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By Root 793 0

it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up. ‘Holy,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘whole’—they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family.”

“Amen,” said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. “What happens,” he asked after a pause, “when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?”

“It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That’s because, fundamentally, they’re very happy at home. I wasn’t, and so when I walked out, I’d sometimes stay away for a whole month.”

“And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?”

“It’s not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that’s being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that’s being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn’t think,” she added, “that it’s only when they’re in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn’t just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights—brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while the mother’s doing something else. Duties as well as privileges—but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer—working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying…” She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald’s mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, “But what about you?” she went on. “I’ve been so busy talking about families that I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last.”

“Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?”

Susila smiled. “You did it to yourself,” she assured him. “I merely pressed the buttons.”

“Which buttons?”

“Memory buttons, imagination buttons.”

“And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?”

“If you like to call it that.”

“What else can one call it?”

“Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?”

“But what did happen?”

“Well,