D. Power, well known in the local Irish community, had family connections to European theatre. For Tom, who ‘liked it very much’, this was a very different sort of religion to that practised by his Unitarian family. The Church of the Immaculate Conception had coloured statues, paper flowers, alluring lights; ‘the pews had little gates that I could swing on’.53 The Catholic, Trinitarian Annie, to whom he felt close, discussed with him the existence of God. ‘I remember’, he wrote in his thirties, a theological argument about God as First Cause being ‘put to me, at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid’.54 Theological and philosophical arguments intrigued Tom from childhood, but his sense of mischief remained unsubdued. Henry photographed his little brother with Annie, around the time Tom started at his first school. Hand on hip, Annie looks impatient to get on. Tom grins at the camera, conspiratorially.

Dramatic weather – Mississippi floods, spring rain, high winds – governed the rhythms of St Louis. In summer, with temperatures routinely reaching the 90s Fahrenheit (over 32°C), many wealthy families fled the heat and spent their time in resorts further north, often in New England. The St Louis press carried advertisements for hotels in resorts including Bar Harbor, Maine, and Gloucester, Massachusetts: leisured, well-off mothers would take their children there for several months, while fathers worked on in the heat and spent a shorter time holidaying with the family.55 The Eliots summered this way, migrating and returning according to the seasons. In winter, when Missouri thermometers dipped to near freezing, there might be snow. Tom, who had a fondness for Mississippi steamboats (but whose mother thought Mark Twain’s recent Huckleberry Finn unsuitable reading), delighted to hear their whistles blasting on New Year’s Eve: the St Louis levee was jampacked with vessels; tales were told of heroic steamboat races. Yet perhaps spring was the Mississippi’s most dramatic time, bringing with it regular inundations when, after rains, what Tom saw as the memorable ‘long dark river’ might burst its banks.56 In Missouri flooding could occur at almost any time of year, but most commonly around April and May. Tom recalled being taken down in flood time to the Eads Bridge just to see the power of nature. That bridge, with its massive stone pillars and monumental girder-work, still spans the river, a celebrated feat of engineering. In 1896 it was tested almost to destruction.

During that spring, not long after the St Louis Globe-Democrat had published verses about ‘April’s laughing sheen’ and how ‘Cold and dull as memoried pain / Drips the rain’, news items began to appear about devastation caused in the Southern states by torrential rain and cyclones.57 Almost a hundred people were killed in Texas in mid-May when a cyclone hit. In St Louis itself, however, life went on untouched by such turmoil: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was in town, bringing a ‘free street cavalcade’ with ‘100 Indian warriors’ as well as a detachment of US Cavalry commanded by Colonel W. F. Cody – Buffalo Bill himself. Accompanied by marching bands, daily shows featured such attractions as that ‘peerless lady wingshot’ Miss Annie Oakley, and even an exhibition herd of buffalo.58 Tom had a taste for such things; his grandmother Eliot liked to recall how an Indian had sneaked into her kitchen and stolen a red ribbon from her hair; a treasured family possession was a photograph of a Native American, Chief Joseph, wearing a suit; Forest Park in St Louis, where there were ‘Indian Mounds’, was, Tom recalled, ‘to me, as a child, the beginning of the Wild West’.59 He went there to photograph ‘a rather mangy buffalo’ chained to a tree.60 His lifelong interest in comings together of the supposedly ‘primitive’ and the modern urban has its origins in his St Louis boyhood, but in his eighth year his city was suddenly convulsed by the most spectacular event of his boyhood.

The cyclone which struck St Louis on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 May 1896 was one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to hit an American city. Though its havoc was overshadowed in popular memory by the spectacle of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, what happened in St Louis was also apocalyptic. Some reports refer to a ‘cyclone’, others to a ‘tornado’ or ‘hurricane’. For hours heavy dark clouds built up on the horizon. ‘Early mutterings’ gave way to damp gusts bringing a downpour of rain. Eyewitness accounts in the following day’s St Louis Globe-Democrat detail how a great rain cloud ‘came up slowly at first; from the west, beyond Forest Park. As the black rim mounted higher above the horizon, its arc embraced more territory to the north and south.’ After the thunder and lightning a ‘hurricane’ broke over the city’s western area about 5 p.m., bringing ‘a deluge of rain’ and for half an hour making even ‘the best built structures tremble’. Then a second storm struck from the south-west, destroying large parts of the city hospital, injuring patients and passers-by, capsizing boats moored at wharves on the Mississippi, and killing more than a hundred people. Some were ‘crushed beneath falling walls, hurled against the sides of buildings, struck by flying timbers, cut by the shattered glass’, or ‘shocked by the network of down wires’ as the city’s famous streetcar system was smashed. ‘Flashes of lightning’ lit up the carnage as night approached and hundreds of injured people struggled through the streets of a city plunged into premature darkness because its power and public transport systems had been knocked out. ‘A thousand electric cars stood dark and deserted on the tracks, while men and women toiled homeward through the drenching rain.