Wake Up! Wake Up!
We need a break from the North, all that class and angst. Let’s pop South for a holiday. See what they do down there.… Jesus! It’s a horror-show! The kids are not safe on the sands. Nina Bawden’s Devil by the Sea. A child’s nightmare: to enter the adult world.
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Hilary crosses the threshold. It is the moment she becomes a teenager. Difficult. She is forced to do it against her will, only the adult’s uncomprehending laughter, their refusal to take her seriously, pushing her into this new territory, childhood’s no-man’s land. The bright lights have gone. The fairy magic is no more. It is overcast and dull here. So mundane and…what…I’m talking a new language, which, amazingly, I comprehend.
“I thought he was the Devil. But he’s not, is he, he’s just a poor, old man?” A faint, very faint anxiety clouded her eyes.
“Yes, he’s just a poor old man.” He had stopped smiling now and his face was suddenly very sad. Hilary thought she had never seen anyone look so sad. “Whatever they tell you later on,” he said, “you’ll remember that, won’t you?”
“Hilary wondered what he was talking about. She said, “I don’t expect they’ll want to talk about him. The never wanted to listen, after all. I expect they were too busy. People usually are.” She spoke in a flat, thoughtful voice, her eyes fixed on her dangling feet.
“I’m not busy now,” he said.
She looked at him, without interest, and frowned. “I promised to see his bird, you know. It’s wrong to break a promise, just as wrong as it is to tell lies. Can I go and see his bird to-morrow?” She spoke urgently, as if this were very important to her, and looked at him.
“I don’t know, Sometimes promises have to be broken.” He saw the rebellion in her eyes and added hastily, not wishing to upset her now, “Perhaps you can go. We’ll see.”
He saw that she accepted this, not because she believed him but because she had suddenly grown old enough to know that she had no alternative: she could despair, or she could allow herself to be soothed by a consolation that did not console. He also saw, fingering the bristles on his chin, that she was not really interested in him, nor in what he had to say to her. She was absorbed in a world of new discoveries: that other people are not to be relied upon; that promises can be broken; loyalty abandoned; the world that is also childhood’s end. Then his expression changed. He was not concerned with the child, she was not his business. His voice became crisp and clear.
“Come now,” he said. “Tell me how you knew the little girl was called Poppet.”
And in a calm, disinterested voice, because the entire episode had ceased to have any meaning for her, she told him.
The Devil is real to Peregrine and Hilary. Real in a variety of senses: a real fiction and an actual fact; also an exact description of the psychological terrors that beset them. They turn Dotty Jim, because he kills kids, into a character of evil, badness personified; a child’s metaphorical mind seeking some mythic embodiment to grasp the emotions they feel. A strange, disturbing man, who does bad things, must be the Devil, for that is what the Devil does. To a child - like the artist - fictions are real, although children transform their metaphysical fantasies into material beings; an evil phantom to enter a living person: the Devil into Dotty Jim.
The parents do not understand. They are also unbelievers, which makes it worse. Unable to take religion seriously, Alice and Charles cannot grasp that their children are talking about real people in this town; that the Devil inhabits an actual person, who walks the streets of Hempstead! No, this is some fairy tale, they think; this talk of the Devil an imaginary creation, promoted by the local news of a child killed, a father’s decease. These adults occupy a simple world, where the metaphorical and the symbolic do not exist: these are just silly ideas, Hilary’s mind disturbed by the newspapers.
The man and the little girl had left the entrance to the Fun Fair and were walking away from the town, towards the marshes. They were linked closely together as if a great affection bound them. From this distance it was impossible to tell whether the child’s steps were lagging or whether she went willingly. Once she turned round, her small face as flat and blank and meaningless as a piece of white paper, appearing briefly against the man’s dark sleeve. Perhaps she was crying: if she was, it was a very tiny cry, not loud enough to be heard above the sound of the sea and the noisy yelling of the gulls. The man’s wide skirts blew around them both so that some of the time Poppet was almost completely hidden. She was so small, now, that she had little character or significance. She was, already, a committed child, lost beyond redemption.
The children, sensing that something irrevocable was happening, drew closer together and watched in silence.
At last Hilary whispered, “I wonder where they’re going.” Peregrine did not answer her. He was breathing noisily, watching the departing coupled with a fixed, glazed stare.
Hilary said hopefully, “I expect he’s her Daddy.” This, on the whole, had not seemed likely so she tried again. “Or her Uncle, or somebody like that.”
Peregrine suddenly flushed bright scarlet. “He’s not anyone she knows. He’s taking her away. He’s the Devil.”
Peregrine feels the bad atmosphere, and is forced by Hilary to define it. But the person and the quality they represent - evil - is all mixed up, and is described in an odd but compelling way: he is the Devil, the essence, the feel, of what’s wicked. But there’s a problem. His parents hate all that superstitious Christian stuff. Therefore, because Dotty Jim is the Devil, they can’t tell their mother; for she will ridicule the belief, which they’ve got from an adored nanny. Not wanting his nanny’s beliefs denigrated - an attack on nanny herself - Peregrine tells Hilary not to tell….
The killer is reprieved. Free to roam this seaside town, in the school holidays.
Hilary, older and cleverer than her brother, is conflicted over such reticence. There is also the unpleasant fact that just before taking Poppet, the Devil had fondled her knee. Hilary has an urge to tell, but convinced of her own badness - her associative mind blames itself for a schoolfriend’s death - she doesn’t. Jealous of her brother, resenting her mother, Hilary has a guilty conscience, which blocks any confession. Does she identify with Dotty Jim, are they both part of the same evil spirit? Maybe…. She envied Poppet’s beauty, her popularity…. Did she want Poppet to die? Has the Devil fulfilled her wish? Such ideas are beyond Hilary’s means to articulate. They create an atmosphere which Hilary inhabits; and this far more powerful than any crime Dotty Jim has committed; a child more interested in her own feelings and thoughts than what actually goes on out there in the world. And these are unstable, fluid. Though terrified of Dotty Jim, she is persuaded to walk to his caravan; and on their way she feels affection for this odd man. When arrested she feels sorry for him. Feeling trumps fact, which almost ceases to exist. It’s a miracle he is caught, for even in the police station Hilary will not reveal her secret. Her emotions and her ideas far more important than some abstract sense of justice, or this man’s murder and murderous intent: she would not have come out of that caravan alive.
Hilary is saved by Wally’s intervention. He crosses his own psychological frontier: after seeing her scared he speaks to a policeman. Yet she rejects Wally when he tells these adults that she has seen the Devil: she denies any such thing. A complex cluster of emotions - including self-conscious awareness of the absurdity of believing in the old demon - prevents her from telling the truth. She feels sorry for the poor old man. She feels ashamed of her own ideas. She didn’t like the way the policeman tackled Dotty Jim to the ground. And these adults won’t believe her anyway. The killer is going free…!
The novel is a marvellous evocation of a child’s peculiar morality. Suffused with a child’s ideas and a child’s feelings, it is embodied in fictions that are not only believed true but attract enormous loyalty, partly because these kids know the adults think them nonsense. One of the most difficult problems for a child: to protect their world from that awful common sense, the blasé attitudes, of their parents. It is in this gap between these two worlds that Dotty Jim can kidnap kids and kill them. No parent is going to believe that he is the Devil. But that it is precisely what he is to these children. The abstract idea - though prosaically dressed - larger than any concrete fact.
There is strain; for Hilary is growing into adolescence. The adult world is impinging upon her, forcing her to doubt, to give up her make-believe characters. This belief in the Devil, her insistence upon it, may even be a rearguard action against the loss of a childhood she feels she is losing. Hilary’s whole being fragile and unsafe. She knows she cannot speak about the Devil here, in this station. Yet against her will she says…. They won’t believe her. They are laughing…. She will not be taken for an idiot. The Devil is real. He did take Poppet…. Even now most of the adults are not convinced: she is just making it up, they say, Hilary is always telling lies (typical adults her parents cannot make a distinction between falsehoods and fictions). Hilary will not have it! To protect the Devil from these adults' cruel jibes she mentions that it was Dotty Jim who took Poppet away. Luckily there is an adult in the room who understands a child’s mind.
Something to note: a child’s mind works through flashes of inspiration. Peregrine suddenly sees that Dotty Jim is the Devil; Wally immediately knows that Hilary is telling the truth. The atmosphere of a person stamps itself onto the consciousness of these kids, whose thoughts are embodied feelings.
Children live in a different world from the adults. The old share something of the child’s mentality, though here the aestheticism of the child - that thinking in myth and symbol - has been replaced by an intense selfishness; life reduced to satisfying one’s own obsessions. The great aunt is another ‘character’; an aristocrat, who, having spent a lifetime performing roles - always the centre of attention - now plays the rich eccentric, with priceless heirlooms in her room and The New Statesman on the breakfast table. A commanding presence, when around nephew and niece-in-law. Yet, in truth, she is deteriorating badly. Poor, lodging with relatives, she is terrified of being kicked out, while her mind is going: she combs the beach and brings back all sorts of rubbish home. Like the children she too has a world to protect; though it is a much smaller, uglier one than theirs: more Chapman Brothers than Hieronymus Bosch. Naturally, she is the first adult Hilary tells.
What a remarkable old creature, he thought indulgently. How many old ladies would scramble along a rough beach at nearly eighty? She must find it dull, after her active life, to be confined to an ageing body. The spirit didn’t always grow old at the same pace—hers hadn’t, anyway. She was game. She could have shinned up those cliffs if she’d really had to. He was proud of her toughness, her indomitable old age.
He chaffed her good-humouredly. “Come on, tell me what you were doing.” He became conscious of a smell of salt and seaweed. There was a garment drying by the fire. “You were paddling,” he accused delightedly, “at your age!”
She did not respond to his teasing. Her eyes were fixed on him with an unfamiliar look, sly, almost afraid, as if she had something to hide. Her hands fluttered over something in her lap. Curious, he bent forward and saw a toy sailing-boat.
“Surprise for the kids?” he asked.
She thrust the toy behind her back and glared at hm. “It’s mine,” she said. “Mine.” He was taken aback by the ferocious intensity in her voice. Poor old girl, he thought, she’s going ga-ga.
The aunt is too scared of losing her home to inform Alice and Charles of Hilary’s confession. She fears they will blame her for allowing Hilary read the newspaper; thereby upsetting her (that a child might actually know something about the world…what an absurd idea!) Later there is an incident between the aunt and Dotty Jim on the beach, where she is just saved from a murderous attack. Also when on the beach she sees Hilary climbing up dangerous cliffs. She does not tell the parents. Better a murderer at liberty than a mad woman discovered in a respectable house.
We forget how fragile is public morality, that loose network of thought and feeling binding us to strangers. We live too much inside our own minds to identify with it strongly. And the weaker we are the more likely to retreat into comfortable fantasies. Thus the great aunt’s disconnect between her intense selfishness and her show of public concern - that New Statesman. When our passions are engaged Self wins out. And the kids? The public realm isn’t the same for them as for the adults. They speak a different moral language, one bound up with their emotions, and thus idiosyncratic and opaque. No society has a single shared set of moral concepts. The ages have, in fact, different moral codes, each with their own qualities of thought and feeling.1 To believe in the Devil is to feel his essence, which trumps any mundane fact; this feeling tied to an idea of the self, and its relations to society, to one’s parents. Yet to an adult such beliefs seem exaggerated and therefore unreal: for them it is simple, the Devil does not exist, therefore the Devil didn’t kill anyone. Fools! They are missing the point! He represents an evil principle which has taken over Dotty Jim; this principle Hilary’s main concern; the projection of her fears. A single murdered child cannot compare to an evil phantom flying through the sky - it could land on anyone….
“You forgot your change.” The word seemed to hold some dreadful, hidden purpose. Hilary thought: He can take any shape, he can look how he likes. She ran with wild fear behind her, reached the last lamp-post, reached, hurling herself against the gate, scattering the gravel, her house. Pounding on the door, the brass knocker echoing in the street, she heard voices calling her on the wind, Hilary, Hilary. The door opened and she fell forward into the hall, saved by Mrs. Peacock’s hand. A grey streak, a phantom, fled past them into the night.
It is this pervasive fear that the idea of the Devil captures. He can be everywhere; he even attaches himself to the friendly owner of the corner shop.2 To deny the Devil is to deny the reality of these feelings, which take a child over. We are witness to the insensitivity and incomprehension of ordinary adults (a curious feature of this novel is the sympathy for Dotty Jim, who mentally little is more than a child, his murders child-like reactions to rejection and pain). Only an adult detached, intelligent and sympathetic - the detective - has the insight and patience to unpick this skein of emotions, thought and fiction. Luckily he sorts it out.
Only when Hilary crosses the threshold into adolescence do the adults understand her. Before it is all mistranslation. Misreading Hilary’s reaction to the death of her kitten - Dotty Jim strangled it - Alice sends her with Janet off to the Funfair: it will cheer her up. Oh no! Alice is sending Hilary towards her worst fears. She is sending her to Dotty Jim! But a child’s emotions change so quickly. On the rides she is exhilarated, and forgets her tormentor. But the fairground is haunted by the Devil.
Someone moved in the mirror behind her, a giant, incredibly tall, incredibly thin. His dead eyes met Hilary’s in the glass; she turned and the corner of his raincoat whisked round the corner.
Drawn, like a person in a dream, like a pin to a magnet, she followed him through the pattern of changing shapes. She had a feeling of fearful excitement, of awe, as if she were on the point of some essential discovery. There were hundreds of Hilarys, fat ones, thin ones—all with blue, cotton dresses and brown, sandalled feet. Then he was there too: in the mirror his reflection flickered and changed until reality no longer existed. Only the opaque eyes and the long, bitten fingers, twisting in the mirror did not change.
“Hallo, Girlie,” he said softly and smiled, showing his long, yellow teeth. His fingers closed on her shoulder, she could feel the heat of his hands through the stuff of her dress.
“Let me go,” she cried, but the fingers tightened. She bent her head and bit his hand: it was like biting a bone.
He let go and she ran, with an enormous head and thin tapping legs towards the end of the passage. She put out a hand and it disappeared as she approached the glass. She slipped into another passage. She was tiny now, a tiny Hilary running in a blue dress down an empty corridor. Then the man was behind her, a fairy creature with legs made of pea sticks. She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it except a small, hurt whimper. She stumbled beneath the red Exit sign ran out into the fairground.
We feel sorry for the parents: a child’s emotion appears out of all proportion to what an adult knows, which they, which Alice, mistakenly thinks of as reality. Their’s a mentally anorexic view of the world, starved of imagination and art. The children’s wild emotions and fantastic talk seem to Alice and Charles like a Fun House at the Fair - a child’s view of things is highly distorted. Yes, but…distortion, exaggeration, caricature…are they not pointing to something real? If only these two were connoisseurs of Kirchner and Schiele. But no, too conventional for that.
When Dotty Jim catches Hilary he is very nice, and she responds immediately to his affection. Another problem for parents: kids change so rapidly, and thus are not taken seriously. Hilary can’t be really scared if she is chatting happily to this Devil man.…
What is fleeting is often the most important.
She would have died if not for Wally’s flash of insight, and his bravery in talking to a policeman. In this world only a child can save a child, because only they have the necessary understanding. But even then it’s touch-and-go, the adults too distant, too unbelieving to be trusted with the serious stuff, a child’s deepest feelings, their strongest beliefs.
We know these adults are insensitive, but are they wrong? We don’t believe so. No stable moral code can be based on a child’s character, which is too emotionally fluid and too conceptually artistic to offer a coherent and reliable basis on which to think and act. Only when a child discards the idea of the Devil and cools down her feelings can she properly participate in the adult world; take on its moral responsibilities, act with integrity.
At last Hilary dobs Dotty Jim in.
Review: Devil by the Sea
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