The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [181]
Pyjamas or some other kind of dope.
A sturdy matron will be set to cope
With Lord—who isn’t “quite the thing”
And give his wife the leisure to elope
And Mrs. James will entertain the King.
There was a sense that fun was now permitted, was indeed obligatory. The stiff black flounces, the jet necklaces, the pristine caps, the euphemisms and deference, the high seriousness also, the sense of duty and the questioning of the deep meanings of things were there to be mocked, to be turned into scarecrows and Hallowe’en masks. People talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex. At the same time they showed a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.
Olive Wellwood became, not very willingly, a matriarch. She had constructed her own good picture of the Todefright family, which was innocent and comfortable. There were sons and daughters and babies in various stages of creeping, crawling and tottering, there were children having real and imaginary adventures in the woods and on the Downs, there were informal gatherings round the fire in winter, or the lawn in summer, where old and young mingled and discussed things with laughter and serious common sense. There was the steady scratch of the pen nib in the study, parcels of manuscript Violet took to the post, the satisfactory cheques that arrived with the admiring letters of readers, both children and adults. This she had made, as surely as she made the worlds of fairytale and adventure which were nevertheless often more real to her than breakfast or bathtime. She and Violet alone knew that both worlds were constructed against and despite the pinched life of ash pits, cinders, rumbling subterranean horrors, and black dust settling everywhere. The woods, the Downs, the lawn, the hearth, the stables were a real reality, kept in being by continuous inventive willpower. In weak moments she thought of her garden as the fairytale palace the prince, or princess, must not leave on pain of bleak disaster. They were inside a firewall, outside which grim goblins mopped and mowed. She had made, had written, this world with the inventive power with which she told her stories.
She could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it, or change it, though her stories knew better. And she had to ignore a great deal, in order to persist in her calm, and listen steadily to the quick scratch of the nib.
At the time of the old Queen’s death, she had a popular success with a collection of tales, which included the tale of the wraiths and puppets at the Grande Exposition, and the sinister and sly tale of The People in the House in the House, in which a child imprisoned some tiny folk in her doll’s house, and was in turn imprisoned by a giant child.
A fashionable magazine sent a young woman to interview Mrs. Wellwood, and a photographer, who posed her, sitting by the fire in a rocking-chair in a velvet gown, reading to the assembled younger children, from Phyllis, now fourteen, and Hedda, now eleven, in smocked dresses and black stockings, their long hair, Phyllis’s fair, Hedda’s dark, shining on their shoulders, to Florian, now nine, and Robin, now seven, and Harry, now five, in sailor suits. Violet handed round cocoa and biscuits, and did not appear in the picture. The interviewer, whose name was Louisa Catchpole, wrote reverently of the shining heads of the listeners—“you could have heard a mouse squeak, or a beetle scurry,” she wrote, entering into the style. She asked the children which was each one’s favourite tale, and was slightly baffled by their answers. This meant that Olive found herself explaining that each child had his or her very own story, which was continually added to, and kept in the glass cupboard in a specially decorated book. Louisa Catchpole said this was a charming idea, and begged to see the books. The photographer took pictures of the cupboard, and of the imaginatively decorated covers of