The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  E. M. Forster grieved over the invasion of Abinger by machines and the violation of Chanctonbury Ring. Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloomsbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jefferies and later W. H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land—both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.

  English earth is confined, even where it is wild, by what Melville called the masterly and alien ocean. Its fields are confined, its copses are enclosed and managed, its footpaths are well trodden. Visitors from South Africa and the Far East feel odd on British earth. They have the sense that none of it is pristine, all of it has been trod and trod and trod, from the Stone Age on. Compared to the Cévennes and the Massif Central the wild Yorkshire moors are a pocket handkerchief on a tarpaulin. Poets, as well as peasants, deplored the enclosures of commons. It is a sad fact that military camps, like the one at Lydd, tend to preserve wild species, birds and plants, by excluding curious and loving humans along with human predators.

  German earth is different, though Germans at this time, in a largely landlocked country, under its Kaiser with maritime ambitions, also felt the huge pull of earthly nostalgia. Germans, until the twentieth century, had lived in small walled cities, between which extended their Wald—not Robin Hood’s hiding-place in the greenwood, but miles and miles of Black Forest, sombre forest, alien forest, haunted by creatures and presences altogether more dangerous and threatening than Pucks, boggarts and that squat nasty fairy, Yallery Brown, stuck in the Lincolnshire mud. Germans went back to the earth. They went hiking and singing up mountains, into the Wood. They were Wandervögel, going back to Nature (an ambivalent goddess). They too, camped by lakes and plunged naked into their depths. They became vegetarians, and wandered the streets of Munich and Berlin in earthy garments, wholesomely constructed by killing only vegetables. They worshipped the Sun, and the earth mothers who had preceded patriarchy.

  The inhabitants of Schwabing retreated, or progressed, to the community of saints, artists, and nature-lovers on the Mountain of Truth, the Monte Verita, in Anconà, beside a Swiss lake. Here in 1900 came Gusto Gräser, a poet who played with his name, which meant grasses, and said he was in search of roots, the roots of plants, roots to eat, the roots of words, the roots of civilisations and mountains. He eschewed not only meat, but metal, which he believed should be left inside the earth, in its place, inside rocks. He lived in caves and slept in wayside chapels. His brother, also believing that the use of metal implied mines, miners, foundries, armaments, guns and bombs, made a house of wood, using its natural sproutings and forkings as forms. He lived there with Jenny Hoffman, who wore date stones, for buttons, on her clothes. They danced there. Rudolf Laban later led his chain of naked maenads celebrating sunrise by the lake, in the meadows. Lawrence and Frieda came there, Hermann Hesse and Isadora Duncan. The anarchist Eric Mühsam came and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whose father, a criminologist, wanted him locked up for lewdness and drugs. Everyone wore sandals, like pilgrims, like apostles, like ancient Greeks.

  Max Weber believed that the modern world was an iron cage, ein stahlhartes Gehäuse, an engine casing. The Naturmenschen tried to break the bars, to go back. Carl Gustav Jung came to believe that the minds of humans were moulded not only by human inheritance, and individual history, but by the earth, the soil, which grasped their roots. Deutschlands Boden, German soil, was put to use by völkisch thinkers and believers in racial purity as well as by those desiring to go back to Nature and Mother Earth under the Sun. There was birth, and there was rebirth, enacted by the Sun Hero who returned to the tellurian depths, confronted the terrible Mother, or Mothers, and burst out again into the sunshine. Siegfried was a Sun Hero. So was D. H. Lawrence, a miner’s son, reborn as a German sensibility after finishing Sons and Lovers, having read the letters of Otto Gross, Frieda Lawrence’s earlier lover, and The Meaning of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud.

  A concomitant, but not consequent, backwards stare was the intense interest in, and nostalgia for, childhood. The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild.

  But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. One aspect of it was male clubbable behaviour, eating school suet pudding in gloomy surroundings, playing japes and jests on fellow house guests, retreating into boating expeditions, and hikes, and picnics, playing elaborate practical jokes on the unsuspecting, disguising themselves as Middle Eastern potentates (Virginia Woolf) or newspaper reporters (Baden-Powell in the army in India). They were good at playing with real children—H. G. Wells turning a nursery into a model field of war, or a series of railway junctions, Baden-Powell, again, amusing the children by pretending that his feathered helmet was a chicken. They used waggish school jokes in their letters: Tee hee! My wig! They wrote wonderful tales, also in letters, for their solemn children, of messing about in boats, of picnic baskets, of getting lost in the Wild Wood in the winter and finding a comfortable hearth underground in a badger’s holt, of tooting horns in automobiles and making idiots of the Law.

  Richard Jefferies wrote about Bevis in the 1880s. In Wood Magic Bevis is a small child who could speak the languages of the woodland creatures. He can speak their language, but his vision is schoolboy and lordly, unlike that more subtle forest child Mowgli. He knows spiders are male, and the thrushes he converses with kindly allow him to collect one egg, as long as he leaves one, and tells no other boys.

  In Bevis, the Story of a Boy he makes a raft, and a camp, and plays at being an explorer in the deserts and jungles of the Empire. He plays at making stockades, like Jim in Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, and goes home for tea and bread and honey.

  In 1901 James Barrie wrote The Boy Castaways for the Llewellyn-Davies boys, Peter Rabbit was published, and Kipling published Kim, the tale of a boy scout. In 1902 E. Nesbit wrote Five Children and It, a tale where resourceful, unwise children meet a sand-fairy. In that year Barrie published The Little White Bird, in which an embryonic Peter Pan, the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, made his first appearance. This book was given by the sage naturalist W. H. Hudson to David Garnett, son of the publisher Edward Garnett, and Constance Garnett, the translator of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. David Garnett, who did grow up, in some ways at least—he became a “libertine” on principle and attracted both men and women—found the book sickening, and returned it to the giver, saying he did not like it. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, was staged (in a primitive form) in 1904. Rupert Brooke went to see it twelve times. In 1906 Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared, and so did The Railway Children and Benjamin Bunny. It was seriously suggested that the great writing of
the time was writing for children, which was also read by grown-ups.

  Kenneth Grahame, who wrote for the decadent Yellow Book in its golden days, published Pagan Papers in 1893, TheGoldenAge in 1895, Dream Days in 1898 and The Wind in the Willows in 1908. He had what might be thought of as a grown-up job; he was Secretary to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

  He married in 1899. He was forty and an archetypal pipe-smoking bachelor. His new wife turned up to the wedding in an old white muslin dress—“dew-wet from a morning walk,” with a wilting daisy chain round her neck. She was a girlish thirty-seven-year-old.

  He wrote to his wife in baby talk. “Jor me no more bout diet cos you are mixin me up so fritefly. I eets wot I chooses wot I dont want I dont & I dont care a dam wot they does in Berlin thank gord I’m British.” His son, known as Mouse, had to be sent away with his nanny to the country because his favourite game was to lie in the road in the path of approaching motor cars, causing them to halt abruptly.

  In 1905 Major-General Baden-Powell, in charge of the British army in Mafeking, was fascinated by Peter Pan which he saw twice. That year, Baden-Powell proposed unsuccessfully to Miss Rose Sough. She was eighteen. He was forty-seven. He finally married in 1912, when he was fifty-five and his wife “a girl of twenty-three,” a tomboy who became a Lady Scoutmaster. He constructed camps for Boy Scouts and was moved by photographs of naked boys bathing. One of his interests was watching executions—he would travel many miles, and cross frontiers, to be present at them.

  In Germany, there were theories of children and childhood. A child, according to Ernst Haeckel, was a stage in the evolutionary development of an adult, as a savage was a stage in the development of a civilised human being. A life recapitulated the history of the earth—the embryo in the womb had the gills of a fish and the tail of a simian. Haeckel had a religion of nature, finding the good, the true and the beautiful in the forms of life, from radiolarians to Goethe. Carl Gustav Jung took up this idea, and came to believe that the thoughts of children resembled those of ancient peoples. He drew a parallel “between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between the lower races and the dreams.” The human soul was layered, from the roots of the mountain to the conscious tip. The child lurked and cavorted in the lower levels, occasionally rising like captured Persephone, to sport in the flowery meadows.

  Meanwhile, in 1905, Sigmund Freud published his Three Essays on Sexuality, including one on infantile sexuality. Infants, he said, were polymorphously perverse. Thumb-sucking, ear-stroking, pleasure in the wind in your knickers as you swung rhythmically in a swing tied to a branch, pleasure in the speed of the motor car and the pistons of trains, all these were indications of a masked and active sexuality. Children desired their mother or father, wished to marry her or him, had fantasies of slaying the other parent. An Austrian bourgeois of his time, Freud felt able to judge these propensities. Children had not constructed mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust, morality. “In this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists… Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession …” Freud knew that children were not sweet, or gentle, or carefree. He knew they could hate. He quoted Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman. “As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and that’s her eldest sister.” In England, that remark is flippant, a drawing-room witticism, an Oscar Wilde shocking paradox. In Germany, where Max Reinhardt put on Shaw’s plays along with Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Gorky’s Lower Depths, it would be received with a difference.

  Everyone went out into the tamed and changing earth, and made camps. From Ancona to Chipping Camden, where C. R. Ashbee had led his East End guild of craftsmen like Aaron into the Promised Land, and had immediately constructed a huge communal mud-bath of a swimming-pool, people went out into the air, built temporary shelters in tree roots, practised skills that in some cases were derived from the scouting and tent-building skills of Mafeking and Ladysmith. David Garnett camped with the four wild and beautiful Olivier sisters, Brynhild, Marjorie, Daphne and Noel, who climbed trees like monkeys and dived naked into rivers from ancient bridges. (Their father was a Commonwealth Office minister, Sydney Olivier, a founding Fabian who spoke out against the Boer War and was sent to govern Jamaica.) These combined with the perfectly beautiful Rupert Brooke to form the Neo-Pagans, along with James Strachey, who was hopelessly in love with Brooke. Later, the Fabians themselves ran educational summer camps, with lectures, and gymnastic drills. Baden-Powell made many rules, moral and practical, for Boy Scouts, and later, with his sister Agnes, for Girl Guides. He drew on American Native woodcraft and British military camaraderie, as well as Kim and Mowgli. There was a camp at Hollesley Bay Colony on the East Coast, visited by Beatrice Webb in 1905, where broken-down men were to be put together again. She went also to a Salvation Army camp in Hadleigh Farm, where they collected released convicts, tramps, drunks and vagrants, fed them, helped them and preached at them. There was also an idea current amongst anxious social thinkers about the undeserving poor, which said that the “concentration” camps invented by the efficient British army in South Africa might be used to segregate—even, it was suggested, to sterilise or put down—the irredeemable, the hopeless, the dangerous.

  • • •

  Time passed at very different speeds for all these people, between 1901 and 1907, when one event changed all their lives. For some it ticked like metronomes, for others it lurched giddily, for some—the little ones—it still resembled space, boundless and sunlit, boundless and shining with snow and ice, always threatening impossible boredom, always offering corners to go round, long, long roads stretching ahead. There were measures for some—menstruation, exams, parties, camps, pay days, cheques in the post, deadlines, telegrams, crises in banks. And for others, day after similar day. Some bodies got older rapidly—the babies, the menopausal. Some appeared hardly to change at all, from year to year.

  Ann Warren changed most, and felt time, paradoxically, as something hanging and slow. She was a neat baby, a brown baby, like a hazelnut, Frank Mallett said, presenting her with a woollen jacket and knitted boots. She learned to sit up, and sat where she was put, and looked around Marian Oakeshott’s cottage garden, seeing hollyhocks and marigolds she assumed were eternal. One day she stood up, and staggered from grass to border, crashing down amongst the delphiniums and knowing them now as an acrid smell as well as a blue series of towers. For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect. She learned language, and faces, Elsie and Marian, Tabitha and Robin, who pushed her over and kissed her better, his red hair blowing in the breeze. She learned to expect sweets from Patty Dace and Arthur Dobbin and Frank Mallett, who made her daisy chains. Marian Oakeshott said to Elsie, as they walked with their children along the Military Canal in the summer of 1903, that she thought Ann was a very clever child, a noticing child, a thinking child. “Like you,” said Marian to Elsie.

  “Much good it has done me,” said Elsie to Marian, not denying that she was clever.

  “It’s not too late,” said Marian. In 1903 Elsie was twenty-four. She would be twenty-eight in 1907, which is almost thirty, and was no longer “young.” She was already afraid in 1903 of being somehow solidified into resignation in 1907.

  “It is too late,” she said to Marian, whom she had come to care for. “I done for myself having Ann, you know that. So I must sit in this Marsh and slave for these silly women. I made my own bed. Or at least, I put the mattress down.”

  “I don’t ask Tabitha to look after Ann so that you can settle down in a Slough of Despond. What do you want to do? You must want something.”


  Elsie wanted sex, but there was no one to offer it whom she would have touched, and Ann’s coming had made her wary. She wondered if Marian wanted sex. Once, thinking about desire, which she didn’t do for a good year and a bit after Ann’s birth, she had said to Mrs. Oakeshott “I expect you still miss him terribly.” And Marian had said “Who?” And Elsie had known, as Marian smoothly talked over her mistake, and said she missed him all the time—Elsie had known that Marian was in the same position as herself, that there was no Mr. Oakeshott, dead or alive. This made her feel less beholden—which was good for her—and protective, which was also good for her. She knew Marian knew she knew. She knew neither of them would ever mention her knowledge. She felt a kind of love for Marian’s courage and resourcefulness.

  She said now, with her usual sharpness, “Girls from my class, mam, are not encouraged to want things.” The mam was a joke, they both knew. They walked on in silence. Elsie said

  “I did want to make very small pots. Miniature pots. I still do sometimes, when Mr. Fludd and Philip are away. But then I squash them up again, almost all. It’s hard having Philip around. I know what a really good pot looks like, and I know his look like that and mine don’t mostly. They can exist or not, it don’t matter.”

  “You’d be better off being a teacher than a sort of servant.”

  “Hah! And how should I be qualified to do that? I don’t read too well.”