The Children's Book

7

Humphry left on Monday morning to resign his post at the Bank of England. He was full of nervous excitement. He told Olive, who was resting in bed, that he would speak to the Secretary and ask for his resignation to take place immediately. He said he should miss the Old Lady. He thought he might stay in Town and see a few people. He would go to the Yellow Book evening in the Cromwell Road, and have a word with Harland. He would call on Henley at the New Review, and drop in at the Economist. And perhaps take the train to Manchester and talk to the Sunday Chronicle. Olive remarked mildly that at some point he would need to settle and actually write something. And added that she hoped Oscar’s arrest with a yellow book under his arm had not finished the magazine.

“It was only a French novel. Not Harland’s Yellow Book.”

“Nevertheless, they had their windows smashed by a nasty crowd.”

Humphry in his city suit bent and kissed his wife. She was never responsive in the early days of pregnancy, another reason for taking a trip elsewhere. He said he would get breakfast sent up.

“And send Tom, if you see him.”

“Of course.”

In the hall Violet held out his overcoat and his hat, with his briefcase. He wondered if Violet knew Olive was expecting. He knew remarkably little about what the sisters knew about each other. He said “Look after the house, Vi.”

“You may be sure I shall.”

Tom came up with the breakfast, which Ada had put on a tray. Olive said, as she always said, “Come to my arms my beamish boy,” and they both laughed. Tom put the tray on the bedside table, and bent into Olive’s embrace. She was flushed. Her hair was a dark pool against the pillows. In earlier days Tom had snuggled into bed with her, and she had told stories of the inch-high warriors who marched through the counterpane’s hills and valleys. Later, both he and Dorothy had been invited to curl one at each side, but Dorothy was gawky and the whole thing became less cosy. He had for some time been too big to get into the bed. But he sat on the edge, and patted the unseen limbs under the covers, and said he was sorry she didn’t feel well. She smiled, and said it would pass. She thought she would have a working-in-bed day. Perhaps he would fetch the story books? She had had a few new ideas. Tom kissed her again, slid off the bed and went downstairs.

The story books were kept in a glass-faced cabinet in Olive’s study. Each child had a book, and each child had his or her own story. It had begun, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns. Tom’s was inky-blue-black, covered with ferns and brackens, some real, dried and pressed, some cut out of gold and silver paper. Dorothy’s was forest-green, covered with nursery scraps of small creatures, hedgehogs, rabbits, mice, blue-tits and frogs. Phyllis’s was rose-pink and lacy, with scraps of gauzy-winged fairies in florid dresses, sweet-peas and bluebells, daisies and pansies. Hedda’s was striped in purple, green and white, with silhouettes of witches and dragons. Florian’s book was only little, a nice warm red, with Father Christmas and a yule log.

The project had begun with Tom’s discovery, in his story, of a door into a magic world that appeared and disappeared. The imaginary door was in a real place, in a Todefright cellar full of coal and cobwebs. It was a small, silver trap-door, that would take a child, but not an adult, and it could be seen only by the light of the full moon. It led into an underground world full of tunnels, passages, mines, and strange folk and creatures, benign, maleficent and indifferent. It turned out that Tom’s hero, who was sometimes called Tom and sometimes Lancelin, was on an apparently endless quest to find his shadow, which had been stolen by a Rat, when he was in his cradle.

This tale had been so successful, that Olive had invented other doors, in the fabric of their daily reality, for the other children. Dorothy’s alter ego, a stalwart child called Peggy, had found a wooden door, with iron bolts, in the root system of the apple tree in the orchard. This proved to be a way into a strange country populated by half-beasts, people and creatures who could change their skins and sizes, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, so that you might find that you were a human child one moment, and a hedgehog the next, hiding in dead leaves. There were wolves in this land, and wild boars. Phyllis’s character, a princess who had been changed for a little servant girl, found a crack in a teapot she was being made to wash, in the middle of a picture of a pretty glade, in which ladies danced, with flutes and tambourines. You could make yourself small enough to slip through the crack by chewing a certain kind of Chinese tealeaf, known as gunpowder, which came in hard little pellets and unrolled into leaf shapes in hot water. In Phyllis’s story there were princes and princesses all waiting in castles, frozen or sleeping, for the redeemer to find the clue, and release them. Hedda’s way in was inside the grandfather clock in the dining-hall. You could see the gateway whilst the clock was striking midnight. It led to a world of witches, wizards, woods, cellars and potions, with children roosting in cages like chickens in need of setting free, and wondrous contests in shape-shifting between magical dwarfs and wizards, black ladies and blue gnomes. Florian’s story had hardly begun. It was possible his door was in the chimney, where he claimed to have seen a hefty scarlet figure with a sack. It was also possible that he would grow out of that, and make another world. In the interim, his story was peopled by his stuffed toys, a bear called Furry, a white cat called Snowy, and a stripy knitted snake called Ringary. In the world through the portal they were figures of power, sleek and glossy, Bear, Cat and Snake.

Tom looked into his book. The story had advanced a page or two. A group of seekers were descending a dark tunnel—they were the shadow-less hero, a gold lizard the size of a terrier with garnet eyes, and a transparent, jellylike formless being who poured along the ground and constantly changed shape. A new figure had appeared, who ran in front of them, leaving soft footprints in the dust. There was some question as to whether it was the lost shadow, who had taken on substance. Or it might be another seeker, a friend or an enemy or simply a stranger, in the dark.

The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless. They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit onto the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning. There were tributary plots, that joined the mainstream again, further on, further in. Olive plundered the children’s stories sometimes, for publishable situations, or people, or settings, but everyone understood that the magic persisted because it was hidden, because it was a shared secret.

All of them, from Florian to Olive herself, walked about the house and garden, the shrubbery and the orchard, the stables and the wood, with an awareness that things had invisible as well as visible forms, including the solid kitchen and nursery walls, which concealed stone towers and silken bowers. They knew that rabbit warrens opened into underground lanes to the land of the dead, and that spider-webs could become fetters as strong as steel, and that myriads of transparent creatures danced at the edge of the meadows, and hung and chattered like bats in the branches, only just invisible, only just inaudible. Any juice of any fruit or flower might be the lotion that, squeezed on eyelids, touched to tongue or ears, would give the watcher or listener a way in, a power of inhuman sensing. Any bent twig might be a message or a sign. The seen and the unseen world were interlocked and superimposed. You could trip out of one and into the other at any moment.

Tom delivered the heap of books to his mother in her nest of quilt and counterpane. She asked him if he had peeped. Of course, said Tom, of course he had peeped.

“Who do you think is running in front of them?”

They made the plot between them, some of the time.

“A lost boy. A boy who fell in by accident, down one of the shafts?”

Olive considered. “Friend or enemy?”

Tom was not sure. He said he thought the intruder was not sure. He could turn out to be either. He still thought he could get out quickly, Tom told his mother, he hadn’t learned how hard it was to get out.

“I’ll work on it,” said Olive. “Now go and do your Latin.”

Olive was sometimes frightened by the relentlessly busy inventiveness of her brain. It was good and consoling that it earned money, real bankable cheques in real envelopes. That anchored it in the real world. And the real world sprouted stories wherever she looked at it. Benedict Fludd’s watery pot on the turn of the stair, for instance. She looked casually at the translucent tadpoles and had invented a whole water-world of swimming water-nymphs threatened by a huge water-snake, or maybe by that old terror, Jenny Greenteeth, lurking in the weeds and sifting them with her crooked fingers, before she reached the landing.

Yesterday’s events had also transmuted themselves into story-matter, almost as fast as they had happened. She had watched Anselm Stern’s version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale with glee—her response to any performance, any work of art, was the desire to make another, to make her own. She was in that world, watching, not in flat dailiness. The gliding movement of the puppets, the glitter of the limelight on their silk organza dresses, the half-visible strings, like spider-silk, had transmuted into other figures in other lights in her head, almost before they had performed their own sequence of movements. Suppose a puppet managed to free itself and come to life, and strut and nod amongst clumsy humans, with their thick, fleshy fingers? It wouldn’t be like Pinocchio; the creature would have no desire to be a “real child,” just a desire for independent life. For a moment, at the terrible point when Olimpia disintegrated into a whirl of severed limbs, Olive had done Anselm Stern the justice of simply responding to his art, of feeling simple shock. But then she was away again. Supposing a puppet become a real creature met a doll who refused to be real, who was inert, waxy, complacent? There were dolls who somehow had souls—or characters, or personalities anyway—and there were dolls who resolutely refused to come into being, who simpered and sat like suet. Dorothy didn’t like dolls. Phyllis had a whole cot full of both kinds, the living and the lifeless. Suppose the newly freed puppet walked into a nursery and was attacked by a flannelly array of simulacra—of course, she had got this idea from Olimpia, in the first place, how clever Hoffmann was—you could make a truly eerie tale for children, but you must be careful, she knew, not to overstep some limit of the bearable. She often came close to overstepping it. Indeed, her success as a children’s writer had begun with The Shrubbery, which did come very close to the impermissible, indeed, according to some percipient critics, crossed the boundary. But children liked to glimpse the unbearable, in manageable doses. She herself had had a book, as a child, Hans Andersen’s Tales. Her mother had read to her, “The Princess and the Pea,” “Thumbelina.” She had been filled with horror for the inch-high girl, in the care of the stupid kindly mouse, who was promised to a stout, blind, black Mole who would take her underground to bourgeois comfort where she would never again see the light of day. It was probable, Olive thought, that the whole complicated wanderings of Tom underground had started with her own childish fear of Thumbelina’s mole-tunnel.

She spread honey on her toast, and sipped her tea. Tom had put a little posy of wild flowers on the breakfast tray, heartsease and bluebells, and a few fronds of fern. She felt a movement of nausea as she bit into the toast, which the sugar of the honey alleviated. An unbidden image of the unborn child inside her came into her mind, something coiled in a caul and attached, like a puppet, by a long thread to her own life. She tried very hard to feel neither hope nor fear for the unborn. If she thought of them, it was more in terms of the waxy stillborn, with their closed faces, than in terms of a potential Tom or Hedda. She feared for them, and their presence disturbed her peace. Also, she cared for them, she took care. She bit into the honey and butter and bread, nourishing herself and the blind life she had not exactly invited to settle in her. She turned her mind to the shadowy fugitive underground.

Olive Grimwith was a miner’s daughter. Her father, Peter Grimwith, had been a buttie, hacking away at the coal-face in his stall, under the very ground she walked over, to get to school, or the Goldthorpe shop. Her mother was Lucy, who had been born Lucy Appledore, a draper’s daughter, in Leeds. Lucy was a small, thin, exhausted creature, who hoped to be a schoolteacher, and knew things like the meaning of the name Lucy, which was “light.” There were five children, Edward, Olive, Petey, Violet and Dora, who had been an unexpected baby, and had died with her mother, of pneumonia, when Olive was twelve. Edward and Petey had both gone down the mine at the age of fourteen. Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from “there” and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals.

Olive Grimwith persisted in Olive Wellwood, not least because of the steady presence of Violet Grimwith, who had been little at the time of the disasters, and nevertheless felt the pull of roots, wanted to remember things, would say suddenly “Do you remember bread and dripping on Sunday? Do you remember greasing pit boots?”

It was Olive who, when she could not avoid it, could remember Peter and Petey, Lucy and Dora. Or so Olive thought.

The storyteller was not Lucy, who taught them their letters, and tried to teach them manners. It was Peter, who came home for his tea, his clothes stiff and black with coal dust, his eyes and lips red in his coal-black face, his fingernails broken and engrained with jet. He took Olive on his knee, after his bath, and told her tales of the world underground. He told her about the living creatures down there, the soft-nosed ponies who trundled tubs of coal along the tunnels, the mice and rats who whisked in and out of the ponies’ nosebags, ate the miners’ snap and chewed their candles, if they were not careful. He told her about the bright yellow canaries, trembling and hopping in their cages. They were a living alarm-system. If they suddenly fell dead, it was a signal of the approach of one of the invisible terrors, choke damp, white damp, fire damp. These were gases released from the deep slumber of the coal by the hammers and pickaxes of the miners, or by the collapse of a section of pit-props. For the coal, Peter Grimwith told his daughter, had once been living forests—forests of ferns as high as trees and brackens as fat as barrels and curling things that were scaly like snakes. And they were sunk and compacted into ancient mud. You could find the ghost of a leaf, millions of years old, or the form of a thirty-foot dragonfly, or the footprint of a monstrous lizard. Most wonderful was the idea that their vegetable death had only been suspended. The three damps were the exhalations of the gases of their interrupted decay. He told her the names of the dead plants which now smouldered and flared in their kitchen grate. Lepidodendron, sigillaria. He told her the scientific names of the gases that were the “damps.” Carbon dioxide, which smothered you fast. Carbon monoxide, which crept up on you, peacefully so to speak, smelling of violets and other sweet flowers. And methane, “which is what comes out of the back end of cows, Olive,” which was the fire damp. There were tales that rats sneaking off with smouldering candles had sparked huge explosions. “Perhaps you could put a match to a cow, Olive,” said Peter, and Lucy said “Hold your tongue, that’s not a nice thing to tell a girl.”

There were stories too of invisible inhabitants of the mines—beings known as knockers who could be heard tapping, a creature called Blue-cap, who was clothed in a flaring light-blue flame, and sometimes helped to push the tubs, a mischievous bogle-thing, called Cutty Soams, who delighted in cutting the soams, or traces, by which the ponies and the workers pulled the tubs and trams. You did well to put out a ha’penny for them, if you knew they were there. His tales of kobolds were as practical and as vivid as his tales of rats and canaries.

He brought home in his pocket, from time to time, a coal with a fernleaf apparently incised in it. And twice he brought one of the “coal-balls” for which the Gullfoss mine was famous. A coal-ball is a preserved knot of once-living things, compacted together, leaves, stems, twigs, seed-pods, flowers and sometimes even seeds, millions of years old. Olive Wellwood still had these petrified lumps, but she showed them to no one.

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.

Charles was allowed to come because he was not very interested in tree houses—he was urban by nature—but suitably admiring of the constructive skills that had gone into the building. Tom had wondered whether Philip would like the house. He thought he might, since he had been found in a hidey-hole. But Philip had already gone to the marshes in the carriage with the Fludds and Dobbin. Tom had also wondered whether to show it to Julian. Julian might not see how special it was. And Dorothy might not like Julian’s dominating presence. It was altogether too early to have views about Julian.

They sat down on the heather couches, which were covered with blankets, and Tom offered them all apples and toffees, from a store he kept in a box.

“What did you mean,” Dorothy asked Charles, “when you said lots of people aren’t their parents’ children?”

Griselda said that her friend Clementine Burt was always being teased because she didn’t look anything like her father, and then people pointed out that she did look very like Lady Agnes Blofeld, and her mother had said that was natural, because they had an ancestor in common. But her brother Martin had overheard their parents talking, and had told Clementine he was sure her father was Lord Blofeld. Charles elaborated. Lord Blofeld and Clementine’s mother had to have adjacent rooms at big country-house parties. It was well known by everyone. Dorothy asked if Clementine was very upset. Griselda said she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to talk about it. Dorothy was distracted by wondering whether Clementine was more Griselda’s friend than she was. Griselda added that Clementine had said she was sure she wasn’t the only one. Charles said Agnes Blofeld was quite put out, because Clementine was prettier and nicer than she was, the same sort of girl, but much more attractive. Tom did not like talk about whether people were attractive. He said, musing,

“If you found out your parents weren’t your parents, would you be a different person?”

“I think so,” said Griselda. Dorothy said it went back to what Auntie Violet had said, about your real mother being the one who took care of you and fed you and so on. She had always known that Violet believed, in some way, that she was their real mother. She saw why, but she did not think of herself, or want to think of herself, as Violet’s daughter.

Griselda said that Clementine had heard her parents shouting at each other, and her mother weeping.

Tom said everyone’s parents shouted at each other, didn’t they? Dorothy remembered being with Tom on the landing, overhearing a violent parental argument. “I have always looked after your children,” one had yelled, and the other had said, “And I may say the same.” Tom and Dorothy both knew that parents in rage referred to the children as “your children.” It was never pleasant for children to overhear such things, it could not be, they had become objects, bones of contention.

Sometimes they played a game of “Who would you like for parents if you didn’t have your real ones?”

You wouldn’t want to play that game if you were Clementine.

Tom thought of his life, the woods, the garden, the books, the human voices, the presences of family in and out of the house, the wonderful movement from comfort to freedom and back.

“We are a happy family,” he said, vaguely and gently. “Have a bull’s-eye? Or a pink fizz?”

Charles asked Dorothy if she was really going to be a doctor, or was it just something she had said?

“I just said it, and saw it was true.”

“I should like to do something like that. I don’t know if I could face all the mess of people being sick, let alone having to carve them up. But I think one should try to do something to make things better. Your father understands that. Mine doesn’t.”

THE SHRUBBERY

HERE WAS ONCE A MOTHER, whose husband had gone on a long voyage, and had neither come back, nor sent any news, for a long time. Consequently, the family had fallen upon hard times, though they lived in a pleasant house in the country, with gardens and orchards. Mothers in stories, in general, are of two kinds. There are mothers who are warm, and devoted, and self-sacrificing, and resourceful and endlessly good-tempered and loving. Then there are the other kind, who are often not mothers, but only stepmothers, who are unkind, and proud, and love some children (their own) better than others, and treat children like kitchen-servants, and will not let them play, or dream. If you had to choose, the mother in this story is a good mother, not a bad stepmother. But she is not perfect, as real human beings are not perfect. She has so many children that they call her Mother Goose, or Old Shoe-Woman, when they are teasing. She does her very best for them. She darns their clothes and turns sheets sides-to-middle, and makes nourishing food out of inexpensive—no, let us say honestly—out of downright cheap things, carefully simmered, made tasty with herbs that cost nothing. She makes sure that those who go to school have waterproof shoes. She scrimps and saves so that each child has some little gift to open on his or her birthday or at Christmas. She has sat up all night sometimes, making a pretty blouse out of an old dress, or a furry toy out of an old jacket of her own, that has worn so bald that she cannot go out in it. And anyway she has nowhere to go to. She has no time for visiting, nor friends to visit.

Most of her children were good-natured and helpful. They had their tasks—polishing spoons, fetching milk, watering the herb garden. The little ones ran about the kitchen and the yard like a flock of goslings and were of course often in the way, or underfoot. But there was one—neither the smallest nor the biggest, but perhaps the largest of the very little ones who were not yet at school—who caused trouble. His name was Perkin, but nobody used his name. They called him Pig. This nickname had a kindly origin. One of his sisters, peering into the cradle when he had newly appeared amongst them, had observed that he was shiny, like an “icky pinky pig.” And everyone had laughed, and ever so lovingly, they had called him Pinky Pig, when he was a plump baby, and just Pig, when he began to run about independently.

I think we all know someone who has an embarrassing nickname that would have been better discarded or not thought up in the first place. Pig found his natural enough, when he was very little, and even had a toy piglet, made of pink flannel, from whom he would not be separated. He took an interest in pigs he met on walks, or on visits to farmyards. But as he got older, he noticed people using his name reproachfully or mockingly. “What a little pig,” they said, when he ate too fast. “What a grubby little pig,” they said when he got muddy, which he often did, because he liked playing in earth, uncovering roots, studying earthworms. So somewhere he began to think his name meant that he wasn’t liked, perhaps wasn’t loved.

I am not saying that his nickname made him a naughty boy. Naughty boys are born every moment, and all mothers know that naughtiness is like curly hair, or blue eyes—it just happens. Pig was in fact a pretty boy, with yellow curls and bright blue eyes, sparkling with mischief. But he was most ingeniously naughty.

He brought things into the house, and stored them in odd places. He made a nest of worms in the flour bin, and the worms suffocated, and the flour had to be thrown out. He fed a whole seed-cake to the birds on the lawn, and the children had to go without cake for tea. He got in amongst the canisters on the dresser and mixed lentils with tealeaves, mustard with sugar, peppercorns with raisins. “My own cooking,” he called this, and wailed most dolefully when Mother Goose spanked him, which she did to teach him a lesson, which he refused to learn. He came in from the garden covered with mud and made himself a nest amongst the clean laundry in the basket, where he fell asleep, looking innocent and charming, like the Babes in the Wood. All the clean bedclothes and towels and shirts had to be washed again and mangled again and dried again and ironed again. And then he fell over, carrying a jar of paintbrushes in water, and landed headfirst in the washed-again clothes and soaked them with painting-water. He hid things—he hid teaspoons in mouseholes, and buttons in drains, and scissors in the pickle-jar, and forgot where he had put them. His long-suffering mother—and she was long-suffering—said that having him in the house was like living with a boggart or a naughty imp. Once, when he cut up his new collar to make it look like lace, she called him a changeling. What was that? asked Pig. But he got no answer. He was always asking questions, that was another thing. What was the wind, and why was this beetle dead and this one wriggling, and who growed the grass, and who were the little people in the roots of the shrubbery, and why did pigs snuffle, and what tapped at his bedroom window at night and why did people have to sleep when they could be awake? He got no answers because his mother was exhausted, and because most of his questions were asked in a shrill voice when one of the other children was already talking and saying something sensible moreover, about school homework or holes in stockings.

He liked collecting things. He had a bag of dead insects and a bag of special twigs and a bag of glass marbles, and a bag of personal pebbles, which were the collection he most loved. He knew them all, their knobs and smooth surfaces and rough places. Most of all he loved a piece of white limestone with a hole running through it, a self-bored stone he had found in the shrubbery. He would put it to his eye and say he could see things through it that were invisible. He said he saw little women trotting about on the draining board. He said he saw his mother’s hair full of spiders spinning long threads to make her a veil. He said he saw a mouse holding out a hank of gold thread on the ends of its tiny paws, for another mouse to wind into a golden ball.

There came a day when Mother Goose was particularly tired, and particularly sad, for she had received a letter in the post, and thought it might be news of her husband, but found that it was after all a forgotten coal bill. She was making pastry, to make a big pie for the children’s supper, with a little meat eked out with a lot of vegetables and herbs. It happened that the only child in the kitchen was Pig, as all the others were at school, or running errands, or playing with friends, or taking naps if they were little. Pig was playing with his marbles and pebbles, by the fender in front of the range. Mother Goose was suspicious because he was so quiet. She knew she ought to be pleased that he was quietly playing, but she was unhappy, and she was right to be unhappy, of course. She sifted the flour and fat through her fingers, and heard a faint clicking sound. She said, without looking round, “What are you doing, little Pig?”

“Playing at marbles,” said Pig. “The marble army is fighting the pebble army. The marbles is quicker and the pebbles is thicker.”

“You mustn’t let them roll around the kitchen floor,” said Mother Goose. “It’s dangerous.”

Pig didn’t reply. She was always saying things were dangerous, and no harm had ever come to him. When she turned back to her flour he sent out an advance party of marbles, the little green and rose ones he called “punies,” and they scattered satisfactorily round the hearth. The pebbles had to go after them. They made a solid formation in a square, and then, click, clack, crunch, they flew into the punies, and there was mayhem. Pig sent out a platoon of brown marbles, in support of the little ones, and the pebbles responded with a furious assault.

Mother Goose turned round. She said “I told you not to let them roll on the floor,” and Pig was startled, and dropped the whole bag of marbles, which went every which way. He started to scramble away to hide behind the coal-scuttle, for he saw he would be smacked, and he ground his knee on a marble, which hurt, and caused him to see that it was a bit dangerous.

Mother Goose came across the kitchen, intending to grab Pig by the ear and spank him. But she slipped on a rolling clutch of marbles and pebbles, and fell with a crash, knocking over the pastry-bowl as she fell. Her hair came unpinned and she hit her head on a table-leg and hurt her cheek and blacked her eye. Her hair was full of flour and her cheek was bloody, and she glared at Pig, she did glare. Pig decided she looked funny. It was better than deciding she looked frightening, though in fact she did look a bit like a wild witch. He laughed.

“That’s enough,” said Mother Goose. She began to gather up the pebbles and marbles and throw them into the waste basket. Pig shouted “Don’t” and Mother Goose said

“I have had enough of you. Go out into the shrubbery and don’t come back.”

Pig felt that the whole kitchen was turning round and round like the coils of smoky glass inside the see-through glass of the big alm-marbles. He snatched at his self-bored stone—he couldn’t save any of the others—and scrambled to his feet, and ran out of the kitchen door. He pulled it shut after him as best he could—he wasn’t tall enough to reach the latch. And he stood for a few minutes in the yard, waiting to be called but he wasn’t. So he trotted round the side of the house, and across the garden into the shrubbery, which was a big shrubbery, and overgrown, with things that shouldn’t be there, the snaking brambles and clumps of nettles and wandering tresses of bryony, for Mother Goose had had to tell the gardener she couldn’t pay him. For a person as small as Pig, the shrubbery was the size of a forest. Or at least, not to exaggerate, of a dense little wood. It had mazy paths, and things were reaching out to infest them, and obscure them, and cover them over, pennywort which runs riot, and periwinkle, plants which are pretty but need a firm hand, and untidy trailing plants with sticky burrs.

Pig didn’t usually go far into the shrubbery. He got his worms and his pebbles from the flowerbeds in front of the house. But he thought he would just show Mother Goose, so he marched in, and went on marching in.

As he got further into the trees and bushes, and further away from the house, he had the feeling that the bushes, and the undergrowth, were getting bigger, and that he was getting smaller. He went a little more slowly—he didn’t really know exactly where he was, by now, for the shrubbery was laid out like a maze, and Pig was far too small to see over the top of anything. He might be going in a circle that would lead to the mouth of the first path he had entered, or he might be pressing further and further to a hidden centre. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the leaves were long on the other leaves and the gravel path, shadow on shadow, like a grey web over the green. At the same time all the things in the shrubbery appeared to be more solid, and more full of the deep greens and tawny browns of the things that grew there. He stopped to look at a holly. A holly is a living creature in any case but this holly seemed to him to be full of almost too much life, of a different kind. The shiny leaves almost seemed to be giving out a green light, and the few berries seemed to be redder and rounder and glossier than any berry he had ever seen before. And yet at the same time, they were caught in the thick net of almost solid shadows. Pig said to himself, I am not afraid, which meant, of course, that he was. He clutched his white stone tighter, as though it was a talisman. He saw a little clump of toadstools with silky fawn surfaces and the most lovely pleated frill of very pale flesh-colour whorled round above the pearly damp stems. He had the odd idea that he wanted to be the holly-berry, or the toadstool, not only to see. He went slower still—he had all the time in the world, he had been told never to come back—and felt time had stopped all around where he was.

He came to a place where there was a little wooden bench in a diminutive clearing. The bench was covered with a very bright green slime that was growing on it. Pig sat down on it without even thinking of how the slime was going to stain his legs and his socks and trousers. It was suddenly quiet. There had been sounds of things in the undergrowth—a bird chirping like two pebbles rubbed together, and once a rustle of unseen feet in the leaf-mould. Now there was nothing. Pig put his stone to his eye, and looked through it at a tangle of brambles and ferns. Sitting on the ferns was a very small woman, a nut-brown woman with a brown skin, and long brown hair under a brown hat, and sharp brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. She was neither old nor young, and she was wrapped in a brown cloak, veined like a leaf. She had a neat litle basket, and was gathering something—Pig could not see what, it was too small. He sat very still, said nothing, and went on looking through his stone. After a moment or two, the woman closed the basket, climbed down off the fern fronds she had been sitting on, and walked away down the path. He watched her go, until she came to a gnarled root of a thornbush; she ducked under it, and seemed to disappear into the earth.

Pig stood up and trotted after her. He knelt down on the path, on his green-stained, mud-stained knees that would so have upset Mother Goose, and he looked under the root. There were a few fine white bones, from some long-dead fledgling, and a carpet of leaves, rotted to skeletons. No sign of any little woman, though there was a kind of mousehole, going in and down, under the tree. He looked in, and saw spiralling mud, and shadow. He put his self-bored stone to his eye, and put his eye to the hole and peered down.

It was beautiful. It was a hall, with a bright gathering of people, some all earth-brown, like the woman he had followed, but some all gold with bright hair and yellow garments of a very old-fashioned kind, and some all silver, with moony-white hair and dresses with glancing lights in them. They were all very busy—some cooking at a bright hearth, some weaving on tiny elegant looms, some playing with tiny children the size of ants or beetles. The whole room was brown, with brown tables and brown velvet chairs and hangings, but there were gold and silver plates and cups on the tables, and little lamps burned in silver lampholders in crannies and on shelves.

“Oh!” said Pig. “How I wish I could come in.”

There was a shrill chattering sound, like a flock of disturbed starlings, and all the brown and gold and silver faces were turned up to him, and everyone froze motionless.

Then a slender man, one of the gold people, with a gold jerkin, and pointed gold shoes, came to the foot of the tunnel, down which Pig was peering. He wore a most lovely cloak, made of the soft blue and soot-black and lemon-yellow feathers of blue-tits and great-tits, and a kind of high-crowned hat, with a feather in its ribbon.

“You can come in,” he said. “You are welcome.”

“I am too big,” said Pig, who had always been too small for anything he tried to do.

“You must eat fernseed,” said the little man. “Do you know where it is to be found?”

“Underneath the leaves’ fingers,” said Pig, who was observant. He looked about him, and there were pale ferns, glimmering in the shadow of the thornbush. He was an impulsive child. He did not think, is this safe? Or, how will I get back if this works? He picked a fernleaf, and scratched the seeds from underneath the fronds, and put two or three on his tongue, and swallowed them. Then he turned back to the tunnel under the roots and picked up his stone and looked through.

It is very difficult to describe his sensations during the next few moments. He was, at exactly the same time, looking at a small mousehole, or wormhole, into which two of his plump fingers might have fitted with difficulty, and balancing himself on a kind of ledge above a broad, deep, rough stairway with huge steps cut in mud and leading steeply down. Worse, his lovely stone was at the same time fitted as it always was into his little fist, and become as heavy as a tombstone.

“Courage, Pucan,” said the voice of the little man, whom he could not see, for the tunnel had grown very long and was full of a kind of mist.

“My name is Perkin,” said Pig.

“Amongst us, it will be Pucan. Everything is different here.”

There was a moment when Pig, or Pucan, thought of drawing back.

But his body felt full of the mist which was in the earthy hole, and he could hear the little voices calling through the mist, and the fair folk leaping and singing, like tiny musical hammers on glass. So he lifted a foot, which was at the same time as heavy as lead and as light as a feather, and dragged it over the rim of the hole. And when that was done, there he was, a tiny manikin, lithe and wiry, running easily down and down into the hall. And when he made his way into it, there was the golden man, now taller than Pucan was, and a silver lady, and they welcomed him ceremoniously and with laughter. They said they were the king and queen of the Portunes, Huron and Ailsa, and he was welcome to their midst. And everyone joined in a circular, mazy dance, capering and pointing their toes, and Pig found that he knew the step as well as the next dancer, and that he could sing the tunes with the best of them.

In the world outside it was getting dark, and Mother Goose had tidied her kitchen, put away the marbles and put the pie in the oven, where it was giving out a tasty smell. She had washed and dressed her wound and brushed and knotted her hair. And for a time she had enjoyed the silence. It was quiet and orderly. And then, because she was a mother, she had begun to wonder what had happened to Pig. So she went to the door and called him, softly, in the evening air, and then louder, with a note of irritation and alarm in her voice. But everywhere was silent. There were none of the usual noises, no owl screeching, no wing flapping on its way to a roost. The air felt thick, like jelly setting. She thought Pig must be hiding to annoy her, but she wasn’t sure she believed herself. She caught up her shawl and went out to look for him. By then, all the other children were back in the kitchen, so she told them to look after each other, and to look out for Pig, and shout to her, if he came back.

And then she walked, in the dusk, hurrying and calling, like a hen whose chicks had wandered away. She walked faster and faster, in wider and wider circles, and the silence thickened round her voice. At first she called, Pig, Piggy, and then, to make it more enticing, Little Pig, and finally, because Pig sounded suddenly bad in her ears, in the dark, she called Perkin, Perkin. But there was no answer and darkness fell, and the giant silver-gold moon rose over the shrubbery, shining blindly, making different shadows. And she had to go in again, for she had many many children to feed and put to bed, and it was late, and Perkin-Pig did not answer.

The next day, he had not come back, and she resumed her search. She searched, and kept the house distractedly, and searched again, day after day, her voice more and more weary and forlorn. She ranged widely, in lanes and fields where Pig had never been. She went through and through the shrubbery, which had resumed its usual life and noises, birds, mice, snail-shells under her feet. And one day—after a long time—she noticed little Pig’s self-bored stone, shining whitely, half-buried under a root. And she picked it up and began to cry, and put the stone’s opening to her weeping eye.

She was simply looking around, not searching for anything, when she saw the opening of the hole, or tunnel. And for some reason she felt she must look into the hole through the stone—reminding herself as she did so of Pig’s irritating little ways, which seemed more charming with hindsight. And she saw the warm brown hall, and the gold, silver and brown people, all at their work, weaving and stitching, polishing and broiling, and a gathering sitting at table, amongst whom she saw Pig-Perkin, comfortably clothed in a nut-coloured jerkin and leggings.

She tried to speak but could only make little wailing sounds.

Pig looked up. What he saw was a huge single eye, veined with red, brimming with salt water, surrounded by long wet hairs, blocking the way out through the tunnel. He dropped the gold beaker he was drinking from. Then she heard her voice, as she found it, and said “Pig, little Pig, where are you?”

“You can see,” he said. “I’m on a visit. To my friends the Portunes. I have a new name. I have work to do, down here, and I shall go out and look after growing things, with the others—”

He was swimming around in front of her tear-filled eyes. She thought he seemed to have become ageless, neither boy nor man. She said

“Come home.”

He replied that she had told him not to. “You know I didn’t mean it,” she said.

“Words have their own life,” said King Huron, coming to the foot of the tunnel. “Go home, woman. Pucan is in a good place here.”

She said something about getting a spade, about digging them out, like ants.

There was a terrible buzzing in the hall, then, more like angry hornets. The King said

“You will do no good. He will not come back, and you will bring down ill luck on yourself and all your family.”

She was afraid. She sat like clay, staring through the hole in the stone.

“Go home,” said Pucan. “I’m around and about. I’ll come to see you, one of these days, quite soon.”

“Promise?”

“Oh yes,” he said, and took up his beaker, and drank whatever was in it.

She put the self-bored stone carefully in her apron pocket, so as no longer to hear the buzzing and the laughter. He had said he would come, quite soon.

As she hurried out of the shrubbery, and saw the sunlit windows of the house, and her eldest daughter with the smallest child, looking out of the door for her return, she remembered the tales of those who visited the friendly folk, and for whom seven years passed like a day and a night.