The Children's Book

3

This was the Wellwoods’ third Midsummer Party. Their guests were socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and workingmen’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and the North and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more. The Wellwoods’ parties were not Fabian teas with solid cups and saucers and a frigid absence of entertainment. Nor were they political meetings, to discuss the London County Council, Free Russia and Russian starvation. They were frivolous, lantern-lit, silk and velvet fancy-dress parties, with masques, and dancing to flute and fiddle.

The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. And there were many other children. There were large families, in which relations shifted subtly as new people were born—or indeed, died—and in which a child also had a group identity, as “one of the older ones” or “one of the younger ones.” The younger ones were often enslaved or ignored by the older ones, and were perennially indignant. The older ones resented being told to take the younger ones along, when they were planning dangerous escapades.

The parents—and the Wellwoods were no exception—found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with eight, or ten, or twelve children spread their love differently from the way in which they might have concentrated on a singleton or two infants. Love depended on the spaces between infants, on the health of the parents, on death, on the chances of which child survived an epidemic or an accident, and which did not. There were families in which the best-loved child had died, and remained the best-loved. There were families in which, apparently, the dead had disappeared without trace, and were not spoken of as realities. There were families in which an unborn child was dreaded and shrunk from, only to become, on emerging alive from blood and danger, the best-beloved after all.

Most of the parents of these favoured children had not themselves been so fortunate. If they had run wild, it was because they were neglected, or being hardened for life, and not because freedom was good for them.

Much of the freedom, both of parents and of children, depended on the careful work of servants, and of dedicated aunts, who had been old-fashioned sisters, in stricter days.

The Wellwoods appeared to be one of these open and pleasantly complicated families. Humphry Wellwood was the second son of a Quaker wool merchant, himself the younger brother of a Quaker banker. The family home was in the North of England, where Yorkshire meets Lancashire, south of Cumberland. Humphry was born in 1856 and his brother, Basil, was two years older. Basil was sent into an uncle’s broking business, in 1873, as a stockbroker’s clerk. He did well in the City, moving to an Anglo-German bank, Wildvogel & Quick, and marrying, in 1879, a Wildvogel daughter, Katharina, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven.

Humphry was a very bright schoolboy, and the masters at his Quaker school persuaded George Wellwood to send him to Oxford. He entered Balliol in 1874, and came under the influence of Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who believed that they were educating leaders of men, but also felt strongly what Beatrice Webb, as a young woman, described as a growing “class consciousness of sin” or guilt. This sense of sin led this generation of young men and women to go out and do good to the poor, in person. They went to the East End and managed tenement buildings. They conducted university extension classes for workers. H. R. Hyndman, who founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1882, was sceptical about the motives of these high-minded people. They came in waves of fashionable concern, he said, having discovered that there was a brick and mortar wilderness just beyond the Bank of England with two or three million inhabitants, many of them in woeful distress. Hyndman was a cynic. He remarked that “many a marriage in high life was the outcome of these exciting excursions into the unknown haunts of the poor.”

Humphry graduated in 1877, two years after the Christian Arnold Toynbee, whose devotion to the needy, and early death, were commemorated by Canon Barnett’s founding of Toynbee Hall, designed as a community of graduates, who would, themselves, live and teach amongst the poor. Humphry, full of excitement, gravitated naturally to the East End, and lived in two rooms in College Buildings, a model tenement. He gave classes in all sorts of places on all sorts of things: the English, the Ideals of Democracy, Sanitation, Henry V, the Gold Standard, and English Literature. At Oxford, like everyone else, he had studied dead languages and maths. Literature excited him greatly. He taught Shakespeare and Ruskin, Chaucer and Jonathan Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. He was good at it. He acquired a following of students of all ages. He read aloud, with fire and clarity. He was helpful to eager women, after the class was over.

In 1879 he put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a church hall in Whitechapel. The cast was a daring mixture of real workers and idealistic visitors. It was also a daring mixture of men and women. Humphry thought almost constantly about women, whatever else he was thinking of. He dreamed waists and ankles, unwound hair and the haunches that moved under the staid skirts. The Dream is a good play for women, but this project was (he knew it) entirely inspired by two particular young women who came to all his classes and sat at the front, asking clever questions. They were out of place amongst the Cockneys, Irish, Polish and German Jews. They spoke broad Yorkshire. Humphry’s own accent was educated Yorkshire, with some flat vowels. They wore plain, well-cut dark dresses, with very pretty little hats, decorated with gay silk flowers, anemones and pansies, poppies and violets. The elder was strikingly lovely, with huge brown eyes and coiled mahogany hair. The younger had the brown eyes, but lesser, and usually cast down, and nut-brown hair scraped subtly tighter. They were certainly not condescending lady visitors. They were the deserving poor—their gloves were threadbare, their shoes creased and worn—but there was something loose and wild about them under the respectability, that appealed to something wild in Humphry.

He had made friends with a young Cambridge man, Toby Youlgreave, who was writing a dissertation on Ovid, in the hope of a Fellowship at Peterhouse, and lecturing to the East End audiences on English Fairy Mythology, his real passion. Toby’s Christianity was fraying, but he believed there were more things in heaven and earth than most people dreamed, and told Humphry, seriously, over a beer, that he had seen uncanny creatures, not only in woods near Cambridge, but passing between market stalls, or peering out of windows, in the Mile End Road. Our world was interpenetrated, he said. We had known it in the past. We have lost the knowledge. He was a large-shouldered man, of middle height, with impressive buttocks and calves, and a thick head of lion-coloured curls. His eyes were as blue as the Pied Piper’s, candle-flames where salt is sprinkled. His lectures were popular, for various reasons. Craftsmen came for ideas for brooches and carvings of English little people or haunting spirits. The religious dissatisfied came in search of the spilt spiritual content of their lives. Mothers came for tales to tell children, and teachers for information. And then people came because word went round that you could never quite tell what Mr. Youlgreave would say, or what he would claim to know.

It was some time before the two friends realised that the Misses Grimwith were sitting in the front row of both the lectures on Literature and those on Fairy Mythology. They also realised that both were smitten by the elder Miss Grimwith.

Toby said to Humphry “It’s you she prefers. You have gravitas. You impress her. I’m a buffoon.”

Humphry didn’t disagree: it was what he thought himself. He said “We could put on the Dream and she could be Titania. I’m sure she could do it. We could combine our classes.”

Naturally, Humphry directed. In the end, he couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else playing Oberon. He offered Toby Puck, but Toby said he had always wanted to play Bottom, and that way he would at least lie in Miss Grimwith’s arms. They borrowed a Church Hall in Whitechapel, and auditioned Miss Grimwith, whose rich, light voice rang out, perfectly. Miss Violet Grimwith, offered Hermia, or Hippolyta, said she had no ambition to act but would make the costumes, as she was a dressmaker. They found a wiry cockney barrow-boy, who was a perfect Puck, and a tall blonde lady librarian for Helena. The Athenians were a pleasant mix of visiting gentlemen and indigenous workers. The costumes were generally judged to be aesthetically brilliant. Olive Grimwith was dressed in floating moonsilver with peacock feathers, silken flowers and naked feet. Humphry wanted to get to his knees and kiss the feet. He tormented himself with detailed thoughts of other things he wanted to do. At the end of the fairy dance at the end of the play, he whirled her into the wings, and took her into his arms.

They were married in the Whitechapel Register Office in 1880. Violet came, and Toby Youlgreave, and witnessed the marriage.

Humphry did not immediately tell his family that he was a married man. He was living on an allowance from his father in Yorkshire, who believed that Humphry was preparing for a university teaching career, and did not mind—indeed approved—his charitable enthusiasms. A son, Peter, was born two months after the wedding. Some months later, Humphry took his bride and his baby, and introduced them to his brother. Katharina Wellwood was by then herself expecting a child (Charles, born later in 1881). The baby Peter was irresistible, at the confident, smiling stage. Olive was elegant and ladylike. Basil lectured Humphry on improvidence, and on responsibility, and found him a regular job, as a clerk in the Bank of England. It was not what Humphry would have desired, but it was a steady, if modest, income. Humphry, Olive, Violet and Peter moved into a little house in Bethnal Green. Humphry turned his sharp mind to banking. He needled Basil by joining the arcane bimetallism dispute siding with those who proposed a double monetary standard. Silver and gold, both, should be basic monies, to the obvious advantage of our Empire and traders in India. Basil, with most of the City, staunchly supported the Gold Standard. Basil felt, but did not say, that Humphry was shifty and ungrateful, as well as irresponsible.

The year 1881 was a year of beginnings. A number of idealist, millenarian projects and groups were founded. There were the Democratic Federation, the Society for Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society, the Anti-Vivisection movement. All were designed to change and reinvent human nature. The younger Wellwoods looked into them all and joined some. Toby Youlgreave, who was almost part of their small family, immediately joined the Theosophists, and took his friends with him. All three also attended the early meetings of the Democratic Federation, which was mostly attended by German and Austrian socialists and anarchists, some disgruntled English workingmen and some university idealists. William Morris defended the Austrian dissident Johannes Most, who wrote what Morris described as a song of triumph at the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Most went into a British prison, and Hyndman demonstrated in public. Basil begged Humphry not to involve himself.

In October 1882 Edward Pease founded the Fellowship of the New Life, and the younger Wellwoods went to its meetings. They discussed, there and at the Democratic Federation, organisation of unemployed labour, the feeding of board schoolchildren, nationalisation of mines and railways, the construction, by public bodies, of homes fit for the People.

In the winter of 1882, in Christmas week, Peter came down with croup, and died. In the same week, Thomas Wellwood was born.

In 1883 Olive Wellwood was seriously ill. Violet managed the little house. Karl Marx died. Attempts were made to explode local government offices, The Times newspaper and underground railways full of people coming from exhibitions in South Kensington. Basil took Humphry to his club, and told him very firmly that anarchism simply would not do. A Bank of England officer could not be seen hobnobbing with anarchists.

Humphry responded by taking his wife—to give her a change of air, he told Katharina—to Munich, where they had various secretive meetings with freethinkers and socialists. They visited the Alte Pinakothek, and were present at the opening of the Löwenbräukeller, complete with napkins and tablecloths, and the music of four military bands. Olive recovered sufficiently to dance at Fasching. Tom was left behind with Violet for the first, but not the last, time.

In 1884 the Fabian Society branched out of the Fellowship of the New Life. Humphry and Olive—now restored to a pale loveliness—joined. So did Toby, though his attendance was irregular. Olive knitted through the meetings, head bowed, clicking her needles.

Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn.

In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship—an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners’ children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.

Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.

In 1889 Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive’s early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming—or return—of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring. She took ideas from Toby’s ethnological books. She invented dangerous hidden elfin and dwarfish folks. She wrote Elfinia and the Forest Beasts, The Sandals of the Salamander, The Queen of the Ice Caverns, The Hidden Knife-Box People, The Boring Borehole, and The Shrubbery, or the Boy Who Vanished, which made her name, and earned her a considerable sum of money. She was now writing small books, and longer ones, as well as magazine stories.

The younger Wellwoods decided to move to the country, bought Todefright in a dilapidated state, renovated it, and settled there at the time of Florian’s birth, at midsummer 1892. In 1893 another girl was born and lived for a week.

It was in that year that Humphry Wellwood also began writing for the Press. He wrote a few articles for the Economist, under his own name. He also began a series of anonymous reports on dubious financial dealings, published in a satirical weekly called Midas. His pseudonym was The March Hare. He wrote about the Kaffir Circus and the activities of the Randlords, who dealt in South African gold. He took an interest in the new Westralian mines, some of which were as fictitious as Olive’s imagined Borehole. The Wellwood children played games in which they chased gnomes and great Worms through Jumpers Deep, Nourse Deep, Glen Deep, Rose Deep, Village Deep and Goldenhuis Deep, or through Bayley’s Reward, Bird-in-Hand, Empress of Coolgar-die, Faith, Hit or Miss, Just in Time, King Solomon’s, Nil Desperandum and The World’s Treasure. Tom had clear imaginations of many of these places. Rose Deep was glittering caverns of rosy quartz, with flushed rivers winding into the mountains. Nil Desperandum was black and slippery with sullen fires in hidden crevices, and funnels opening to the sky. He knew you could see the stars by daylight from the depths of mines, and tried to imagine how this would look in reality. Would the sky that held the visible stars be blue, or black, and why?

Basil Wellwood made money in the Kaffir Boom. He made suggestions for small investments to Humphry, who instead invested early, on principle, in bicycle shares. Upon the flotation of the Dunlop Tyre Company, Humphry suddenly found himself more than financially comfortable. He engaged a maths tutor, with a view to entering Tom for Eton. Toby was helping with the classics.

There was champagne at the 1895 Midsummer Party.