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By Root 1996 0

It had been sent to Olive to review in The English Illustrated Magazine, along with a heap of children’s tales and fairy stories, although it was no such thing. It was called Mother Nature’s Little Book of Bedtime Rhymes, and was by Herbert K. Methley. It contained prancing, jaunty little rhymes about creatures which, if anthropomorphised at all, must appear evil in that human guise. The spider and the praying mantis, crunching up the living, nutritious limbs of their mates. The cuckoo, that great deceiver, laying her camouflaged egg (Nature was so helpful, the blotches were indistinguishable from the willow-warbler’s own eggs) and flying off to sing in the branches, whilst her industrious skinny offspring, with its blind, fleshy head, evicted the little warblers, one by one, and grew into a monster that dwarfed the nest. The ichneumon fly, laying its exquisite eggs under the skin of grubs, who were walking larders, slowly sucked dry. Dorothy had showed it to Tom, who waved it away. He was not a boy who pulled the legs and wings off things. Dorothy said

“It’s a good book because that’s how the world really is. And it makes it funny, which is clever.”

“What is it, how is the world, what do you mean?” asked Phyllis, and got no answer.

12

Prosper Cain was happy to be distracted, by Olive Wellwood, from the problems of the Museum. Various papers and magazines were on the attack, criticising the circulating exhibitions, expressing shock at the imprudent purchase of fakes, including the Palissy platter, and most of all complaining that the art education of the British had “idiotically and inexplicably become vested in the hands of soldiers.” The Museum was nothing more than an almshouse for the army. The present Director, Professor Middleton, was not a soldier, but a reclusive scholar from Cambridge, who was greatly ill at ease with Major-General Sir John Donnelly, head of the Department of Science and Art, and was also persecuted by the irascible aesthete James Weale, keeper of the Art Library. The atmosphere was sour, and Prosper Cain spent much of his time shuttling between incompatible people with unacceptable proposals. He had no one in whom to confide, and felt lonely. It was pleasant to be greeted by Mrs. Wellwood’s warm smile of admiring respect, to be asked for anecdotes and practical information that were easy and pleasant to impart. He noticed her condition, under her swinging Liberty dress. In some curious way it allowed him, safely, to recognise that she attracted him. She was like a lovely carving or painting, though he could hardly say so. She fixed her liquid dark eyes on him, and he relaxed, and smiled back. He asked how the tale of the child detectives was progressing. She said that the construction of a detective story was interesting.

“You know, Major, a story, especially a mystery story, is all topsyturvy. It works backwards, like tunnels of mirrors. The end is the cause of the beginning, so to speak. I need my resourceful children to find hidden things, and therefore I need to know who hid them, and where, and why. But really they were hidden in order to be found.”

Prosper Cain said he hadn’t thought of it that way. He asked if her own children helped her to write about child characters. He was not sure he knew how young people thought or felt, despite having two of his own.

Olive dropped her voice, and leaned towards him.

“You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.”

“You write from your own inner child? I don’t know if my own still exists. Military life and museums do not encourage spontaneity.”

“I will share a secret with you. I don’t really like making up imaginary children. I get most frightfully bored by their little disputes and their innocence. I think the persisting child in myself inhabits Elfland—not pretty gauzy Fairyland but a more dangerous and wilder place altogether. I like watching invisible beings and strange creatures who creep into the real world from