Little Ben is shut away in a cupboard, too, at the beginning…. And someone had an ‘evil-smelling cloth to wipe his mouth’, to wipe out any sick.
THE LORDLY ONES
“Because of his silence they forgot to explain things to him, arrivals and departures and changes of plan,…”
The exquisite story of Ben, a neuro-diverse boy, although his parents, like all parents, when this story was published, would never have understood that. The father dealt out cruel corporal punishment to him, instead, and his mother allowed a candle to ‘flounce her figure to a grotesque shape.’
They took him from the city of Exeter one day, amid confusion and without warning, to a smaller house on the thinly populated moors. With a bedroom where he had not yet worked out its shape and nature before darkness set in.
Thus moved to the moors, he somehow got mixed up with such moors as people, and indeed so might I have done at his age, not realising that words can mean two different things at once, and he ran away with this roaming clan of what he deemed to be ‘lordly ones making towards the hills’, and to whom he had taken his parents’ own meagre food to help them, and he is now with a beautiful golden-haired woman as his mother who allows him to be breast-fed by herself as she does to her own raggedy son…
The magic of this story is too beautiful and, yes, equally too hard to bear. And I am in denial about what really eventually happened. As with Deborah’s pool….
And with whatever else was acceptable to write about in 1959. Far worse than now. While our now is somehow still far worse than their then. Null Immortalis.
End of The Breaking Point
***
“How beautiful they are,
The lordly ones
Who dwell in the hills,
In the hollow hills.”
— William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)
(Used in Rutland Boughton’s 1914 opera, ‘The Immortal Hour’)
My full review of THE BREAKING POINT: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/the-breaking-point-stories-by-daphne-du-maurier/
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