There were pale faces and sinking hearts in more St Louis homes than ever known before in the city’s history.’61

Some of the worst devastation was by the river, where a long line of steamboats and wharf boats had been overturned, crushed, sunk, or had their superstructure torn away. One boat, swept from its wharf, was blown to the foot of Locust Street; entire structures as well as vessels were pulverised along the levee; in the city streets buildings collapsed, roofs were torn off and raging fires lit up the night sky, their flames reflected in the Mississippi beyond the wreckage of steamboats. Eventually the conflagration was put out by the sheer intensity of the rain.

Though Locust Street was some distance from the epicentre of the storm, its power was evident there as elsewhere in a large industrial city where smokestacks and church towers collapsed, and buildings on Jefferson Avenue (where Annie sometimes took Tom to her church) were destroyed. While the Eliots’ own place of worship survived, its younger St Louis sibling, the Unitarian Church of the Unity at whose dedication Tom’s grandfather had preached, was so badly damaged that it required rebuilding.62 We know Tom was at home at the time of the cyclone because on the following morning he was photographed (probably by his brother) along with his mother, two of his sisters and a cousin in front of their house. Hands clenched, his mother stares resolutely straight at the camera; cousin Henrietta looks at the photographer too; but Tom, who has climbed up on to the struts of the front gate, is looking westwards along the street. So is his sister Margaret (who was particularly sensitive to the sound of thunder); Marion Eliot can hardly be seen, but she has one hand to her head. Though the people are neatly dressed, this is not a calm, carefully composed photograph, but a record of a family conscious of themselves as survivors.63

More than eight thousand buildings were destroyed in the cyclone, but the Eliots’ house, about a mile and a half inland from the Eads Bridge, kept even its front windows intact. No doubt the family did what they could to protect the little boy not just from the storm but also from the gruesome accounts of horror that circulated afterwards. Inside 2635 Locust Street, even if the house shook, the weather made its presence felt principally as terrific sound: thunderclaps, blasts of wind, torrential deluge. Yet no one who went outdoors in St Louis in the days that followed could fail to see the desolation. ‘Death and Destruction Everywhere’ read one of the headlines in the Globe-Democrat two days later. The newspapers were full of how, just across the river, parts of East St Louis were ‘one vast charnel house’ where famished homeless people roamed the streets among the groans of the injured in ‘a living graveyard’.64

Accompanying these news stories a picture of the Eads shows mangled girder-work, fallen blocks of masonry, crashed rail carriages and downed wires. Across much of the city telegraph, telephone, electricity and gas supplies remained cut off for several days. Tales circulated of children buried alive, people blown out of their houses, even of corpses being driven through the streets on coaches pulled by storm-crazed horses. Safe and surely shielded from much of this, seven-year-old Tom left no surviving account. A quarter of a century later, however, nourished by the advanced study of Sanskrit texts and Classical learning, he would produce in the astonishing soundscape of ‘What the Thunder Said’ the most famous thunderstorm in world poetry, part of a work, The Waste Land, which envisages urban destruction, with the dead walking modern city streets, rain, a great river and scenes of horror. He was by no means writing the story of the 1896 St Louis cyclone, but he knew perhaps better than any other English-language poet what an apocalyptic thunderstorm sounded like.

After the cyclonic astonishments of the natural world came the measured anticlimax of school. Annie Dunne took him to his first educational establishment, which was run by an impressive teacher. Ellen Dean Lockwood (whose name suggests her parents relished Wuthering Heights) was an American Unitarian who had spent time in Brazil with her husband Robert in the early 1880s. The couple returned to the States in 1884 with their baby son and set up at 3841 Delmar Avenue in St Louis a small co-educational primary school which catered especially for prosperous and distinguished families. Tom recalled it as being ‘beyond Vanteventer Place’, a recently built gated community that was one of the city’s most select enclaves.65 Shortly before instructing Tom and his friend Thomas McKittrick, ‘Miss Lockwood’, as Tom called her, had taught the withdrawn and intense nine-year-old Sara Teasdale, helping that fledgling poet overcome her shyness and giving her the confidence to proceed to the Mary Institute. Mrs Lockwood had also taught her own son, Dean; he was a Latinist by the age of ten, went on to study Classics at Harvard and became a distinguished scholar. This was the sort of educational trajectory that the Latin-quoting Hal and the educationalist Lottie Eliot wanted for their shy, bright youngest child.

Determined, but also possessing a ‘lovable disposition’, Mrs Lockwood had struggled for some years with curvature of the spine and showed ‘unusual vitality and will power’. Lottie knew this sensitive, cosmopolitan teacher through the Church of the Messiah as weIl as through a local women’s group, the Wednesday Club. A schooling with her was likely to make Tom suitable for admission to the Mary Institute’s partner establishment, Smith Academy, where his brother Henry had been studying. At Mrs Lockwood’s school Tom seems to have done well. His friend and classmate ‘Tom Kick’ found it hard to keep up with him. The two boys were among Ellen Lockwood’s last pupils. She died young in December 1898, when Tom was in his first term at Smith Academy.66

Before he went there, he summered as usual for about three months in Massachusetts. Since earliest childhood he had travelled outside St Louis, sometimes considerable distances.