The Children's Book

26

A family, and a human being inside a family, put together a picture of their past in voluntary and involuntary ways, carefully constructed, arbitrarily dictated. A mother remembers one particular summer gathering on a lawn, with iced lemonade in a jug, and everyone smiling—as she puts in the album the one photograph where everyone is smiling, and keeps the scowling faces of the unsuccessful snapshots hidden in a box. A child remembers one scramble over the Downs, or zigzag trot through the woods, out of many, many forgotten ones, and shapes his identity round it. “I remember when I saw the yaffle.” And the memory changes when he is twelve, and fourteen, and twenty, and forty, and eighty, and perhaps never at any of those points represented precisely anything that really happened. Odd things persist for inexplicable reasons. A pair of shoes that never quite fitted. A party dress in which a girl always felt awkward, though the photographs are pretty enough. One violent quarrel of many arising from the unjust division of a cake, or the desperately disappointing decision not to go to the seaside. There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers. A red leather belt. A dark pantry full of obscene and lovely jars.

And there are public memories, which make markers. They were all Victorians, and then in January 1901, the little old woman, the Widow at Windsor, the Queen and Empress died. All Europe was full of her family, whose private follies and conceits and quarrels shaped the lives of all other families. When she began to fail, her German grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm, cut short the celebrations of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Prussian Crown, and got into his special train to cross the Channel. No notice, he said, should be taken of him in his capacity as Emperor. He came merely as a grandson. His own people felt he should have respected their hostility to the war against the Boers. His aunt by marriage, Princess Alexandra of Wales, who hated Hohenzollerns, felt he should keep away. The Channel was brilliantly sunny and furiously stormy. The Prince of Wales, dressed in a Prussian uniform, met his nephew at Victoria. Deathbeds, like weddings, create dramas, both comic and terrible. The Kaiser took over this deathbed. He sat beside his grandmother, propping her up with his one good arm, with her doctor on her other side. “She softly passed away in my arms,” he said. He made himself the hero of the funeral procession too. He rode beside the new King on a huge white horse. In Windsor the horses pulling the gun-carriage with the coffin came to a standstill. William leapt down from his pale horse, and reharnessed them. They moved smoothly away. The English crowd cheered the German Kaiser. His yacht, Hohenzollern, was now moored in the Solent, and the royal families celebrated his birthday on 27th January. He seemed reluctant to go home. He proposed an alliance of the two Teutonic nations, the British guarding the seas, the Germans the land, so that “not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission, and the nations would, in time, come to see the necessity of reducing their armaments.”

The Prince of Wales carried out his own family rebellion, and let it be known that he proposed to reign as King Edward. Victoria and Albert had named him Albert Edward, but he chose to follow the six earlier English Edwards. “There is only one Albert,” he said in his Accession Speech “by universal consent, I think deservedly, known as Albert the Good.”

He was not, in Albert’s way, a good man. He was immediately named “Edward the Caresser.” He liked women, sport, good food and wine. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about the Edwardian house party.

There will be bridge and booze ’till after three

And after that, a lot of them will grope

Along the corridors in robes de nuit

Pyjamas or some other kind of dope.

A sturdy matron will be set to cope

With Lord—who isn’t “quite the thing”

And give his wife the leisure to elope

And Mrs. James will entertain the King.

There was a sense that fun was now permitted, was indeed obligatory. The stiff black flounces, the jet necklaces, the pristine caps, the euphemisms and deference, the high seriousness also, the sense of duty and the questioning of the deep meanings of things were there to be mocked, to be turned into scarecrows and Hallowe’en masks. People talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex. At the same time they showed a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.

Olive Wellwood became, not very willingly, a matriarch. She had constructed her own good picture of the Todefright family, which was innocent and comfortable. There were sons and daughters and babies in various stages of creeping, crawling and tottering, there were children having real and imaginary adventures in the woods and on the Downs, there were informal gatherings round the fire in winter, or the lawn in summer, where old and young mingled and discussed things with laughter and serious common sense. There was the steady scratch of the pen nib in the study, parcels of manuscript Violet took to the post, the satisfactory cheques that arrived with the admiring letters of readers, both children and adults. This she had made, as surely as she made the worlds of fairytale and adventure which were nevertheless often more real to her than breakfast or bathtime. She and Violet alone knew that both worlds were constructed against and despite the pinched life of ash pits, cinders, rumbling subterranean horrors, and black dust settling everywhere. The woods, the Downs, the lawn, the hearth, the stables were a real reality, kept in being by continuous inventive willpower. In weak moments she thought of her garden as the fairytale palace the prince, or princess, must not leave on pain of bleak disaster. They were inside a firewall, outside which grim goblins mopped and mowed. She had made, had written, this world with the inventive power with which she told her stories.

She could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it, or change it, though her stories knew better. And she had to ignore a great deal, in order to persist in her calm, and listen steadily to the quick scratch of the nib.

At the time of the old Queen’s death, she had a popular success with a collection of tales, which included the tale of the wraiths and puppets at the Grande Exposition, and the sinister and sly tale of The People in the House in the House, in which a child imprisoned some tiny folk in her doll’s house, and was in turn imprisoned by a giant child.

A fashionable magazine sent a young woman to interview Mrs. Wellwood, and a photographer, who posed her, sitting by the fire in a rocking-chair in a velvet gown, reading to the assembled younger children, from Phyllis, now fourteen, and Hedda, now eleven, in smocked dresses and black stockings, their long hair, Phyllis’s fair, Hedda’s dark, shining on their shoulders, to Florian, now nine, and Robin, now seven, and Harry, now five, in sailor suits. Violet handed round cocoa and biscuits, and did not appear in the picture. The interviewer, whose name was Louisa Catchpole, wrote reverently of the shining heads of the listeners—“you could have heard a mouse squeak, or a beetle scurry,” she wrote, entering into the style. She asked the children which was each one’s favourite tale, and was slightly baffled by their answers. This meant that Olive found herself explaining that each child had his or her very own story, which was continually added to, and kept in the glass cupboard in a specially decorated book. Louisa Catchpole said this was a charming idea, and begged to see the books. The photographer took pictures of the cupboard, and of the imaginatively decorated covers of the individual tales. Miss Catchpole said to the children that they must feel they were very special people, having their own stories in this way. It was Phyllis who replied solemnly, oh yes, they did feel special.

The interview and pictures appeared under the headline “A Modern Mother Goose.” The article spoke of Mrs. Wellwood’s calm motherly presence, and her expressive voice, spicing the stories with mystery, thrills and dangers, all by the flickering firelight, in which more magical creatures could be seen. Mrs. Wellwood, Miss Catchpole said, held strong beliefs about the imaginative lives of children being just as important in education as verbs and triangles. Her grateful family extended far beyond the pretty children clustered round her, into all sorts of homes, privileged and plain, wherever a book of tales could be bought or borrowed. People in the present age, she opined, did not leave their childhoods behind them, as the earnest Victorians had done. Tales for children, like Mrs. Wellwood’s, were read and discussed with delight, by old and young. There is an eager young child persisting in every lively grown-up, and Mrs. Wellwood knows how to address these children, as she knows how to entrance her own.

THE PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE IN THE HOUSE

HERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE GIRL who was very kind to little creatures. She used to make nests and put them out hoping that birds would find them. She went fishing in the park for tadpoles and kept them in a big jam jar, and cried bitterly, when they all died. She made homes in matchboxes for caterpillars and ladybirds. And she had a beautiful doll’s house, in which there lived a family of dolls with tiny china faces and stuffed bodies.

She made lovely little meals for the dolls in the doll’s house. She made jellies with individual bits of blackberry in them, and currant buns with one currant, and tiny tarts which slightly overlapped the pretty china plates in the doll’s house. She put out tiny glasses of ice cream with red-currant jelly on top, and little biscuits with icing flowers on them. The awful bit was when the food went limp and had to be disposed of—in case it attracted mice, or other nasty creatures, like beetles and silverfish, her mother said. Her mother was keen on hygiene.

Her name was Rosy. Her mother liked roses. The doll’s house was decorated in a variety of rosy pinks. Rosy sewed quilts and blankets and rugs for the dolls. She had tried clothes, but her sewing was not fine enough and the dolls looked ridiculous in the hats and jackets she made. So she made more and more sheets and blankets. Some of the dolls had ten or twelve each.

She pretended that the dolls made their own beds and cooked their own meals, and went to school, and slept, but she wasn’t very good at pretending, and knew very well that they depended on her sharp fingers for every movement.

One day, going to the park in the city centre to look for creatures, she thought she saw a beetle running under a tree root. She laughed aloud because it looked like a little old lady in a stiff coat. Then she saw it was a little old lady in a stiff coat, waving some sort of stick in front of her, which Rosy had mistaken for the beetle’s horns. So she sat down, very quietly, not too close—she was good at watching creatures—and after a time she saw two more little people run across the grass—sheltering in the shadows of leaves and pebbles—dressed in the same kind of stiff, tubelike brownish clothes. Their heads were encased in round black shiny hats. It was as though they were trying to disguise themselves as beetles.

She came often to watch them, after that. She saw that they had paths, as ants do, along which they always scurried. She brought a magnifying glass her uncle had given her, and studied the roots of the trees, when the little folk had gone into the ground. She found cupboards and larders, with rough, hardly visible shelves containing parcels and packages wrapped in dried leaves, and fine, fine little hooks from which dangled fine nets full of seeds—beech mast, thistledown, sunflower seeds. Under another root she found a barely visible covered market, with baskets made from nutshells set out on trestle tables made from twigs—all cleverly disguised to look randomly stacked, to the human eye, or the questing eye of a puppy. There were minute clay jugs and pannikins full of a fluid a little thicker than water, that might have been juice, or diluted honey. There were chestnut shell platters of what looked like new chopped meat, but she could not tell what kind of meat.

She watched their comings and goings, and learned the rhythm of their gatherings. They danced on a Tuesday, under the highest arch—their music sounded to her like nothing but a whisper and a scratch and a squeak—she could see their fiddle-like instruments, and their straw pipes, but not the string of the bow or the holes for the fingers. They did not go to market every day. They went twice a week, all jostling and—cheeping, like chickens, almost inaudibly. She put a few tiny glass beads around the roots, to see what they would do with them. They avoided them.

She thought how amazed they would be, to move out of their drab, furtive world into the rosy, silky comfort of her doll’s house. She persuaded her mother to buy her a fine butterfly net—with a small diameter for close work—and took it down to the park, with a couple of jam jars, with strings and lids. Then she waited until their dancing was at its liveliest, put the mouth of the net over the arch of the root, and stirred vigorously amongst the dancers with a stick, so that they leapt into the air and dispersed every which way. As she had hoped, a few of them made the mistake of fleeing into the mouth of her net. She scooped them up—she had caught about eight—and carefully decanted them into the jars. She held the jars up to her eye, and peered in. She had three old ladies, two children, a young woman and two men of indeterminate age. They were all flat on their faces, under their cloaks, trying to look like dead insects or fallen leaves. But she knew better.

When she got them home, she opened the mouth of the net to the doll’s house door, and shook the net, so that they would run in. They did not. So she had to prod them with a knitting needle, which looked a bit cruel, but was for their own good. Then they crawled and scrambled into the house and collapsed on the sitting-room floor. Rosy, considerately, drew the little pink silk curtain across the window, so they could recover in shade and privacy. Then she latched the front of the house securely and went away. They would recover, she thought, and settle in, and play with her. When she went back, they had drawn back the curtains, and their beady little faces were pressed against the windows, peering out. When they saw Rosy, they retreated, creeping under the dolls’ beds, and behind the pretty sofas. Rosy put her presents in through the door—tartlets and sponge cakes, icing sugar flowers and hundreds and thousands, a pile of little party dresses and velvet jackets from the dolls’ wardrobes. She noticed, of a sudden, that the little creatures had dragged and heaped the resident dolls into a kind of rubbish heap in one corner of the kitchen. She gave them some dolls’ teapots full of lemonade in case they were thirsty.

They would not play. They were worse than the dolls, for they made sick little screaming sounds if she tried to pick them up and dress them, and one of them bit, or stabbed, her little finger, which developed a nasty sore. They didn’t touch the pretty food, and they tore up the pretty dresses and made a kind of nest of them, on the beds and the sofas. She knew what she should have done, but she was stubborn, and lonely, and meant well, so she sat and whispered into the keyhole, and down the chimney, that she only wanted them to play, to enjoy the nice things in the house, she would give them all sorts of things they hadn’t got, wheelbarrows, chests of drawers, even a little omnibus, if they would play with her. They pretended to be dead. She thought they might be starving, and hit on the idea of giving them dolls’ pans full of porridge oats, which were more like the food they sold in their market.

She began to feel, without realising it, that she was gross and monstrous.

Her chubby hands seemed to her like legs of ham, and her fingers were like rolling-pins.

She said, “Please, play with me, it is such a lovely house.”

Now, it is necessary to know that Rosy’s house was on the edge of a meadow, by a cold stream that had come leaping and rushing down the side of a mountain, and spread out into still pools across the flat grassland, under willows and white poplars. In the old days this side of the river had been known as the Debatable Land, and no one had built there, because over and beyond the mountain was a strange country where no one went, and from which strange things and creatures occasionally came. There were tales of wild wolves, flowing in grey clouds along the hillside, and tales of the fairy folk, in green cloaks, and soft boots, selling strange foods that melted in the mouth and drove young women to death and starvation, for they refused all other food after tasting these pale wafers and sharply sweet berries. There were also tales of giants, who had put huge legs over the ridge, and came down into the plain, filling their pockets with cattle and sheep, pulling up whole trees, and leaving sandy pits, which were their footprints. Rosy had been told these “fairy stories” and liked to hear them. Like all children, her nature was unsatisfied by what she could immediately see and touch. But also, like all children, she enjoyed the comfort of knowing that dragons and witches, giants and wood demons, are real only in a different world, where the mind, but not the body, can travel. “Over the mountain” changed colour, shape and topography constantly, as Rosy made it up, with little thrills of delight and safe fireside terror.

But perhaps we only dream such things because somewhere, some time, they are and were as we imagine them? Rosy told no one about the little people in her doll’s house, who were solid enough, and cross enough, to be independently real. But they were not to be shared, in case, despite being solid, they vanished.

One day Rosy was lying on her stomach, gazing in at the window of the doll’s house. Her mother had crossed the river to shop in the village. She heard a heavy sound, like a hammer on a road, or in a forge. Thud, thump, thud, a regular crashing. The floor of her house trembled, and Rosy trembled on it. The windows of her house darkened. She heard a great wind, sighing and soughing in the chimney. She lifted her head, and tried to look out of the window, and could not at first make out what she saw. It was black velvet dark, ringed with concentric splinters of palest blue, mixed with silvery threads and emerald-green lights. The circle of splinters was surrounded by something whitish, between blancmange and the white of a soft-boiled egg. It was an eye. It was an eye that was as big as the window. There was an enormous gruff grunt, like an oak tree falling. Then her house began to sway from side to side. And then to rise, as though some vast creature was pulling it up by the roots, which was indeed what was happening. Rosy felt very sick and held on to a stool, which didn’t help, as the stool shot across the sloping floor and back. The house was lifted, shaken, and dropped, falling with a muffled sound into soft dark. Then it rose again, and began to move, jerk by jerk—huge jerks—stride by stride. Something, someone, had dropped the whole house into a monstrous sack, and was making off with it. Rosy began to cry. Finally—because the striding went on so long, she fell into something between a faint and a sleep.

Later she peeped cautiously out of the kitchen window of her house. She saw huge carved posts rising out of sight, and realised that they were the legs of a vast table, whose surface was out of sight. She made out a bucket as big as the house she was in, and a lot of overlapping coloured blankets, which she understood to be the edge of a rag rug, the size of a lawn. Then she heard thudding again, and saw a shiny shoe with a thick high white sock in it, a little girl’s shoe, on a huge foot. There was a rustling and thumping, and the eye was to the window again. The front door opened. Rosy cowered against the kitchen wall. The giant child began to murmur and growl what Rosy could see were meant to be soothing sounds. A plump hand, the size of a sofa, squeezed in through the door, twisted, and reached with bolster-like fingers in Rosy’s direction. Thumb and finger closed round Rosy, who was dragged, resisting, out of her own door and swung up in the air. The giant child was sitting on the rug, in a heap of scarlet skirts like the folds in a hilly landscape. She pinched Rosy’s middle, and held her up to her eyes, frowning as she stared. She had a lot of thick shiny yellow hair, standing out round her head like the sun. Her breathing sounded like bellows. An eye that size is a terrible thing—wet colour round a black space that opens into an unknown intelligence. There were more booming, soothing sounds.

Rosy twisted and squirmed and spat, like an angry kitten. She bit the finger that restrained her as hard as she could, which caused the giant child to yowl so loudly that Rosy thought her ears were bursting. She went on struggling and scratching and biting. A huge tear brimmed on the lower lid of the giant eye, flowed over, and fell, a heavy liquid sphere, and splashed on the hand that held Rosy. Another followed. Rosy found herself thrust back inside her door; the fingers extracted her key, fumbled, and turned it in the lock, from the outside. Then the shutters were pushed, from the outside, against the windows, and Rosy’s world went dusty dark.

She did not even think about the little people in her doll’s house. She was reminded of them when the giant child opened the front door and pushed in a platter the size of a tea-tray full of chopped-up fragments of some fruit or vegetable—turnip or pear—with a sickly smell she couldn’t bear. She had food, for the time being—the kitchen and the larder were stocked with biscuits and cheese. But her revulsion at the giant food made her suddenly full of misery about what she had done to her own captives. She knelt down by the doll’s house, with tears running down her cheeks, and opened the hasp that kept the front wall closed, and said in a whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I would let you out, I should never have shut you in, but now we are all prisoners. I don’t suppose you understand a word I say. I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The little people had been crouching in the nest of toy bedclothes. One of the little old ladies stood up. To Rosy’s amazement, she spoke. Her voice was high and scratchy, like a cricket sawing away with its legs. Rosy had to stop breathing to hear her.

“We do understand. That is, we understand your language. We don’t understand why you took us prisoner and we don’t want to. We want to go home.”

“Oh, if only you could. But something—someone—has carried away me and my house and we are locked up in a giant kitchen. Come and look.”

She took the old lady up, very carefully, and placed her on the table, so that she could see out through a crack in the shutters. The old lady commanded Rosy to fetch the others. She asked them, very politely, to step into her sewing-basket, and in this she lifted them all up to the window.

It was clear that they could make no sense of what they saw. Rosy said “That’s a table-leg, and that’s the edge of a rug. This is a dish of food it put in for me to eat, but it’s loathsome and smells quite horrible. You have to believe me. It took the key and locked the door on the outside. It is a monster.”

“You are a monster,” whistled one of the little men, severely. “We know a monster when we see one.”

“Oh I am so sorry,” Rosy said again, beginning to cry. Her tears splashed into her sewing-bag amongst her captives, and one of the little children was hit full in the face by a balloon of salty liquid.

“You see,” said Rosy, “we can’t get out.”

“You can’t get out,” said the little man. “We can. We can squeeze and scramble under your door, which doesn’t fit perfectly. We can escape easily, but to what and to where we don’t know.”

At this point they all fell silent, as they heard the crashing footsteps of the giant child. The cracks in the shutters were full of the red light of her skirts. The monster looked to see if its offering of food had been accepted, and sighed heavily when it saw it had not. It spoke, incomprehensibly, booming like an organ in a church. Rosy stayed mum. The door closed again, and the key turned.

Rosy said

“When it’s dark, you could all get out and run away to somewhere. I should think you’re so little the monster can’t even see you. You can run away like spiders.”

The little old woman then said something surprising.

“If you—Miss Rosy Monster—can push the key to the floor from inside the house, we can slide under the door, where the step dips, and take with us a string, a rope, which we can tie to the key, so that you can pull it back to the inside, and open the door, and go out.”

Rosy was dumbfounded.

“Why should you want to help me to get out?”

“Well,” said another woman, “we could say practically that your legs are a great deal longer than ours when it comes to making our way home. Or you could say we don’t approve of locking people up and making them into toys. Or you could say both.” She added “Don’t cry. It makes us damp.”

Rosy said “Even if I get out, I don’t know where we are, or how to get out of this kitchen.”

“That’s as may be,” said the little man. “One thing at a time. First we get out, second we hide and hide—we are good at hiding, we can give you advice—then we work out the way home.”

“We must have come over the mountain.”

“Then we find the mountain, and cross it. Some advice, young monster. You will be dreadfully visible in a bright pink dress. Find yourself some clothes the colour of shadows and dead leaves before nightfall. And make yourself a satchel of food you can eat, and put in some oats for us. We can travel in this basket and hide amongst the bobbins of thread. Think what you will need on a journey. Something to cut and stab with. Something to drink from, for you and for us. Now go and find string, to make a rope to pull in the doorkey.”

Rosy did as he said, and they waited till nightfall and all went as they had planned.

How they made their dangerous way home over fells and fens, how the large child helped the small people, and how they helped her, must wait for another tale …