The Jungle by Elizabeth Bowen

“‘Anywhere special? I know of a tree with three apples they’ve forgotten to pick. We might go round that way and just see —’ […] Elise’s apple tree was half way down the kitchen-garden. They looked up: one of the apples was missing. Either it had fallen or some interfering idiot had succeeded in getting it down with a stone. The two others, beautifully bronze, nestled snugly into a clump of leaves about eight feet up. The girls looked round; the kitchen-garden was empty.”

…and this is quoted at length not only because of its meaningful vibes with ‘The Apple Tree’ (thud, thud, thud) but also because of the snug lap sleeping by Elise on Rachel’s KNEE at the end, without the oreaence of any Shadowy Third such as Joyce  – or Charity  of the ‘two tennis balls’ chest! 

Fifteen years old on the brink of big sister Adela’s ‘boy and girl parties’, but not quite ready, with Elise, boyish and wielding a significant under-lip, and Rachel who discovered the secret Jungle land near the school, signs of tramps and even a vision of a dead girl’s bent arm, with its ‘elbow’ unspoken. They end up there, innocent sexually awakening versions that have been unblended from the contemporary Evadne Price’s Just Jane  character as versions of Crompton’s Just William. With bloomers tucked into their skirts. ‘Wading’ to the autumn Jungle with late childhood’s cloying progress of Zeno’s Paradox? And the apples may Fall. or be offered?

“Elise was not listening. ‘I ought to have been a boy,’ she said in a matter-of-fact, convinced voice. She rolled a sleeve back. ‘Feel my muscle! Watch it – look!’”

 …again, with any elbow unspoken. Although both Elise and Rachel have EL in their names.

Rooks circling above, so was this an October dream version of a happy autumn field? …

“Here was the place where the dead girl’s arm, blue-white, had come out from under the bushes. Here was the place where Elise, in the later dream, had come up and touched her so queerly.”

We all wake up in the slow no man’s land between wars? When we think that sleeping forever, on someone’s knee version of an elbow, is just biding our time? Re- or Un-Wilding?

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All my reviews of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/