The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [15]
They rode back more soberly. Dorothy fetched a postcard and stamp from Olive’s bureau. Philip held the pen awkwardly and stared at the blank rectangle. Dorothy—not overlooking him—waited by the window. Once or twice he seemed to be about to set pen to postcard, but did not. Dorothy decided he might get on with it if she went away. When her hand was on the door-latch, Philip said “Promise you won’t read it?”
“I wouldn’t. Letters are private. Even postcards. I could get you an envelope to put it in, that would make it private. Would you like that?”
“Aye,” said Philip. He said “It’s partly I’m a bad speller.”
He wrote
Dear Mum and all,
I am well and Ill rite agen soon. Hope you are well. Philip.
Dorothy brought an envelope and Philip addressed it. He was grateful and also irritated, that Dorothy had noticed his duty and his need.
3
This was the Wellwoods’ third Midsummer Party. Their guests were socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and workingmen’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and the North and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more. The Wellwoods’ parties were not Fabian teas with solid cups and saucers and a frigid absence of entertainment. Nor were they political meetings, to discuss the London County Council, Free Russia and Russian starvation. They were frivolous, lantern-lit, silk and velvet fancy-dress parties, with masques, and dancing to flute and fiddle.
The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. And there were many other children. There were large families, in which relations shifted subtly as new people were born—or indeed, died—and in which a child also had a group identity, as “one of the older ones” or “one of the younger ones.” The younger ones were often enslaved or ignored by the older ones, and were perennially indignant. The older ones resented being told to take the younger ones along, when they were planning dangerous escapades.
The parents—and the Wellwoods were no exception—found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with eight, or ten, or twelve children spread their love differently from the way in which they might have concentrated on a singleton or two infants. Love depended on the spaces between infants, on the health of the parents, on death, on the chances of which child survived an epidemic or an accident, and which did not. There were families in which the best-loved child had died, and remained the best-loved. There were families in which, apparently, the dead had disappeared without trace, and were not spoken of as realities. There were families in which an unborn child was dreaded and shrunk from, only to become, on emerging alive from blood and danger, the best-beloved after all.
Most of the parents of these favoured children had not themselves been so fortunate. If they had run wild, it was because they were neglected, or being hardened for life, and not because freedom was good for them.
Much of the freedom, both of parents and of children, depended on the careful work of