The Children's Book

32

Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians knew they came after something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed little mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust. The new King was an elderly womaniser, genial and unhealthy, interested in oiling the wheels of diplomacy with personal good sense, in racehorses, in the daily shooting of thousands upon thousands of bright birds and panting, scrambling, running things, in the woodlands and moors of Britain, in the forests and mountains of Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Russia. It was a new time, not a young time. Skittishly, it cast off the moral anguish and human responsibility of the Victorian sages Lytton Strachey was preparing to mock. The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously. The sun shone, the summers broiled and were brilliant. The land, in places, was running with honey, cream, fruit fools, beer, champagne.

They looked back. They stared and glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes purposeful nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age. There were many things they wanted to go back to, to retrieve, to reinhabit.

They wanted to go back to the earth, to the running rivers and full fields and cottage gardens and twining honeysuckle of Morris’s Nowhere. They wanted to live in cottages (real cottages, which meant old stone, mossy cottages) and grow their own fruit and vegetables, getting their own eggs and gooseberries. They wanted, like Edward Carpenter, to be self-sufficient on smallholdings, and also to be naked and dabble their toes in real mud, like him, having taken off real, handmade sandals, like him. They did love the earth. The chalk Downs and Romney Marsh are the ultimate heroes of Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906, the year of the building of HMS Dreadnought. Ford Madox Ford, living on a smallholding in Winchelsea, wrote movingly about digging the bones of a buried Viking out of the cliff at Beachy Head. Ford’s bones in the cliff are like the human bones in Kipling’s chalk, or the bones turned up on the Downs by rabbits in Hudson’s Shepherd’s Life. They are a dream of humans as part of the natural cycle, as they no longer seem to be.

E. M. Forster grieved over the invasion of Abinger by machines and the violation of Chanctonbury Ring. Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloomsbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jefferies and later W. H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land—both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.

English earth is confined, even where it is wild, by what Melville called the masterly and alien ocean. Its fields are confined, its copses are enclosed and managed, its footpaths are well trodden. Visitors from South Africa and the Far East feel odd on British earth. They have the sense that none of it is pristine, all of it has been trod and trod and trod, from the Stone Age on. Compared to the Cévennes and the Massif Central the wild Yorkshire moors are a pocket handkerchief on a tarpaulin. Poets, as well as peasants, deplored the enclosures of commons. It is a sad fact that military camps, like the one at Lydd, tend to preserve wild species, birds and plants, by excluding curious and loving humans along with human predators.

German earth is different, though Germans at this time, in a largely landlocked country, under its Kaiser with maritime ambitions, also felt the huge pull of earthly nostalgia. Germans, until the twentieth century, had lived in small walled cities, between which extended their Wald—not Robin Hood’s hiding-place in the greenwood, but miles and miles of Black Forest, sombre forest, alien forest, haunted by creatures and presences altogether more dangerous and threatening than Pucks, boggarts and that squat nasty fairy, Yallery Brown, stuck in the Lincolnshire mud. Germans went back to the earth. They went hiking and singing up mountains, into the Wood. They were Wandervögel, going back to Nature (an ambivalent goddess). They too, camped by lakes and plunged naked into their depths. They became vegetarians, and wandered the streets of Munich and Berlin in earthy garments, wholesomely constructed by killing only vegetables. They worshipped the Sun, and the earth mothers who had preceded patriarchy.

The inhabitants of Schwabing retreated, or progressed, to the community of saints, artists, and nature-lovers on the Mountain of Truth, the Monte Verita, in Anconà, beside a Swiss lake. Here in 1900 came Gusto Gräser, a poet who played with his name, which meant grasses, and said he was in search of roots, the roots of plants, roots to eat, the roots of words, the roots of civilisations and mountains. He eschewed not only meat, but metal, which he believed should be left inside the earth, in its place, inside rocks. He lived in caves and slept in wayside chapels. His brother, also believing that the use of metal implied mines, miners, foundries, armaments, guns and bombs, made a house of wood, using its natural sproutings and forkings as forms. He lived there with Jenny Hoffman, who wore date stones, for buttons, on her clothes. They danced there. Rudolf Laban later led his chain of naked maenads celebrating sunrise by the lake, in the meadows. Lawrence and Frieda came there, Hermann Hesse and Isadora Duncan. The anarchist Eric Mühsam came and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whose father, a criminologist, wanted him locked up for lewdness and drugs. Everyone wore sandals, like pilgrims, like apostles, like ancient Greeks.

Max Weber believed that the modern world was an iron cage, ein stahlhartes Gehäuse, an engine casing. The Naturmenschen tried to break the bars, to go back. Carl Gustav Jung came to believe that the minds of humans were moulded not only by human inheritance, and individual history, but by the earth, the soil, which grasped their roots. Deutschlands Boden, German soil, was put to use by völkisch thinkers and believers in racial purity as well as by those desiring to go back to Nature and Mother Earth under the Sun. There was birth, and there was rebirth, enacted by the Sun Hero who returned to the tellurian depths, confronted the terrible Mother, or Mothers, and burst out again into the sunshine. Siegfried was a Sun Hero. So was D. H. Lawrence, a miner’s son, reborn as a German sensibility after finishing Sons and Lovers, having read the letters of Otto Gross, Frieda Lawrence’s earlier lover, and The Meaning of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud.

A concomitant, but not consequent, backwards stare was the intense interest in, and nostalgia for, childhood. The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild.

But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. One aspect of it was male clubbable behaviour, eating school suet pudding in gloomy surroundings, playing japes and jests on fellow house guests, retreating into boating expeditions, and hikes, and picnics, playing elaborate practical jokes on the unsuspecting, disguising themselves as Middle Eastern potentates (Virginia Woolf) or newspaper reporters (Baden-Powell in the army in India). They were good at playing with real children—H. G. Wells turning a nursery into a model field of war, or a series of railway junctions, Baden-Powell, again, amusing the children by pretending that his feathered helmet was a chicken. They used waggish school jokes in their letters: Tee hee! My wig! They wrote wonderful tales, also in letters, for their solemn children, of messing about in boats, of picnic baskets, of getting lost in the Wild Wood in the winter and finding a comfortable hearth underground in a badger’s holt, of tooting horns in automobiles and making idiots of the Law.

Richard Jefferies wrote about Bevis in the 1880s. In Wood Magic Bevis is a small child who could speak the languages of the woodland creatures. He can speak their language, but his vision is schoolboy and lordly, unlike that more subtle forest child Mowgli. He knows spiders are male, and the thrushes he converses with kindly allow him to collect one egg, as long as he leaves one, and tells no other boys.

In Bevis, the Story of a Boy he makes a raft, and a camp, and plays at being an explorer in the deserts and jungles of the Empire. He plays at making stockades, like Jim in Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, and goes home for tea and bread and honey.

In 1901 James Barrie wrote The Boy Castaways for the Llewellyn-Davies boys, Peter Rabbit was published, and Kipling published Kim, the tale of a boy scout. In 1902 E. Nesbit wrote Five Children and It, a tale where resourceful, unwise children meet a sand-fairy. In that year Barrie published The Little White Bird, in which an embryonic Peter Pan, the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, made his first appearance. This book was given by the sage naturalist W. H. Hudson to David Garnett, son of the publisher Edward Garnett, and Constance Garnett, the translator of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. David Garnett, who did grow up, in some ways at least—he became a “libertine” on principle and attracted both men and women—found the book sickening, and returned it to the giver, saying he did not like it. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, was staged (in a primitive form) in 1904. Rupert Brooke went to see it twelve times. In 1906 Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared, and so did The Railway Children and Benjamin Bunny. It was seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for children, which was also read by grown-ups.

Kenneth Grahame, who wrote for the decadent Yellow Book in its golden days, published Pagan Papers in 1893, TheGoldenAge in 1895, Dream Days in 1898 and The Wind in the Willows in 1908. He had what might be thought of as a grown-up job; he was Secretary to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

He married in 1899. He was forty and an archetypal pipe-smoking bachelor. His new wife turned up to the wedding in an old white muslin dress—“dew-wet from a morning walk,” with a wilting daisy chain round her neck. She was a girlish thirty-seven-year-old.

He wrote to his wife in baby talk. “Jor me no more bout diet cos you are mixin me up so fritefly. I eets wot I chooses wot I dont want I dont & I dont care a dam wot they does in Berlin thank gord I’m British.” His son, known as Mouse, had to be sent away with his nanny to the country because his favourite game was to lie in the road in the path of approaching motor cars, causing them to halt abruptly.

In 1905 Major-General Baden-Powell, in charge of the British army in Mafeking, was fascinated by Peter Pan which he saw twice. That year, Baden-Powell proposed unsuccessfully to Miss Rose Sough. She was eighteen. He was forty-seven. He finally married in 1912, when he was fifty-five and his wife “a girl of twenty-three,” a tomboy who became a Lady Scoutmaster. He constructed camps for Boy Scouts and was moved by photographs of naked boys bathing. One of his interests was watching executions—he would travel many miles, and cross frontiers, to be present at them.

In Germany, there were theories of children and childhood. A child, according to Ernst Haeckel, was a stage in the evolutionary development of an adult, as a savage was a stage in the development of a civilised human being. A life recapitulated the history of the earth—the embryo in the womb had the gills of a fish and the tail of a simian. Haeckel had a religion of nature, finding the good, the true and the beautiful in the forms of life, from radiolarians to Goethe. Carl Gustav Jung took up this idea, and came to believe that the thoughts of children resembled those of ancient peoples. He drew a parallel “between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between the lower races and the dreams.” The human soul was layered, from the roots of the mountain to the conscious tip. The child lurked and cavorted in the lower levels, occasionally rising like captured Persephone, to sport in the flowery meadows.

Meanwhile, in 1905, Sigmund Freud published his Three Essays on Sexuality, including one on infantile sexuality. Infants, he said, were polymorphously perverse. Thumb-sucking, ear-stroking, pleasure in the wind in your knickers as you swung rhythmically in a swing tied to a branch, pleasure in the speed of the motor car and the pistons of trains, all these were indications of a masked and active sexuality. Children desired their mother or father, wished to marry her or him, had fantasies of slaying the other parent. An Austrian bourgeois of his time, Freud felt able to judge these propensities. Children had not constructed mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust, morality. “In this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists… Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession …” Freud knew that children were not sweet, or gentle, or carefree. He knew they could hate. He quoted Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman. “As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and that’s her eldest sister.” In England, that remark is flippant, a drawing-room witticism, an Oscar Wilde shocking paradox. In Germany, where Max Reinhardt put on Shaw’s plays along with Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Gorky’s Lower Depths, it would be received with a difference.

Everyone went out into the tamed and changing earth, and made camps. From Ancona to Chipping Camden, where C. R. Ashbee had led his East End guild of craftsmen like Aaron into the Promised Land, and had immediately constructed a huge communal mud-bath of a swimming-pool, people went out into the air, built temporary shelters in tree roots, practised skills that in some cases were derived from the scouting and tent-building skills of Mafeking and Ladysmith. David Garnett camped with the four wild and beautiful Olivier sisters, Brynhild, Marjorie, Daphne and Noel, who climbed trees like monkeys and dived naked into rivers from ancient bridges. (Their father was a Commonwealth Office minister, Sydney Olivier, a founding Fabian who spoke out against the Boer War and was sent to govern Jamaica.) These combined with the perfectly beautiful Rupert Brooke to form the Neo-Pagans, along with James Strachey, who was hopelessly in love with Brooke. Later, the Fabians themselves ran educational summer camps, with lectures, and gymnastic drills. Baden-Powell made many rules, moral and practical, for Boy Scouts, and later, with his sister Agnes, for Girl Guides. He drew on American Native woodcraft and British military camaraderie, as well as Kim and Mowgli. There was a camp at Hollesley Bay Colony on the East Coast, visited by Beatrice Webb in 1905, where broken-down men were to be put together again. She went also to a Salvation Army camp in Hadleigh Farm, where they collected released convicts, tramps, drunks and vagrants, fed them, helped them and preached at them. There was also an idea current amongst anxious social thinkers about the undeserving poor, which said that the “concentration” camps invented by the efficient British army in South Africa might be used to segregate—even, it was suggested, to sterilise or put down—the irredeemable, the hopeless, the dangerous.

• • •

Time passed at very different speeds for all these people, between 1901 and 1907, when one event changed all their lives. For some it ticked like metronomes, for others it lurched giddily, for some—the little ones—it still resembled space, boundless and sunlit, boundless and shining with snow and ice, always threatening impossible boredom, always offering corners to go round, long, long roads stretching ahead. There were measures for some—menstruation, exams, parties, camps, pay days, cheques in the post, deadlines, telegrams, crises in banks. And for others, day after similar day. Some bodies got older rapidly—the babies, the menopausal. Some appeared hardly to change at all, from year to year.

Ann Warren changed most, and felt time, paradoxically, as something hanging and slow. She was a neat baby, a brown baby, like a hazelnut, Frank Mallett said, presenting her with a woollen jacket and knitted boots. She learned to sit up, and sat where she was put, and looked around Marian Oakeshott’s cottage garden, seeing hollyhocks and marigolds she assumed were eternal. One day she stood up, and staggered from grass to border, crashing down amongst the delphiniums and knowing them now as an acrid smell as well as a blue series of towers. For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect. She learned language, and faces, Elsie and Marian, Tabitha and Robin, who pushed her over and kissed her better, his red hair blowing in the breeze. She learned to expect sweets from Patty Dace and Arthur Dobbin and Frank Mallett, who made her daisy chains. Marian Oakeshott said to Elsie, as they walked with their children along the Military Canal in the summer of 1903, that she thought Ann was a very clever child, a noticing child, a thinking child. “Like you,” said Marian to Elsie.

“Much good it has done me,” said Elsie to Marian, not denying that she was clever.

“It’s not too late,” said Marian. In 1903 Elsie was twenty-four. She would be twenty-eight in 1907, which is almost thirty, and was no longer “young.” She was already afraid in 1903 of being somehow solidified into resignation in 1907.

“It is too late,” she said to Marian, whom she had come to care for. “I done for myself having Ann, you know that. So I must sit in this Marsh and slave for these silly women. I made my own bed. Or at least, I put the mattress down.”

“I don’t ask Tabitha to look after Ann so that you can settle down in a Slough of Despond. What do you want to do? You must want something.”

Elsie wanted sex, but there was no one to offer it whom she would have touched, and Ann’s coming had made her wary. She wondered if Marian wanted sex. Once, thinking about desire, which she didn’t do for a good year and a bit after Ann’s birth, she had said to Mrs. Oakeshott “I expect you still miss him terribly.” And Marian had said “Who?” And Elsie had known, as Marian smoothly talked over her mistake, and said she missed him all the time—Elsie had known that Marian was in the same position as herself, that there was no Mr. Oakeshott, dead or alive. This made her feel less beholden—which was good for her—and protective, which was also good for her. She knew Marian knew she knew. She knew neither of them would ever mention her knowledge. She felt a kind of love for Marian’s courage and resourcefulness.

She said now, with her usual sharpness, “Girls from my class, mam, are not encouraged to want things.” The mam was a joke, they both knew. They walked on in silence. Elsie said

“I did want to make very small pots. Miniature pots. I still do sometimes, when Mr. Fludd and Philip are away. But then I squash them up again, almost all. It’s hard having Philip around. I know what a really good pot looks like, and I know his look like that and mine don’t mostly. They can exist or not, it don’t matter.”

“You’d be better off being a teacher than a sort of servant.”

“Hah! And how should I be qualified to do that? I don’t read too well.”

“I shall teach you to qualify to be a teacher. I shall teach you—and two or three others—in the evenings. Once you’ve got some of the way, you can be a teaching assistant and go on to qualify. Then you’ll be able to choose where to work and earn wages. I still can’t fathom how the Fludds pay you.”

“They don’t, mostly. Philip does. He sells a few pots and he gives me some money. They give him some, sometimes, not regularly. What he really cares about is being able to buy clay and chemicals and fuel and things. But he sees me right.”

“You’re all mad and muddled. It’s shocking.”

“I’d like to try this teachering. I can bring Ann, can I?”

“That is my idea.”

Between 1902 and 1907 Tom Wellwood changed from being someone who was about to settle down to be a student, to being someone who had not settled down to be a student. In 1901, when Dorothy suddenly went to Munich, Tom was eighteen. In 1907, he was twenty-four, a young man, not a youth. He had gone through broken-out skin and new stubble on lip and cheek, his voice had rounded out, his gold hair thickened and coarsened. He had gone through believing he wanted to go to Cambridge with Julian and Charles, to knowing, without allowing himself to know he knew, that he must avoid this, that it would destroy him. During these five years he went on walking holidays with Toby Youlgreave, and sometimes with Julian, and sometimes with Joachim and Charles as well. These were supposed to be “reading” holidays, and Tom was supposed to be learning. He read a lot. He read books of woodcraft, and books of knightly romance, and books about the earth. He knew a lot of lyric poetry. He had interesting conversations with Toby about Shakespeare and Marlowe, but when he did finally get into a schoolroom with an exam script before him, he had the odd sensation that he did not know who he was, that there was nobody there capable of setting pen to paper. Some kind of automaton in his place wrote some pages of banal nonsense. He failed. He was more afraid of becoming unreal than of failing to progress in his education, but that, too, he did not put into words. He wrote things in the Tree House, and burned them, in case anyone found them. He became secretive. Most of what he felt he really was, was incommunicable to his companions who were striding or sauntering into the social world. He knew the woods. He watched the trees age and thicken and spread. He watched saplings struggle and take hold, he saw the keepers axing the rotten beeches. He wanted, but he did not know he wanted, to be like Ann, to stay in a world, in a time, where every day was an age, and every day resembled the one before. Some of the time, he lived in the old story. He found himself muttering and murmuring with his back to an oak where Tom Underground had faced a pack of wolves with a flaming brand, or running easily along tracks as though he was himself a wild creature, a wolf.

This was both intensely satisfying, and sickly, like masturbation and its aftermath.

Tom might have been different, Dorothy thought later, if Dorothy’s sense of time had not been completely the opposite of his. It began when she came back from Munich. She was seventeen, he was nineteen, they had been inseparable, she had followed him like a squire, like an animal helper, through furrows and thickets. But she did not tell him about Anselm Stern, and only casually mentioned Wolfgang and Leon, as exciting new acquaintances. Tom could have been forgiven for thinking Dorothy had fallen in love with one of these Germans, but his thoughts didn’t run that way, love was something he sheered away from. He felt, simply, excluded. He was like a wild animal ranging round a stockade, or a forest house, trying to get in, to find a slit or slot, and failing.

This sense of Dorothy’s distance was exacerbated, for both of them, by the artificial—that is, nothing to do with the weather and the earth—timetable she had set herself, or discovered had been set for her. The parents and tutors were not wholly helpful with this. The person who told Dorothy what she had taken on, how very much work was ahead of her, was Leslie Skinner, who took a fatherly interest in her, and once, involuntarily, stroked her hair.

She would need to matriculate, he said. She would need to pass Latin, English, Maths, General Elementary Science, and one of: Greek, French, German, Sanskrit, Arabic, Elementary Mechanics, Elementary Chemistry, Elementary Sound, Heat and Light, Elementary Magnetism and Electricity, Elementary Botany.

After successfully matriculating, there would be the Preliminary Scientific Examination, in Chemistry and Physics, and General Biology.

In order to get the MB degree she would need

To have passed the matriculation exam not less than five years previously.

To have passed the Preliminary Scientific Exam not less than four years previously.

To have studied medicine for five years after matriculation or four years after the Preliminary Scientific Exam, one year of the four to have been spent in a recognised institution.

To have passed two medical exams, the Intermediate and the Final MB.

For the final MB she would need to have attended lectures, seen twenty certified labours (of women), practised surgery for two years, and medicine for two years, including a study of infectious diseases and lunacy.

She would need to specialise in medicine, surgery or obstetrics and be proficient in vaccination. To take the BS and become a surgeon, she must also have done a course in operative surgery and operated on a dead subject.

The London School of Medicine for Women was granted a Royal Charter in 1902 and was now a college of the University of London. So Dorothy’s way was open. It was a very hard way.

Dorothy sat in Leslie and Etta’s dark, polished drawing-room and worked it out on her fingers. At the earliest, she could qualify as a surgeon in 1910, which, for someone aged eighteen in 1902, who would be twenty-six in 1910, seemed to slice a whole segment, her youth, out of her life. She sat very still listening to the hooves and wheels in Gower Street, and thought about Dorothy Wellwood. Did she want to know all that? People were married at twenty-one or twenty-two. They had passions and dramas which she could not afford to have. She looked down at her moving fingers in her lap, and thought, after all, how interesting flesh and bone is, how interesting the growth of a child from a seed is—is knowing better than doing?

Leslie Skinner said “You are pensive.”

“It’s such a long time. So much of—of my life, of anyone’s life. Particularly a woman.”

“There are easier ways of helping people.”

Dorothy continued to look at the skin, the knuckles, the slightly bitten nails, the lifeline in her palm. She said “It isn’t really helping people. It’s knowing.” “A rare thing in a young woman.”

“Why should women not know things?”

“It is generally believed that they prefer to feel, to care for others …”

“Are you telling me not to try to be a doctor?”

“I have been a teacher long enough to know when that is no use. Even if I have not taught many young women. And I have to say, those women I have taught are self-selected for willpower and—intent. The decision is yours. But I will help—I should like to help—if you feel you must go ahead.”

Nothing is final, Dorothy thought pragmatically, and made a final decision.

Time passing, for most young women, was to do with finding a husband, or being sought as a wife. In 1902, Griselda, like Dorothy, was eighteen, Florence Cain was nineteen, Phyllis was sixteen, Hedda was thirteen, Imogen Fludd was twenty-three, and Pomona was twenty. Of all these young women, only one, Florence, was “in love,” and she was in love with her brother’s lover, Gerald, which was an unsatisfactory state of affairs for all three of them. It was possible, Philip Warren thought, that Pomona was in love with him. She followed him around, and once or twice began sentences with “When we are married…” which he pretended not to hear. He did not like her touching him, though she was beautiful, in her childish way. She might be what in the Potteries was known as “simple” but he thought also she might be acting a part. He didn’t want to have to think about her. He wished Elsie would think about her, but Elsie thought about Ann, and house-cleaning, and her programme of reading. She simply didn’t like Pomona, although she was perfectly polite. But politeness and dislike combined can be deadly. Pomona pretended not to notice, but made no advances to Elsie.

Phyllis thought less about being in love than about preparing to be married. Like many children of shifting, insecure Bohemian households, she had a romantic vision of an ordinary, comfortable household, that kept strict hours and was warmly predictable. She dreamed more of quilts and counterpanes and table-linen than of male bodies, or even chaste kisses. She didn’t talk to anyone much—except Violet, who encouraged her hope of respectable domesticity—and no one told her something might be missing from her calculations. She—alone of the Wellwood children—had played with dolls as a little girl, and she now imagined babies, clean, docile, smiling, holding out little rounded arms to be cuddled, some blonde, some dark, some boys, some girls. She would be the maker of a world with no shouting, no insecurity, no danger. When they went camping, she was in charge of the pots and pans and made delicious hotpots for everyone. By 1907 she was twenty-one and no one in any camp had clutched at her, or trailed her, let alone suggested they might marry. She knew the wrong people, she thought, and did not know where to find the right people. She was sandwiched between two sisters with too much initiative. Violet said the right young man would come along and notice her, but Violet was not in a position to introduce her to young men. Phyllis tried calmly to believe Violet.

Hedda in 1902 was thirteen. She resented being female. She thought she had been born to suffer injustice, and subordination, and that she would rebel. In 1903 Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters founded the WSPU, the suffragettes. Olive, like other successful women of her generation, had not involved herself in agitating for the Vote, although she accepted unreflectively that it was a “good thing,” better to have a Vote than not. Florence Cain attended meetings of the NUWSS and heard Millicent Garrett Fawcett speak. It was Hedda who, between 1903 and 1907, became more and more obsessed with suffrage, with opposition, with action, with revolt. She followed, eagerly, the campaign of the militants, as they broke glass and set bombs, were imprisoned, and later took to hunger-striking and suffered forcible feeding (1909). She occasionally hectored her mother and sisters. The rest of the time she brooded darkly. She would Act. In the beginning was the Act.

The person whose timetable, during the early years, was directed towards matchmaking was Griselda. She had promised her mother that in exchange for her time with Dorothy in Munich she would take part in the London Season of dances and house parties. Dutifully, she did. For her, 1902 was measured out in dressmakers’ and hairdressers’ appointments, balls and dances, country-house parties, tea-parties, lists of dancing-partners in tiny books with pretty covers hanging on gold and silver threads. She received two or three proposals of marriage—her pale and elegant good looks excited admiration—and protested calmly that she “did not know” these young men, that she could not imagine spending the rest of her life with them. There were many other young men who sensed a remoteness, a wilderness of ice, inside her, danced with her because she danced well, and proposed to other, funnier, warmer girls. Griselda invited Dorothy, with gentle desperation, to come to dances with her as she had gone to Munich, and Dorothy, grimly facing the reality of the timetable she had imposed on herself, said she could not. She could afford neither time nor money. She loved Griselda as much as ever, but she had a timetable. She said also that Griselda had said she meant to matriculate and study. Griselda said, maybe she would. Wait and see. She wasn’t as clever as Dorothy, she said, though both of them knew she was.

Julian Cain was at King’s College, Cambridge, where he discussed both the Higher and the Lower Sodomy with Gerald and others. In 1901 he had been an Apostolic “embryo,” invited to breakfasts and dinners, investigated to see if he had interesting or amusing ideas. In 1902 he went through the birthing ceremony on the famous hearthrug, received the essential anchovy toast, and became a full member of the secret Conversazione Society, or the Apostles. He gave a witty talk on the manifold uses made of museums by human beings, from cognoscenti and artists to tradesmen, policemen and naughty children, which was well received. The Apostles gently mocked German philosophy by referring to themselves as The World of Reality—everything else in the universe was only Appearance, and persons who were not chosen Apostles were dismissed as phenomena. Something similar was going on, but with more bombast and more edge, in Bohemian Schwabing where the anarchist Erich Mühsam claimed that Schwabing had no boundaries because nothing in it was normal, there was no norm, measurement was not possible. The members of the Schwabing exclusive society, the Kosmische Rundschau, referred to themselves as Enorme, or Giants, or outside the normal—and those who were not Enorme were Belanglosen, unattached, meaningless. The Kosmiker inclined towards nature mysticism, and racial mysticism, and were given to dressing-up as ancient Greeks and Romans, with vine leaves in their hair. They put on plays and pageants, as did that beloved Apostle, Rupert Brooke, who enacted the Herald in Aeschylus’ Eumenides in 1906, lovely in boots, greaves, helmet and a military tunic and skirt so short that he was unable decently to sit down at the postperformance party in the Darwin house in Silver Street.

Julian talked easily to Brooke and to Bloomsbury but he did not belong. He was cynical about their high-mindedness, and more cynical about their cynicism. He wanted to want something, and did not know what it would be, or if he would find it. He knew it was not Gerald, though he loved him. He thought to himself that a love-affair, once begun, always envisaged its end. Time did not stand still. If Gerald could have loved Florence, as Arthur Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson’s beloved friend in the days when they were young, and Apostolic, had apparently come to love Tennyson’s sister Emily, there might have been a future, with the children Tennyson had imagined dandling on an avuncular knee. Sometimes, Julian thought, he would not much mind if he were told he was to die tomorrow. It wouldn’t matter. When he felt like that he walked into the Fitzwilliam Museum and asked to look at Samuel Palmer’s water-colours. They shone from an unearthly, too earthy, earth.

Charles/Karl decided for study, rather than immediate anarchy, and also went to Cambridge, a year later than Julian, and also to King’s. He was neither observed nor selected by the Apostles, and did not know of their existence. He took part in the luncheons and talks the serious undergraduates of those days arranged for workingmen, and found himself tongue-tied and at a loss. He went, in the summer vacation, on a walking holiday with Joachim that happened to wander past the new clinic on the Monte Verità, and the encampment of the holy, the mad, the aesthetic, the criminal and the lecherous that lay around it. He danced amiably in circles, hand-in-hand with Mädchens and maenads, greeted the Sun, discussed the coming of a future state of total freedom, and went back to Cambridge. He discovered he was good at economics. He graduated in 1905 and went to Germany to visit old friends. The British Government appointed a Royal Commission to study the Poor (and appointed Beatrice Webb as a member). Karl decided he could help the poor better by studying them than by getting to know them, and enrolled as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics.

Geraint Fludd was in love, and making money. He was in love with Florence Cain, who smiled enigmatically and sadly when he told her so, and behaved as if he had said nothing. He found he needed urgently to know about sex and visited those who sold it. He coupled with street women, thinking of Florence, told himself he would not do that again, and did it again. Basil Wellwood, from time to time, found himself treating “Gerry” as the son he would have wished to have, interested in money, that most abstract of subjects, and in the ships and caravanserais and descending pitc-ages and slow barges that took things, all sorts of things, coconuts, carpets, sugar cane, glass beads, ingots, wheels with spokes, light bulbs, oranges, apples, wine and honey and converted them into change and exchange, shares and hunting and fishing and house parties and golf.

Basil asked Gerry what he “would do” theoretically, in certain situations—the issue of Consols, the run on Kaffirs—and lent him small sums of money, like the landlord in the parable of the Talents—five guineas, say, which Gerry made into another five guineas. At the end of May, in 1902, it was clear that the war in South Africa was coming to an end. There was expectancy in the Kaffir market. Gerry made a quick profit on some shares in a project called “Geduld Deep” which was simply a hole in the ground unrelated to the respectable Geduld Proprietary Mines. He bought, and sold, before the bubble burst and the story was over. The Financial News downplayed the concentration camps—in April they say, there were only 298 deaths out of 112,733 inhabitants—2.6 per thousand, say 32 per 1,000 per annum. “English factory towns often get as high as that.” Gerry had a straw boater and a selection of stiff collars. He felt slightly contemptuous of those, like Julian, Tom and his parents, who had no idea of the intricate beauty of gold and silver, the real things. But he was also lonely, and when invited to the summer camps by the river amongst the trees, he came, divested himself of suit and city boots, and bathed naked with the others.

Time moved as differently for the generation of the fathers, mothers and aunts. Humphry Wellwood welcomed the end of the war—it had been uncomfortable, even if gallant, being a pro-Boer. He wrote articles about mining scandals, including Geduld Deep, mocking the confidence men and the gullible alike. He became slowly obsessed by the way in which Alfred Dreyfus must have experienced Time, since time was the most terrible aspect of the long-drawn-out, cruel and confusing injustice done to him. He had been arrested and condemned, for a crime he did not commit, in 1894. His sword had been broken in front of him, and for five years he had been a convict, in appalling conditions, on Devil’s Island. The real traitor—acquitted in 1898—had killed himself, and in 1899 Dreyfus’s case had been reopened. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Cassation—he was still marched into court between guards, a convict—and then he was reconvicted, and sentenced to spend ten years in prison. Humphry had stood with the crowds and had seen him, a sickly, upright, grey husk of a man, with lightless eyes. (In 1906 he would be exonerated, and recalled to active duty.) He twined round Humphry’s imagination. All those stolen years, all that time of meaningless horror in that place—how did it pass, what was in his mind? Was it sluggish, or a false eternity, or did it burn with the pain of injustice and solitude? Humphry wrote about it. He wrote an article in which he said it was everyone’s duty to imagine, every day, that apparently endless, unreal reality of subjugation. Humphry wrote better as he got older.

He had hoped that his inconvenient need for new women would slacken with his muscles. Women his age were no longer desirable, why should he be? And yet, he was. He kept testing it—women lecturers at summer schools, youngish ladies in bookshops, Fabians, socialists, he excited them, and through them, himself. He visited Marian Oakeshott from time to time, and played with her Robin and young Ann, before catching her round the waist and complimenting her on her fine figure and lively intelligence. Her Robin was the spitting image of his other Robin, at Todefright. He felt everyone must notice this, but no one said anything. Marian did not love him, now, he knew. But he sometimes persuaded her into bed, because she had a need, which tormented her, for certain things he had taught her. “I hate you,” she would say, clutching him, and he would murmur cheerfully, as he pumped, “Better hatred than indifference. At least we are alive.” And she would laugh drily.

He had frightened himself by clutching at Dorothy. He did love Dorothy. He had always loved Dorothy, always knowing she was not his. And it was not that he loved, in her, the same things he loved in Olive for she was not darkly passionate but stubbornly practical, somehow wise in her independence. He was tortured by the rift he had caused. (He relieved the torture by seducing a female student from the LSE after a meeting on women’s rights.) He watched her behaviour, when she came home. She spoke to him in public, drily, practically, much as she always had. He wondered whether she would ever allow him to speak to her in private again. Then, one day, she came to him, in his study—it was the summer of 1902, and she had sat some of her exams for matriculation, and was preparing others for the end of the year. The tutors were organising a reading party in a cottage in the New Forest, a romantic cottage, in a clearing in the trees, with a river running past. Dorothy said she was going, with Tom and Griselda and Charles, to read there—and Julian and Florence would come, and Geraint and maybe the Fludd girls. She said

“And my father is coming to stay with August Steyning, and his sons are coming with him, and I think it would be fun to invite them to the camp. Wolfgang and Leon, that is.”

Humphry dared not ask any questions. He murmured, awkwardly, “That’s good, that’s good.” Then, lightly, “What do they know?”

“As much as they need to know. We don’t really talk about it. But I like them. Very much. And they like me.”

“Well, that’s good. No harm done?”

Dorothy hesitated. Both of them remembered the urgently fumbling hands, the blood. Humphry wanted to say, please don’t set one mad moment against a lifetime—well, your lifetime—of love. He stared at the floor. Dorothy said, judiciously,

“Not no harm, no. But it is all right. You are my father, that’s a fact.”

It was a warning, as well as a concession.

“I do love you,” said Humphry, entering the forbidden ground. And Dorothy was able to say, lightly, practically, apparently easily, “I love you too. Always did.”

Humphry put his arms briefly round her, and kissed the top of her head, as he had done when she was a little girl. And she kissed the side of his beard, lightly, lightly, as she had done as a little girl.

During these years Prosper Cain was preoccupied with the slowly rising, dangerous, dust-clouded new building, draped in a network of scaffolding, muffled, and mysterious. Under the scaffolding domes, pinnacles and a central crowned tower came into being. Inside the building there was dissension between those concerned primarily with the beauty of the objects to be displayed, and those concerned with their utility as teaching aids for craftsmen. There was a movement on the Continent to construct or reconstruct rooms and settings—panelled, or with stone pillars and lancet windows, in which beds, tables, chairs, carpets and ceramics could be seen as the museum designers imagined their makers might have seen them. In Munich the Bavarian National Museum was newly built to show—on its façade—every period and style of architecture—and inside rooms with ceilings, floors and pillars expressly designed to show off a collection of church furnishings, or a lady’s boudoir. Photographs of these splendours were published in 1901, and the Emperor of Prussia expressed approval and delight.

Prosper Cain had failed to save the strange and lovely furniture, bought by one of the jurors at the Paris Exhibition and donated to the Museum. It had been banished to Bethnal Green, and South Kensington had been sneered at as a “pathological museum for design disease” by those favouring order and logic. In 1904 Major Cain travelled with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and saw that the display mixed “order and connection to facilitate study” with “sufficient variety to give the feeling of life: thus a piece of tapestry is seen, as it should be, over a bed, a chest or a seat, not placed in a line between an earlier and a later specimen.” This was what Prosper Cain would have wished to achieve. But it was not to be. The Museum’s fate was to be decided by a civil servant from the Board of Education, Robert Morant, who had tutored the royal family in Siam, and taught the poor in Toynbee Hall, before setting South Kensington in order. He believed that it was the duty of the curators to make an educational order—spoon after spoon, banister next to banister, dishes in rows and carpets side by side. He simply demoted Skinner—who died fifteen months later, in 1911 at the age of fifty, of a broken heart. Prosper Cain had admired Skinner and had shared his views. He kept his own post but felt detached from the new order. All this was still to come. Major Cain plotted and planned and projected in the first seven years of the new century. It ate up his life, but he took pleasure in it.

His children delighted and worried him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl, became, he said to himself, “moony” as she grew into womanhood. He was distressed by her ability to cling on to a hopeless—indeed, he considered it an unreal—passion for a man who was not what she thought he was. He thought he should perhaps speak to her, but was profoundly shy, when it came to speaking of the heart. She would not listen to him if he did speak, and what could he decorously say? He assumed—he needed to assume—that Julian would grow out of what he, as an army man, saw as a normal phase of passionate male friendship. But the other—this Gerald—he knew in his bones would not. But you can’t say that to a young girl. He considered appealing to Imogen Fludd but she, too, could not be decently approached on this subject.

He had his worries about her, also. In 1902 she was twenty-three and becoming an accomplished silversmith. He liked to watch her work.

The new Professor of Design, W. R. Lethaby, and Henry Wilson, the expert in silverwork and jewellery, newly arrived from the Art-workers Guild, had introduced new ways of working. The artists sat at French jewellers’ benches, which were made of beech and had semicircular holes cut, like a flower, under which hung leather sheepskins to catch every shred and filing of precious metals as they fell. Each worker had his or her own blow-pipe, and tall Imogen sat there patiently, her hair coiled behind her head, tending the sharp blue flame, making long silver wires for filigree work, beating silver plates finer and finer. She worked in soft stones—turquoise, opals. She used a delicate bow, an ash rod strung with iron wire, to slice opals, which had to be done very very slowly and precisely. Prosper Cain liked to look at her calm face as she concentrated. She wore an indigo-blue overall, full length, and tucked her long legs under the sheepskin. At first he had thought her inexpressive and slow, but he thought now that she was a masked woman, that underneath was another kind of creature, fierce, precise, determined, capable of beauty. He was surprised that none of the male students seemed to have discovered these qualities. They paid her little attention. Other women students were vivacious or sultry. Imogen Fludd was—as her teachers recognised—an artist, and committed to her art. But Prosper Cain felt she should have life, too. Her douceur was unnatural.

There had been talk of Pomona joining Imogen at the Royal College. She had come up to London, looking flustered and pink, and had taken the exams. She had failed. Neither her father’s reputation, nor her sister’s excellent progress, nor Prosper Cain’s interest in her could disguise the fact that she had no talent, the examiners said, that the work was both childlike and childish. She seemed rather relieved, than not, when the decision was broken to her, and went back to Lydd. It was Imogen whose eyes were red-rimmed at supper that evening, but she said nothing.