His dead Grandfather’s mores still dominated family life; his own birth had been preceded by the passing of his sister Theodora; he had been enamoured of the child actress who played the dying Carol in The Birds’ Christmas Carol. At school during an outbreak of fever in early 1900, Dr Curd had to give a speech memorialising a pupil who had died; a week later an assembly of staff and pupils paid tribute to another dead boy.27 In 1901 one of Tom’s school contemporaries, Walter Crunden, whose brother had just died of meningitis, became ‘nervous’ and ‘was stricken with brain fever’ said to have been brought on by ‘long-continued nerve strain in preparing for a school debate’.28 Like Tom, Walter was a reciter of poetry, and had a marked taste for literature. Such events did nothing to lessen Lottie Eliot’s fearfulness about her potentially vulnerable younger son. Long afterwards, when a commentator on Tom’s upbringing remarked on the ‘anxiety’ and even ‘distress’ in his mother’s face, he did not demur.29 His mother worried he was lonely. As he moved through Smith Academy, she grew increasingly aware that, though her youngest child was ‘most friendly’, nonetheless ‘We have lived twenty-five years on the old Eliot place, while all our friends have moved out, and Tom desires companionship of which he has been thus deprived.’30 His lack of friends and his health concerned her.

Though Tom took part in ‘gymnasium training’ with the other boys, his mother was clear he ‘could not participate in football and other such strenuous sports’. He was, she realised, ‘almost the only fellow debarred from football’. She agonised about his ‘physical limitations’ and paid careful attention to what the family physician said when he examined Tom’s ‘congenital rupture’. By 1905 the doctor thought the condition ‘superficially healed, but as the abdominal muscles are weak, care must still be exercised’.31 Personally as well as professionally, even if perhaps she ‘saw herself as a failure as a teacher’, Mrs Eliot cared passionately about bringing up children, and worried about their welfare.32 Throughout Tom’s early teens she was a leading, successful campaigner for the rights of youngsters in the St Louis penal system; by 1903 she had been ‘for a number of years one of the managers of a temporary home for children’.33 She knew how to influence her family too, encouraging them to continue her preoccupations: her eldest daughter Ada, already a student at Radcliffe during Tom’s infancy, was secretary of Boston’s Family Welfare Society when Tom started high school. Ada, who had once mouthed sounds to her baby brother, went on to specialise in child welfare issues, winning early in her distinguished social work career the nickname ‘Angel of the Tombs’.34 Yet, as Mrs Eliot grew increasingly deaf, and as Tom’s siblings left home, the frustrated poet who was his mother grew all the closer to her shy, poetry-loving younger son. Sometimes she worried the nature of their closeness might be oppressive for Tom. ‘I talk with him’, this strong-willed woman wrote when he was sixteen, ‘as I would with a man, which perhaps is not so good for him as if he had young people about him.’35

In the early 1930s, a few years after his mother died, and at a time when he had grown familiar with psychoanalysis, Tom remarked to a small audience of American students that the treatment of ‘mother-love’ in D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious was ‘better than all the psychoanalysts’ had to say on the topic.36 Lawrence (one of whose ‘conspicuous weakneses’, according to Tom, was that he ‘gave his best to his mother’) writes of how the middle-aged mother in particular can demand ‘more love’ from ‘one who will “understand” her. And as often as not she turns to her son.’ Fantasia of the Unconscious saw such an engulfing situation as ‘a dynamic spiritual incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant’. Such circumstances produced ‘introversion’ in sons when ‘Child and parent’ were ‘intensely linked in adult love-sympathy and love-will’, yet the child’s developing sexuality, though roused by parental love, could not find adequate expression through the intense parent-child bond and so clashed against it. For Lawrence this state of affairs was bound up with the child’s ‘own shame and masturbation, its own cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex curiosity … There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable.’ To suggest that every detail of Lawrence’s argument should be read back into Tom’s relationship with his mother would be unfair; but it is striking that he later called attention to this account of ‘mother-love’ as especially perceptive. Revealingly, where Lawrence (though he does write about love between a mother and a son) uses the non-gendered expression ‘parent love’, Tom substituted ‘mother-love’.37 The boy whose Mamma fretted over his health, and who shared with her a deep love of poetry, grew up to become the thirty-one-year-old poet who gratefully accepted her offer to make him a new pair of pyjamas: ‘it would seem to keep us nearer together’.38

Little or nothing is known about sex education or possible instances of homosexuality at Tom’s single-sex school, but traditionally Smith Academy did give its boys at the age of twelve or so some instruction in ‘Physiology’ through ‘familiar talks’; at home Tom’s father’s strict views on sex and sex education grew severe as he aged.39

I do not approve of public instruction in Sexual relations. When I teach my children to avoid the Devil I don’t begin by giving them a letter of introduction to him and his crowd. I hope that a cure for Syphilis will never be discovered. It is God’s punishment for nastiness. Take it away and there will be more nastiness, and it will be necessary to emasculate our children to keep them clean.40

Though these sentences date from 1914, they reflect the sexual code Tom’s father passed to the boys in what Tom’s older brother called ‘such a fanatically conservative family as ours’.41 Later Tom’s brother became conscious of being attracted to girls who seemed exciting but unsuitable; he married late, happily, and had no children. For Tom, shy and sometimes fastidious, his father’s attitude to sex was unlikely to relieve any anxiety he may have had about his body, not least when conscious of potential weakness caused by his congenital hernia. Yet photographs of him with his father suggest there was clear physical affection between them. As a couple, Lottie and Hal Eliot had produced seven children. Tom’s parents were strict, but hardly sex averse.

On at least one occasion during his Smith Academy years Tom moved beyond parental control. In 1904, rather than staying for the summer at Eastern Point, he headed further north to Quebec. Though in another country (this was his only boyhood trip abroad), he was still in Eliot territory. The previous year his uncle, the Reverend Christopher Rhodes Eliot of Boston, had visited the St Louis Eliots and preached at the Church of the Messiah.42 Around that time Christopher also bought land on the shore of Canada’s Lake Memphremagog. This became the site of a fifty-four-acre family camp, Camp Maple Hill, where everyone slept in tents. At Camp Maple Hill Christopher Eliot’s Scottish wife Mary liked to read aloud Walter Scott’s ballads, encouraging visitors to join in impromptu songs and amateur theatricals.43 When Tom went in 1904, it was the camp’s first season.