The Innocents by Margery Sharp Page A

being able to repeat a chorus-ending of Euripides, which as yet I could not.—None of the texts from my father’s bookcase had been much use to me, requiring as they did a fair knowledge of Greek already. I had difficulty in even identifying a chorus-ending from Euripides on the page. However the next time I was in Ipswich I found a modest elementary handbook, and began from the beginning with my alpha-beta.
    That the young Cockers for their part, though accepting and tolerating, never took much notice of her, was rather an advantage. As I have said, anything new needed to be taken very slowly, with Antoinette, and young Mrs. Cocker had no reason in the world to apologize to me for not inviting her to birthday-parties.
    It was still a sign of Antoinette’s difference from other children that she had no conception of a birthday. To most children, birthdays are of such cardinal importance, almost the first question one asks of another is how old are you? Antoinette was in fact now six, but perfectly unaware of it, and even I might have lost count but for the birthday presents arriving each year from New York—and then indeed, owing to the war, often months late.
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    Cecilia otherwise wrote punctually, describing how busy she was with Bundles for Britain—(she organized concerts and balls for them)—and always ending with a few lines for Antoinette, such as, “My precious, your mummy misses you so much, she thinks of you all the time,” which messages put me in something of a quandary. Though Antoinette couldn’t read, I might have read them to her; she still wouldn’t take in any meaning, having no conception of a mother. I was no usurper: Antoinette’s relation to myself, I believed, and was happy to, was essentially that of a young rabbit to a lettuce—source of food, shelter, and general point of repair. In the end I simply suppressed the messages altogether.
    But soon a worse quandary arose. “Isn’t it surely time Tony wrote a letter to me?” complained Cecilia. “Tell her she must be a good girl and mind her book, so she can write to her mummy!”
    Antoinette could no more write than she could read; but how to explain why—involving as it did the child’s whole predicament—by letter? Not there to witness her daughter so obviously thriving, Cecilia must have been thrown into deep (and as I believed unnecessary) distress. She might have imagined a little idiot. So at last I decided to employ a subterfuge. I clasped Antoinette’s fingers round a pencil, and guided them to trace in capitals DEAR MUMMY I HOPE YOU ARE WELL LOVE AND KISSES.
    I had intended to make her sign, Antoinette , but though the ploy began as a game she soon tired of it, and was wriggling to get away at WELL. However Cecilia was apparently satisfied, for she didn’t raise the point again.
    Antoinette’s father never wrote to her at all. He was obviously even busier than Cecilia, and I imagined better realized the inutility. I didn’t blame him. In Mr. Hancock and Doctor Alice he had left the best agents he could to watch over his daughter’s well-being under my roof. He couldn’t know Doctor Alice departed for London—whence in fact she never returned; she lost her life in one of the last bombings.
    So did Rab Guthrie lose his life in the war. In the summer of ’44 Cecilia had graver news to report than a row of seats unsold at a Bundles for Britain concert: that she was a widow, her poor darling Rab having literally worked himself to death. I could well believe it; he’d always struck me as a worker, and I had seen what pressure the war could put on just a pig-man, let alone an industrial chemist. In a way I quite mourned him—particularly because he’d never seen his daughter on a pony. Cecilia for her part (she wrote) felt such an appalling sense of loss, her only hope of avoiding a nervous breakdown was to throw herself more than