The Children's Book

17

In September 1896 Tom put on his spanking new uniform, and got into the train, at King’s Cross, with crowds of other Marlowe boys. The family—Olive, Violet, Dorothy, Phyllis and Hedda—Violet carrying baby Harry—had come to see him off, and already he saw that they were an embarrassment. They were too many, too loud, too female, too agitated. His mother’s beauty made her remarkable in the wrong way. Dorothy’s scruffiness made her remarkable in another wrong way. They had had long discussions about how much of his hair must be cut off. It had been trimmed, once, and cousin Charles had said it wouldn’t do, it would be thought girly, and now it was trimmed close to his head, so that he felt exposed, and saw himself as a condemned felon. He wore a cap, sewed in segments of wine and gold felt, with a tassel and foolish little brim, that made his lovely face egg-shaped. He wore a blazer, in the same rich wine-red, with a unicorn embroidered in dull gold on the breast pocket. He was not allowed, as a new boy, either to do up the buttons of this garment, or to put his hands in his pockets. He had a wine-red tie with small unicorns on it, which he would be allowed to exchange for a knitted tie in two years, and a bow tie when he was eighteen. He had a stiff white rounded shirt-collar, which had to be buttoned—later again, it would be allowed to be unbuttoned, and later still he could wear a shirt with a pointed collar, like a man. His mother said she thought the presence of the imaginary unicorns might be a sign of imagination. Tom did not think so. When he got into the train, Hedda started to howl, and had to be taken away.

And so he went North. Marlowe was in the Yorkshire dales, just outside a market town called Fosters. It was hideous, built in grey stone slabs, imposing and imprisoning, with all sorts of anachronistic turrets and portcullis gates. Tom saw Julian Cain, and called out to him, across a quadrangle. Julian sauntered over—the boys cultivated a kind of vulpine lope—and said sotto voce that Tom must never use his first name, and must never speak to older boys unless he was spoken to. Tom said how could he know all these things? And Julian said he would learn them pretty quickly, or the archets would take it out of him. Boys who at Eton would have been prefects and fags, were at Marlowe archets and butts. Julian asked what house Tom was in, and was told Jonson House—the Houses were named for seventeenth-century dramatists, the heirs of Marlowe, Dekker and Jonson, Middleton and Ford, Webster and Turner (anglicised from Tourneur). Tom said he was to be Hunter’s butt. Hunter was the head archet of Jonson, blond and muscular, with a face like a knife. He was captain of the Second Eleven, and rowed stroke in the Jonson boat. Tom had formed an unfavourable impression of him, but dared not ask Julian what he was like, in case he was breaking some complex tabu. Julian knew what he was like, but dared not tell Tom. Tom would find out soon enough. Julian was in Ford House, whose head archet was a mild boy called Jebb, who was the best slow bowler in the whole school, and therefore did not have to keep proving himself. Julian looked at what had been done to Tom’s loveliness, to cram him into cap and blazer, and saw that it still shone out. The shaved nape of his neck was elegant and vulnerable. For Hunter’s butt, this presaged horrors. Keep out of Hunter’s way, Julian wanted to say, keep out of his way, my dear. Tom’s innocent mouth was perfection. It said “There is so much to learn, and no one tells you what it is.”

“They knock it into you,” said Julian. “As it was knocked into them.”

Julian, at sixteen, shared a study with two other boys. Tom, as a new bug, had no private place. Not even the jakes, where the boys stood and sat at a long open stool with regular holes in, and considered each other’s privates, furtively or openly. Not in the dorm, where he lay two feet away from a boy called Hodges and a boy called Merkel, both of whom had that smell both cheesy and acrid which permeated the whole school. Hodges asked him if he liked touching or being touched best, and Tom went fiery-faced and said, neither. He was, of course, being touched, by Hunter, who had his own gang of bloods, solid members of the rugger scrimmage, who played a kind of game of forfeits with the newbutts, which consisted of tearing off their garments, one by one, as they tested them on arcane school lore. “What do we call a creep who smarms at the archets.” “A sucky-bum,” said poor Tom, who knew that one. But they went on and on until they found things he didn’t know—that you must never say bacon and eggs, but always pigs and shelly, you must not say prep, but bogroll. What must you do when we beat you? Say thank you, because it’s good for you, or we’ll beat you a lot more. His underpants were taken before his socks and shoes, and they all handled him, one after another. The whole code of such places insists that it is foul and dishonourable to tell anyone of such happenings. Tom didn’t.

He bumped into Julian on a cross-country run in the Dales, for a short distance, and thought of speaking to him. But he looked at Julian and saw both that Julian knew what was happening, and that Julian, like everyone else, expected him to grin and bear it.

His letters home said that he was settling in, and had various duties like making the archets’ beds, and bringing them things from the tuckshop. He imagined a stolid, unimaginative small boy writing, and wrote what he imagined such a boy would write. Humphry remarked to Olive that his letters were dull for a boy with two writers for parents, and Olive said that it was just protective camouflage, she was sure, boys at school were not encouraged to show their feelings. He always wrote at the end “Thank you, Mama, for sending the story. It makes all the difference.”

Considering that there were six other children in the house, and Humphry of course, Olive missed Tom appallingly. He had something to do with her power to write good stories—real stories as opposed to pot-boilers—and she needed him. He was neither audience nor muse, exactly, but he was the life of the story. She went on writing Tom Underground for him, compulsively. She hoped he didn’t mind her having changed her hero’s name from Lancelin to Tom. Names are things over which writers sometimes have little control. Tom underground would neither act nor think, without his true name. The plot sprouted all sorts of delectable, frightening complications as Tom underground made his way inwards and downwards, along rushing underground rivers, along ledges beside plunging black funnels whose end could not be seen—or heard; if you dislodged a pebble, no sound of landing came back. Sometimes there were caverns lit by encrusted glittering jewels, which someone unknown had cut free of the rock and polished. Sometimes at a distance there were sounds of activities—whisking things that might be rats, or larger animals, trundling wheels of trucks in adjacent galleries, passing trains and troupes of gnomes and salamanders, from whom Tom concealed himself in a crevice, fearing their alien dark faces and spiked, filthy fingernails.

Time went on, and Tom’s stolid little letters continued to come. Thanks, Mater, for the delish fruitcake, which was much appreciated by the archets. Can you send more treacle cake, the Head Archet likes it. (So do I, when I get any.) Yesterday we went on a cross-country run in the Dales, by a trout-stream. It was soggy weather, we got soaked and covered in mud, but it was nice to be out in the open, and I put up a respectable time, coming third. I am trying to improve at rugby and have a mass of bruises to show for my efforts. Fawcett Major said my running was creditable but my tactical sense nil. I shall work on the latter. Thank you for sending the story. It makes all the difference. Your loving son, Tom.

The story was an embarrassment. How does a suddenly little boy, deliberately deprived of privacy, read dozens of pages of typed paper, without drawing attention to himself? How and where could he hide? The story was a necessity. Tom reading Tom Underground was real: Tom avoiding Hunter’s eye, Tom chanting declensions, Tom cleaning washbasins and listening to smutty jokes was a simulacrum, a wind-up doll in schoolboy shape.

He went underground. The school was heated by a bellowing and shuddering system of coke-fired radiators. There were coalholes and boiler-rooms down there, accessible from the basement locker rooms. Tom furnished himself in the village on a school outing, with a little oil lamp on a rocking base called a Kelly lamp. He remembered, in the days when he had been Tom, pursuing the hiding boy through the underground pillars and vaulted arches of the South Kensington Museum. Tom was one of those lonely boys who imagines rapidly and easily that he is the only one of his kind in the whole community, that he is in a sense the unique butt of all mockery, bullying and ordinary spite. So it did not occur to him that other desperadoes might have been driven to take refuge here, amongst the shovels and brooms. But he did find traces of previous fugitives—a chalk drawing of a row of hanged boys on gibbets on a wall, a carefully folded travelling rug, and pillow, with a neatly buckled satchel, under a heap of sacking. There must be, or have been, at least one more like him. So he made his hidey-hole in a very cramped, unpleasant corner behind a roaring furnace, which belched out unpleasant fumes. Even other fugitives might not think first of this as a refuge. There he spread a blanket, put on a sweater, lit his Kelly lamp, and read Tom Underground, smearing the typescript with sooty fingers.

The travelling prince had acquired various companions, some human, some inhuman, some of whom had stalked him for days before revealing themselves, some of whom he had himself tracked through burrows and into crannies. One was a mine-spirit, who was of a kind known as gathorns, and whose name seemed to be, like all his kind, Gathorn. He was slender and pale, and could make cobalt-blue light shine from his hair and the tips of his fingers. He described himself as timorous, but in moments of danger showed a tremulous, but real, courage. There was a scurrying salamander-like creature, as long as Tom was tall, like a small dragon on bow legs, with ivory-coloured scales, and crimson eyes like red coals. He had hissed and reared his crest when he saw Tom, but the gathorn had soothed him, and co-opted him to the company. He could always find fresh water, where it trickled down slate or sprang through fissures in the shale. There was a thing that was sometimes there and sometimes not there, which took the form of a huge, transparent tube, rounded at both ends, with eyes and a mouth that appeared and vanished from time to time in random places on its body. It was known as Loblolly and had dropped like a bead of amber into the prince’s hair, and then had swelled and expanded to line a whole cavern. It could flow along the ground, or diminish to a heavy square of jelly that the young prince could carry in his pocket. It warned of the three lethal damps—Fire Damp, Choke Damp, and White Damp—and would spread its own body as an impermeable tissue to prevent these horrors creeping in through cracks and pinholes.

Other beings were met, and neither trusted nor distrusted. Cutty Soams, very jolly, half-mansize, chipping away with a pickaxe in a green and mustard glow, bared to the waist but wearing a ragged green cap and a spiky beard, warning against going further on or deeper down—he would never dare, oh no. He misdirected the Company, sending them left along a level which ended with an impenetrable rock-face. He may or may not have been helping the Enemy. They were aware of spies. Little fluttering bats with eyes like minuscule rubies and diamonds, touching hair with bony fingers, flickering away into shadow. Worms of all shapes and sizes, quick and slow. Dancing lights that they had the sense not to follow. A carved figure on a stone chair, swelling out of the rock.

• • •

There was also the Wild Boy. It was possible—Tom in the story entertained the possibility—that the Wild Boy was Tom’s Shadow. He was always glimpsed at a distance, at the other end of a tunnel, running fast. He was ragged and dusty, barefoot and fleeting. Sometimes he turned to wave, mocking or inviting, they did not know, before vanishing into the shadows.

They found him, of course. Hunter and his sidekicks, Blewett and Fitch, stalked through the boiler-room in dressing-gowns and slippers, shining a light into crannies and under ledges and pipes. They probably went on these boyhunts regularly, though this did not occur to Tom, who felt he was Tomallalone, unique, the single object of their mocking venom. Hunter’s dressing-gown was scarlet, wide-skirted, the colour of judges’ robes, with gilded braiding and a gold cord round his manly waist above his purposeful haunches. He had glossy beetle-black slippers, embossed with his crest, which had plumes and portcullises on it. The butts would clean the coal dust off the slippers the next day. Tom remembered, holding his breath, that he had himself performed that task, and was furious with himself for not seeing what it implied. They sauntered past his hiding-place, and he breathed again, and then, of course, they turned, and Hunter said “Let’s just cast an eye behind here—now what have we here, a naughty little newbutt, out of bed, with a little lamp and a filthy heap of paper, and a blanket too, all mod cons. You will see me tomorrow, Wellwood, and I’ll flay your buttocks for you. Now, show me what you’re reading to yourself. Some smutty tale, I’m sure.” He motioned to Blewett to seize the pages. Tom bared his teeth, like a rat, and cowered back, and panted.

“Bum-wad,” said Hunter. “Read it out, Blue, let’s hear what the little swine is masturbating with.”

Blewett read. He read badly, halting and humpy, putting on a false, exaggerated squeak.

Then Gathorn said “We need to go still further in, however dark it is.”

And Tom said “I would give anything, almost, to see the light of day. I am shadowless by torchlight and candlelight, I might as well be shadowless in the sun.”

And the Loblolly hummed a little tune, and said that rats were nearby, he could smell them, thousands of rats, swarming through the tunnel. And Tom said “I am afraid I may never come out of here alive.”

• • •

“What sort of crap is this?” said Hunter. “Stories for babies, whining babies who need bedtime pap like this. You won’t forget this in a hurry, Wellwood.”

Tom croaked “Give it back.”

“Did you write it yourself? It’s pretty comprehensive rubbish, isn’t it? And you know what we do with rubbish. We could cut it up for bum-wad. Or we could just chuck it in here,” he said, opening the door of the furnace.

A flame shot up from the surface of the incandescent coke-bed inside the boiler. Blue flames rippled, gold flames flickered, dull red patches sprouted on the exposed lumps. The stench was asphyxiating. Fitch began to cough, and Hunter began to throw Tom Underground, page by page, clump of pages by clump, into the open porthole. The story writhed and shrivelled on its bed of fire. Tom seized his Kelly lamp, which he had turned off, and hurled it at Hunter’s head. It struck his cheek, leaving a bruise and a blister, and poured lamp-oil down the scarlet gown, in dark stains.

“You could be sent away for this,” said Hunter, mopping his cheek with a handkerchief. “You nasty little turd, you could be hurled up in front of the Head, you could be beaten in front of the whole school, you could be finished. You’ve hurt me, you bummer. Really hurt. I’ll see you never forget it. I think you might like to get sent away, and I don’t think you should get anything you like. So I’ll stay mum, and make sure you pay—this hurts, I’ll hurt you, make no mistake.” He cuffed Tom about the ears; rhythmically, several times, so that Tom’s head was a box of pain.

“Come and see me after school tomorrow. Think about it. Bring me the black cane, after school tomorrow. Don’t forget, now, will you? And you can get the oil off my dressing-gown first thing tomorrow.”

The next morning, Hunter waited in vain for his butt. He sent scouts out to look for him—he was probably shaking somewhere, in some hidey-hole, paralysed with terror, he had no guts. He wasn’t found by class-time, and was marked absent in the register. He did not appear to receive his beating after school. He was not in the dorm at night. Hunter sent Fitch down to search the cellars, but he was not there.

• • •

The next day, the headmaster asked the whole school if anyone had seen Wellwood. Hunter had shown his bruise and cut to the Head, saying curtly that Wellwood had caused it, by throwing a hot lamp, when he was caught reading after lights out. The Head said the boy was probably hiding. In his mind was a sick memory of an earlier beautiful boy, swollen-faced and no longer beautiful, hanging from a hook in the coal-cellar. He told Hunter to set about finding Wellwood. He instituted a search of the grounds. After another two days, he called in the police, and telegraphed Humphry Wellwood.

Humphry and Olive got on a train, and went North. Humphry was partly annoyed to be missing a deadline for the Evening Standard. Olive was trying to hold on to several story-threads, from The Outlaws to Tom Underground. At the same time, exactly, as they experienced normal continuing irritation, they found themselves, somewhere else, alien, frozen by fear, staring at raw shapes through the window of smoke, steam, looming vegetables.

When they arrived at Marlowe Tom was still lost. Humphry counted the days during which Tom had been missing and he himself had not been informed. He expressed indignation. Olive said Tom’s letters had been perfectly placid. With hindsight, too placid, not like Tom at all. They met Hunter, who assessed them insolently, curtly displayed his bruise and cut. Olive asked him how he had come by it. Hunter explained that Tom had been using a lamp to read a heap of nonsense in the dark, and had thrown the lamp at him, when discovered. A hot lamp is dangerous, said Hunter. He stared coolly, and apparently unperturbed.

Olive suggested, when Hunter had gone away, that it might be worth talking to Julian Cain, who knew Tom outside school, and might be in his confidence.

Julian was fetched, and said he knew nothing. He said, under questioning, that he thought Tom was finding it hard to settle in. He said cautiously, to Humphry, that Jonson’s was famous for discipline, and newbutts—new boys, that was—sometimes found it hard, at first. Humphry understood the unspoken message, but it did not help. There was no sign of Tom, and after a few days in an inn, Humphry and Olive went home again, to their other children, and to wait in case Tom got in touch, which he did not.

Todefright became terrible. Phyllis cried a lot, and got smacked frequently. Humphry drank whisky, and talked to the police. Olive walked. She walked from end to end of the house, as a woman in labour walks, to use the contracting muscles to distract body and mind from the pain. After three weeks, walking, walking, occasionally sinking into the nearest chair and pulling at her fingernails and hair, she took some of Humphry’s whisky, and then some more. At first late at night, and then, in small slugs, in the evening, and then in the day, still walking, walking. After six weeks, her bright black hair was dull and bushy, and her eyes—though she did not weep—were puffed by whisky.

Violet managed everything. Meals, letters to editors, the little children, who had not been told, though Violet knew Hedda knew perfectly well what was going on, although she did not know what Hedda thought or felt about it.

Dorothy went out. She didn’t go to stay with Griselda, or to any of her lessons. She went out into the country and disappeared. It was odd that neither Humphry nor Olive noticed her absence, though they might have been supposed to be anxious about their other children.

Dorothy went to the Tree House, which was still well camouflaged by autumn foliage and bracken turning gold. She sat quietly on the edge of one of the bracken beds, and waited. After six weeks, she found a chipped pottery mug, and some mouldy crumbs, just inside the door. She began to stalk the Tree House, creeping up on it from behind, not approaching down paths, and by this method she was able, one day, to go in and find the ragged boy curled like an unborn child in the heather nest, with worn shoe soles, a filthy jacket several sizes too large, a satchel she recognised, a shock of long, dusty hair, full of all sorts of things, living and very dead.

Dorothy said “I knew you’d come here. I think I’d have known if you were dead. I thought you weren’t.”

Tom made a scratching, snuffling noise.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Helping a gamekeeper,” said Tom. It was all the answer she, or anyone, ever got. It was like and unlike one of Olive’s tales of fugitives. It took Dorothy two more days to persuade him to walk back with her to Todefright. She never, ever told Olive that she had known for two days where he was, without saying anything, for she would never have been forgiven.

When Olive saw ragged Tom she had to rush into the cloakroom to be violently and unromantically sick. She came back, her face white as plaster, and put her arms around her boy, who smelled of unspeakable things, and whose skin had no bloom. He stiffened, and instinctively pushed her away. She said “Where have you been?” She said “We were sick with worry.” Tom did not reply. Olive put her arms again round his hunched, unresponsive shoulders and said “You will never go back there again.” Olive wanted to tell him, in pain and grief and rage, what the days of waiting and not knowing had been like, and knew that his own state was too bad for her to burden him with hers. She had been there before, when the pit flooded, when the fire damp puffed its venom. She had waited and grimly known she was waiting in vain, had almost longed for certainty to replace the agony of uncertainty. Something in her—because of those earlier waits—had known Tom would never be seen again. And now he was here, alien and grubby. She said “My poor boy.” She said to Violet “He must have a bath, and his own clothes.” She said to Tom “You can tell me all about it, in your own good time.”

But he never told her about it. Olive suspected that he was telling Dorothy, and interrogated Dorothy. Dorothy said, quite truthfully, that she knew nothing except that Tom had been helping a gamekeeper. Olive did not really believe that this was all that Dorothy knew. Tom said one thing, after a week or so. “I haven’t got the story.” Olive said “Never mind. I have a copy. Don’t worry. I know all about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” said Tom, and went and shut himself in his bedroom.

Olive felt shut out. Tom was part of her, and she was part of Tom, and the evil boy, Hunter, had severed the connection. She was angry with Tom, because of the waiting she had done, and his unawareness of the waiting. She was not given to introspection. She had “been through” something bad, and she dealt with it in her usual way, writing a children’s story of an innocent boy set upon by bullies at school, and bravely defying them. She made a Gothic horror out of the neo-Gothic turrets of Marlowe and included a heartfelt appeal for schools to become kinder and more civilised places. Innocence should not be regimented and brutalised, like recruits to an army. We should care for our young, and teach them tolerance, kindness and self-reliance. This book, with the title Dark Doings at Blacktowers, was a huge success. Julian Cain read it in the Easter holidays of 1897 and said to himself that if he were Tom he would find the book unforgivable. By then Tom was apparently back to “normal,” running wild in the woods, and still doing Latin with Vasily Tartarinov and English with Toby Youlgreave. Olive had given him a copy of Blacktowers, inscribed “To my dear son, Tom,” but it was not clear to her, or to anyone, whether he had read it. He had developed a habit of simply not speaking about a great number of things. Olive did not write any more of Tom Underground until after the publication of Blacktowers. She rewrote the last section she had sent to Marlowe, with the company trapped in a shaft which was a dead end, and made them hear a silvery tapping on the other side of what had seemed impenetrable rock. Gathorn wielded his pick from one side, and the other pick echoed his blows, until the rock suddenly crumbled, and they were in a large chamber, lit by silver lamps, where a creature neither woman nor spider, but with features of both, was spinning long silvery threads …