by Sarah Moss
‘Mummy read it!’
‘Why, Mummy?’
I thought about why. Because I don’t want you to. Because I don’t want your grubby fingers on my nice clean keyboard, adorned so far with the detritus of chocolate stolen from you and the odd drop of claret. Because I think of my laptop as part of my mind and you do quite enough buggering around in there. I opened one of the big recycling bags provided by Oxford City Council.
‘Because I’d like to do something with you, and because those games encourage you not to think about other people.’
‘Moth in a bag?’
‘No, love. Absolutely not.’
‘Read Lucy and Tom!’
I dumped an armful of bureaucracy into the bag.
‘But I don’t like thinking about other people.’
‘Mummy read it!’
‘Just a minute.’
I held the bag open under the table and swept all the papers off the edge. A cup in which islands of blue mould floated on what was once tea rolled off the edge of the table.
‘Oh Mummy! Bugger a tea.’
I picked up the cup, and on second thoughts added it to the bag. When it’s my turn to take the rubbish over, I sometimes dump the recycling bag in landfill anyway, just for the thrill.
‘That’s why it’s good for you. All right, Moth. Once upon a time there were two little children called Lucy and Tom. This is a picture of them in the early morning.’
‘You said we could choose what to do and now you’re doing Moth’s thing and not mine! It’s not fair.’
‘Lucy is big enough to get out of bed and put on her slippers and her red dressing gown. Tom sleeps in a cot. He throws all his toys out, one by one – bump – on to the floor. I didn’t say you could choose, I asked what you’d like. Three people usually call at Lucy and Tom’s house before breakfast, the paper boy, the milkman and the postman. Lucy is scraping the last bit of porridge out of her bowl.’
‘But now you’re doing what Moth chose and you won’t let me do what I chose.’
A better mother would have them cutting out dragon scales by now.
‘Raphael, for goodness’ sake stop whining like that. I’m offering to play with you. Think of something we’ll all enjoy. After breakfast, Lucy is very busy helping her mother about the house.’
‘You just keep reading that stupid book and tidying up and you won’t ever do what I want.’
Moth pointed at Raphael. ‘No shouting at Mummy! Raph being very boring.’
‘I am not being boring! Mummy, he called me boring!’
‘No shouting at Moth!’
‘He’s not shouting at you, darling. And I really don’t spend all my time tidying up. Raph, you’re just wasting time we could be spending doing something fun. We could do potato printing, or make a dragon collage, or we can go look at the village.’
I picked up a tea-towel with brown stains and discovered that it was concealing a pile of Giles’s smug organic lifestyle magazines, which even he doesn’t actually read, although I suspect him of leaving them in the kitchen in the hope that I will follow the recipes. I added them to the bag.
‘I don’t want to look at the bloody village. If they’d built it properly it wouldn’t have fallen down.’
I made a final effort.
‘We can go look and see if we can work out why it fell down.’
‘I want to play on your computer.’
‘More reading!’
The sink was surrounded by empty jars awaiting recycling, some of which had been there since we were here last summer and none of which had been properly rinsed. I tumbled them on top of the magazines, and was then inspired to remove from the cupboard several jars which we appeared to be keeping out of a superstition – originated, I feared, by Julia – that minute scrapings of Marmite and mustard might be capable of parthenogenesis if left to themselves for long enough.
‘Mummy read it!’
‘I said, I want to play on your computer.’
I knotted the bag.
‘At half-past ten, the children have a drink and a biscuit. If it is fine, they go into the garden.’
‘Mummy, I said I want to play on your computer!’
‘And I said you can’t. Why don’t we make a card for Daddy’s birthday?’
Moth waved his arms. ‘Cake an’ candles! Pick Moth up!’
Giles’s birthday wasn’t for another month, but I could imagine the manufacture of a card taking that long.
Raph slammed his book on to the floor. ‘Because it would be crap.’
‘Raph, come on. We’ve talked about this. It’s better if you don’t use words like that.’
‘You do.’
I put Moth down and he sat on the floor and leafed through Building Bridges. ‘I know I do sometimes, but people get offended when children swear.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Raph, I don’t know, they just do. Because they like thinking children are innocent.’
‘What’s innocent?’
I like this kind of conversation. Conversationally, sometimes, I’m a good mother.
‘It means either you haven’t done anything wrong or you haven’t meant to do anything wrong. It’s the opposite of guilty. I think it comes from Latin. Daddy would know.’
‘What does that have to do with saying “crap”?’
There was the sound of tearing paper. I grabbed Raphael as he lunged.
Raph pounced, fists raised. ‘Mummy, he’s torn my book! Mummy, I hate him, I don’t want a little brother any more! I’m going to hit him!’
Moth looked up, half a page waving in a damp hand and apparently unmoved by his brother’s onslaught. ‘Oh dear, Raph being very boring again.’
‘No, Moth, no tearing. No tearing books. Poor Raphael. Give me that page, Moth. Raph, I know you’re very angry but we don’t hit people, do we?’
Moth waved the page at the window and giggled. I wedged Raphael under my arm and he kicked at the Cassingham ancestral armchair. Just under eleven hours until bedtime and no papier mâche or gingerbread in sight.
When Giles came back I was stirring yoghurt into Moth’s soup so it contained some calories. Giles put his arm round my waist and kissed me.
Raph watched. ‘Daddy, why did you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Kiss Mummy.’
‘I always kiss Mummy. Shall I kiss you too?’
‘Kiss Moth! Lunch nearly ready!’ shouted Moth.
‘No, you don’t kiss Mummy.’
Moth’s soup was now too liquid for him to manage and I was already behind on the laundry. I crumbled some bread into it, making the kind of mess that no one over the age of three would be asked to eat, even by me. Raphael was right, Giles doesn’t kiss Mummy.
Giles sat down. There was no birdshit on his shoes or clothes.
‘Anna, are you remembering that the Fairchilds are coming at the end of the week? I’ve ordered extra soap and loo paper but we still need some books over there and I’m afraid someone’s going to have to make up the beds and put out towels and such. And I told her we’d supply the basic groceries, salt and oil and so on.’
I put his bowl in front of him. Vegetable soup, made with vegetables and water. Heinz do these things better, because that’s what they get paid for. ‘By “someone” and “we” do you by any chance mean “Anna”? And would “and so on” happen to take out any stray hours of research time?’
‘I’m pretty busy, you know. And it is in your interest as well to make this work, now we’ve sunk all that money. Jake says the painting will be done and dry in time but there are bound to be snags.’
I put my own bowl down and took a deep breath. Moth was putting handfuls of soup on his face. I felt like eating about as much as I felt like putting on a frilly pinny and skipping about with a feather duster.
‘Oh, so this is about the destiny of the son and heir, is it? And my obligation to sacrifice my foolish little ideas about writing for the greater glory of the Cassingham dyn
asty.’
He put his head in his hands like a husband in a 1930s farce. ‘No. It’s just about us making our project work, that’s all. You and me, remember? Our project for our island. That we worked on all year. That was, actually, your idea. That’s all it’s about.’
‘Oh.’
There was a silence.
Raphael took the last spoonful of his soup and left the room with his bread and butter. Blue sky showed through a hole high in the mounds of cloud outside, and I could see Jake’s boat cutting a white furrow across the sea. Off to the mainland for supplies. Again.
I turned my spoon over in the bowl. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just so worried I’m going to lose everything.’
‘Not everything. Not, for example, me or the kids. You just might not get another academic job straight away.’
Moth yawned and looked surprised.
‘Come on, love. Let’s have that top off. And we’ll find you a clean one and then time to go have a sleep, OK?’
I rolled his top off so the soup didn’t transfer to his hair, wiped his hands and face and picked him up. He patted my face. ‘Mummy very sweet.’
I kissed him.
Giles watched us for a moment. ‘I’ll take him up, if you like. Have your lunch. Then maybe we could go over together and talk about what we need to do before Saturday.’
‘OK,’ I said. I sat down.
‘Mummy,’ said Moth.
‘It’s all right, love. Daddy take you up.’
‘Daddy?’ Moth held my gaze over Giles’s shoulder as he went off down the hall. I should have gone to find Raphael, but I sat at the table, gazing at the patterns of the children’s spilt soup and listening intently to the note of guilt twanging somewhere at the back of my mind. I have sinned, yes, I have put not just the recycling but the charity bags in landfill, because it’s easier than taking them to the shop. I have never cleaned a fridge. I have twice slapped Raph and once put newborn Moth down to sleep on his front in the half-hope that he would not wake up. I have kept an extra ten pound note when given too much change in a perfectly pleasant restaurant. But there were other things too, reverberating just out of sight. I shook my head, as if to get water out of my ear, and started to stack the plates.
While the influence of Rousseau on literary treatments of childhood in this period is obvious and well documented, it is interesting that there is little evidence of his work having any effect on the lives of children. Children’s experience is notoriously difficult to reconstruct, but the childcare manuals studied in this chapter, taken together with accounts of the foundling hospitals and boarding schools, suggest an era in which, contrary to prevailing Romantic ideology and the practice of a very few experimental childcare practitioners such as Dorothy Wordsworth, the days of children living away from their birth families were assiduously managed to conform to immovable routines, with very limited variation or stimulus beyond prescribed and authorized activities. As ever, it seems that the relationship between the theory and practice of parenthood may be inverse.
The middle sentence was too complicated. I sat for too long looking at ‘suggest an era in which’ and then stretched until my shoulders cracked. Darkness peered in through the window. I could hear Giles reading to Raphael upstairs, something about space travel and computers with gold lettering on the front, and I could hear the sea, which was beginning to calm down. I needed a footnote for ‘well documented’, even though anyone who had read anything at all on the subject would know it was true. A footnote, at least, would push me closer to the word limit, which was more of a word goal. I typed ‘See, for example’ and then gazed at the screen. I use a photo of the children as my wallpaper, not because I like looking at it but to remind me that my time is limited and I mustn’t mess around, and Moth’s feet stuck out from under the footnote. I wondered about making a cup of tea or, better, finding another bottle of Hugo’s claret. And maybe some chocolate. Though if Giles found me foraging in the kitchen he might reasonably conclude that work was less pressing than I had claimed. There was a cluster of lights out at sea, signifying a container ship making its stately way to or from America, a great floating car park carrying plastic toys in their impenetrable packaging and new shoes nesting in tissue paper, the frozen corpses of lambs from the green hills of New Zealand and tuna fish that had nosed the seaweed of the tropics, a cornucopia of the unnecessary topped by small cabins where men had distilled their possessions down to the truly essential and lived, like the hermit, without the tangles of objects and demands that snare most of us. I let my chair thud forward and Googled ‘ww2 Colsay evacuees’. Google is no way to conduct academic research.
People have been generating history on purpose. The archive held more than five thousand first-person accounts of evacuated children, which are either oxygen for the next generation of historians or an obfuscation of the historical record. History is a retrospective that needs to be partial and fragmentary if we are to make any sense of it. There is no story in the muddle and pain of real life, rolling from century to century in births, couplings and deaths distinguished only by the settings and costumes in which we enact them, only a twisted familiarity. I tried and failed to imagine the mess that would result if every Pict had tweeted an account of Roman occupation, every Roman his or her own personal narrative of the decline and fall, every Saxon peasant a full and frank account of conversion to Christianity, every Viking farmer the detail of the theft of every Saxon cow. If every human presence on this planet left a story. A written record that is a mere simulacrum of real life in all its trivia and futility is worse than nothing; it seemed suddenly possible that social networking sites are in fact the end of History. Which is not of immediate concern to an eighteenth-century specialist. Two clicks later I had found what I was looking for.
The Castle School’s wartime location was even more beautiful than our usual abode. The owners of Colsay House on the island of Colsay off the north-west coast of Scotland offered their house to Miss Leach for the duration (it was only years later that it occurred to me that they might have thought it better to offer it to a genteel girls’ school than have their house requisitioned for military training or some such). Getting there was such an adventure for us! Most of us had never been so far north, and of course the trains were just a joke during the war – there wasn’t really a timetable at all and they were so slow and you could never ever get a seat. There was blackout by then and I remember me and my friend Mabel sitting on my suitcase telling ghost stories and getting sillier and sillier as we got more tired, until in the end a man told Miss Leach that if she couldn’t keep us quiet he was going to pull the cord and stop the train. And then we were in some kind of hostel in Edinburgh, and then another train and I think we walked the last bit, because petrol was so hard to get, and then at the end a boat. I’ve grandchildren of my own now and it makes me shiver to think of those two poor women shep-herding thirty girls on that journey, but it was wartime and you just did what you had to do.
Anyway, I still remember that first morning. It had been dark when we arrived but we woke up and you could just tell from the light that we were by the sea, and we all ran out in our pyjamas! It was only September, of course, and such a bright day – we didn’t know then that it would be the last time we saw the sun for weeks. The house was lovely, solid stone, but even so it was a terrible winter and we all had chilblains. We used to sit in lessons wrapped in blankets sometimes, but of course if anyone complained they got told to think about what our fathers and brothers were enduring and that shut you up pretty quickly. We’d always had quite a lot of freedom at school, children were more independent in those days anyway and Miss Leach didn’t believe in too many rules, but on Colsay we could do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we went to lessons and behaved like civilized human beings and stayed away from the cliffs at the north end. I don’t think there’s anyone living on the island now, which always makes me feel sad to think of it, but there were a few families stil
l farming then and because the house wasn’t big enough for all of us some were boarded out. They were so kind to us, considering. I mean, it wasn’t an easy life at all up there and most of the men were away, although farming was meant to be a reserved occupation, and then they got given all these silly English girls and there wasn’t much room in the houses to start with. They were lovely people. I think actually they felt sorry for us, coming from London as most of us did. They even let me milk a sheep! I’d never heard of anyone using sheep’s milk before.
Miss Leach had the idea that we should be trying to grow our own vegetables, same as everywhere else in the country. The locals told her it wouldn’t work, and of course they’d have been doing it themselves if they could – the food wasn’t exactly luxurious for them at the best of times – but she thought maybe they hadn’t tried the right varieties and she had us all out there digging and planting. We enjoyed ourselves, but I can’t say the results justified the outlay! We kept hens, which was more successful, and goats, though I’m sure we didn’t milk or eat those so I don’t know exactly how it was helping the war effort. Miss Leach and Miss Bower used to take it in turns to go over to the shop at Colla on Saturdays and we’d give lists of what we wanted with our sweet rations, though in practice you had to take what you could get, which was sometimes nothing! Of course there was no gymnasium, and nowhere really where we could play tennis or netball, so after a while Miss Bower decided we would have football instead, which was unheard of for girls but we rather enjoyed it, and some people tried to swim at the end of the summer term but it really was too cold.
I remember hearing about Dunkirk, but somehow where we were none of it seemed real, not until a few of the girls started to get bad news about their families. We had one girl, Esther, who’d come out of Germany on the Kindertransport, and she used to wake the others in her room with nightmares and crying for her mother, though of course we didn’t know then what was happening to the Jews in Germany, and someone else whose mother was in a house that got bombed out, and so on. The worst thing was one of the younger girls had an accident. She’d been boarded out with a lady called Mrs Buchan until Mrs Buchan had her baby, and then she had some bad news from home and she was in such a state she got the week off lessons. She took the baby off for a walk and went over the cliff – a terrible time. I remember them bringing her body back with a blanket over it and we weren’t even crying, we didn’t know what to do. It must have been very bad for her mother. I think we all had someone to grieve for, by the end, but it really was a happy time for me. I always meant to go back to Colsay but I don’t think it’s going to happen now!