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By Root 2170 0

same deep pool. Dorothy was struggling with the Preliminary Scientific Examination. Tom, nearly twenty-one, had made a worse hash of his matriculation than in 1902, and knew it, though his tutors and family did not, for the marks were not yet public. He spent time avoiding questions about when he would go to university, and where. All this had added a studied evasiveness—still charming enough—to his carefree demeanour. Imogen had graduated, and needed to decide on the future. Florence was thinking about whether to study, what to study, where to study, and was in the interim reading and dreaming, in a generally accusing way, if these things can accuse. Gerald came less often to the Museum, but he still came, just enough, and talked intelligently to Florence, with easy good manners, just enough to prolong her torment. Julian had sat his Finals in Classics, and was also waiting for the results.

Spirits were lowered, in the group as a whole. It was possible that the camp might have restored them, but in the event, they were overwhelmed by rain, in what turned out to be the wettest summer ever recorded. They lay in their tents, night after night, listening to the beating of the water, and the flailing of the branches, and the hissing of the wet leaves and the trickling of mud under their groundsheets, around their tent-pegs. They mostly moped. Tom proposed a mud-fight, but the others could work up no real enthusiasm. They were clammy and uncomfortable. Then one night the wind got up, and the guy-ropes tore loose and the tents slopped and slapped over the grass. They crawled, soaked, out from under. The tutors tried to light a fire in the cottage, but spirals of rain soughed in the chimney and it sputtered and went out. They made tracks gloomily towards the back door, huddled under sodden blankets. A figure went past them in the opposite direction, racing and whirling. It was Tom, half-visible through the ropes of driving rain. He ran along the jetty, and dived into the pond, and came up again, blowing water like a triton, his hair plastered to his face.

“Come on,” he cried. The rain beat in polka dots around him, and vicious whip-lashes of wet wind stirred up the pond’s surface into crowns and ridges. “Come on,” cried Tom, but no one came, and although he splashed vigorously for some time, they all felt—including Tom—silly, and humiliated. The next day, they went home.

Nineteen hundred and three was the year when the English King went to Paris with pomp, circumstance and amiability, to lay the foundations of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In Germany the Social Democrats won an election and argued over the principle of wearing knee-breeches to pay an official call on Kaiser Wilhelm, who believed they were a gang of traitors. In 1903 H. G. Wells joined the Fabian Society with the intention of shaking it up. A lunatic penetrated the Bank of England and fired shots at the Secretary, Kenneth Grahame. Grahame left the Bank in 1908: the Bank seemed to think he was more interested in writing stories, and messing about in boats, than in the national economy. In Manchester Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union. She was, the editor of the Labour Leader told her daughter Sylvia, “no longer sweet and gentle.” Patty Dace was interested, but did not join. In London there was a Festival of the Music of Richard Strauss; Anselm Stern and his sons came over and accompanied Dorothy, Karl and Griselda to the performances. Griselda was excited by the music. Dorothy was not.

Herbert Methley published Mr. Wodehouse and the Wild Girl. This was a mystical, fleshly, atmospheric tale of the doomed passion between the solitary poet (“my name is a version of Wodwose, the Green Man, the Man of the Woods”) and an earthy, even muddy, child of nature in Romney Marsh. It was briefly successful and had some good reviews, before the police and the censors descended on the bookshops and burned their stock. Phoebe Methley said to Marian Oakeshott that she knew she should be very angry, and that censoring serious literary work was wrong