The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “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.