The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

He came to modern women, who were, in the world he described, both the victims and the corrupters of men. The symbol of all this was “dress”—such women spoke of “dress,” not of clothing. Women “dressed” at once to stimulate and repel the natural attentions of men. They scented themselves, they besprent themselves with flowers and feathers and furs taken from other living creatures. They submitted to torture from whalebone cages to cramp their bodies into shapes that could show off their “dress” that was the blazon of their separation and servitude. They wore ludicrous shoes that crushed their toes and distorted their stride, not so very far away from the abominable practices of the Chinese footbinders. All this “dress” labelled, invited and repelled, in equal quantity. The women of today were as gaudy as the peacock or the male bird of paradise—gaudy with these male symbols of domination and combativeness—but they lurked like captive lovebirds in the cage of their adornment.

  Women should be able to meet and speak as equals to other human beings, of both sexes. They should wear simple but lovely clothing, and there should be no false shame. A woman’s ankle is a lovely thing. It is no scandal to ride a bicycle in a garment which is practical for the purpose, even if that natural part of the body may be seen.

  He looked up and across to the back of the hall.

  “There is no reason why rational dress should be shapeless, severe or ugly. A young lady with a trim waist, in the future as much as now, must be expected to take pleasure in a pretty belt. There is no necessary connection between rational behaviour and ancient, prudish Puritanism. We should remember that a woman is a woman, not a sofa, or a cake.”

  26

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

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

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

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

  There will be bridge and booze ’till after three

  And after that, a lot of them will grope

  Along the corridors in robes de nuit

  Pyjamas or some other kind of dope.

  A sturdy matron will be set to cope

  With Lord—who isn’t “quite the thing”

  And give his wife the leisure to elope

  And Mrs. James will entertain the King.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  THE PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE IN THE HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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