THERE was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handy-man on the driver’s seat. Hold-alls, bags and boxes were piled upon the floor. “These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,” said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement.
Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round solemn eyes, first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother.
“We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off,” said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back against the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes, her lips trembling with laughter. Happily at that moment Mrs. Samuel Josephs, who had been watching the scene from behind her drawing-room blind, waddled down the garden path.
Mansfield reveals the euphoria of change in this opening. The ‘crisis’ of relocation is witnessed from several contrasting perspectives so that the reader is aware of the conflict between adulthood and childhood, between in Blakean terms, innocence and experience.
Notice how revelatory is the term lump of a child’. Short story writers choose their language as carefully as poets and the word ‘lump’ subverts any cosy assumptions about maternity and care. The almost feverish energy of Linda is contrasted against the wide eyed watchfulness of Kezia and Lottie, who uniformed in their very best travelling clothes, find that they are superfluous to their mother’s requirements. They are not on the list of her most important things. The lightness and ethereal ‘distant’ quality of Linda’s register is contrasted with the neighbourly stolidity and security of Mrs Joseph’s duck like ‘waddled.’
Space is a literal and metaphorical device used to explore the ambivalence of intimacy. We are plunged into this moment of metamorphosis where characters are being transported away from themselves and replanted elsewhere. Hence Prelude as the title may suggest with its evocation of Wordworth’s famous poem of Recollection, explores the transformative impact of childhood upon memory. It is an elegy and the elegaic tone underlines the transience and fragility of the past.