The Children's Book (16 page)

The other story was, as storytelling, more satisfactory. Once (only once) Peter and Lucy had taken their children by train to the seaside, to Filey, where they had taken lodgings for a week, and played and paddled in the great sandy bay. Filey had been
clean
. The sea had been vast. You went down a steep hill, and into a tunnel under the promenade and the road, and you came out on the blowing soft sand, beyond which was the hard, wet sand, with its rippled surface and its pools of salt water. She began to tell herself a story of a boy, Peter Piper, imprisoned in an orphanage, a boy alone in the world, with no one to love, and no one who loved him. And this boy formed a plan, which he carried out with meticulous patience, to escape at night and
walk
to the sea, away from the soot and the sludge and the sulphur. This tale was as precise in the telling as the other was loose and vague. Everything had to be imagined, and worked through—the staircase in the orphanage, the bolt on the inner door of it, the great locks on the outer, the stolen key that released them, the oil that silenced the grinding of the mechanism.

Step by step, literally, as Olive Grimwith performed her household tasks, Peter Piper marched into liberty, along long city roads with lurking beggars and coal-delivery men, onto a highway, through villages (not real villages, she knew the names of none, but villages with greens, and ducks, and geese, and shops with jangling bells on springs over the door). Peter developed blisters, and Olive limped across the Beans’ kitchen. Peter was hungry, and turned aside into a field, where a kindly shepherd gave him a sandwich—no—gave him cheese, and an apple—delicious, crumbly cheese and a
hard, sweet
apple—her mouth watered.

There were pursuers, of course—the authorities, the master to whom Peter was to be apprenticed—Peter lay hidden in a ditch and saw their boots go past—

It was in fact Violet who suggested, one Christmas, when Olive was on a brief visit to Auntie Ada and her family, that perhaps they should run away.

Violet was covered with bruises which Olive had only half-noticed. Her mind on Peter Piper, and the road to the seashore, she asked Violet where they should run to.

“London, I should think,” said Violet. “We could get work of some sort there. I’ve saved up enough for one train ticket. We’ll have to take the money for the other out of her purse.”

And so they came to be in the audience of Humphry Wellwood’s English Literature lectures, dressed in blouses, skirts and hats made by Violet, who had found a good job in a dressmaking shop, and had found work for Olive, too, in plain-sewing, nothing fancy.

Violet had thought this might be a good place to find, as she put it to herself, a step up and out.

Olive found Humphry, and the rhythms of Shakespeare and Swift, Milton and Bunyan, which she thought she had craved all her life without knowing it.

They stepped up, and out.

Whilst Olive wrote her stories, Violet instructed the smaller children on the lawn. It was a hot, bright day. The servants were finishing clearing the end of the party. Violet was settled in a sagging wicker armchair, her workbasket beside her, darning socks, pulled neatly over a wooden mushroom, which had been painted like a fly-agaric, scarlet with white warts. Phyllis, Hedda and Florian were doing “nature study” with a collection of flowers and leaves they had collected. Tom and Dorothy, Griselda and Charles, were lying around on the lawn, half-reading, half-listening, half-making desultory conversation. Tom was supposed to be doing his Latin. Robin slumbered under a sunshade in his perambulator. A cuckoo called, from the orchard. Violet told them to listen.

“In June he changed tune,” she said.

“Cuck,” cried the cuckoo abbreviated.

Violet told about cuckoos.

“They make no nests. They borrow. They lay their eggs secretly in other birds’ nests, among the other eggs. The mother cuckoo picks the foster mother carefully. She lays her eggs when the foster mother is fetching food. And the foster mother—a willow-warbler, maybe, a
bunting perhaps, feeds the stranger fledgling as though it was her own, even when it grows much larger than she is, even when it is almost too large for the nest, it cries for food, and she answers …”

“What happens to her real children?” asked Hedda.

“Maybe they leave early,” said Violet vaguely.

“It pushes them out,” said Dorothy. “You know it does. Barnet the gamekeeper showed me. It pushes the eggs out, and they go splat on the ground, and it pushes the fledglings out. It goes round and round and shoves with its shoulders, and tips them out. I’ve seen them on the ground. And the parents go on feeding it. Why don’t they know it isn’t theirs?”

“It’s surprising what parents don’t know,” said Violet. “It’s surprising how many creatures don’t know their real parents. Just like Hans Andersen’s ugly duckling, which was really a swan. Mother Nature means the baby cuckoo to survive and fly away with the other cuckoos to Africa. She takes care of it.”

“She doesn’t take care of the willow-warblers,” said Dorothy. “If I were the willow-warbler, I’d let it starve.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said Violet. “You’d do what comes naturally, which is feed what’s crying out for food. It’s not so easy to decide who are your own real children.”

“What do you mean?” said Dorothy, sitting up.

“Nothing,” said Violet, retreating. Then, almost
sotto voce
, she said to the mushroom-stocking “Who is a child’s real mother? The one who feeds it, and cleans it, and knows its little ways, or the one who leaves it in the nest to do as best it can …”

Dorothy could hear Violet’s thoughts, as she had heard Philip’s. This was not the first time Violet had spoken this way. She said, turning to science for help,

“It’s just natural instinct. For the cuckoos, in their way, and the willow-warblers in theirs.”

“It’s the kindness at the heart of things,” said Violet. She stabbed at the sock with a needle. Charles said, in an audible undertone,

“Lots of people aren’t really their parents’ children, don’t really know who their real parents are, you hear about it all the time—”

“You shouldn’t be listening to such things,” said Violet, with a return of force. “And folk shouldn’t be telling you.”

“I can’t help having ears,” said Charles.

“Then you’d better wash them,” said Violet.

Hedda took up her shoe-dolls. “All these have no father or mother, only a shoe. They are
mine
to look after.”

Something had become very uncomfortable. Tom put his nose in his Latin. Griselda proposed to Dorothy that they go for a walk in the woods. Charles said he would come, and Tom.

“Cuck,” said the cuckoo in the wood. “Cuck, cuck, cuck.”

“It’s funny,” said Dorothy, “how it knows it’s a cuckoo when it comes to flying to Africa, it goes with the cuckoos. I wonder what it thinks it is, when it goes. It can’t
see
itself.”

They went into the woods, two by two, two boys, followed by two girls, all four clothed in shabby, serviceable Todefright clothes in which trees could be climbed, and brooks could be forded. They were going to the Tree House, which was a secret, hidden place, which very few people knew about or could find. It was woven into the tentlike lower branches of a Scots pine, which was the central roof-tree, stitched together with cord and strings, thatched with heather and dead bracken, disguised with more random branches. It had two rooms, with spy-hole windows. It was possible to lie out on its roof, amongst the arms of the tree, and there were couches of heather, and wooden box tables inside. It was Tom’s favourite place on earth. Inside, and wholly hidden away, he was himself. He thought of the Tree House as his place, although the designing intelligence, the solidity of the construction, were Dorothy’s. Dorothy liked to bring things to it, to study them—small skulls, and unusual plant forms. She also liked to go into it with Griselda and talk intensely for hours. Tom assumed that they talked, for he had the grace not to go with them. And because he left them together, they in turn left him his long periods of solitude, when the house was his hiding-place. There was always the problem of Phyllis, who insisted on tagging along, if she noticed they were going there, and was unwelcome both because she tried to “play house” in it, with mummies and daddies, and because Tom, Dorothy and Griselda knew that she was the weak spot in their tissue of silence. She might tell, she might enjoy telling, and had to be both threatened and bribed.

Charles was allowed to come because he was not
very
interested in tree houses—he was urban by nature—but suitably admiring of the constructive skills that had gone into the building. Tom had wondered
whether Philip would like the house. He thought he might, since he had been found in a hidey-hole. But Philip had already gone to the marshes in the carriage with the Fludds and Dobbin. Tom had also wondered whether to show it to Julian. Julian might not see how special it was. And Dorothy might not like Julian’s dominating presence. It was altogether too early to have views about Julian.

They sat down on the heather couches, which were covered with blankets, and Tom offered them all apples and toffees, from a store he kept in a box.

“What did you mean,” Dorothy asked Charles, “when you said lots of people aren’t their parents’ children?”

Griselda said that her friend Clementine Burt was always being teased because she didn’t look anything like her father, and then people pointed out that she
did
look very like Lady Agnes Blofeld, and her mother had said that was natural, because they had an ancestor in common. But her brother Martin had overheard their parents talking, and had told Clementine he was sure her father
was
Lord Blofeld. Charles elaborated. Lord Blofeld and Clementine’s mother had to have adjacent rooms at big country-house parties. It was well known by everyone. Dorothy asked if Clementine was very upset. Griselda said she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to talk about it. Dorothy was distracted by wondering whether Clementine was more Griselda’s friend than she was. Griselda added that Clementine had said she was sure she wasn’t the only one. Charles said Agnes Blofeld was quite put out, because Clementine was prettier and nicer than she was, the same sort of girl, but much more attractive. Tom did not like talk about whether people were attractive. He said, musing,

“If you found out your parents weren’t your parents, would you be a different person?”

“I think so,” said Griselda. Dorothy said it went back to what Auntie Violet had said, about your real mother being the one who took care of you and fed you and so on. She had always known that Violet believed, in some way, that she
was
their real mother. She saw why, but she did not think of herself, or want to think of herself, as Violet’s daughter.

Griselda said that Clementine had heard her parents shouting at each other, and her mother weeping.

Tom said everyone’s parents shouted at each other, didn’t they? Dorothy remembered being with Tom on the landing, overhearing a violent parental argument. “I have always looked after your children,”
one had yelled, and the other had said, “And I may say the same.” Tom and Dorothy both knew that parents in rage referred to
the
children as “your children.” It was never pleasant for children to overhear such things, it could not be, they had become objects, bones of contention.

Sometimes they played a game of “Who would you like for parents if you didn’t have your real ones?”

You wouldn’t want to play that game if you were Clementine.

Tom thought of his life, the woods, the garden, the books, the human voices, the presences of family in and out of the house, the wonderful movement from comfort to freedom and back.

“We are a happy family,” he said, vaguely and gently. “Have a bull’s-eye? Or a pink fizz?”

Charles asked Dorothy if she was really going to be a doctor, or was it just something she had said?

“I just said it, and saw it was true.”

“I should like to do something like that. I don’t know if I could face all the mess of people being sick, let alone having to carve them up. But I think one should try to do something to make things better. Your father understands that. Mine doesn’t.”

HERE WAS ONCE A MOTHER,
whose husband had gone on a long voyage, and had neither come back, nor sent any news, for a long time. Consequently, the family had fallen upon hard times, though they lived in a pleasant house in the country, with gardens and orchards. Mothers in stories, in general, are of two kinds. There are mothers who are warm, and devoted, and self-sacrificing, and resourceful and endlessly good-tempered and loving. Then there are the other kind, who are often not mothers, but only stepmothers, who are unkind, and proud, and love some children (their own) better than others, and treat children like kitchen-servants, and will not let them play, or dream. If you had to choose, the mother in this story is a good mother, not a bad stepmother. But she is not perfect, as real human beings are not perfect. She has so many children that they call her Mother Goose, or Old Shoe-Woman, when they are teasing. She does her very best for them. She darns their clothes and turns sheets sides-to-middle, and makes nourishing food out of inexpensive—no, let us say honestly—out of downright cheap things, carefully simmered, made tasty with herbs that cost nothing. She makes sure that those who go to school have waterproof shoes. She scrimps and saves so that each child has some little gift to open on his or her birthday or at Christmas. She has sat up all night sometimes, making a pretty blouse out of an old dress, or a furry toy out of an old jacket of her own, that has worn so bald that she cannot go out in it. And anyway she has nowhere to go to. She has no time for visiting, nor friends to visit
.