The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Hedda felt as she felt, walking in the countryside, when the weather turned wild. First, you put your head down, and try to protect the dry places inside your damp garments. Then, as damp becomes drenched, and fingers and toes cool and numb, you put your head up, open your mouth, and eat the weather, tasting the sting of the air and the water. This was the Mud March. Hedda was young and strong and striding. A policeman shoved her. She kicked at him with a sharp boot. He skidded in the mud. She was blooded.

  She learned to speak at meetings. She went to a meeting in Sutton where someone emptied a sack of live rats into an audience. Things were thrown, foul things, rotten eggs, cayenne pepper, blown towards the speakers from bellows. The opposition was implacable, ingenious and stronger than most women. It was adept at knocking the chair from under the speakers. Men at meetings clutched respectable women by the breasts, or pushed beer-breathing mouths into their faces, pretending the women had invited it.

  Hedda was afraid. She was partly excited by being afraid. It made her sure she was alive, and that life had a meaning, which she had always been uncertain about. But the fear was very real, and grew more intense as she came to understand, and to see, just how real the dangers were, of being badly hurt, or worse. She stitched up her own torn dresses: she did not want Violet asking too many questions. She did not tell her family where she went. They thought she was sticking stamps, and collecting subscriptions.

  Talk boiled, and intermittent marches and other actions surged into being around the condition of women, and the condition of the Poor. In Cambridge in 1907, an idealist Trinity undergraduate, Ben Keeling, resuscitated the Cambridge Young Fabians. This was remarkable for being the first university society to admit both men and women as members. Keeling was a socialist and invited Keir Hardie, trade unionist and feminist, to speak. He diverted a howling mob of rugger-playing university thugs by deploying two counterfeit Hardies, in fat beards and red ties. He had a poster in his room with the workers of the world advancing with clenched fists. Its title was “Forward the Day Is Breaking.” A Newnham woman, Ka Cox, was treasurer, and the Newnham contingent not only came to listen, but spoke fluently. Amber Reeves, daughter of William Pember Reeves, soon to be Director of the LSE, made a formidable speech proclaiming the relativity of morals, and sympathy with the Russian bomb-throwers and bank-robbers. She was self-assured and beautiful and very clever.

  Graham Wallas, one of the Fabian Old Guard, who had resigned because of a difference of opinion on Free Trade, and had—with some reservations—supported H. G. Wells’s attempts to shake up and reform the Fabian Society, came to speak. He was teaching Charles/Karl at the LSE and Charles/Karl came with him. Wallas spoke on the irrational aspects of human nature in politics—the herd instinct, the bubbling up of the subconscious in crowds and groups. That explorer of the unconscious depths, Sigmund Freud, was hardly known in Cambridge. The Interpretation of Dreams, with its claims that male infants desired to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, although it had appeared in German in 1900, had not yet sold out its print-run of 600 copies. Charles/ Karl knew of its existence, because he had met the wild and anarchic psychiatrist, Otto Gross, preaching Pan and Eros, amongst the bacchantes from Munich in the Mountain of Truth in Ascona. The Society for Psychical Research, home to serious psychologists and needy spiritualists, had also noted the Traumdeutung, believing Freud’s dreamwork to be a new way of exploring the Soul, and maybe the Common Soul to which all humans should have access. The irrational bubbled up, and met the rational, which fastened on it with glee, apprehension and, in Cambridge, wit.

  In the summer term the Cambridge Young Fabians decided to invite Herbert Methley to speak to them. They wanted him to talk about the relations between the sexes. Wells was trying to recover respectability, after A Modern Utopia and In the Days of the Comet, denying that he had ever advocated “something nasty called free love … a sort of utopia of salacious freedoms … the absolute antithesis of that regulated parentage at which socialists aim.” Methley was writing columns in magazines over the pseudonym “Wodwose,” about the need for a new Paganism, for “natural” behaviour, for “spontaneity” and “a proper attention to the Life Force.” He wrote short stories about women who were the priestesses of Gaia, who understood the ancient goddess, Chthon. (He corresponded with Jane Harrison about this.)

  He spoke at the Cambridge Young Fabians on the subject of “The Conventions of the Novel.” This looked innocent enough as a title to pass the critical gaze of censors and critics. He spoke in a Literary Lecture Room in Trinity Street. Julian Cain went along to hear him, with some other Apostles, including the beautiful Rupert Brooke from King’s, who was an enthusiastic Fabian. There he found his sister, Florence, in a smart blue dress, and Griselda Wellwood in silver-grey, as well as the other Newnham regulars. Charles/Karl was also there, having come to visit, and chaperone, Griselda, which he could do, as an elder brother who had graduated. They were all invited to dinner in Brooke’s rooms, afterwards, where a more informal discussion was to take place. Methley’s books had been censored: he needed to be circumspect in public.

  He spoke very cleverly about how the conventions of the novel mirrored the conventional attitudes of society. Everything in a novel must end with a marriage—this was still so, although great novelists had already revealed that life, and love, particularly love, continued after marriage and were not confined by it. He said that intelligent young people who read novels came to see—as they lived their lives—that the world did not quite correspond to the world described either by novels, or by conventional social beliefs. On the one hand, the young ladies present surely did not really believe that their very existence and presence would be an intolerable provocation to the young gentlemen present, unless they were accompanied by chaperones? On the other hand, the young gentleman were not all ready to turn the young ladies into idols, or goddesses, or visions of perfection? They had come to talk to them as was right and proper. They were grown-up people, in charge of their lives.

  And then, subtly and disconcertingly, he changed tack. As they grew older, he said—“I have the advantage over you of some years of experience and observation, no other”—they must realise that they knew, and felt, and observed, all sorts of things—nuances of delicate feeling, strange little social observations, seeds of attitudes, and problems—which did not appear in novels. He must mention the sexual feelings, because not to do so would be dishonest. The character in a novel must put into a reverential, chaste kiss feelings that surged up from underground and—in a novel, perhaps in life—had to be repressed. You came, as a reader, to recognise coded descriptions—taking off a glove, let alone a stocking, conveyed so much more than those simple acts. He was always surprised at the description of scholarly, or intelligent, ladies, as bluestockings. For the word—in itself a lovely, mysterious word—caused people to think of precisely what they were being defied to think of—the human body, in all its energy and beauty.

  He had said he must mention the sexual feelings. But to give the impression that they were the only, or most powerful, feelings would also be wrong. Women in novels were saints, sinners, wives, mothers. Sometimes they were actresses. They were not politicians, financial managers, doctors or lawyers, though they might be artists of what George Eliot called “the hand-screen sort.” And yet modern women felt inside them the struggling towards the light of the repressed doctors and lawyers, bankers and professors, politicians and philosophers. There was more subterranean life, nearer the surface, feeling its way blindly through veins and tunnels, like roots, which move like animals. And if these energies broke the surface, or the skin, there were dowagers like the Duchess and the Red Queen, waiting to hammer them down with mallets and bind them with iron hoops, as Blake said or, to change the metaphor, to reply, as the Fool did to King Lear, who cried “O me! my heart, my rising heart! but, down!”

  Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ’em i’ the paste alive; she knapped ’em o’ t
he coxcombs with a stick, and cried Down wantons down!

  Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.

  Rupert Brooke’s rooms were much grander than the Newnham bedsitters, and had a deliberate leathery shabbiness. The dinner party consisted of a few Apostles and a few Fabians, including some of the Newnham ladies. They stood, and sipped sherry, and nervously discussed the lecture.

  Rupert Brooke must be, Julian thought, the most beautiful man in Cambridge. All his features had exactly the right generous proportions in relation to each other, brow, chin, lips; shoulders, waist, long legs. His skin was milky and his eyes—long-lashed—small and grey-blue. He wore his hair long, parted in the middle, and was always tossing it back. It was bright gold, with a shade of foxy russet in it. He did not often meet your eye. His voice was less lovely than his face—too high, too light, with a squeak in it. The Kingsmen fell in love with him, one after the other, and he appeared not to notice. His election to the Society, Julian thought, was because he looked like a Greek statue—they wanted him—and was part of a trend to admit members whose claims to be interesting relied on loveliness rather than intellect. Julian was not attracted to him. He tried too hard, was too universally amiable.

  But his presence made Julian think critically of his fellow Apostles. They were plain, the serious ones, knobbly and awkward, and above all pale, like things come out from under stones, Julian thought. They looked washed-out. Julian considered Herbert Methley’s metaphor of pale roots pushing blindly in the dark, and looked at the nerveless, long Strachey fingers, the thin necks and hunched shoulders of his fellow students. They were famous in this little world, but they were timid outside it. He had fits of thinking he had had enough of all this earnestness and bawdiness. He was half-Italian. He needed red wine and strong cheese, not crumpets and honey.

  He said, truthfully, to his sister, that the Newnham ladies made the gathering much more interesting. Florence asked him what he thought of the lecture, and Julian said that Methley was master of mixed metaphor. “But he is right,” said Florence. She went across the room to where the writer was being questioned, and said, very clearly, that she believed he had said things that needed saying.

  Methley held both his hands out to her. They were thin, strong brown hands, that took a grip on Florence, in one polite movement.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. And then “I remember you. You came to my lecture at Puxty, and listened to it. A lecturer is always glad to see a face with real understanding in it. This is the second time.”

  He did not add that an understanding face is more highly valued when it is young, female and handsome. But his look implied it. Florence flushed, and then paled again. She asked him a question about one of his novels.

  Julian found himself, when dinner was served, sitting next to Griselda Wellwood. He discovered that, like himself, she was considering a life devoted to scholarship.

  “What do you intend to study?” he asked her.

  “I am half German. I should like to study German fairytales. They’ve been much studied already—as examples of an old Germanic religion, the life of the Volk, going back to Aryan sources, all that. But that isn’t what interests me. It’s really all the ways in which fairytales aren’t myths that interests me. The way there are so very many versions—hundreds—of the same odd tale—Cinderella, say, or Catskin—and they are all the same and all different. They work according to some sort of rules and I’d like to work out what they are.”

  Julian was interested. He asked, what rules?

  “They seem to me like coloured mosaics, with separate little pieces that fit together. Why does the stepmother always say the heroine has given birth to a monster? And why does the king then order her hands to be cut off and hung around her neck, and put her in a boat and push it out to sea? And why can the hands always be miraculously grown back?”

  Julian gave a comic shudder. He said it was all very bloodthirsty, and those who wanted to keep fairytales from children were quite right.

  “That’s another thing I want to study. I don’t think the real tales do frighten you. I think you accept the rules. They work in a fenced world which isn’t the real world, where nothing ever really changes. Witches get punished, and goose-girls become princesses, and what was lost is restored.”

  “I don’t know. I was peculiarly horrified as a small brat by the eyeballs stuck on the thorns, or the dead men impaled on a fence round the glass hill, or the witch in the barrel full of nails.”

  “I would suggest it was a kind of gleeful horror. Whereas H. C. Andersen’s stories do hurt the reader. The Little Mermaid walking on knives and losing her tongue.”

  “So you think you will settle in Newnham and investigate magic woods and castles, and fairy foam on perilous seas?”

  “I cannot make my mind up. Sometimes I think a women’s college is like the tower Rapunzel was shut in, or even the gingerbread cottage. I don’t want to become unreal. Do you know what I mean? I think it is different for men.”

  “It may not be. I’m writing a thesis on English Pastoral—I wanted to compare the poets and painters. I wanted to look at the world of the Faerie Queene and the work of those painters who followed William Blake. Do you know Samuel Palmer?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “He paints magic corn-stooks with golden light pouring through them. English fields. Seductive. Lovely. Innocent. If you are half-German I’m half-Italian, and I sometimes think this College is simply the apotheosis of the public school—it looks like an iced cake, and we sit in it like—like—”

  The image that came into his mind was enchanted rats and mice, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t utter it. He said

  “Guinea pigs.”

  “Guinea pigs? Why on earth?” Griselda laughed.

  “I don’t know. Yes I do. Comfortable in a cage.”

  They smiled at each other. Griselda was thin and sinuous. Her face was pale, and so were her lashes, and so was her fine gold hair, so demurely knotted. But she wasn’t pallid, like the poking-roots Apostles, she wasn’t pale because she was in the dark. She had a fine waist. She was much more beautiful, Julian thought, than the rosy, creamy, pretty Brooke. He suddenly remembered that he had swum naked with her, at the New Forest camp, years ago, and had paid no attention, because he was looking at Tom.

  “There is an old gentleman who works in the Fitzwilliam Museum, who has a collection of Samuel Palmer. And Edward Calvert. I should like to show you. You could come with Florence, then we should be quite correct.”

  “It is odd that we have to be so correct, when we have known each other so long. It is very silly.”

  In flaming June, some weeks after Methley’s lecture, Charles/Karl put his bicycle on a train at Charing Cross, got out at Rye and rode out across the Romney Marsh, past East Guldeford, Moneypenny and the Broomhill Level, swerving between dykes and sewers, watching the plovers circle and hearing the geese honk, and the splash of a fish rising. He rode up beside Jury’s Gut Sewer towards Pigwell, skirting the Midrips ponds and the Lydd Firing Ranges of the army. He came to a cottage standing by itself, in a windswept but flowery garden, with a painted board, Birdskitchen Corner. It was an old, brick building, with a porch, and beach beside it. The lawn was small, lumpy and drying out. A small girl was playing on the lawn, with an assortment of pottery mugs and plates and dishes, and a ring of seated dolls and animals. She had long fine brown hair, and a small, neat face. “If you’re good,” she said to a stuffed badger, “you can have two slices.” She poured water from the teapot, and handed out dandelion heads. “Not that you ever are good,” she said, and looked up, and saw Charles/Karl. “Hello, Ann,” said Charles/Karl.

  She stood up, turned and ran into the house. She came out again, followed by Elsie, wiping floury fingers on her apron.

  “I was just pa
ssing by,” he said to her, smiling cautiously.

  “It’s not often people pass by here, seeing that the track doesn’t really go anywhere.”

  “It’s a track I’ve come to like,” he said. “So I ride down it.”

  “Sit down,” commanded Ann. “And I’ll give you some tea and cake.”

  “May I?” he said to Elsie.

  “I think so,” she said.

  So he sat on the bench, and was given a blue lustre cup of clear water, and a rosy plate with two dandelions and a daisy. “Pretty cups and plates,” said Charles/Karl.

  “Philip makes them for her. Well, no, now I look at them, you’ve got a little dish I made myself, years ago.”

  They were silent for a moment. He reached into his haversack and brought out a parcel in green shiny paper, tied with ribbon, which he handed to Ann. She opened it. It was a book of nursery rhymes, prettily illustrated. Ann held it to her chest, and said to Charles/Karl

  “I can read, you know, I can read all by myself.”

  “She can, too,” said Elsie. “I taught her.” She said “You can stay to dinner, if you want. There’s cod, enough for three, and parsley sauce, and potatoes.”

  “I should like that.”

  So they went in, and sat at table, and talked peacefully, to and about Ann.

  “Mrs. Oakeshott is away?”

  “She’s gone to a lecture in Hythe. And Robin’s out with a friend. So we’d have been peacefully lonesome, if you hadn’t come along.”

  Elsie was now a student-teacher, in Puxty School. She earned a little money, and lived in part of Marian Oakeshott’s cottage. Charles/Karl, after praising the juiciness of the cod, and the freshness of the sauce, asked if the work was as interesting as she’d hoped.