OUR EXPLOITS AT West Poley concerns two cousins with deceptively uncharged names – Steve, tall, masterful and headstrong and not near the Author’s conscience, and Leonard, delicate, nervous and acquiescent and the I that grows to tell the tale – who go exploring in the Mendip Caves and accidentally discover that they are able to alter the course of the stream that runs through the local parish, diverting it from West to East Poley and back again, and thus influencing the domestic and commercial well-being of the parishioners in each. The story affects a gently homiletic air, not exactly that of mere precept, but a healthy tone, as Hardy himself put it, suitable to intelligent youth of both sexes, alternating action with comments on the difficulty of discriminating between one community’s rights and desserts and another’s, and pressing the superior claims of discretion over adventure. In the background but never far away hovers the mythic figure of the Man who had Failed, enabled (and indeed enobled) by that very failure (he had failed through want of energy and not want of sense) to make the wisest decisions and speak the truest words. ‘Quiet perseverance in clearly defined courses is, as a rule,’ he tells Steve who needs to be told, ‘better than the erratic exploits that may do much harm.’

‘Okay,’ said Camilla to her class. ‘What’s this story really about?’

It always makes a melancholy spectacle, adults penned in children’s tiny desks, straining their eyes towards a teacher just as they did a half a lifetime before, still without any answers to someone else’s questions. And the matrons who sat in rows before Camilla this morning – all members of a vigorous local women’s group – were especially touching. Tyrannical instructresses in their own homes, empresses and undisputed law-givers there in all matters great and small, they were cramped and even cowed here, mere vassals in the grip of another’s imperious will. Worse for them, too, they had been set the conundrum most bewildering and insulting to the domestic and maternal mind: they had been asked to consider the possibility that a thing was not the thing it said it was but another thing entirely. Motherhood is necessarily inimical to philosophy; the close proximity of a baby fills a mother’s head with the inescapable poignancy of the real, and long after the baby has grown up and gone she is still fiercely protective of hard facts and actualities. And so they were angry with Camilla who didn’t look as if she had ever kept a child or a kitchen clean, and their anger made them wilfully obtuse, wedded them to their obtuseness, bound them in an intense ideological attachment to it. ‘It’s just a story,’ they said. ‘It’s about two little boys who go into a cave and get up to mischief. Little boys are like that, you know.’

‘Go on,’ said Camilla. ‘What else is it about?’