The Children's Book (6 page)

In 1879 he put on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in a church hall in Whitechapel. The cast was a daring mixture of real workers and idealistic visitors. It was also a daring mixture of men and women. Humphry thought almost constantly about women, whatever else he was thinking of. He dreamed waists and ankles, unwound hair and the haunches that moved under the staid skirts. The
Dream
is a good play for women, but this project was (he knew it) entirely inspired by two particular young women who came to all his classes and sat at the front, asking clever questions. They were out of place amongst the Cockneys, Irish, Polish and German Jews. They spoke broad Yorkshire. Humphry’s own accent was educated Yorkshire, with some flat vowels. They wore plain, well-cut dark dresses, with very pretty little hats, decorated with gay silk flowers, anemones and pansies, poppies and violets. The elder was strikingly lovely, with huge brown eyes and coiled mahogany hair. The younger had the brown eyes, but lesser, and usually cast down, and nut-brown hair scraped subtly tighter. They were certainly not condescending lady visitors. They were the deserving poor—their gloves were threadbare, their shoes creased and worn—but there was something loose and wild about them under the respectability, that appealed to something wild in Humphry.

He had made friends with a young Cambridge man, Toby Youlgreave, who was writing a dissertation on Ovid, in the hope of a Fellowship at Peterhouse, and lecturing to the East End audiences on English Fairy Mythology, his real passion. Toby’s Christianity was fraying, but he believed there were more things in heaven and earth than most people dreamed, and told Humphry, seriously, over a beer, that he had seen uncanny creatures, not only in woods near Cambridge, but passing between market stalls, or peering out of windows, in the Mile End Road. Our world was
interpenetrated
, he said. We had known it in the past. We have lost the knowledge. He was a large-shouldered man, of middle height, with impressive buttocks and calves, and a thick head of lion-coloured curls. His eyes were as blue as the Pied Piper’s, candle-flames where salt is sprinkled. His lectures were popular, for various reasons. Craftsmen came for ideas for brooches and carvings of English little people or haunting spirits. The religious dissatisfied came in search of the spilt spiritual content of their lives. Mothers came for tales to tell children, and teachers for information. And then people came because word went round that you could never quite tell what Mr. Youlgreave would say, or what he would claim to know.

It was some time before the two friends realised that the Misses Grimwith were sitting in the front row of both the lectures on Literature and those on Fairy Mythology. They also realised that both were smitten by the elder Miss Grimwith.

Toby said to Humphry “It’s you she prefers. You have
gravitas
. You impress her. I’m a buffoon.”

Humphry didn’t disagree: it was what he thought himself. He said “We could put on the
Dream
and she could be Titania. I’m sure she could do it. We could combine our classes.”

Naturally, Humphry directed. In the end, he couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else playing Oberon. He offered Toby Puck, but Toby said he had always wanted to play Bottom, and that way he would at least lie in Miss Grimwith’s arms. They borrowed a Church Hall in Whitechapel, and auditioned Miss Grimwith, whose rich, light voice rang out, perfectly. Miss Violet Grimwith, offered Hermia, or Hippolyta, said she had no ambition to act but would make the costumes, as she was a dressmaker. They found a wiry cockney barrow-boy, who was a perfect Puck, and a tall blonde lady librarian for Helena. The Athenians were a pleasant mix of visiting gentlemen and indigenous workers. The costumes were generally judged to be aesthetically brilliant. Olive
Grimwith was dressed in floating moonsilver with peacock feathers, silken flowers and naked feet. Humphry wanted to get to his knees and kiss the feet. He tormented himself with detailed thoughts of other things he wanted to do. At the end of the fairy dance at the end of the play, he whirled her into the wings, and took her into his arms.

They were married in the Whitechapel Register Office in 1880. Violet came, and Toby Youlgreave, and witnessed the marriage.

Humphry did not immediately tell his family that he was a married man. He was living on an allowance from his father in Yorkshire, who believed that Humphry was preparing for a university teaching career, and did not mind—indeed approved—his charitable enthusiasms. A son, Peter, was born two months after the wedding. Some months later, Humphry took his bride and his baby, and introduced them to his brother. Katharina Wellwood was by then herself expecting a child (Charles, born later in 1881). The baby Peter was irresistible, at the confident, smiling stage. Olive was elegant and ladylike. Basil lectured Humphry on improvidence, and on responsibility, and found him a regular job, as a clerk in the Bank of England. It was not what Humphry would have desired, but it was a steady, if modest, income. Humphry, Olive, Violet and Peter moved into a little house in Bethnal Green. Humphry turned his sharp mind to banking. He needled Basil by joining the arcane bimetallism dispute siding with those who proposed a double monetary standard. Silver and gold, both, should be basic monies, to the obvious advantage of our Empire and traders in India. Basil, with most of the City, staunchly supported the Gold Standard. Basil felt, but did not say, that Humphry was shifty and ungrateful, as well as irresponsible.

The year 1881 was a year of beginnings. A number of idealist, millenarian projects and groups were founded. There were the Democratic Federation, the Society for Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society, the Anti-Vivisection movement. All were designed to change and reinvent human nature. The younger Wellwoods looked into them all and joined some. Toby Youlgreave, who was almost part of their small family, immediately joined the Theosophists, and took his friends with him. All three also attended the early meetings of the Democratic Federation, which was mostly attended by German and Austrian socialists and anarchists, some disgruntled English workingmen and some university
idealists. William Morris defended the Austrian dissident Johannes Most, who wrote what Morris described as a song of triumph at the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Most went into a British prison, and Hyndman demonstrated in public. Basil begged Humphry not to involve himself.

In October 1882 Edward Pease founded the Fellowship of the New Life, and the younger Wellwoods went to its meetings. They discussed, there and at the Democratic Federation, organisation of unemployed labour, the feeding of board schoolchildren, nationalisation of mines and railways, the construction, by public bodies, of homes fit for the People.

In the winter of 1882, in Christmas week, Peter came down with croup, and died. In the same week, Thomas Wellwood was born.

In 1883 Olive Wellwood was seriously ill. Violet managed the little house. Karl Marx died. Attempts were made to explode local government offices,
The Times
newspaper and underground railways full of people coming from exhibitions in South Kensington. Basil took Humphry to his club, and told him very firmly that anarchism simply
would not do
. A Bank of England officer could not be seen hobnobbing with anarchists.

Humphry responded by taking his wife—to give her a change of air, he told Katharina—to Munich, where they had various secretive meetings with freethinkers and socialists. They visited the Alte Pinakothek, and were present at the opening of the Löwenbräukeller, complete with napkins and tablecloths, and the music of four military bands. Olive recovered sufficiently to dance at Fasching. Tom was left behind with Violet for the first, but not the last, time.

In 1884 the Fabian Society branched out of the Fellowship of the New Life. Humphry and Olive—now restored to a pale loveliness—joined. So did Toby, though his attendance was irregular. Olive knitted through the meetings, head bowed, clicking her needles.

Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn.

In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship—an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners’ children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.

Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.

In 1889 Andrew Lang’s
Blue Fairy Book
appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive’s early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming—or return—of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring. She took ideas from Toby’s ethnological books. She invented dangerous hidden elfin and dwarfish folks. She wrote
Elfinia and the Forest Beasts, The Sandals of the Salamander, The Queen of the Ice Caverns, The Hidden Knife-Box People, The Boring Borehole
, and
The Shrubbery, or the Boy Who Vanished
, which made her name, and earned her a considerable sum of money. She was now writing small books, and longer ones, as well as magazine stories.

The younger Wellwoods decided to move to the country, bought Todefright in a dilapidated state, renovated it, and settled there at the time of Florian’s birth, at midsummer 1892. In 1893 another girl was born and lived for a week.

It was in that year that Humphry Wellwood also began writing for the Press. He wrote a few articles for the
Economist
, under his own name. He also began a series of anonymous reports on dubious financial dealings, published in a satirical weekly called
Midas
. His pseudonym was The March Hare. He wrote about the Kaffir Circus and the activities of the Randlords, who dealt in South African gold. He took an interest in the new Westralian mines, some of which were as fictitious as Olive’s imagined Borehole. The Wellwood children played games in which they chased gnomes and great Worms through Jumpers Deep, Nourse Deep, Glen Deep, Rose Deep, Village Deep and Goldenhuis Deep, or through Bayley’s Reward, Bird-in-Hand, Empress of Coolgar-die, Faith, Hit or Miss, Just in Time, King Solomon’s, Nil Desperandum and The World’s Treasure. Tom had clear imaginations of many of these places. Rose Deep was glittering caverns of rosy quartz, with flushed rivers winding into the mountains. Nil Desperandum was black and slippery with sullen fires in hidden crevices, and funnels opening to the sky. He knew you could see the stars by daylight from the depths of mines, and tried to imagine how this would look in reality. Would the sky that held the visible stars be blue, or black, and why?

Basil Wellwood made money in the Kaffir Boom. He made suggestions
for small investments to Humphry, who instead invested early, on principle, in bicycle shares. Upon the flotation of the Dunlop Tyre Company, Humphry suddenly found himself more than financially comfortable. He engaged a maths tutor, with a view to entering Tom for Eton. Toby was helping with the classics.

There was champagne at the 1895 Midsummer Party.

The Wellwoods’ Midsummer was a slightly movable feast. Humphry explained to Philip that midsummer day—that is, the longest day of the solar year—is in fact June 21st. But the European Feast of St. John is the evening of June 23rd leading to St. John’s Day on June 24th and that also is called Midsummer. “In practice,” said Humphry, who believed in talking to the young as though they were fellow men, “in practice, we have been somewhat eclectic with our own celebrations, choosing true midsummer, or St. John’s day, depending on the convenient day of the week for holding a party. Today is Friday 21st which is
true midsummer
, although midsummer eve was yesterday, and we shall be embarking on the declining days at dawn on Saturday, though still in advance of Europe… Saturday is full moon, so we will celebrate—if we are lucky with the weather—by the light of a waxing gibbous moon. ‘Gibbous’ is a good word,” said Humphry, who was a word-savourer. Philip had been alarmed at the number of words flying round the table that he had never before encountered. But he now had a mental image of a waxing gibbous disc, and his ever-active mind’s eye began to decorate a large bowl with waning gibbous, waxing gibbous, and truly circular discs. It could be interesting. Silver and gold on dark cobalt.

“Friday is a good day for friends to join us,” said Olive. “They are all gathering here for the weekend away from the city. We shall keep you very busy with preparations, Philip.”

“Good,” said Philip.

The household, family, staff and Philip, was set to frenzied work. Olive and Humphry had both already completed their writing stints, around dawn, before breakfast. The kitchen was full of smells of cooking, and no one was to have anything for lunch except bread and cheese, for the stove, and most of the crockery, were pre-empted. Philip was assigned to help with the decoration of the garden and orchard. He helped set up trestle tables on the lawn near the house, and then to arrange little cosy, or conspiratorial, groups of chairs in picturesque places. All chairs were requisitioned—wicker chairs, deckchairs, schoolroom chairs, the nursery rocking chair, cane and metal garden chairs. They were placed in
arbours, in the clearing at the centre of the shrubbery, even in the orchard. Then the lanterns were swung from branches, and half-concealed in clumps of tall grasses and decorative thistles in the herbaceous borders. Philip was sent with Phyllis to hang lanterns in the orchard. It was an unkempt, raggedy place with moss and lichens on the twisted branches of old fruit-trees, and brambles snaking in from the wild and in places smothering everything. Some of the trees had odd structures in them made from planks and bits of rope. These were good places for illuminations, Phyllis said. She attached lanterns to ropes and sent Philip climbing up to the platforms. “These are old tree houses,” said Phyllis. “From when we were little. Even Hedda can get into these. We’ve got a much better one—out in the forest. But it’s a secret,” she added, doubtfully. Philip was picking up hard windfall apples. Phyllis told him to watch for wasps. “You get all sorts of worms in them, popping their little black heads out at you. It’s a horrible idea, biting into something wriggly—”