Books: In the Good Old Mothertime

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OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE (286 pp.)—Julian Gloag—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

Our Mother's House could be a sick novel in the tradition of those horror jingles which amused the Victorians, such as:

Little Willie, in the best of sashes,

Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes.

By and by the room grew chilly,

But no one liked to poke up Willie.

There are these seven children, living in a quiet suburban London street, and when mother dies, they do not tell anybody, but just quietly bury her in the back garden and carry on for a year or more as if nothing had happened. Well, nothing much. Gerty is bad, and they punish her and she dies, and they bury her too. Then Dad turns up. They had never seen him before. He thinks they are "a ripe bunch of little bastards," but buys them treats until he gets fed up and wants to pack them "into the bleeding orphanage." So Hubert, the most responsible of the little ones, conks him on the head with a poker. It's that old burial problem all over again; then the spoilsport authorities arrive. "Quite ordinary little children," says their teacher, as a man from the Home nervously prepares to take delivery of the six survivors. "Hubert . . . sensible little fel low," chimes in a neighbor.

The writer who can breathe fictional health into a story as sick as this one must be credited with a minor miracle. Genuine magicianship may be so conceded to Julian Gloag, a suitably baleful-looking young (32) New Yorker, ten years out of school (at Britain's Rugby and Cambridge), who has made a memorable fable about his seven motherless moppets. He has succeeded, partly by attention to details that worry the practical reader, such as how did they get the money? Little Jiminee, a talented penman, forged endorsements on mother's mysterious but regular checks, and Hubert cashed them when he bought the groceries. Gloag's terrifying tots do more than this; they offer the reader no escape from their own zany world, which is presented as complete in itself with its own tribal laws.

Spiv & Tart. Mother rules their lives in death as she did in life. They build a sort of playhouse in her tomb in the backyard lily patch and call it The Tabernacle, and slowly evolve the forms of a religion based on the dead. Hymns and the promulgation of rules and cruel punishments comprise its simple liturgy. The fact is—not that facts, as such, mean much to them—that mother was a local scandal as a woman of loose morals (which is partly why the adults accepted the kids' story that mother was "sick") and no two of the children had the same father. "Dad" is a racecourse spiv named Charlie Hook who has given them nothing but his name. When he tells them that mother "was an 'ore—a bleeding tart," he blasphemes the religion of the Sacred Mother. He had to be destroyed.

The tale invites comparison with those classics of darkened childhood, Richard Hughes's High Wind in Jamaica and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Novelist Gloag has named his adult villain Captain Hook, presumably after J. M. Barrie's piratical menace in Peter Pan. One does not have to believe in fairies, however, to give cold credence to the awful reality of Gloag's matriolatrous, patricidal tribe of tots.