by Angus Wilson
“That’d be best to take off th’ dress”, she said, and to encourage Myra, she took off her own cotton sunbonnet and pulled her blue cotton dress with its pinafore over her head. Folding it, she carried it under her arm. Some of the authority she normally exercised over the indistinguishables must have been communicated to Myra, for after a moment’s hesitation she, too, took off her fine blue-ribboned straw hat and her lace-trimmed dress.
Myra was secretly afraid of cows, but she did not like to say so to anyone on the farm (or indeed to her mother, for Mrs. Longmore, in her abhorrence of fear in children’s lives, did not like her own to mention that emotion). Now, to keep up her spirits, Myra showed off her petticoat, explaining how it was made of handmade lawn, and how the insertions and the top were of handmade Brussels lace passed down from her Cartier grandmother. The little farm girl listened and even felt the material with a look of interest, but not with what Mrs. Longmore would have called “wonder.” Or certainly no wonder for Myra’s having such a fine petticoat, for her attention had been suddenly and entirely caught by the real likeness between the Brussels lace and the flowers so long familiar to her that Mrs. Longmore had told her were called Queen Anne’s Lace. She had brushed her way through high standing clumps of these as she came from the beech hedge into the meadow. Now she ran back and fingered the creamy flowerheads.
“Look, that crumbles”, she called. With difficulty she broke one of the tough stems and held the flower out towards Myra; as she did so, clouds of pollen flew up from the mass of little florets.
“Stardust”, cried Myra, and then, because she longed to attract the Tuffield girl back into her own orbit, she started to pirouette again, “I’m the Princess of the Stardust”, she sang. She whirled round and round, moving towards the farm girl—she did not want to be separated from her in a field where there were cows, yet she did not want to seem to be at her call. “Scatter the Stardust for the Stardust Princess”, she cried.
The Tuffield girl threw the flower away into the hedge. She wanted to tell Myra not to be a softy, but it seemed better to say nothing.
In any case the Stardust Princess was soon in grief. Absorbed in her pirouettes, less sure-footed than the farm girl, she swung round into one of the few plashy, muddy patches in the field, where beneath the coarse grass an underground spring defied the months of sunshine. Brown-yellow clay mud spattered both her white stockings to above the ankle, splashed her snowy petticoat; the mud seeped, squelching, from her shoes. Discomfort and fright made her cry. The little Tuffield girl was always prepared for tears, they were so much part of her daily chores. If they were “temper tears”, she tried to copy her mother’s roughness with shakes and slaps; if, like Myra’s, they seemed “real”, she could express her own nature, one at once practical and tender. She wiped Myra’s face with her handkerchief; she cleaned the mud from the stockings with handfuls of long grass, and, when this only smeared the dirt, she tried to scrub it off with an end of her own pinafore soaked in spittle. The sunshine, a slight soft south westerly breeze, freedom, a sense of happiness not to be lost, loosened her imagination. She said,
“Stocken and shoe ‘d best be taken off”.
Before Myra knew where she was, she had been seated on a molehill, long since dried into a hummock, and before her was the small Tuffield girl on her knees removing the muddy white shoes, lifting up the petticoat to unloose the suspenders, peeling off the long white stockings. The sense of being served quietened Myra; she felt herself once again a princess, although she voiced no more royal commands. The farm girl hitched up her own faded and patched white cotton petticoat and, unclipping her suspenders, slipped down her black cotton stockings, and removed them with her shoes all in one movement. Barefoot, gingerly, the two girls stepped out across the field.
Myra, remembering her mother’s actions, slipped her arm round her companion’s waist, and, raising her lips to the other girl’s cheek, kissed her. The Tuffield girl seemed surprised, hesitated, then returned the kiss. Taking Myra by the hand, she ran across the meadow. Past the cows they went (whatever other result, Myra Longmore never feared cows again in her life, so reassuring was the hand that led her on), down to where the spikes of yellow flags shone in the sun.
“There’s water runnin’. There’s water runnin’,” the Tuffield girl sang out to a tune that came suddenly into her head. Myra joined in, and, dancing and singing, they came to a small brook. It was the Tuffield girl that led the way in, but both girls were soon paddling and splashing in the pebbly clear water. The cold was delicious to Myra after days of sweating heat, with (unlike home in Chelsea) no more than basins or hip baths to wash away the stickiness; to the Tuffield girl it was like discovering the Pole But after five minutes or so, the intense cold of the water contrasted disagreeably with the intense heat of the sun; the pressure of the pebbles began to hurt their feet. They jumped from the brook and started to pick the long yellow-headed flags. Then Myra, leaning too precariously to break a sharp sheath, dropped her straw hat into the stream. At first, she was as delighted as her companion, to see how quickly the brook carried it away from them. Then she became scared as she saw it bobbing off, crown downwards, like some worn-out old shopping basket, its ribbons all soaked and bedraggled. The little Tuffield girl was clapping her hands with joy when she was brought back to reality by Myra’s slapping her hand and crying,
“You’ve lost my hat. Mummy says the blue ribbons are adorable. It’ll be spoilt now.”
Partly to astonish Myra into silence or perhaps to comfort her by sharing her loss, partly from delight at this reversal of all seemliness, the farm girl took off her sunbonnet and threw it into the stream. Made of cotton, it sank immediately. But, of course, Myra’s hat was not lost. It had come to rest in a shallow among some wild musk. At first, they were delighted with the newly-scented hat, but, then, when Myra put it on, water trickled all around her face and neck from its wide brim. The Tuffield girl ran back and fished her own bonnet out to share disaster once again. The results were unequal, for the cotton bonnet could be wrung almost dry, and, though unsightly, was wearable; nothing but misery could come from the watery straw, and the dye of its adorable blue ribbons had started to run down the lace top of Myra’s petticoat.
It was the farm girl’s idea that they should leave their hats to their watery fate, but Myra was delighted with the notion: for as hats, hers was clearly the greater disaster, but as boats, hers was a stately schooner and the sunbonnet a shabby wreck. She began a long story of the straw hat’s future adventures, in which the blue ribbons had become adorable princesses. “And they sailed on and on and on until they came to a wonderful smiling lake where everything was still and beautiful . . .” For a little while the Tuffield girl stayed and listened to this story, because Myra’s voice had become so strangely like Mrs. Long-more’s as she told it; but soon she tired of such tinkling—”the princesses were so, so, so happy”, and “there swimming on the lake was a beautiful white, white swan”—when there was better noise to make for oneself as much as one liked and anything, even swans perhaps, to find. So she walked off on her own across the most soggy part of the meadow where the shade of overhanging elms allowed only zebra stripes of sunlight to pierce through.
Behind these elms stretched woodland as far as she could see. Here and there, where the earth was covered with low-growing ground elder, she could in fact see quite a long way down irregular avenues of even darker green splashed with sunlight; but in most directions her view was blocked by hazel nut bushes and tangles of wild rose and bramble. She thought it must be Paddock Wood, a huge wood of which she had often heard her mother give warning, for somewhere in a clearing of its trees there were sometimes to be found encamped gipsies. Gipsies were her mother’s supreme example of idleness and wickedness; they were not only a bogey for the children but they offered Mrs. Tuffield her chance, by ordering them off the farm premises or reporting them to the village policeman, of fighting the Devil made Flesh. But somehow the realisation tha
t she was so close to this famous occasional encampment of the Evil One neither drew the Tuffield girl towards the sinister wood nor sent her in panic running away from it. She merely turned her back to the trees and sat down propped against a huge knobbly hole of one of the elms. Above her she could see the smooth flat underside of a giant yellow fungus that protruded from the tree trunk. She gazed up at this for a while, and then turned her attention to the ground, to some wood-lice that in idly scratching away a piece of bark she had set in busy motion. But she was absorbed in neither the still fatness of the fungus nor the scaled scurry of the woodlice, they seemed merely objects helpful in crowding out thought or fancy. She was content, lying back in the warmth of the leaf-dappled sunshine, just to be; she could not remember such a thing before, she could only recall doing things or thinking about things to be done.
Myra was doing a great deal. Without any listeners, the story of the princesses and the swans soon began to sound empty, even though she tried to alarm herself by inventing a lake witch whose evil powers were unlimited; but she could think of no frightening thing for the witch to do that she had not thought of before. So she decided to make a princess’s crown of wild flowers; it could serve by crowning her own head to compensate for lack of an audience and perhaps it would compensate to her mother too for the loss of the straw hat (for she had already begun to long for and dread homecoming.) Mummy was always pleased when she made beautiful things and showed imagination. She was, in fact, very skilled with her fingers and had soon threaded a chaplet of buttercups, daisies, vetch, and lady’s slipper that would have satisfied most girls of her age. But her skill and the thought of Mummy’s needed praise made her ambitious. She decided to weave not just a chaplet but a full crown of braided flowers two or three inches deep. Across and round the meadow she ran, now bending low for many minutes picking bare a whole patch of tough-stemmed marguerites, now dashing off to the far edge where the grass ran into a wheatfield and poppies grew in profusion and among them a few cornflowers. With all her blooms selected she sat herself on a dry bare patch in the middle of the field, emphasising by her eminent isolation her independence of the farm girl, who was so unconscious of her. She was quite intent for half an hour before, with the sun beating down on her un-familiarly bare head and arms and legs, she began to feel first flushed, then sore, and, at last, sick.
When she stood up, she became giddy. She began to cry, as she ran towards the other girl, “I want to go to my Mummy. I want to go home.” In her distress, she dropped her clothes and shoes and the crown of flowers. The Tuffield girl picked them up and added the garments to her own bundle, but the crown of flowers had fallen in pieces. She would have left them on the ground, but, to distract Myra’s fears, she gathered them up and handed them to her.
“That was a rare little old crown”, she said, then, remembering Mrs. Longmore, corrected herself, “That’s proper beautiful, Myra. We’d best go into the wood. That’ll be cool there for you to mend it.”
Myra was afraid to go into the wood; after the strong sunlight she seemed to be entering night’s blackness; she blinked and stumbled. The elder girl took her arm to guide her away from the bramble thickets; but her firm grasp was painful to Myra’s burnt skin. She broke from her crying, “You hurt me. You hurt me.” For a moment a vision of Mrs. Longmore’s beautiful eyes distressed at the sight of her adorable Myra burned, and behind her the harsh condemning lines of her own mother’s waxy face and, worse, the flashing black anger of her father’s eyes, filled the Tuffield girl with sick panic, but her sense of well-being was strong enough to flood through her, washing all other thoughts away.
Myra meanwhile was almost hysterical; rage and fright and discomfort pressed on her so; she ran among the brambles and the briars, half hoping for disaster, half terrified at her own panic. Her ankles and feet were scratched, the precious lace of her petticoat hem was sharply torn. At first the little farm girl called after her by her name, but when she received no response, she changed to a soothing, clucking sound much like that she used when feeding the hens. Violet sometimes got out of control and then only such a sound could hush her. It worked now with Myra, too, for she came limping back to the pathway that the older girl had trampled out among the ground elder, and lay there, curled up, whimpering and muttering so that it was hard to hear her voice. It was still the sunburn and the heat she complained of, though she seemed quietened a little by the cool of the undergrowth. Most of her wounds were only grazes, but above her right ankle a thorn branch had cut sharply into the flesh. It was Mrs. Tuffield’s first aid method to ignore “as fussing” all injuries unless they bled; but bleeding wounds she instantly bandaged, not with any aim to heal, for she never cleaned any wound, but rather to hide any tiresome evidence that her children were really in pain. Her eldest child had learnt these methods exactly. Her own rag of handkerchief she had discarded in favour of the snail shells; nor could she find any in the pockets of Myra’s dress. Then a wonderful idea came to her. In her life of minding and doing she did not have much on which to sharpen her intelligence except the organisation, the better ordering of her daily chores; all this last year she had been seized with a new pleasure—that of finding ways and means that served two purposes at once. It was this new thrill of killing two birds with one stone to which she had attached Mrs. Longmore’s frequent phrase “a wonderful idea”. So now she took off her petticoat— it was an old one of her mother’s cut down but not cut down enough, and, in any case, to bandage a wound was surely so important that her mother must forgive her—and unpicking the hem she tore it away in one long strip. With this she bound Myra’s ankle. But that was only half the deed done; more important was to persuade Myra to follow her own example and take off her petticoat. In that way she would be cooler and what was more the Brussels lace would be safe from the thorns and spikes—oh, it was “a wonderful idea”, a kind of three in oner!
“Look”, she cried, and she stood up in her camisole and drawers and twirled round, “Look! I’m cool, I’m cool!” and, indeed, she felt cool and free and happy as she had never felt before. Myra was horrified.
“Oh, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t. Someone might see.”
“There’s no one and if there was your mother said we was to ‘feel free’.” (The phrase came from one of Mrs. Longmore’s defences of Liberty gowns, one of her diatribes against the deforming tyranny of the corset, but how was a farm girl of twelve to know the proper limits of Kleidreform?)
Myra felt the force of the other girl’s joy, was drawn into imitation of the freedom of her movements. Soon the two little girls each in camisole and drawers, the smaller the proud wearer also of a liberty bodice, were seated among some cool-leaved clumps of wild arums mending the crown of flowers. When it was done and Myra acknowledged as Queen, both girls felt contented and friendly to each other as they had not done before on that afternoon. Not even Myra’s highly-coloured, dramatic and menacing version of The Babes in the Wood, literally learnt at her mother’s knee, with which she now appropriately entertained the elder girl, diminished in any degree their enjoyment of the dark wood’s sun-splashed coolness; nothing seemed alarming there—neither the sudden clacking of pigeons in the tree-tops, nor the scuttling flight of rabbits in the undergrowth, nor the untimely nearby hoot of a barn owl disturbed in its rest. They kept along the winding path of low undergrowth with the high elms and oaks and hornbeams protective above them. The Tuffield girl led the way, treading down the elder and garlic and loosestrife, bending back the fretful arms of bramble that barred their way. All thought of gipsies had gone from her mind, though she remembered with content that Paddock Wood was said to be so big, she hoped that it might stretch on for ever.
And then suddenly the dim light ahead of them grew brighter, until wish how she might, there could be no doubt that the trees were growing sparser, the undergrowth changing to scrub, the wood coming to its end. Soon they were making their way among saplings of hazel and blackthorn and at last on to a patch of rank grass
that sloped down into what seemed a gulf across which they could see another grass bank. But the opposite bank was carefully fenced and mown; along its crest stretched a neat laurel hedge through whose yellow-spotted leaves she could glimpse a garden and the wistaria-clad ironwork of a verandah. For a moment the little Tuffield girl stood stock still as though she had walked into a dream, for here where Paddock Wood should have stretched on forever was a place familiar to her if not on every day, at least in every week. Then she knew—the unknown wood they had come so enchantedly through was not Paddock Wood at all, but a small copse very well known to her from the other side—the very side on which they were now standing. The verandah and garden belonged to the rectory, which she passed every Sunday on her way to church, the rectory where she was to go into service whenever (or if ever) Rosie grew old enough to look after the others. And the gulf between them was the Church Lane; from the back of the farm they had come by a way unknown to her to a place only a few minutes from their own front gate. She was about to turn as quickly as possible back into the copse, back to the happy land where her stay had been so short, but Myra had seen further down on the rough bank’s slope the mauve of a rare patch of scabious and the Queen must have them for her Crown. Already in hasty descent to get what she wanted she had slipped on the bank’s surface and was sliding contentedly down the slippery outcrop of chalk. The eldest Tuffield resigned herself to following. But now Myra sent up a wail of distress, for the sharp descent of the bank carried her on relentlessly past the scabious, on to bump painfully on the dusty road below. The Tuffield girl, doggedly setting her heels in one after another of the bank’s many rabbit holes, managed to avoid such a precipitate slide, stopped herself by the clump of flowers and picked a handful as an offering to allay Myra’s misery. And so they did. The mauve pincushion heads were worked into the front of the crown like some semi-precious stones. And then, since they had arrived at the road, and the shortest way back was so directly before them, Queen and lady in waiting must set off for home. But even into Myra’s royal fantasy and the farm girl’s sudden Grace there crept some prudential sense of their daily world, of policy and pleasing and deportment. Even royalty must be robed to walk down Church Lane, however spattered and tattered the robes might be—as to the hat, the floral crown would surely in its beauty compensate Mrs. Longmore for its loss (Myra was sure it would), and the Tuffield girl counted on Mrs. Longmore’s powerful intercession before the doom seat to save her. But they must be decent for fear Father or Mother should chance to see them before they found Mrs. Longmore to present her with the crown.