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By Root 2103 0

were polymorphously perverse. Thumb-sucking, ear-stroking, pleasure in the wind in your knickers as you swung rhythmically in a swing tied to a branch, pleasure in the speed of the motor car and the pistons of trains, all these were indications of a masked and active sexuality. Children desired their mother or father, wished to marry her or him, had fantasies of slaying the other parent. An Austrian bourgeois of his time, Freud felt able to judge these propensities. Children had not constructed mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust, morality. “In this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists… Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession …” Freud knew that children were not sweet, or gentle, or carefree. He knew they could hate. He quoted Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman. “As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and that’s her eldest sister.” In England, that remark is flippant, a drawing-room witticism, an Oscar Wilde shocking paradox. In Germany, where Max Reinhardt put on Shaw’s plays along with Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Gorky’s Lower Depths, it would be received with a difference.

Everyone went out into the tamed and changing earth, and made camps. From Ancona to Chipping Camden, where C. R. Ashbee had led his East End guild of craftsmen like Aaron into the Promised Land, and had immediately constructed a huge communal mud-bath of a swimming-pool, people went out into the air, built temporary shelters in tree roots, practised skills that in some cases were derived from the scouting and tent-building skills of Mafeking and Ladysmith. David Garnett camped with the four wild and beautiful Olivier sisters, Brynhild, Marjorie, Daphne and Noel, who climbed trees like monkeys and dived naked into rivers from ancient bridges. (Their father was a Commonwealth Office minister, Sydney Olivier, a founding Fabian who spoke out against the Boer War and was sent to govern Jamaica.) These combined with the perfectly beautiful Rupert Brooke to form the Neo-Pagans, along with James Strachey, who was hopelessly in love with Brooke. Later, the Fabians themselves ran educational summer camps, with lectures, and gymnastic drills. Baden-Powell made many rules, moral and practical, for Boy Scouts, and later, with his sister Agnes, for Girl Guides. He drew on American Native woodcraft and British military camaraderie, as well as Kim and Mowgli. There was a camp at Hollesley Bay Colony on the East Coast, visited by Beatrice Webb in 1905, where broken-down men were to be put together again. She went also to a Salvation Army camp in Hadleigh Farm, where they collected released convicts, tramps, drunks and vagrants, fed them, helped them and preached at them. There was also an idea current amongst anxious social thinkers about the undeserving poor, which said that the “concentration” camps invented by the efficient British army in South Africa might be used to segregate—even, it was suggested, to sterilise or put down—the irredeemable, the hopeless, the dangerous.

• • •

Time passed at very different speeds for all these people, between 1901 and 1907, when one event changed all their lives. For some it ticked like metronomes, for others it lurched giddily, for some—the little ones—it still resembled space, boundless and sunlit, boundless and shining with snow and ice, always threatening impossible boredom, always offering corners to go round, long, long roads stretching ahead. There were measures for some—menstruation, exams, parties, camps, pay days, cheques in the post, deadlines, telegrams, crises in banks. And for others, day after similar day. Some bodies got older rapidly—the babies, the menopausal. Some appeared hardly to change at all, from year to year.

Ann Warren changed most, and felt time, paradoxically, as something hanging and slow. She was a neat baby, a brown baby, like a hazelnut, Frank Mallett