As a baby he was taken, as he recalled, to Louisiana, though another family member recorded that his earliest travels were with his mother to Pass Christian, then a small yachting town, in Mississippi on the Gulf of Mexico. According to this account, not long after Tom’s birth his sister Charlotte was ill and their mother took her there, along with Tom and Henry, to convalesce.67 Though Tom was too young to remember, it may have been a difficult time for Lottie; she looks rather thin and tired in photographs. With a family of six, one of whom was ill in Tom’s early infancy, Lottie Eliot had to face several demands. Such circumstances, and his mother’s continuing commitment to social reforms in St Louis, brought Tom even closer to Annie Dunne.

The earliest holidays Tom remembered were vacations in coastal New England. From his fifth year onwards the family went to summer at the fishing and resort town of Gloucester, on the Cape Ann coast ‘about forty miles north-east of Boston’.68 To start with they stayed at the recently constructed Hawthorne Inn. Built at Wonson’s Point in East Gloucester, this large establishment had a multi-storey seafront block whose verandahs and decking extended on to the rocks of the shoreline. Surrounded by a complex of other lodgings, it was strikingly literary in its nomenclature. Not only was the hotel itself named after the great early-nineteenth-century novelist of New England Puritanism, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the surrounding buildings, such as Seven Gables and Blythedale, were named after the titles, places and people of his works.69 Hawthorne became one of Tom’s favourite novelists, an author preoccupied with ‘spiritual problems’, whose work he read from his early teens onwards and whom he related to his own New England ancestry as well as to a line in American writing which included Henry James and, by implication, himself.70 In an unusual way as a young child, he had holidayed among Hawthorne’s works.

It was probably at this most literary of hotels that, as very small boys sometimes do, he fell in love for the first time. ‘I had my first love affair’, he recalled in 1939 in a tone at once self-mocking and embarrassedly honest, ‘at (as nearly as I can compute from confirmatory evidence) the age of five, with a young lady of three, at a seaside hotel. Her name was Dorothy; that is all I know. My feeling towards her was expressed entirely by bullying, teasing, and making her fetch and carry: yet I remember clearly that I pined for a bit after we were separated in the autumn.’71 A shy, truss-wearing, youngest child in a predominantly female household, the five-year-old boy made the most of having a little girl playmate to boss around. Yet, over four decades later and half jokingly relating this experience to Dante’s meeting with the child Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, he knew such early encounters could be important. Recalling that ‘My relations with later inamoratae(?) were more distant and respectful’, he mentions in the same letter being enamoured of ‘a young lady with ringlets (name unknown) who took the part of the angel child who died, in a performance called “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” at another seaside resort’.72 This little girl, playing the part of Carol in a dramatisation of a once popular sentimental story by the American writer Kate Douglas Wiggins, would have been acting the part of a beautiful, suffering invalid battling with long-term illness and inspiring her loving family at Christmas before succumbing to her fatal malady. The story was a popular one (there would be a reading from it at Tom’s school when he was fourteen), and dramatisations of it often involved singing and elements of dance.73 Whether or not Tom was aware of his sister Theodora’s premature death or of how in 1864 his cherished aunt Ada (after whom one of his sisters was named) had drowned aged sixteen while skating on a pond, associations between mortality, suffering and female love were part of his childhood even before (aged about eleven) he read the works of Edgar Allan Poe in which such a nexus of ideas is common.

However shy in Missouri, he enjoyed meeting little girls at Gloucester, and at least one other little boy. A series of photographs taken on the boulder-strewn shoreline and on the sand show him around 1896 in the company of his cousins Barbara and Eleanor Hinkley and Frederick Eliot. Sometimes Fred’s sisters, Abigail and Martha, came too. These Massachusetts relatives were his summer playmates. Similar in age, privileged upbringing and Unitarian background, they got on well together. They dug in the sand, carefully supervised by their nannies, or sat, all smiles, in a row on a hammock; or clambered over rocks, examining rock pools. Sometimes, wearing a hat with a brim to protect him from the summer heat, Tom played on top of a big boulder where he had erected a flagpole as if it were a fort. Less than a mile away, Fort Hill Avenue led to the remains of an actual Civil War fortification which became a military campground again in the summer of 1898 during the Spanish-American War. As Tom played by his flagpole on the rocks, his ever-vigilant mother stationed herself nearby.

Gloucester was very different from St Louis. Twenty years before Tom’s birth, Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine called it ‘the most extensive fishing port in the world’.74 In the 1890s, with three centuries of documented history behind it, the place was very much a working harbour, full of local boats and gear, busy with the salting and packing of fish; but Gloucester’s increasingly well appointed hotels also lured wealthy vacationers from Boston and beyond. In the late 1880s and 1890s on land sold off at Eastern Point, some wealthy men, including Tom’s father, built extensive second homes in what is today an exclusive gated community.

Decades earlier, Gloucester’s combination of setting and marine light had attracted American painters of the Luminist school; in 1880 Winslow Homer had created some of his finest watercolours while living in a lighthouse on a tiny rocky island in Gloucester harbour; the area continued to appeal to artists and writers. Graced by Protestant, Catholic and Unitarian churches, this place was also sanctified by art. ‘It has’, wrote Tom later, ‘the most beautiful harbour for small ships on the whole of that coast.’75 Though Gloucester’s growing population in 1900 hovered around 25,000, the town’s eminence as a locus of fishing, fish smoking, boatbuilding and heroic voyaging endured. Tom saw how ‘on the long rows of drying racks that lie behind the wharves, the salt fish is dried in the sun’. He watched fishing ‘schooners’ as they set out ‘for their cruises of several weeks’.76 (Locals claimed to have coined the word ‘schooner’.) These vessels with their huge white sails thronged Gloucester throughout Tom’s boyhood; proudly he claimed he had seen the Rob Roy launched in 1900.

During this time, as they had done for many, many years, schooners in quest of cod, halibut, haddock and herring voyaged from Gloucester round Eastern Point at the tip of Cape Ann, then headed north up the New England coast. Small boats called dories would be lowered over the side; men on board would row out to fish for cod. Drownings were frequent.