A sense of this dead patriarch stayed with Tom from boyhood to old age:

I was brought up to be very much aware of him: so much so, that as a child I thought of him as still the head of the family – a ruler for whom in absentia my grandmother stood as viceregent. The standard of conduct was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful.33

Almost suggesting ancestor-worship, this memory of childhood indicates, too, a sense of being drilled in rectitude. Propriety mattered in every word and deed. ‘When I was a small boy’, he recalled, ‘I was reproved by my family for using the vulgar phrase “O.K.”’34 Tom grew up in a family in which to buy candy for oneself was considered ‘a selfish indulgence’.35 He knew from a very early age that his ancestry could be traced back to those Puritan Eliots who had been involved in New England’s seventeenth-century witch trials. For all their more recent Unitarianism, the Eliots had inherited a witch-hanging, judgemental, Calvinist streak. In later life, even when he tried hard not to, Tom could appear a ‘Puritan ascetic’.36

His upbringing was strict, but cossetted. The family was looked after by a team of servants. They depended not just on the productions of a cook but also on the labour of maids, a gardener and a nurse. When baby Tom was in his second year and his sister Charlotte was ill, Lottie felt ‘always stirred up by the wretched kitchen girls’ who seemed to cost more in wages but to skimp on their work.37 Set back just a little behind railings from the tree-lined sidewalk, and in summer almost screened by foliage, the Eliots’ house was higher than the dwelling to its right, and enjoyed some open ground towards the left, in the direction of the Mary Institute at the intersection of Locust Street and Beaumont Street. Mary Institute classes stopped in the early afternoon and the girl pupils routinely did callisthenics in the grounds, their voices and laughter drifting over the wall. When he thought they had gone, Tom might venture into the schoolyard ‘which seemed to me, as a child’, he wrote, ‘of vast extent’. Sometimes he even went inside the school itself, wandering the corridors, inhaling the smell of chalk, ink and cedar pencils: he was always alert to smells. Alone, or occasionally with a friend from a similarly privileged, prosperous background – such as ‘Tom Kick’, his playmate Thomas McKittrick, Jr – he went into the gymnasium and played on swinging rings and parallel bars, or else threw Indian clubs. Playing here was exciting, but also unnerving. He was in a space familiar to all his sisters and several of his female cousins who had studied there, yet usually off-limits to boys. Once, he went into the schoolyard before all the pupils had left, and saw girls staring at him through a window. He fled. These almost fairy-tale incursions haunted him. He also remembered early attempts in this zone at his father’s favoured game, golf.

There was at the front of our house a sort of picket fence which divided our front yard from the schoolyard. This picket fence merged a little later as it passed the wall of the house into a high brick wall which concealed our back garden from the schoolyard and also concealed the schoolyard from our back garden. There was a door in this wall and there was a key to this door. Now, when the young ladies had left the school in the afternoon and at the end of the week, I had access to the schoolyard and used it for my own purposes of play. When the girls had left in the afternoon, the schoolyard was mine for a playground, first of all under the supervision of my nurse and later for practicing approach shots with a lofter, which was sometimes dangerous for the windows. They must have been very brief approach shots, but then I was a very small boy with a very small lofter, or mashie. At any rate, then, in the schoolyard I remember a mound on which stood a huge ailanthus tree. Oh, it seemed to me very big and round on this little mound.38

St Louis was sometimes nicknamed ‘Mound City’ because of the presence of ancient Native American earthwork mounds. Tom’s own mound was a good place to play. He went with Henry to a nearby climbing frame. In sunhat and sailor suit he threw a ball. He was photographed at the age of seven or eight, standing beside the big ailanthus tree with Tom Kick: two smiling, sailor-suited boys, happy to be up to mischief.

The school grounds were Edenic, but, like the rest of St Louis, literally polluted.