universal consent, I think deservedly, known as Albert the Good.”

He was not, in Albert’s way, a good man. He was immediately named “Edward the Caresser.” He liked women, sport, good food and wine. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about the Edwardian house party.

There will be bridge and booze ’till after three

And after that, a lot of them will grope

Along the corridors in robes de nuit

Pyjamas or some other kind of dope.

A sturdy matron will be set to cope

With Lord—who isn’t “quite the thing”

And give his wife the leisure to elope

And Mrs. James will entertain the King.

There was a sense that fun was now permitted, was indeed obligatory. The stiff black flounces, the jet necklaces, the pristine caps, the euphemisms and deference, the high seriousness also, the sense of duty and the questioning of the deep meanings of things were there to be mocked, to be turned into scarecrows and Hallowe’en masks. People talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex. At the same time they showed a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.

Olive Wellwood became, not very willingly, a matriarch. She had constructed her own good picture of the Todefright family, which was innocent and comfortable. There were sons and daughters and babies in various stages of creeping, crawling and tottering, there were children having real and imaginary adventures in the woods and on the Downs, there were informal gatherings round the fire in winter, or the lawn in summer, where old and young mingled and discussed things with laughter and serious common sense. There was the steady scratch of the pen nib in the study, parcels of manuscript Violet took to the post, the satisfactory cheques that arrived with the admiring letters of readers, both children and adults. This she had made, as surely as she made the worlds of fairytale and adventure which were nevertheless often more real to her than breakfast or bathtime. She and Violet alone knew that both worlds were constructed against and despite the pinched life of ash pits, cinders, rumbling subterranean horrors, and black dust settling everywhere. The woods, the Downs, the lawn, the hearth, the stables were a real reality, kept in being by continuous inventive willpower. In weak moments she thought of her garden as the fairytale palace the prince, or princess, must not leave on pain of bleak disaster. They were inside a firewall, outside which grim goblins mopped and mowed. She had made, had written, this world with the inventive power with which she told her stories.

She could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it, or change it, though her stories knew better. And she had to ignore a great deal, in order to persist in her calm, and listen steadily to the quick scratch of the nib.

At the time of the old Queen’s death, she had a popular success with a collection of tales, which included the tale of the wraiths and puppets at the Grande Exposition, and the sinister and sly tale of The People in the House in the House, in which a child imprisoned some tiny folk in her doll’s house, and was in turn imprisoned by a giant child.

A fashionable magazine sent a young woman to interview Mrs. Wellwood, and a photographer, who posed her, sitting by the fire in a rocking-chair in a velvet gown, reading to the assembled younger children, from Phyllis, now fourteen, and Hedda, now eleven, in smocked dresses and black stockings, their long hair, Phyllis’s fair, Hedda’s dark, shining on their shoulders, to Florian, now nine, and Robin, now seven, and Harry, now five, in sailor suits. Violet handed round cocoa and biscuits, and did not appear in the picture. The interviewer, whose name was Louisa Catchpole, wrote reverently of the shining heads of the listeners—“you could have heard a mouse squeak, or a beetle scurry,” she wrote, entering into the style. She asked the children which was each one’s favourite tale, and was slightly baffled by their answers. This meant that Olive found herself explaining that each child had his or her very own story, which was continually added to, and kept in the glass cupboard in a specially decorated book. Louisa Catchpole said this was a charming idea, and begged to see the books. The photographer took pictures of the cupboard, and of the imaginatively decorated covers of the individual tales. Miss Catchpole said to the children that they must feel they were very special people, having their own stories in this way. It was Phyllis who replied solemnly, oh yes, they did feel special.

The interview and pictures appeared under the headline “A Modern Mother Goose.” The article spoke of Mrs. Wellwood’s calm motherly presence, and her expressive voice, spicing the stories with mystery, thrills and dangers, all by the flickering firelight, in which more magical creatures could be seen. Mrs. Wellwood, Miss Catchpole said, held strong beliefs about the imaginative lives of children being just as important in education as verbs and