The exposed brick side-wall of the Eliots’ house had to be washed periodically in this big industrial city known for its smoke and dust. Coachmen wearing dark top-hats clattered by outside along dusty Locust Street, sometimes cracking their whips above their horses. St Louis was proud of its wealth and style. In a metropolis with a French name and heritage, there were external shutters to the sides of most of the windows of the Eliot home, making it look just a little French. The front steps took visitors up to an arched doorway, and afforded a glimpse of basement quarters below, familiar to the family’s servants, black as well as white. Aged three, Tom played indoors with a favourite soft toy, a little dog – probably a dachshund – with floppy ears and black, beady eyes: Toby. A few years later, sitting in his well-tailored jacket under one of the house’s many pictures, Tom learned to play the baby grand piano. There were books aplenty – from a set of Dickens novels to An Evil and Adulterous Generation by Tom’s eighteenth-century great-great-great-grandfather, the Harvard-educated Reverend Andrew Eliot of Boston. Yet Tom himself was sometimes hard to find. In a house dominated during the day by his mother and his sisters, he sometimes concealed himself from visitors. One friend of his sisters remembered him hiding away, ‘pale and thin and shy’, keeping out of the way of of his sisters’ female guests.39 Though he learned to manage it through formality and occasional bluster, his shyness never left him.

Like his siblings, the boy was posed to be photographed for family albums. In one early picture, taken around 1891, he is holding Toby and dressed for cold weather in an ankle-length, hooded coat trimmed with fur. In his dark gloves he looks happy, but a little bemused perhaps, clad in outdoor clothes for a studio picture. Photographed a year or so later, long hair combed over his large ears and with an enormous pale bow tied at his neck as well as a neat striped collar visible over his darker jacket, he looks every groomed inch the model child. In early infancy, as was not uncommon for boys in wealthy families, he was sometimes dressed in what looks like a skirt. Like his sisters, he always appears carefully neat. He was, after all, an Eliot.

While very conscious of their ancestry and the standards that went with it, the Eliots also cherished, from a safe distance, some more scandalous aspects of their family history. Lottie’s parents were Thomas Stearns of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and Charlotte Blood. Tom, in distant Missouri, called them Grandpa and Grandma ‘Faraway’.40 Lottie liked to claim that one of her ancestors had been a Colonel Blood who had stolen the British crown jewels, and that another was English novelist Laurence Sterne. Neither story was accurate, but in Tom’s boyhood they enhanced the family’s specialness, as well as reaching back not just to New England but even to Old England beyond. What small boy, however shy, would not relish being related to a jewel thief called Colonel Blood?

Special and privileged, Tom could be teased. When he was little an African American odd-job-man, Stephen Jones, one of whose tasks was to wash down the side-wall, agitated him by pretending to fall asleep beside the fire while toasting a piece of bread held between the toes of his outstretched foot. Tom would jump in alarm as Stephen pretended to wake up and murmured, ‘Some nigger’s foot’s burnin’.’41 Polite yet mischievous, Tom was fascinated by Stephen’s family, and ready to mythologise them. Some of the land nearby had originally been ‘negro quarters’ back in the days of slavery, and stories of that era persisted. Tom’s closeness to these African Americans as a rich white boy in 1890s St Louis is a reminder that his grandfather had stood up for the African American community, and that the Joneses, in their kindness to Tom, would have known his family’s history. Tom recalled Stephen’s father, the janitor of the Mary Institute, whom he called Uncle Henry. At the school Uncle Henry

lived in a sort of basement flat under the Beaumont Street entrance. He was a romantic figure to me as a child, not only because he possessed a parrot which actually did a little talking but because he was reputed to have been a runaway slave and certainly had one mutilated ear. He is said to have been tracked by bloodhounds. But Uncle Henry Jones was a great friend of the family.