The Haunted Wood, page 23
His armour and his weapons were all, I am almost sure, of quite different periods. The shield was thirteenth century, while the sword was of the pattern used in the Peninsular War. The cuirass was of the time of Charles I., and the helmet dated from the Second Crusade. The arms on the shield were very grand – three red running lions on a blue ground. The tents were of the latest brand approved of by our modern War Office, and the whole appearance of camp, army, and leader might have been a shock to some. But Robert was dumb with admiration, and it all seemed to him perfectly correct, because he knew no more of heraldry or archæology than the gifted artists who usually drew the pictures for the historical romances.
The juxtaposition between the children’s romantic fantasies and the prosaic facts of the world about them – the “ancestral home” is, after all, in the Lewisham Road – gives the stories their wit and poignancy. But the children aren’t ever, quite, forced to leave their fantasy: the adults around them respond to it with indulgent kindness (Albert-Next-Door’s uncle scatters coins for them to find as they excavate), and in the closing pages they really do find a Generous Benefactor in the Indian Uncle who whisks them all away to his mansion to live with him in luxury and plenty. The hair-raising destruction they wreak is always, somehow, undone or made good or forgiven. The sense here is that the children inhabit a slightly different moral order from their elders. Childhood is a sort of playpen – governed by child-to-child moral rules (don’t sneak, keep your word, fight if you must but make up with “Pax”) that mirror but don’t map onto the adult world. Adults who can connect with children on their level – such as Edith’s proxy Mrs Bax in The New Treasure Seekers – shine; lofty victorian disciplinarians such as Aunt Emma in The Railway Children, who “believed in keeping children in their proper places,” do not.
The children in Nesbit’s books aren’t just unformed: they are naughty. They set booby-traps. They defy injunctions. They get into scrapes. They threaten to cause, and often, in fact, cause, terrible harm. Kitchens are incinerated by experiments with fireworks; houses are flooded and barges full of coal upended; priceless antiques are given away to strangers. The second of the Bastable trilogy, The Wouldbegoods, describes a series of events in which, after forming the titular society for moral improvement, the children’s best intentions go hilariously awry. Five Children and It tells the reader: be careful what you wish for.* Whether the children wish for beauty, money or adventure, one way or another the Psammead’s magic comes round to bite them. “The Sammyad’s done us again,” says Cyril glumly at one point – an unimprovably concise precis of the book’s theme. They try to be good, and fail, or try to make a wish that will do them good – but fail at that too.
Childhood happiness for Nesbit was linked with the countryside and being in nature. Her own happiest childhood years had been spent In Halstead Hall in Kent, where her mother Sarah retreated after Mary’s death in 1871, and where she was to recall “those dewy mornings – the resurrection of light and life in the woods and fields! Would that it were possible for all children to live in the country where they may drink in, consciously or unconsciously, the dear delights of green meadow and dappled woodland!”†
That expressly connects to freedom of action. In Five Children and It, she was to write that London (and by extension any city) is “like prison for children.” The countryside was a place, in Nesbit’s worldview, where children could – and should – run wild, and the arrival of the children in The White House is marked by rough and tumble:
When Robert had found the broken swing and tumbled out of it and got a bump on his head the size of an egg, and Cyril had nipped his finger in the door of a hutch that seemed made to keep rabbits in, if you ever had any, they had no longer any doubts whatever. The best part of it all was that there were no rules about not going to places and not doing things. In London almost everything is labelled ‘You mustn’t touch,’ and though the label is invisible it’s just as bad, because you know it’s there, or if you don’t you very soon get told.
In her 1913 book Wings and the Child: Or, The Building of Magic Cities, Nesbit lamented:
The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and mines and pot banks – coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron advertisements that scar the fields of earth – all the torn paper and straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root spring pride, anger, cruelty and sycophancy, the mean subservience of the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich.
Here’s the old Rousseauian anxiety about a prelapsarian identity with nature, linked with Nesbit’s Fabian mistrust of commerce and industrialization.
In her best-known work, The Railway Children, Nesbit’s characteristic gleam of dramatic irony is put not so much to comic as to heartbreaking effect – because in this case the adult in the story knows more than the children, and the nearly grown-up daughter knows nearly as much as her mother does. The emotional heart of that story – a family broken and a mother desperate because the father has been framed and jailed on espionage charges (the book was being written in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair) is just hidden from most of its child protagonists. The eldest daughter Bobbie first intuits and later (when she comes across a newspaper story) understands her mother’s deep unhappiness – and, to protect her, pretends not to. The main action of the story takes place after, with father gone, the mother (a writer, like Nesbit), retreats with the children to a small cottage in the countryside.
Absent parents are a staple of Nesbit’s work, as they are of so much children’s writing before and since, and the longing for them suffuses this book, but it does so in complicated ways. The younger children – and this is surely true to child psychology – soon rebound from Father’s absence. Like a finger pressed into rising dough, writes Nesbit, the sorrow at their new situation “made a deep impression, but the impression did not last long. They soon got used to being without father…” The Bastable children’s dead mother, too, is an emotional bruise that occasionally, but only occasionally, throbs.
Yet there’s a plangent sense in The Railway Children that the pain of a lost parent is always there beneath the surface. It never, never goes away. In that book you can see the child-self shrouded in the anguished adult – in Mother as in Edith Nesbit – and a daughter learning, at some level, to parent her own mother.
‘Are you fonder of us than Granny was of you when you were little?’ Phyllis asked. Bobbie made signs to her to stop, but Phyllis never did see signs, no matter how plain they might be.
Mother did not answer for a minute. She got up to put more water in the teapot.
‘No one,’ she said at last, ‘ever loved anyone more than my mother loved me.’
Then she was quiet again, and Bobbie kicked Phyllis hard under the table, because Bobbie understood a little bit the thoughts that were making Mother so quiet – the thoughts of the time when Mother was a little girl and was all the world to HER mother.
When she’s ill with a fever,
Mother talked to herself a good deal, but it did not seem to mean anything. And once she woke up suddenly and called out: ‘Mamma, mamma!’ and Bobbie knew she was calling for Granny, and that she had forgotten that it was no use calling, because Granny was dead.
After Mother has put on her best face for Bobbie’s birthday, and retreated to her room to continue writing, Bobbie looks in on her on her way to bed.
Mother was not writing, but leaning her head on her arms and her arms on the table. I think it was rather good of Bobbie to slip quietly away, saying over and over, ‘She doesn’t want me to know she’s unhappy, and I won’t know; I won’t know.’
The book’s climax sees Bobbie meet her father from the train – his name, in another Nesbittian deus ex machina, cleared by the Old Gentleman the children have happened to befriend as he passes each day on the train.
‘Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!’ That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly round her.
You could speculate, I think, that in this extraordinary book Edith is both Mother and Bobbie; while she is also the narrator who so tenderly watches Bobbie lead Father back to the cottage:
now I see them crossing the field […] Bobbie goes into the house, trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the right words to ‘tell Mother quite quietly’ that the sorrow and the struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come home. I see Father walking in the garden, waiting – waiting. He is looking at the flowers, and each flower is a miracle…
What gave access to such a well of feeling in that book? The tragedy that so often seems to befall the real-life children of writers for children fell heavily on the Bland household. In 1900, Edith and Hubert’s fifteen-year-old son Fabian – the model for Robert in the Psammead stories – had been anesthetized for a routine operation and never woke up. Rosamund, two years younger, was later to claim that she first learned that Edith was not her mother after hearing her cry out: “Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund?”
In her 1907 story “The Criminal,” Edith wrote from the viewpoint of a bereaved mother.
My son; my little son, the house is very quiet, because all the other children grew up long ago, and went out into the world. The lamp has just been lighted, but the blinds are not drawn down now. Outside the winter dusk is deepening the shadows in the garden where, in the days when the sun shone, you used to shout and play.
The year before, In The Railway Children, Edith had made the plainest possible statement of the recuperative hope of her fiction:
Peter’s Mother put her arm round him suddenly, and hugged him in silence for a minute. Then she said:–
‘Don’t you think it’s rather nice to think that we’re in a book that God’s writing? If I were writing the book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right – in the way that’s best for us.’
‘Do you really believe that, Mother?’ Peter asked quietly. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do believe it – almost always – except when I’m so sad that I can’t believe anything. But even when I can’t believe it, I know it’s true – and I try to believe.’
* E. Nesbit, “My School Days: Memories of Childhood,” Girl’s Own Paper, October 1896.
* George Bernard Shaw, who courted her ardently, complained to her: “You had no right to write the preface if you weren’t going to write the book.”
* This is harsh condemnation from Oswald. Nesbit is not alone among children’s writers with a proper sense of children in noting how large food looms in their worlds: much of the trouble that her children get into comes in pursuit of more grub or despair at not getting any.
* This blameless civilian is going about his lawful business when he’s knocked off his bicycle and his cargo of loaves scattered on the ground. In the ensuing punch-up he blacks Robert’s eye. Robert then wishes himself giant-sized, catches up with the baker’s boy and strands him on top of a sixteen-foot haystack. The sympathies of most modern readers will be with the baker’s boy.
* Eleanor Fitzsimons, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit.
* In Nesbit’s words: “And that, my dear children, is the moral of this chapter. I did not mean it to have a moral, but morals are nasty forward beings, and will keep putting in their oars where they are not wanted.”
† E. Nesbit, Op. cit.
“His Greatest Pretend”
J.M. BARRIE
The Little White Bird; Peter Pan in
Kensington Gardens; Peter and Wendy
TRYING TO BELIEVE WAS A PREOCCUPATION, TOO, OF A writer whose key work passed so quickly into the territory of myth that it’s hard to see it as a single, stable text at all. Belief, as everyone who has ever tried to keep Tinker Bell alive – “clap your hands if you believe in fairies!” – is the engine on which the strange world of Peter Pan runs. That world was the creation of a sensitive, singular Scottish writer called James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937).
The wickedly complicated publication history of the Peter Pan stories – first as a series of chapters in a book for adults, then as a stage play, then in various revisions as a book for children – shows not only how much children’s stories jumped between the page and the stage at this point in history (we’ve already seen London productions of children’s classics from the previous century appearing in the background of E. Nesbit’s novels, and A Little Princess started life as a play just as Little Lord Fauntleroy turned into one). It also shows how unstable in the period remained the distinction between children’s literature and adult writing.
Because Peter Pan entered the realm of the mythic from the start – by which I mean it became available to retellings and reinterpretation even in the lifetime of its author – the original vanished quickly from sight. Humphrey Carpenter remarks: “We are dealing here with not just a piece of imaginative creation by one man, but with a public phenomenon.”* On Barrie’s death in 1937 this property of the story was already being remarked. The Times Literary Supplement said:
[Barrie] was able not merely to instruct or entertain but to impregnate the collective mind of his audience. And if he did, indeed, possess this power, which is precisely the power of the great fairytales, criticism may as well throw its pen away, for then he is immortal by election.
Now, as with so many such children’s properties, the Disney film version (Peter as fey as the principal boy in a pantomime; Tink pretty and pert) has overwritten in the collective consciousness a text that’s much, much edgier than that. Barrie once said he hated sentimentality “like a slave hates its master” – which, of course, implies a relationship to sentimentality but a very far from straightforward one. When the statue of Peter was erected in Kensington Gardens, Barrie didn’t like it, he is said to have said, because “It doesn’t show the Devil in Peter.”†
What’s so startling about the original Neverland‡ is how very violent it is. It’s not so much a secret garden or an enchanted island as a perpetual Battle Royale:
The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate.
All wanted blood except the boys, who liked it as a rule, but tonight were out to greet their captain. The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the Twins as two. Let us pretend to lie here among the sugar-cane and watch them as they steal by in single file, each with his hand on his dagger.
Pirates, redskins, lost boys, and beasts stalk each other around the island in permanent readiness for ambush and battle – which, as in adventure stories and childhood games, exist in a blurred interstice between violence and play. To die, as Peter famously declares – in excited anticipation? in bravado? in ignorance? – will be “an awfully big adventure.”
The story reconfirms, even as it mashes them up with cheerful absurdity, the place of pirates, bandits, and “Red Indians” in the childhood imaginary. And it shows how the make-believe that is as abundant here as in Nesbit and Burnett is shaped by children’s writing itself. Captain Hook, it’s said more than once, is “the only man of whom Barbecue [Long John Silver’s nickname in Treasure Island] was afraid.”
The theme of the story is not childhood innocence, but childhood carelessness – and it’s underscored by the imaginary violence implied in many children’s games. When the pirates fire their gun Long Tom, “thus did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.”
When the Darling children and Peter make what, in modern aviation, would be called their final approach to Neverland, there’s a moment when they pause, just above the trees:
‘There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just beneath us,’ Peter told him. ‘If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.’
‘I don’t see him,’ John said after a long pause.
‘I do.’
‘Suppose,’ John said a little huskily, ‘he were to wake UP–’
Peter spoke indignantly. ‘You don’t think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I always do.’
‘I say! Do you kill many?’
‘Tons.’
When we first meet him, in a disconcertingly self-referential moment, the narrator becomes complicit in a casual murder. The joke is that it’s make-believe, because this is a book. But makebelieve and pretending are unstable in Peter Pan’s world:
Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method. Skylights will do. As they pass, Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has not even taken the cigars from his mouth.
It’s not just goodies and baddies. No sooner do the Darlings arrive on the island than Tinker Bell, in a jealous rage, tries to trick the Lost Boys into killing Wendy – “‘Peter wants you to shoot the Wendy […] Quick, Tootles, quick.’ she screamed. ‘Peter will be so pleased.’” – and it’s only by pure luck that Wendy survives the attack. You could see Tink’s murderous anger as adult (“she hated her with the fierce hatred of a very woman”) or as an aspect of childishness that few would like to acknowledge – but its lack of consequences belongs to the world of pretend. And look at the complex of emotions that strikes Tootles, whose bow launched the near-fatal arrow:
