The Children's Book

33

The New Forest camp took place in the peaceful summer of 1902, when the war in South Africa had ended. There was a cottage in a clearing, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a parlour, made of old, red, crumbling bricks. Its windows were unevenly glazed and slightly opaque. It had a garden, full of plants that love shade and were half-wild—foxgloves and mints, sweet woodruff and forget-me-nots. It had a rough lawn which turned into sandy earth, which ran down to a bathing place in the river, a deep pool, half sunlit, half mysteriously green under branches. Someone had built a rickety wooden pier, which extended over the water, and could be dived and fished from. You could also dive from a woody bank on the dark side (it was deeper there), crushing sorrel and campion between your toes as you arched up and out.

Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind inhabited the bedrooms, and unpacked boxes of books onto makeshift bookcases constructed of bricks and planks. They came early, by train to Ashurst and then in a dog cart, carrying the heavy things, tents and kettles, cooking pots and jars of jam. Tom was already there. He had walked across the Downs and leapt out of the fringe of wood, to help with the unloading. Another dog cart brought Dorothy, Griselda and Phyllis. Hedda had been told she was too little, which at twelve she thought she was not. She had had one of her rages, which were beginning to worry her parents, and had deliberately broken a fruit dish made by Philip Warren. Phyllis, at sixteen, was going to cook. She had brought an apron. Florence Cain also arrived in a trap from the station. Julian had suggested she come along—he was coming with Charles/Karl from Cambridge, the next day. And Prosper Cain had asked whether they could not include Imogen. Florence had demurred—the invitation had been to her. Julian, when approached, asked Toby, who said “Why not?” So Imogen had come.

Toby and Joachim and Tom put up tents. There were four of these, two for males, two for females, erected, stretched and pinned down. The girls gathered armfuls of bracken to put under the blanket bags they unpacked. Julian was walking from the station with Charles/Karl on the following day, and hoped to meet up with Gerry who was catching the same train. Florence had written, lightly, to Julian, that he ought to bring Gerald with him, Gerald would enjoy it. Julian had already that summer joined Gerald at an Apostolic reading party in the Tyrol, which had strenuously discussed truth, friendship, moral obligation, ideal beauty, the working classes and other, naughtier things. Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.

Dorothy and Griselda set off with cannikins to walk through the woods to the farm for milk. Imogen asked if she could go with them—she was always somehow in the position of asking, mildly, if she could join in—she was not, spontaneously, invited. Florence stayed in the camp watching Phyllis shelling peas and making jellies. She was listening. She was listening for Julian, Gerry, Charles/Karl and Gerald as though she was in suspended animation until they arrived.

Love—fantastic, unrequited love—distorts and tweaks time into terrible shapes. Through the uneven window-panes Tom and Toby seemed grotesque, their bodies changing shape, fatter and thicker, stretched like elastic. Imaginary Gerald, in Florence’s mind, was precise and radiant and perfectly shaped. Several times every minute she imagined him sauntering through the wood, crossing the lawn, smiling his shy smile of pleasure at seeing her waiting for him. Her skin pricked at the sight of the fantom. She willed him to come.

“Here they are,” called Phyllis, running out in an apron. They strode in—Gerry first, then Charles/Karl, and Julian lazily last. Gerald had not come. Florence knew immediately that she had always known he would not come—probably Julian had not even asked him, knowing that he would find their company childish, after his fine friends. And if she had always known he would not come, what had she been doing to herself, imagining? She was hot with shame, and turned crossly away when Geraint strode across to her—“like a puppy” she thought meanly—and said he was so glad she was there.

Later that day, the Germans came, Wolfgang and Leon, with green hats and sticks, having walked from Nutcracker Cottage with packs on their backs. They sang together—Wandervogel songs, songs from the Winterreise and the Ring. Like Imogen, they were outsiders—they had not shared a childhood. They made the young women self-conscious, and sang to them, and they all joined in.

Afterwards, they all said that they must remember this time, they must never forget what it was to be young, and alive. The sun shone down. The air was golden, and blue, and dark dark green and fragrant under the trees. They walked miles, one day, in a long string of purposeful, purposeless, striding bodies, and the next day they sat in the camp, and sang in German and in English, read aloud to and with each other, read silently lying in grass, or under the stars and moon. They bathed naked in the cool water, by day and by night, the girls behind the cover of the patch of yellow flags, the boys leaping from the high bank. They saw each other’s bodies with the kind of milky curiosity—there would be time enough, they thought and knew, time was infinite and elastic. They laughed at the zebra stripes and chevrons where they had browned beyond cuffs and inside shirt-necks. They all stared at Tom. Tom leaped, and pranced, and hurled himself wildly in curtains of water-drops, stirring up mud and pondweed, trailing leaves and cresses like a savage embellishment. Tom was baked golden-brown all over. His hair was bleached and his body was like gilded branches. He must, Dorothy thought, have spent hours and hours getting sunburned at the Tree House, or somewhere else. They all laughed at him, and he laughed back, and then set off again, running, walking, leaping, diving, in perpetual motion.

They read plays—Comus, with Griselda as the Lady, Julian as Comus and Gerry as the Attendant Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Wolfgang as Oberon, Florence as Titania, Imogen as Hippolyta and Charles, Griselda, Dorothy and Geraint as the confused lovers. Tom was Puck. Toby Youlgreave read Sir Philip Sidney and Malory, Joachim Susskind and the Sterns read poems by Schiller and Goethe, Julian read Marvell’s “Garden” and Tom read Tennyson. Julian had learned conversations with Toby Youlgreave about Philip Sidney. Sidney had written what Julian believed was his favourite sentence—certainly his favourite this year. “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden …” He said he had been looking for a thesis subject, in case he decided to apply for a Fellowship at King’s, and he rather thought there might be something there. “English pastoral, in poetry and painting—” Pastoral was always at another time, in another place. Even the green pool and the long walk, over the Downs, would not become pastoral until they were past. And yet, the sun shone on them, and the leaves and the water and the grass shone with its reflections.

• • •

Memory, too, can smooth nastiness and horrors into gilded patterns. A horsefly bit Julian on the buttock, and the place swelled and burned and pricked. Phyllis burned an apple crumble, and they all said they liked its caramel taste, but left it on their plates—it was too cindery. And another night, there were uncooked sausages. Sage Dorothy got badly sunburned, even though she wore a hat. Her crimson face puffed and glistened around her eyes. Cool Griselda had hay fever. Her mouth tasted of tin and dishwashing water, her pretty nose streamed and streamed, her throat swelled and constricted her breathing, her small stock of handkerchiefs was soaked and smelly, and had to be washed and rewashed and pinned down with big stones to dry in the steady sunlight. Charles/Karl tore a fingernail and bled all over his better shirt. Phyllis had acne. Florence and the Germans remained smooth-skinned and intact, browning slowly.

After the partly cooked sausages, they all had loose bowels, which is embarrassing when you are sleeping in rows in a tent, and there is only one earth closet, attached to the cottage. They had two quiet days after that, and made meek jokes about what had not been entirely funny. But their bodies were resilient. They were young.

The two heroes of this camp were Wolfgang Stern and Tom. They made friends. Leon and Charles/Karl sat and discussed utopia with Joachim Susskind, but Wolfgang charmed everyone, male and female. Dorothy, very sensibly, had drawn Wolfgang aside, and had said, flatly, “I have said nothing to Tom.”

“No?” said Wolfgang.

“He wouldn’t understand,” said Dorothy, defensively. “He would change. I don’t want that.”

“So you arrange your brothers, to suit yourself, Schwesterchen.”

“You are always laughing at me. You do understand, really.”

“I shall be silent as night, and—I don’t know the word, it is not cunning, which I do know—taktvoll.”

“Tactful.”

Dorothy was somewhat apprehensive when she watched Wolfgang set out to charm Tom. They went on little rambles together and exchanged names of plants—Rittersporn, larkspur—the spur is in both. He charmed the young women, too, paying carefully casual compliments to Imogen, Griselda, Florence and even Phyllis, finding them little gifts, stones and bunches of flowers. Julian, who was the same age as Wolfgang, envied him his ease. He was able to swing on the gate between youth and man, innocence and experience, back and forth, easily, with his dark, sharp, alert smile, at once youthfully silly, and slyly almost sexual. “What do you like best about me?” he said to Griselda, with whom he conversed in an Anglo-German babble. “Oh, that’s easy. Your name.”

“My name? But I was simply given that, it is not me.”

“You were simply given your long legs and your face, for that matter,” said Griselda, resting her eyes on these excellent forms. “But you can’t hear Wolfgang in English. It’s terribly romantic. Wolf walk. Wolf pace. We don’t have names that mean dangerous animals.”

“Am I dangerous?”

“Oh yes.”

But this was as far as flirting went, and he had much the same conversation with Florence, and with Imogen.

They waited until the very end of the camp to hold the daring bathing party in which they all went naked into the pool. Wolfgang said it was a ceremony to ensure friendship would last, a kind of pagan total immersion. They invited the tutors to join them, but neither wanted to come. Julian knew that this was because their bodies were already less than perfect. They came shyly out of their tents and took hands, and danced on the lawn, white and gold Griselda with high mediaeval breasts, thickset Dorothy, willowy Imogen, the one who was trying to cover herself, and could not, because Florence, gleaming like porcelain, and chubby Phyllis were holding her hands. They circled a bit, singing “Greensleeves,” as they all knew the tune, and then the line peeled off, and one by one, resolute, laughing, looking furtively at each other, they ran, still holding hands, into the water, shrieking as it closed over their sexes, laughing as their hair tumbled under, and then chasing each other, swimming like ducks or fish. Wolfgang’s hand closed around Griselda’s breast and let go. Geraint managed to catch Florence, and hold her, before she wriggled away like an eel or a Rhine maiden. Tom leaped up out of the water, and somersaulted, and dived down in a curtain of mist and came up, and dived again.

Julian sat on the little pier, his sex lolling between his thighs, and looked on. He thought, we are such fools. We cannot imagine we shall grow old, and we shall grow old, year by year, all this pretty—more than pretty—flesh will be damaged and diminished, one way or another. He put his chin in his hands, and from below the water Tom pulled him down by the ankles, and, laughing wildly, smeared him all over with mud.

Time is cyclical. Time is linear. Time is biological—breasts change shape, mouths harden, hair loses a little gloss. Time is named in years and months. In 1903 they made an attempt to repeat the camp and its innocent pleasures, in the same tents, in the same garden, by the same deep pool. Dorothy was struggling with the Preliminary Scientific Examination. Tom, nearly twenty-one, had made a worse hash of his matriculation than in 1902, and knew it, though his tutors and family did not, for the marks were not yet public. He spent time avoiding questions about when he would go to university, and where. All this had added a studied evasiveness—still charming enough—to his carefree demeanour. Imogen had graduated, and needed to decide on the future. Florence was thinking about whether to study, what to study, where to study, and was in the interim reading and dreaming, in a generally accusing way, if these things can accuse. Gerald came less often to the Museum, but he still came, just enough, and talked intelligently to Florence, with easy good manners, just enough to prolong her torment. Julian had sat his Finals in Classics, and was also waiting for the results.

Spirits were lowered, in the group as a whole. It was possible that the camp might have restored them, but in the event, they were overwhelmed by rain, in what turned out to be the wettest summer ever recorded. They lay in their tents, night after night, listening to the beating of the water, and the flailing of the branches, and the hissing of the wet leaves and the trickling of mud under their groundsheets, around their tent-pegs. They mostly moped. Tom proposed a mud-fight, but the others could work up no real enthusiasm. They were clammy and uncomfortable. Then one night the wind got up, and the guy-ropes tore loose and the tents slopped and slapped over the grass. They crawled, soaked, out from under. The tutors tried to light a fire in the cottage, but spirals of rain soughed in the chimney and it sputtered and went out. They made tracks gloomily towards the back door, huddled under sodden blankets. A figure went past them in the opposite direction, racing and whirling. It was Tom, half-visible through the ropes of driving rain. He ran along the jetty, and dived into the pond, and came up again, blowing water like a triton, his hair plastered to his face.

“Come on,” he cried. The rain beat in polka dots around him, and vicious whip-lashes of wet wind stirred up the pond’s surface into crowns and ridges. “Come on,” cried Tom, but no one came, and although he splashed vigorously for some time, they all felt—including Tom—silly, and humiliated. The next day, they went home.

Nineteen hundred and three was the year when the English King went to Paris with pomp, circumstance and amiability, to lay the foundations of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In Germany the Social Democrats won an election and argued over the principle of wearing knee-breeches to pay an official call on Kaiser Wilhelm, who believed they were a gang of traitors. In 1903 H. G. Wells joined the Fabian Society with the intention of shaking it up. A lunatic penetrated the Bank of England and fired shots at the Secretary, Kenneth Grahame. Grahame left the Bank in 1908: the Bank seemed to think he was more interested in writing stories, and messing about in boats, than in the national economy. In Manchester Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union. She was, the editor of the Labour Leader told her daughter Sylvia, “no longer sweet and gentle.” Patty Dace was interested, but did not join. In London there was a Festival of the Music of Richard Strauss; Anselm Stern and his sons came over and accompanied Dorothy, Karl and Griselda to the performances. Griselda was excited by the music. Dorothy was not.

Herbert Methley published Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl. This was a mystical, fleshly, atmospheric tale of the doomed passion between the solitary poet (“my name is a version of Wodwose, the Green Man, the Man of the Woods”) and an earthy, even muddy, child of nature in Romney Marsh. It was briefly successful and had some good reviews, before the police and the censors descended on the bookshops and burned their stock. Phoebe Methley said to Marian Oakeshott that she knew she should be very angry, and that censoring serious literary work was wrong—“but I am glad, I have to say, that people aren’t reading it and asking me questions. And that wild girl, in my view, resembles no one, living or dead, except the inner tremolo of Herbert’s strung-up sensibility—but I wouldn’t like to be anyone who thought it was based on her, even ever so slightly.”

“Shall I read it?” asked Marian.

“I’ll lend it to you. Wrapped in brown paper, wrapped in newspaper. Keep it in a drawer. You’ll find you don’t really want to read it in bed. Or so I imagine.”

At the end of the year Dorothy had passed all parts of the Preliminary Exam except Physics, which she was to resit. Griselda had matriculated. Julian had his First—neither the best, nor the worst First, a gentlemanly First. Karl had passed Part I of the Maths Tripos. Tom had failed again. Philip was working on a new, silvery blue glaze.