The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Edward, a big boy like his father, had gone cheerfully down the mine, or so Olive thought, if she thought about it, for she had never “known” Edward, who was too big to notice her. Petey, on the other hand. Petey. He was a year older than she was, and took after the mother, rather than the father, a slight little person, though wiry, with his mother’s fine mouse hair. (Olive’s raven abundance came directly from Peter.) He was a boy who wrote poems, and knew the names of flowers and butterflies, and said to Olive that he knew he must go down the mine, but it was not what he wanted. What? Olive whispered into his ear, in the dark, in bed, where they clutched each other for warmth and comfort. What do you want? And Petey said, it’s hardly worth me thinking to want anything, since I can’t have it. And Olive said, I would think, if I was a boy. And Petey said, isna that t’same thing, really? Tha knaws tha mun be a girl, an I knaw I mun go down t’pit.

  Petey went down the pit, as he must, and because he was little, was set to watch a gate, as a trapper. The tunnels’ ventilation, and the containment of fire damp, depended on a series of low gates that were operated by small boys, squatting in holes scooped out of the pit-wall, holding a string, which they pulled, to let the trucks pass. They sat for twelve-hour shifts in the dark, under the low roof, waiting for the sound of approaching trucks. Petey told no one how frightened he was both of the dark, and of the shifting narrowness of his hole, with miles of earth, and coal, and stone pressing on it, and somehow on him. But the night before he went down the first time he gripped Olive tightly and said “What if I canna? What if I darena?”

  And Olive had an imagination of herself, asked to go down there, and of how she would begin to scream and flail in the descending cage, howling to return to the surface. For she could not imagine bending her neck under that threshold, creeping willingly into that dark. They held each other and trembled, and there were tears on both faces, hot and wet.

  When he came up, the first time, Petey said, it wer non sa bad. But the next morning, Olive could feel him rigid with terror.

  He got used to it. He had been tugging his string in the dark just under a year, when far above, the bed of the River Gull trembled, quaked and boiled with bubbles, which were observed by an interested farmhand. This man saw, to his amazement, the river begin to pour away from both sides, through a gaping chasm under its banks. He began to run. He understood that the earth between the bed of the river and the roof of the mine had given way, and water was pouring into the workings. He ran two miles to the pithead, and men went down with messages, and others came back, who had managed to sidestep the rolling torrent, which was filling up tunnels and shafts, cutting off communications with outlying passages.

  Petey’s little hole filled up. Olive did not know if it filled up fast or slowly, if he had tried to escape, or been immediately overwhelmed. Bodies of boys—six of them, and seven men—were sucked along and spat out by the coil of filthy black water. A rescuer fell into an unexpected pothole and was also drowned.

  There was a service in the Chapel and a collection for a memorial stone near the site of the disaster. Peter Grimwith seemed smaller. He walked hunched, looking at the ground. He took Olive on his knee still, after tea—she was almost too big—but he had little to say, no stories, no pocketed secrets. Lucy did not weep in front of the other children. She was pregnant, she coughed perpetually, the rims of her eyes were scrubbed and red. She too, despite her swollen belly, seemed to be shrinking.

  Six months later the whole village was shaken by a series of booms and cracking sounds. They knew what it meant, they lived in dread of it. Everyone left what he or she was doing—a pie half-covered, a boot half-cleaned, the newspaper squares torn up for the ash pits—and went quickly, a few running, most walking fast, very fast, to the head of the shaft, where flames and cinders and hot grit were flying in the evening air. Men came up, and tried to say where the damage was, where men must be trapped. Olive stood holding Violet’s hand, because Violet had grasped her. She would have preferred to have no human contact, not to be, to be in abeyance altogether. Not knowing was intolerable. He was alive, he would come up, they would cling to him and weep. He was dead. They would bring up his body. Or not, if it was consumed, or buried too deep in the treacherous carbon swamp.

  They never found him, nor any of those who had been working with him. The waiting was as long, and as bad, as could be imagined.

  Once Olive woke at night with the idea that Peter and his mates were still alive down there, in a pocket of air behind palaces of rubble, waiting for rescue that couldn’t, and didn’t, reach them.

  These two stories were folded away in the oiled, roped package. The knots were sealed. The woman walked across the moor, in the wind, with the closed, calm parcel, containing the obscene things.

  When Lucy took to her bed and began to die, with the new baby who refused meekly to take milk, or begin to live, Olive stood by her bed, still as a stone. Violet was wonderful. She made beef tea, having begged the beef from the neighbours, she spooned it into Lucy’s cracked lips, she wiped her face, she stroked her hands, she bent over and pulled back the red eyelids, peering under and in. Lucy’s sister, Ada, came from Batly and urged Lucy to live. Auntie Ada and Violet were not friendly to Olive. Stir your stumps, cried Ada. Violet whimpered, and shook the dying woman, compulsively. The person who saw how it was with Olive was Lucy herself, who said in her own mind, struggling less and less often to consciousness, she’s taken too much, she’s all done in. But she found she couldn’t lift her hand to beckon to Olive, or get her mouth to form words. Her last real emotion was anxiety over Olive’s stony stare. Don’t be hard, she wanted to say, and couldn’t. Well, if I can’t, I can’t, she said to herself, and closed her eyes for ever.

  Auntie Ada’s husband, George Mablethorpe, had had an accident in the pit five years earlier. His hip had been crushed by a fall of rock. He sat at home and mended things—boots and shoes, broken china with invisible rivets. There was a son, Joe, who worked down the pit and brought home some of his wages, but the family’s income, and standing, were precarious. Ada was a dressmaker. She sewed pit clothes in heavy cloth, servants’ uniforms, skirts and petticoats. She set Violet, who was good with a needle, to helping her and learning her craft. Olive was good with books, but not with a needle. She had won a scholarship to the high school, and Peter had been proud of her. Auntie Ada let her go on going to school for a year. When she came home at teatime she worked. She scrubbed the wooden closet seat. She knelt on the cement floor to scrub it and she scrubbed the floor, in its stink. She cleaned boots, she peeled potatoes, she polished knives, she scrubbed the front doorstep. Auntie Ada decided she couldn’t be kept in clean pinafores and tidy boots and took her away from school. She didn’t like Olive. She decided to send her into Service. That way, she would not need feeding, and could send back some of her earnings.

  Olive went first to be a housemaid for the owner of a vegetable shop in Doncaster. She wore a black stuff uniform and a heavy pinafore, and an ungainly starched cap like a helmet. Her legs were too thin for the black cotton stockings which hung in folds round her ankles. She was an object of disgust to herself, and her employer felt her presence as baleful. She was sent back to Auntie Ada, and said not to give satisfaction. Auntie Ada bent her over her own sharp knees and beat her with a hairbrush.

  She was sent off again, after consultation with the minister at the Chapel, to be maid of all work to two maiden lady schoolteachers in Conisborough. The Misses Bean had a bookcase full of books, and were genteel. Olive had to pretend to be two maids—a scullery maid enveloped in a mob cap and a thick apron, a parlour maid who brought tea in a starched lacy crown and a frilly apron, with a bib. She hated these clothes. When she looked at her face in the mirror in the morning she imagined a lady, in a ball-gown and a coronet sort of thing. She was growing prettier, and could see it.

  If Olive had been nicer, or more pliable, or more pathetic, the Misses Bean would have discovered that she had been made to give up
a scholarship, and might even have lent her some books, or sent her out to lectures or evening classes. But she continued to look haughty and baleful, and they continued timidly to criticise her ironing, or darning, or silver-polishing. There was a day of hideous embarrassment for all three of them when Olive came into the breakfast-room and said she would have to give notice, as she believed she was dying.

  “Dying of what?” asked Miss Hesther Bean.

  “Of an issue of blood,” said Olive, quoting the Bible, cramped by her first period, bleeding profusely, completely uninformed. The Misses Bean could not bring themselves to explain. They sent for next-door’s Cook, who explained, roughly, not kindly, and showed Olive how to cut up, and wash, strips of old sheets.

  She told herself stories. She had told stories to Violet, when they were little. “There was a green cow and it would not go into its shed, no matter how hard it got hit. It would not, because it didn’t want to, and they got dogs to bark at it, and they got ropes to pull it, and, and, and, they put hay for it in its shed, but it would not.” “Why wouldn’t it, Olive?”

  “I dunno,” said Olive, whose vision of the cow’s extremity was clear, but who saw no reasonable outcome.

  She lived in two stories when she was in Service. One was conventional enough. There was once a noble lady who had been stolen from, or had to flee, her true home, and was living in disguise, in hiding, as a kitchen maid. Riddling the ashes, after all, was what such heroines had to do, they were all smeared and bleared with ash on the path to their epiphany in ball dress and jewelled slippers. There was need of a prince, and she looked for him, as maidens did in folk-magic, swimming out of the darkness behind her candlelit face in the mirror (she was going to be beautiful, that was something, the ugly duckling was qualified to be a swan, the ash-girl to be a bride). Only there was no substance to the shadow. There were words. Handsome, dark, dangerous, wild (she read romances). But no solidity. He was faceless. And worse, he did nothing, so there was no story, only the significant ash-riddling. Once she found a real little jewelled pin in the ashes, hot gold, with tiny blue stones and enamelled leaves. She took it out, and hid it behind a brick in the wall of the backyard. It was a talisman. But the magic it would work was not yet brewed.

  The other story was, as storytelling, more satisfactory. Once (only once) Peter and Lucy had taken their children by train to the seaside, to Filey, where they had taken lodgings for a week, and played and paddled in the great sandy bay. Filey had been clean. The sea had been vast. You went down a steep hill, and into a tunnel under the promenade and the road, and you came out on the blowing soft sand, beyond which was the hard, wet sand, with its rippled surface and its pools of salt water. She began to tell herself a story of a boy, Peter Piper, imprisoned in an orphanage, a boy alone in the world, with no one to love, and no one who loved him. And this boy formed a plan, which he carried out with meticulous patience, to escape at night and walk to the sea, away from the soot and the sludge and the sulphur. This tale was as precise in the telling as the other was loose and vague. Everything had to be imagined, and worked through—the staircase in the orphanage, the bolt on the inner door of it, the great locks on the outer, the stolen key that released them, the oil that silenced the grinding of the mechanism.

  Step by step, literally, as Olive Grimwith performed her household tasks, Peter Piper marched into liberty, along long city roads with lurking beggars and coal-delivery men, onto a highway, through villages (not real villages, she knew the names of none, but villages with greens, and ducks, and geese, and shops with jangling bells on springs over the door). Peter developed blisters, and Olive limped across the Beans’ kitchen. Peter was hungry, and turned aside into a field, where a kindly shepherd gave him a sandwich—no—gave him cheese, and an apple—delicious, crumbly cheese and a hard, sweet apple—her mouth watered.

  There were pursuers, of course—the authorities, the master to whom Peter was to be apprenticed—Peter lay hidden in a ditch and saw their boots go past—

  It was in fact Violet who suggested, one Christmas, when Olive was on a brief visit to Auntie Ada and her family, that perhaps they should run away.

  Violet was covered with bruises which Olive had only half-noticed. Her mind on Peter Piper, and the road to the seashore, she asked Violet where they should run to.

  “London, I should think,” said Violet. “We could get work of some sort there. I’ve saved up enough for one train ticket. We’ll have to take the money for the other out of her purse.”

  And so they came to be in the audience of Humphry Wellwood’s English Literature lectures, dressed in blouses, skirts and hats made by Violet, who had found a good job in a dressmaking shop, and had found work for Olive, too, in plain-sewing, nothing fancy.

  Violet had thought this might be a good place to find, as she put it to herself, a step up and out.

  Olive found Humphry, and the rhythms of Shakespeare and Swift, Milton and Bunyan, which she thought she had craved all her life without knowing it.

  They stepped up, and out.

  Whilst Olive wrote her stories, Violet instructed the smaller children on the lawn. It was a hot, bright day. The servants were finishing clearing the end of the party. Violet was settled in a sagging wicker armchair, her workbasket beside her, darning socks, pulled neatly over a wooden mushroom, which had been painted like a fly-agaric, scarlet with white warts. Phyllis, Hedda and Florian were doing “nature study” with a collection of flowers and leaves they had collected. Tom and Dorothy, Griselda and Charles, were lying around on the lawn, half-reading, half-listening, half-making desultory conversation. Tom was supposed to be doing his Latin. Robin slumbered under a sunshade in his perambulator. A cuckoo called, from the orchard. Violet told them to listen.

  “In June he changed tune,” she said.

  “Cuck,” cried the cuckoo abbreviated.

  Violet told about cuckoos.

  “They make no nests. They borrow. They lay their eggs secretly in other birds’ nests, among the other eggs. The mother cuckoo picks the foster mother carefully. She lays her eggs when the foster mother is fetching food. And the foster mother—a willow-warbler, maybe, a bunting perhaps, feeds the stranger fledgling as though it was her own, even when it grows much larger than she is, even when it is almost too large for the nest, it cries for food, and she answers …”

  “What happens to her real children?” asked Hedda.

  “Maybe they leave early,” said Violet vaguely.

  “It pushes them out,” said Dorothy. “You know it does. Barnet the gamekeeper showed me. It pushes the eggs out, and they go splat on the ground, and it pushes the fledglings out. It goes round and round and shoves with its shoulders, and tips them out. I’ve seen them on the ground. And the parents go on feeding it. Why don’t they know it isn’t theirs?”

  “It’s surprising what parents don’t know,” said Violet. “It’s surprising how many creatures don’t know their real parents. Just like Hans Andersen’s ugly duckling, which was really a swan. Mother Nature means the baby cuckoo to survive and fly away with the other cuckoos to Africa. She takes care of it.”

  “She doesn’t take care of the willow-warblers,” said Dorothy. “If I were the willow-warbler, I’d let it starve.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” said Violet. “You’d do what comes naturally, which is feed what’s crying out for food. It’s not so easy to decide who are your own real children.”

  “What do you mean?” said Dorothy, sitting up.

  “Nothing,” said Violet, retreating. Then, almost sotto voce, she said to the mushroom-stocking “Who is a child’s real mother? The one who feeds it, and cleans it, and knows its little ways, or the one who leaves it in the nest to do as best it can …”

  Dorothy could hear Violet’s thoughts, as she had heard Philip’s. This was not the first time Violet had spoken this way. She said, turning to science for help,

  “It’s just natural instinct. For the cuckoos, in their way, and the willow-warblers in
theirs.”

  “It’s the kindness at the heart of things,” said Violet. She stabbed at the sock with a needle. Charles said, in an audible undertone,

  “Lots of people aren’t really their parents’ children, don’t really know who their real parents are, you hear about it all the time—”

  “You shouldn’t be listening to such things,” said Violet, with a return of force. “And folk shouldn’t be telling you.”

  “I can’t help having ears,” said Charles.

  “Then you’d better wash them,” said Violet.

  Hedda took up her shoe-dolls. “All these have no father or mother, only a shoe. They are mine to look after.”

  Something had become very uncomfortable. Tom put his nose in his Latin. Griselda proposed to Dorothy that they go for a walk in the woods. Charles said he would come, and Tom.

  “Cuck,” said the cuckoo in the wood. “Cuck, cuck, cuck.”

  “It’s funny,” said Dorothy, “how it knows it’s a cuckoo when it comes to flying to Africa, it goes with the cuckoos. I wonder what it thinks it is, when it goes. It can’t see itself.”

  They went into the woods, two by two, two boys, followed by two girls, all four clothed in shabby, serviceable Todefright clothes in which trees could be climbed, and brooks could be forded. They were going to the Tree House, which was a secret, hidden place, which very few people knew about or could find. It was woven into the tentlike lower branches of a Scots pine, which was the central roof-tree, stitched together with cord and strings, thatched with heather and dead bracken, disguised with more random branches. It had two rooms, with spy-hole windows. It was possible to lie out on its roof, amongst the arms of the tree, and there were couches of heather, and wooden box tables inside. It was Tom’s favourite place on earth. Inside, and wholly hidden away, he was himself. He thought of the Tree House as his place, although the designing intelligence, the solidity of the construction, were Dorothy’s. Dorothy liked to bring things to it, to study them—small skulls, and unusual plant forms. She also liked to go into it with Griselda and talk intensely for hours. Tom assumed that they talked, for he had the grace not to go with them. And because he left them together, they in turn left him his long periods of solitude, when the house was his hiding-place. There was always the problem of Phyllis, who insisted on tagging along, if she noticed they were going there, and was unwelcome both because she tried to “play house” in it, with mummies and daddies, and because Tom, Dorothy and Griselda knew that she was the weak spot in their tissue of silence. She might tell, she might enjoy telling, and had to be both threatened and bribed.