Books: The Tells of Childhood

THE LITTLE GIRLS by Elizabeth Bowen. 307 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Dicey, Mumbo and Sheikie were bosomless chums at St. Agatha’s, an all-too-proper girls’ school in the south of England. They carried on like so many Peck’s bad boys in bloomers, planted a gelignite bomb in a bicycle shed, conned free rides in horse-drawn victorias, raced down High Street frothing at the mouth with lemon sherbet powder to convince townspeople that they were possessed by devils. But their biggest adventure in that ill-fated summer of 1914 came the night they buried a coffer of “valuable treasure”—dog chains, bones, a message in an unknown language (jumboed up by Mumbo)—in the orchard behind the school. As snippety schoolgirls, they wondered what posterity would make of it.

Powers of Bitchery. As Elizabeth Bowen’s new novel (her first since 1955) opens, the little girls have become sad-eyed, sixtyish English gentlewomen. Dicey is now Dinah Delacroix, a handsome if slightly dotty widow who lives on her Somerset estate in equivocal intimacy with a cross-eyed, 19-year-old Maltese manservant. Remembering the buried treasure chest, she rounds up her long-lost friends and informs them that it is time to dig up the box and rediscover their old happiness.

But the burden of The Little Girls is that those who would excavate the tells of childhood had better dig alone. Sheikie, “the famous child toe-dancer” of St. Agatha’s, has degenerated into Sheila Artworth, a real estate broker’s wife whose hair is now bluer than her blood. Mumbo, the skinny, frizzy-headed intellectual of the trio, has ballooned into Miss Clare Burkin-Jones, the burly, beturbaned boss of a London gift shop. But these distortions are nothing compared with the heightened powers of bitchery the little girls have acquired.

Suspicious of one another’s motives, they flash aged but envenomed claws. Dicey accuses the unmarried Mumbo of lesbianism, wonders why Sheikie has no children. Mumbo wonders why Sheikie never made it as a dancer, accuses her of social climbing. Both Mumbo and Sheikie are suspicious of Dicey’s relationship to her dusky butler.

Mitfordian Retreads. For all her 64 years Novelist Bowen still writes best about childhood. The long middle passage, which flashes back to the days of St. Agatha’s, catalogues the small terrors and large thoughts of preadolescence with delicate insight. It could stand on its own as a finely wrought novella, and probably should, since the contemporary “comic” passages that flank it are flabby by comparison.

The chest proves to be empty. After a bitter, final attempt at finding the little girl buried in Mumbo’s hulk, Dicey falls ill. When the Maltese discovers her, she is mysteriously bruised and barely conscious, muttering: “It’s all gone, was it ever there? No, never there.”