The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  • • •

  She was saved, though she never knew it, by Violet, who sent a message to Vetchey Manor, just in case Griselda was there. Griselda was. The next day, Dorothy saw her pedalling up the drive, dressed in country tweeds. Dorothy went slowly—she didn’t feel up to running—to meet her. They kissed.

  “You look dreadful. I heard you were here, so I came over. Are you ill?”

  “I fainted. I fainted in an anatomy class. I was holding a heart in my hand and I dropped it, and fainted. I was so ashamed.”

  “You’ve overdone it, as I always knew you would.”

  “They sent me here for a rest.”

  “Is it working?”

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  They went into Todefright, and Dorothy made mugs of tea. Griselda said that maybe Dorothy should visit her in Cambridge. “Do you like it, there, Grisel?”

  “It’s not quite real, but in some ways it’s better than real. I really like the work. I like thinking, you know, thinking about things that aren’t myself.”

  So Dorothy packed her things, and went on the train with Griselda to Cambridge, and was given a guest room in Sidgwick Hall.

  Newnham College was austere, graceful and comfortable. The buildings were red-brick and slightly Dutch, which is to say, domestic. There was a very large, beautiful garden, with an orchard where in the summer the young ladies swayed in hammocks, reading Ovid and John Stuart Mill. There was a hockey field where they covertly (their legs in shortened skirts must not be seen) played vigorous and enthusiastic matches. There was a croquet lawn. They were in the University on sufferance; the women’s colleges were not part of the University, and the women, though they took the same exams as the men, were not awarded degrees by the University. They were free women, pursuing the life of the mind, professionally. Opposition to their presence was smouldering and occasionally broke out into violent polemic, or even hostile rioting. They were felt to be a temptation to, and danger for, the morals of the often rackety young men who were part of the University.

  Their tutors and mentors reacted to this opposition by using supreme caution. The young ladies must be chaperoned wherever they went. They must not entertain men who were not fathers, brothers or uncles. There were male lecturers in the University who admitted them to classes—always with chaperones—and those who did not. Florence Cain was the single woman student at a series of economic history lectures in Trinity College, and had to be accompanied by one of the Newnham Fellows on a bicycle. The women felt themselves to be both demure and dangerous, determined and impeded. They found their situation both frustrating and from time to time wildly comic.

  There have, throughout history, been communities of women, from nuns who had taken vows of chastity and sometimes silence, to the women paupers, ruthlessly segregated by the Poor Laws. These women were different. They had asserted their desire—indeed, their need—to use their minds, to understand the nature of things, from mathematical forms to currency and banking, from Greek drama to the history of Europe. This generation, in the first ten years of the twentieth century—was neither as austere nor as single-minded as the pioneers of the 1870s and 1880s. They worked less hard, frequently, and were often more frivolous, as well as more uncertain, in many cases, of what would be the outcome of what they were doing.

  And as Virginia Woolf observed, in a book which began as a lecture in that College, they liked each other. They made friends. The friendships were based on things other than sex and shopping, clothes and mating. Or sometimes, most often, they were.

  College life had its odd little rituals, in which Dorothy was included. The women lived in comfortable bed-sitting rooms, heated by coal-fires, which were often temperamental and had to be coaxed to burn. There were maids, who carried hot water night and morning, and washed up the china. Shoes were cleaned by a man who collected them. Beds were made, fires were laid. In the early days the College had been left money to provide a lady’s maid for every five young ladies, but the ladies’ maids were not wanted, and the money was used to provide half a pint of sterilised milk each evening for each student. This had led to the custom of giving cocoa parties, often very late at night. Invitations caused anxieties, jealousies, bliss and other emotions. There was a curious custom of “propping”—short for “proposing”—by which one young lady would suggest formally to another that they cease to address each other as Miss Simmonds and Miss Baker and call each other Cicely and Alice. Griselda received many such proposals; Florence, who intimidated people, fewer. Griselda had a distaste for what she called Schwärmerei and attracted a lot of it, with her pale, composed look. She said to Dorothy, on Dorothy’s first evening, that she would find both fiercely independent persons and perpetual schoolgirls in the company, and so it proved.

  Dorothy, used to the pressure of laboratory work and demonstrations, was surprised by how much students like Florence and Griselda were left to their own devices. Florence seemed to be largely responsible for her own reading and learning, and had a tutor who barely commented on her essays. Griselda, studying Languages, was better off. She took Dorothy to a lecture by Jane Harrison, the Classics don who was also a public personality, passionate, eccentric, with a reputation outside the College and outside Cambridge. She lectured in the College, dressed in flowing black robes with a shining emerald stole, which she used to gesture with, almost like Loïe Fuller, whom she also resembled in her dramatic use of magic lantern slides, made from photographs and drawings of Greek carvings and jars. The lecture was on Ghosts, Sprites and Bogeys. It dealt with Sirens, Snatches and Death-Angels, bird-footed man-eating women and Gorgons with evil eyes. It had the odd effect on Dorothy of making her want to return to the labs, partly at least because Miss Harrison reminded her of her mother. Several of the women, Griselda said, were in love with Miss Harrison, and jostled to sit next to her in Hall. She was said to be a great tutor to those she considered worth her attention.

  They walked along the river, and went out in a rowing-boat, Griselda, Florence and Dorothy. They discussed the shape of their lives. Griselda said she half-desired to spend the rest of her life in this College—largely because here she could call her life her own, and do what she wanted to do, which was to think about a kind of German version of what Miss Harrison was doing. She wanted to study the relations between fairytales and religions, find out all the ways in which particular stories—say Cinderella—varied and repeated themselves.

  “And for that,” said dark Florence, sitting in the bow of the boat, letting the river run through her fingers—“for that, you would be happy to live on burned legs of lamb with bleeding interiors, and watery prunes, for ever and ever?”

  “I don’t want to have a house, and staff, and have to order legs of lamb and prunes, black and watery or not. It’s not enough.”

  “But is this enough, all these earnest women, and timid girls and the artifice of a manless world?”

  “You needn’t worry,” said Griselda. “You are engaged to be married.” Privately, she was curious about Florence’s capacity to appear to forget this fact. Florence said that that presented its own problems. They drifted on in silence.

  “The truth is,” said Florence, “that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters, like Viola in Twelfth Night, or Miss Harrison’s harpies and gorgons. Do you not think it might be harmful to ignore the sex instinct? Don’t you think that after twenty years of studying Cinderella you might be seized by the idea of the children you never had?”

  “Quite probably,” said Griselda, lifting a dripping oar and suspending it, so that the boat swung in the current. “But after twenty years of childbearing and fever and confinement and being shut in a house I might be seized by the idea of Cinderella.

  “You are very quiet, Dorothy. Can you see yourself falling in love, and marrying?”

  Dorothy revisited
her mental image of Dr. Barty. He had lost much substance whilst she was in Newnham. He had lost, she saw, precisely, sex. All that was left of him was a Cheshire-cat-like smile. She ducked, as the boat slipped under a weeping willow, accompanied by a slip of fallen leaves.

  “I think it best to suppose that I shan’t,” she said. “But nobody can tell what will happen to them. Do you think getting the Vote would help?”

  “It would remove one of the endless humiliating differences between women and men. It might make it possible—in some new world—for the sexes to talk to each other, like people. At the moment the agitation is just making the women more womanish and the men more grumpy and masculine. Of course we ought to be able to vote. But I don’t know that having the Vote will affect the things that frighten me.” Griselda paused. “Whereas, if I wrote a really good book, that might. Or if you invented a new surgical procedure, or discovered a new drug.”

  “Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”

  Griselda feathered the water, elegantly, and turned the boat, and they went back to tea, and glazed buns, and muffins. Dorothy felt a sudden need for London, and the labs.

  In 1906 there was a General Election. There was a Liberal landslide; fifty-three Labour members were elected, of whom twenty-nine were professed socialists. There was a savage and arcane argument about the nature of the House of Lords. John Burns, the working-class man, entered the Cabinet. The bristling, pugnacious Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. H. G. Wells, also bristling and pugnacious, joined the Fabian Society, and read them a paper on the Faults of the Fabians. Those Fabians who were children of Fabians formed what became known as the Fabian Nursery, full of forward-looking, idealist young men, and determined young women. Fabian summer camps were instituted, with lectures, discussions, and physical jerks. Dorothy and Griselda occasionally attended the meetings of the Nursery. Charles/Karl went to Germany and went from Munich to Ascona, where he watched the wilder German young ladies dancing naked, argued about vegetarianism, and realised that anarchy was impossible. A bomb was thrown that year at the King of Spain and his English bride on their wedding day, killing twenty people. Charles/Karl was appalled, both by the hatred and despair that had caused the deed, and by the random waste of life. In January 1905 on Bloody Sunday the Russian troops had massacred the workers, who had come to petition the Czar, and in February the cruel Grand Duke Sergei was exploded in his carriage by a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary. Charles/Karl made his decision, and enrolled at the London School of Economics to work under Graham Wallas and J. A. Hobson on the causes and structures of poverty. He knew he could not kill anyone, and had come to believe that that was not the way. So he too joined the Fabian Society, and went to the camps.

  Julian Cain was also doing postgraduate work, trying to define a subject for a thesis on English Pastoral, in literature and art. He too went along to the Fabians, with younger men like Rupert Brooke and James Strachey.

  The fiery Wells published a strange fiction, In the Days of the Comet, in which, in some immediate future to come, the magnetic field of a passing comet completely changed the sexual nature of the human race, which became simultaneously promiscuous without guilt, rational and ready to bring up children at the expense of the state in communal nurseries. The books that were loved, however, were still written for children. E. Nesbit published The Railway Children, in which the children’s father was imprisoned, wrongly, and had connections with the Russian liberals. She published, also, The Story of the Amulet, the first book in which children were able—after finding an amulet in an odds and ends shop—to visit the remote past. The remote past, and the English earth, came hauntingly and solidly to life in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, set in Sussex, full of fairytales and magic from under the hill.

  Humphry was sadly amused and pleased by the final rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who, looking pale, transparent and somehow mechanical, was given back his command in the French army.

  Olive was writing. She was writing the play, in collaboration with August Steyning. They had tried this plot, and that, Elves and changelings, Grimm and Lady Wilde. And one day, Olive had raided the cupboard, and carried the books containing the endless Underground tale over to Nutcracker Cottage. She said, hesitantly, that of course it was long, far too long, but it contained things … Steyning would see …

  He was alight with excitement. Here was what they needed. Mines, shadows, a journey, supernatural beings, a good Queen and a bad Queen, a travelling crew of magical creatures, the Gathorn … She had written it as though she had had his own staging skills—his use of lighting—in mind. And Anselm Stern and Wolfgang would be integral to the special effects, the making of the world. They wrote, and talked, and rewrote, all through 1906.

  At the end of that year Tom went to the woods, and found that a gamekeeper had chopped down the Tree House. They were public woods, and he had thought the man was his friend. But there was the Tree House, hacked into a heap of logs and spars—even including those branches of the tree which had supported and concealed it. The contents—the little stove, his writings, such as they were, Dorothy’s outgrown collection of rabbit bones and bird bones and dried skins—all this had been taken. As had his blanket-bag, his mug, his knives. His wooden stool was chopped into chunks alongside the log pile.

  Tom had a few very simple beliefs, one of which was that we should not be attached to things. Other creatures were not. He had taken to wearing the same clothes until they wore out—though Violet grabbed them, washed them, and returned them, at intervals. He saw that these chopped things were not possessions, they were—or had been—parts of himself.

  He had no one to tell. He thought of going to London, to tell Dorothy, and then thought, how would that help? He didn’t know whether she had come to the Tree House since he told her about the vixen, which he had regretted, as though he had betrayed either the vixen or himself.

  He stood very still, for a long time, like a man at a graveside, looking from pale plank to brown bracken to moss on the branches.

  A shadow went over the sun, and it was cold. Tom turned round, and wandered into the wood.

  40

  In February 1907, Hedda Wellwood was seventeen. She was again at home in Todefright, having left Bedales School with a reasonable, but not scintillating, set of exam passes. She did not know what to do, and both Humphry and Olive were too preoccupied to help her. Humphry was deeply, and deliciously, embroiled in the crisis in the Fabian Society, brought on by the imperious ambition of H. G. Wells. He was also in love with the telephone—one had been installed in the offices of the Fabian Society, and he was seriously thinking of installing a private line in Todefright. Women were now a quarter of the Fabian membership, and Humphry suggested to Hedda that she attend meetings of the Nursery, which was more revolutionary and anarchical than its parent group. Olive, writing as she had never written—and writing in collaboration with Steyning and the Sterns—said vaguely that she had supposed Hedda would be applying to Newnham, or the LSE. Hedda frowned, and said she had a right to a bit of time to think. Violet said that she could make herself useful whilst she was thinking, like Phyllis. Hedda put on her coat and hat and said she was going up to London to see some friends.

  Hedda’s friends were workers devoted to Votes for Women. She had discovered the Women’s Social and Political Union, and went to their new headquarters in Clements’ Inn, off the Strand, where she helped with letter-writing, poster-making and fund-raising. Olive, like many successful women at that time, despite her Fabian membership, did not pay much attention to the agitation for the Vote, though, unlike Beatrice Webb, she had never been silly enough to support the petitions against the Vote organised by Mrs. Humphry Ward and other ladies. Dorothy, Griselda and Florence wanted women to be able to study and work as they chose, but did not s
ee the Vote as representing an automatic open gate to intellectual and financial freedom. Hedda was named for an Ibsen heroine whose savage life was sacrificed to meaninglessness. She had a capacity for indignation, and, as was later to be discovered, by her and by others, for rage. The women agitators knew who they were, and knew what mattered. This mattered to Hedda.

  The WSPU had organised marches on Parliament in 1906, when it was learned that there was nothing in the King’s Speech about female enfranchisement. One hundred women invaded the House of Commons, and fought, with umbrellas and boots, to gain admittance to the Chamber. They were fought back by the police—with considerable roughness—and carried away dishevelled, leaving a trail of hatpins, hairpins and bonnets. Ten women were arrested, and refused to pay fines. They were imprisoned. When they came out, they were feasted by the other women. Hedda was intensely moved by all this. Here was something that mattered, a fight, a cause, a way to make oneself into a single-minded speeding arrow.

  At first, she only helped in the office. On February 9th, 1907, the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies organised a mass march from a Parliament of Women to the Houses of Parliament. There was a large gathering of women, composed of forty suffrage societies, including many who had come from the North and the Midlands. There were many fashionable ladies, in landaus and motor cars. They were dressed in black and carried banners.

  The weather was foul. Heavy rain poured and swirled in a slapping, chill wind. The skirts of the women, rich and poor, were soaked and draggled. Their cheeks and noses burned as the cold sleet bit. Mud in the parks, mud in the gutters, mud liquefying the dung in the roads, sucked at them. They went on, in their thousands. Mounted police were used against them. They rode down the women on the footpaths, jostled them and shoved them under the hooves and wheels. The women went on.