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.
4
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—”
They wandered into the orchard. Phyllis pointed.
“These two trees are the magic trees from the story. The golden apple and the silver pear. You can only see the gold and silver in certain lights, you have to believe. These two are the centre. Their branches touch the ground, and their heads are in the sky. And all this—stuff—the bryony and the wild roses—grows over them to make them lovely—”
They were old, neglected, beautiful trees. Philip looked at the shapes of the snarling of their branches and wished he had a pencil. Phyllis took his hand and pulled him forward.
“This is where Rosy lies. See this circle of white stones. Rosy is under these, under the apple and the pear.”
A kitten, a bird?
“We bring her flowers on her birthday. We pour out libations of apple juice for her. We don’t forget her. We will never forget her.”
Her voice was solemn, and creamy with warmth.
“She lived for a week, just one little week, that was all she lived. She had the most perfect little fingers and toes. Now she sleeps here.”
She bent her head reverently. Philip, without putting it into words, detected play-acting. He wondered unkindly if Phyllis even thought about what was really under the white stones, amongst the roots. He said vaguely and falsely
“That’s good.”
He threw several of the hard little apples into the bramble patch. Then he hung a lantern with a crescent moon and a black bird-shadow in the branches of the pear tree, over the white stones.
Phyllis took his hand. She pushed her little body against his side. He had the sense that her flesh had always been clean and pleasant, and that, by contrast, his own never had. This was a feeling, again not in words. He pulled away.
After the decoration of the garden, and the bread and cheese lunch, the business of dressing-up began. Violet dressed the children—including Philip—in the schoolroom whilst Humphry and Olive went to put on their robes, which were a gesture towards “their” play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not rigidly Elizabethan, not yet Athenian, but more flowing Arts and Crafts silks and linens, silver and gold, flowery and floating.