The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  I were begging scraps of paper in South Kensington, Philip thought. And here they throw away whole sheets with one gone-wrong bird in one corner.

  He looked up and had the disconcerting sense that Dorothy was reading his mind.

  Dorothy had indeed, more or less accurately, followed Philip’s thoughts. She did not know how she had done that. She was a clever, careful child, who liked to think of herself as unhappy. Faced with Philip’s hunger and reticence, she was forced, because she had been brought up in the Fabian atmosphere of rational social justice, to admit that she had “no right” to feel unhappy, since she was exceedingly privileged. She was unhappy, she told herself, for frivolous reasons. Because, as the eldest girl, she was treated as a substitute nanny. Because she was not a boy, and did not have a tutor, as Tom did, to teach her maths and languages. Because Phyllis was pretty and spoiled, and more loved than she was. Because Tom was much more loved. Because she wanted something and did not know what it was.

  She was just eleven—born in 1884, “the same year as the Fabian Society,” Violet pointed out. They had been the Fellowship of the New Life, in those days, and Dorothy was the new life, drawing in socialist ideals with her early milk. The grown-ups made further pointed and risky jokes across and about her, which irritated her. She didn’t like to be talked about. Equally, she didn’t like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people’s feelings, and had only just begun to realise that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

  She was busy thinking about Philip. He thinks we are being kind out of condescension, whereas actually that isn’t so, we are just being friendly, like we always are, but it makes him suspicious. He doesn’t really want us to know about where he comes from. Mother thinks his home is unhappy and his family are cruel—that’s one of her favourite stories. She ought to see—I can see—he doesn’t like that. I think he feels bad because they don’t know where he is or how he is. He feels more bad now we’re making all this fuss of him than he did hiding under the Museum.

  I wonder what he wants, she asked herself, without finding an answer, since Philip was silent on that subject—as, indeed, he was silent about almost everything.

  The safety-bicycle lesson took place in the afternoon, as promised. Philip was lent Violet Grimwith’s cycle, a solid machine, painted blue. Violet had named it Bluebell. The Hanger Woods were full of bluebells. Nevertheless Tom and Dorothy felt it was a weak name.

  Tom, on the Steed, rode round and round the grassy clearing between the back door and the woods, demonstrating balance. Dorothy helped Philip, holding his saddle, whilst he balanced precariously.

  “It’s much easier if you’re going,” she told him. “No one can balance at a standstill.”

  Philip set off and fell off and set off and fell off and set off and pedalled halfway round the clearing, and fell off, and set off and rode, a little wobbly, right round the clearing. For the first time since he had come to Todefright, he laughed aloud. Tom was wheeling figures of eight. Phyllis appeared and executed some neat circles. Tom said Philip was now good enough to go out into the lanes, so they went out, Tom in the lead, then Philip, then Dorothy, then Phyllis. They pedalled along Frenches Lane, which was flat, between hawthorn hedges, and then turned up the wooded hillside, up Scarp Lane, between overarching trees which made deep wells of shadow, interspersed with dazzling blades of brightness. Philip had an idea for a dark, dark, cauldron-like pot, with shiny streaks on a matt surface. When he thought of the imaginary pot, and not of the metal construction that carried him, his balance improved, and he accelerated.

  Behind him, Dorothy also went faster. She had the passion for speed which is strongest in girls of eleven or twelve. She dreamed of riding a racehorse along a beach, between sand and sea. Since she had had the bicycle she had dreamed frequently of flying, quite near the ground, skimming the flowerbeds, seated like a fakir on an invisible carpet.

  At the brow of the hill they rode along a glade, and Tom said

  “Shall we swoop down Bosk Hill?”

  “It’s steep,” said Dorothy. “Will Philip be all right?”

  “I’m doing finely,” said Philip, grinning.

  So they turned into Boskill Lane, which had both a sharp gradient and crooked-elbow corners. Dorothy was now in front of Philip, behind Tom, who was speeding away from them. Dorothy felt the usual, delightful tightening in her insides. She looked back to see if Philip was all right. He was nearer than she thought, and she wobbled across his track. He shuddered, skidded, and went through the air, more or less over Dorothy. She fell over on the track, scraping her shins, wheels and pedals spinning. Phyllis sailed past, gripping her handlebars, primly upright.

  Dorothy picked up Mona-Bona-Grona, and went to look at Philip. He was sprawled on his back under an oak tree, deep in a mass of wild garlic, crushed by his landing into extraordinary pungency. He was lying still, staring up through the leaves.

  “My fault,” said Dorothy. “All my fault. Are you hurt?”

  “Don’t think so, no. Winded.”

  He began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “There are things in the country that smell quite as foul as things in the town. Only vegetable foul, not smoky. I’ve never smelt anything in the least—like this.”

  “It’s wild garlic. It isn’t very nice.”

  Philip could not stop laughing. “It’s horrible. But it’s new, you know.”

  Dorothy crouched down beside him. “Can you get up?”

  “Aye, in a minute. Gimme a minute. I’m out o’ puff, as we say. Is the machine damaged?”

  Dorothy inspected it. It was unharmed.

  Philip lay in the disgusting and fascinating smell, and let his muscles go, one by one, so that the earth was holding up his limp body, and he could feel all its roughness, the squashed stalks, the knotty roots of trees, pebbles, the cool mould under. He closed his eyes and dozed for an instant.

  He woke because Dorothy was shaking him.

  “You are all right? I could have killed you. You aren’t concussed or anything?”

  “I’m quite happy,” Philip said. “Here.”

  Dorothy said, taking it in,

  “I could have killed you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “If you want,” said Dorothy, speaking out what had been going round in her mind for some hours, “just to send a postcard to your mother, just to say you’re all right and not to worry, you know—I could get you one, and post it for you.”

  Philip was silent. Things turned over in his mind. He frowned.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I wanted to help.”

  She sat hunched, with her arms around her knees. “You didn’t. Upset me. An’ you’re right. I ought to write to our mum. If you do get me a card, I will write. And thank you.”

  They rode back more soberly. Dorothy fetched a postcard and stamp from Olive’s bureau. Philip held the pen awkwardly and stared at the blank rectangle. Dorothy—not overlooking him—waited by the window. Once or twice he seemed to be about to set pen to postcard, but did not. Dorothy decided he might get on with it if she went away. When her hand was on the door-latch, Philip said “Promise you won’t read it?”

  “I wouldn’t. Letters are private. Even postcards. I could get you an envelope to put it in, that would make it private. Would you like that?”

  “Aye,” said Philip. He said “It’s partly I’m a bad speller.”

  He wrote

  Dear Mum and all,

  I am well and Ill rite agen soon. Hope you are well. Philip.

  Dorothy brought an envelope and Philip addressed it. He was grateful and also irritated, that Dorothy had noticed his duty and his need.

  3

  This was the Wellwoods’ third Midsummer Party. Their gues
ts were socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and workingmen’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and the North and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more. The Wellwoods’ parties were not Fabian teas with solid cups and saucers and a frigid absence of entertainment. Nor were they political meetings, to discuss the London County Council, Free Russia and Russian starvation. They were frivolous, lantern-lit, silk and velvet fancy-dress parties, with masques, and dancing to flute and fiddle.

  The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. And there were many other children. There were large families, in which relations shifted subtly as new people were born—or indeed, died—and in which a child also had a group identity, as “one of the older ones” or “one of the younger ones.” The younger ones were often enslaved or ignored by the older ones, and were perennially indignant. The older ones resented being told to take the younger ones along, when they were planning dangerous escapades.

  The parents—and the Wellwoods were no exception—found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with eight, or ten, or twelve children spread their love differently from the way in which they might have concentrated on a singleton or two infants. Love depended on the spaces between infants, on the health of the parents, on death, on the chances of which child survived an epidemic or an accident, and which did not. There were families in which the best-loved child had died, and remained the best-loved. There were families in which, apparently, the dead had disappeared without trace, and were not spoken of as realities. There were families in which an unborn child was dreaded and shrunk from, only to become, on emerging alive from blood and danger, the best-beloved after all.

  Most of the parents of these favoured children had not themselves been so fortunate. If they had run wild, it was because they were neglected, or being hardened for life, and not because freedom was good for them.

  Much of the freedom, both of parents and of children, depended on the careful work of servants, and of dedicated aunts, who had been old-fashioned sisters, in stricter days.

  The Wellwoods appeared to be one of these open and pleasantly complicated families. Humphry Wellwood was the second son of a Quaker wool merchant, himself the younger brother of a Quaker banker. The family home was in the North of England, where Yorkshire meets Lancashire, south of Cumberland. Humphry was born in 1856 and his brother, Basil, was two years older. Basil was sent into an uncle’s broking business, in 1873, as a stockbroker’s clerk. He did well in the City, moving to an Anglo-German bank, Wildvogel & Quick, and marrying, in 1879, a Wildvogel daughter, Katharina, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven.

  Humphry was a very bright schoolboy, and the masters at his Quaker school persuaded George Wellwood to send him to Oxford. He entered Balliol in 1874, and came under the influence of Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who believed that they were educating leaders of men, but also felt strongly what Beatrice Webb, as a young woman, described as a growing “class consciousness of sin” or guilt. This sense of sin led this generation of young men and women to go out and do good to the poor, in person. They went to the East End and managed tenement buildings. They conducted university extension classes for workers. H. R. Hyndman, who founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1882, was sceptical about the motives of these high-minded people. They came in waves of fashionable concern, he said, having discovered that there was a brick and mortar wilderness just beyond the Bank of England with two or three million inhabitants, many of them in woeful distress. Hyndman was a cynic. He remarked that “many a marriage in high life was the outcome of these exciting excursions into the unknown haunts of the poor.”

  Humphry graduated in 1877, two years after the Christian Arnold Toynbee, whose devotion to the needy, and early death, were commemorated by Canon Barnett’s founding of Toynbee Hall, designed as a community of graduates, who would, themselves, live and teach amongst the poor. Humphry, full of excitement, gravitated naturally to the East End, and lived in two rooms in College Buildings, a model tenement. He gave classes in all sorts of places on all sorts of things: the English, the Ideals of Democracy, Sanitation, Henry V, the Gold Standard, and English Literature. At Oxford, like everyone else, he had studied dead languages and maths. Literature excited him greatly. He taught Shakespeare and Ruskin, Chaucer and Jonathan Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. He was good at it. He acquired a following of students of all ages. He read aloud, with fire and clarity. He was helpful to eager women, after the class was over.

  In 1879 he put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a church hall in Whitechapel. The cast was a daring mixture of real workers and idealistic visitors. It was also a daring mixture of men and women. Humphry thought almost constantly about women, whatever else he was thinking of. He dreamed waists and ankles, unwound hair and the haunches that moved under the staid skirts. The Dream is a good play for women, but this project was (he knew it) entirely inspired by two particular young women who came to all his classes and sat at the front, asking clever questions. They were out of place amongst the Cockneys, Irish, Polish and German Jews. They spoke broad Yorkshire. Humphry’s own accent was educated Yorkshire, with some flat vowels. They wore plain, well-cut dark dresses, with very pretty little hats, decorated with gay silk flowers, anemones and pansies, poppies and violets. The elder was strikingly lovely, with huge brown eyes and coiled mahogany hair. The younger had the brown eyes, but lesser, and usually cast down, and nut-brown hair scraped subtly tighter. They were certainly not condescending lady visitors. They were the deserving poor—their gloves were threadbare, their shoes creased and worn—but there was something loose and wild about them under the respectability, that appealed to something wild in Humphry.

  He had made friends with a young Cambridge man, Toby Youlgreave, who was writing a dissertation on Ovid, in the hope of a Fellowship at Peterhouse, and lecturing to the East End audiences on English Fairy Mythology, his real passion. Toby’s Christianity was fraying, but he believed there were more things in heaven and earth than most people dreamed, and told Humphry, seriously, over a beer, that he had seen uncanny creatures, not only in woods near Cambridge, but passing between market stalls, or peering out of windows, in the Mile End Road. Our world was interpenetrated, he said. We had known it in the past. We have lost the knowledge. He was a large-shouldered man, of middle height, with impressive buttocks and calves, and a thick head of lion-coloured curls. His eyes were as blue as the Pied Piper’s, candle-flames where salt is sprinkled. His lectures were popular, for various reasons. Craftsmen came for ideas for brooches and carvings of English little people or haunting spirits. The religious dissatisfied came in search of the spilt spiritual content of their lives. Mothers came for tales to tell children, and teachers for information. And then people came because word went round that you could never quite tell what Mr. Youlgreave would say, or what he would claim to know.

  It was some time before the two friends realised that the Misses Grimwith were sitting in the front row of both the lectures on Literature and those on Fairy Mythology. They also realised that both were smitten by the elder Miss Grimwith.
>
  Toby said to Humphry “It’s you she prefers. You have gravitas. You impress her. I’m a buffoon.”

  Humphry didn’t disagree: it was what he thought himself. He said “We could put on the Dream and she could be Titania. I’m sure she could do it. We could combine our classes.”

  Naturally, Humphry directed. In the end, he couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else playing Oberon. He offered Toby Puck, but Toby said he had always wanted to play Bottom, and that way he would at least lie in Miss Grimwith’s arms. They borrowed a Church Hall in Whitechapel, and auditioned Miss Grimwith, whose rich, light voice rang out, perfectly. Miss Violet Grimwith, offered Hermia, or Hippolyta, said she had no ambition to act but would make the costumes, as she was a dressmaker. They found a wiry cockney barrow-boy, who was a perfect Puck, and a tall blonde lady librarian for Helena. The Athenians were a pleasant mix of visiting gentlemen and indigenous workers. The costumes were generally judged to be aesthetically brilliant. Olive Grimwith was dressed in floating moonsilver with peacock feathers, silken flowers and naked feet. Humphry wanted to get to his knees and kiss the feet. He tormented himself with detailed thoughts of other things he wanted to do. At the end of the fairy dance at the end of the play, he whirled her into the wings, and took her into his arms.

  They were married in the Whitechapel Register Office in 1880. Violet came, and Toby Youlgreave, and witnessed the marriage.

  Humphry did not immediately tell his family that he was a married man. He was living on an allowance from his father in Yorkshire, who believed that Humphry was preparing for a university teaching career, and did not mind—indeed approved—his charitable enthusiasms. A son, Peter, was born two months after the wedding. Some months later, Humphry took his bride and his baby, and introduced them to his brother. Katharina Wellwood was by then herself expecting a child (Charles, born later in 1881). The baby Peter was irresistible, at the confident, smiling stage. Olive was elegant and ladylike. Basil lectured Humphry on improvidence, and on responsibility, and found him a regular job, as a clerk in the Bank of England. It was not what Humphry would have desired, but it was a steady, if modest, income. Humphry, Olive, Violet and Peter moved into a little house in Bethnal Green. Humphry turned his sharp mind to banking. He needled Basil by joining the arcane bimetallism dispute siding with those who proposed a double monetary standard. Silver and gold, both, should be basic monies, to the obvious advantage of our Empire and traders in India. Basil, with most of the City, staunchly supported the Gold Standard. Basil felt, but did not say, that Humphry was shifty and ungrateful, as well as irresponsible.