His cousin Frederick was there, as were nine women and girls, including several other cousins.

There were trails to mark out on this plot of land, garden ground to plant, even a log cabin to build. This life by shores and forests was a world away from Locust Street, and much more basic than vacationing at Eastern Point. At least one of his cousins noted that it was liberating for Tom to be away from his parents.44 He went swimming in the lake. He rowed on it. The weather was hot. He took part in an expedition to climb a 3,000-foot mountain from whose summit he could see as far as Mount Washington in the United States and Montreal in Canada.

Something of his excitement can be sensed in a verse letter he sent from this camp to his sister Charlotte. Married the year before to architect George Lawrence Smith, son of a Harvard Classics professor, she seems to have been unwell after the birth of her daughter, Tom’s little niece Theodora. ‘Hoping you are better, / At least enough to read my letter’, fourteen-year-old Tom tells his sister about his expedition:

We after breakfast took a start,

Four of us, in a two horse cart

Together with a little luncheon,

Including things quite good to munch on …

Part gauche rhyming, part mischievous excitement, this letter exudes fun, though the writer does not seem entirely sure how his sister will receive it. ‘I suppose now I should desist, / For I am needed to assist / In making a raft’.45

Raft-building was the sort of thing boys did in Captain Mayne Reid’s stories. This summer delighted Tom, and at least one aspect of it entered the heart of his mature poetry. His time at Camp Maple Hill explains why the ‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop’ of The Waste Land is accompanied by a note that sounds surprisingly personal as it details, with its reference to Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, ‘the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province’.46 Tom here brings together a memory of his time among the lakeside trees with the bird book his mother had given him. Under the surface of the mature poem are memories of relative freedom from his parents as well as a treasured maternal link. A sense both of escape from the constraints of home and of a powerful awareness of ties to his upbringing would condition all Tom’s adult life. His first taste of this came in Quebec.

In 1905 he saw Ada married to Alfred D. Sheffield, an instructor at Harvard Preparatory School, Springfield, Massachusetts. The Unitarian marriage ceremony was a quiet one held at the family home in Locust Street. Christopher Eliot presided alongside the Reverend John William Day, who had replaced Reverend Snyder as minister of the Church of the Messiah. A significant figure during Tom’s early teens, Day had established himself as a clergyman with marked philosophical concerns, at least some of which Tom would come to share. Day maintained that knowledge was in an important sense relational. He believed that ‘every created thing is part of some larger life than its own. Learning about the world is a process of learning to what things belong. We do not know a thing by knowing that thing alone, we know it by knowing of what it forms a part.’ Discussing the way ‘the agnostic attitude … assumes that the part is the whole’, this pastor argued for a ‘logic of knowing’ which made the ‘valid inference, like the inferences of science’ that the part can be related to ‘the whole’. While he spoke up for ‘The profound, indisputable significance of the resurrection of Jesus’, Day saw this as affirming ‘a science of the soul, a larger order than the order of birth and death’.47 This for him was the meaning of Easter. Mixing philosophical rhetoric with invocations of Christ, Day continued his predecessor’s custom of making the Unitarian Lent and Easter services a cultural as well as a religious festival. So, for instance, when Tom was eleven, Day preached in the Church of the Messiah at services where members of the St Louis Choral Symphony played, and singers and narrators performed parts of Gounod’s ‘Redemption’ oratorio.48 Like Lottie Eliot, this pastor emphasised the importance of those who had suffered for faith: in a sermon on ‘The Cheer of Suffering’, delivered when Tom was twelve, he stressed that, ‘In all the bright armory of fame, nothing shines with quite the luster which is reflected from the deeds of those who have been tried as by fire and have not been found wanting.’49

In a 1901 Easter sermon on ‘Death in Life and Life in Death’, the intellectually ambitious Day examined the German philosopher and scientist Ernst Haeckel’s thought. Day considered ‘the result of mind and will being concentrated on one kind of reality, so that they lose all sense of every other kind’.50 Tom’s parents regularly took him to church. The boy who listened to this philosophically minded Unitarian preacher later developed into a student who would write on such matters as degrees of reality and who would question in his poetry what was real and ‘Unreal’.51

While he could never match up to the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, the balding, bearded Reverend Day, who championed ‘the survival of the faithful’, shared several of Tom’s parents’ interests, secular as well as religious.52 Not least, he argued that their Church should play a full part in the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, with aspects of whose planning Hal and Lottie, too, were involved.53 Like those of the Eliots, Day’s cultural loyalties lay with the legacy of New England transcendentalism, and in the spring of 1903 he held an ambitious evening at the Church of the Messiah to celebrate ‘the centennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson’. At this event, speaking about philosophy, Professor A. O.