Almost everything I've read about the English writer Elizabeth Taylor remarks on her facility with characterization and mentions that her child characters were particularly well-rendered. Taylor had two children of her own and was ostensibly a housewife and stay-at-home mother although, given the number of books and short stories she published during her lifetime, she must have devoted a large part of her day to writing. If she was anything like her characters -- and they tended to share her social class -- she had household help. I'm guessing she had plenty of time with her children and their friends and time enough to commit her impressions to paper.
This next passage is from her short story "The Wrong Order," which is found in the collection Dangerous Calm
On her slow, perambulating walks about the garden, Rupe attended Hilda, talking usually of death, since it seemed to him to be a forbidden subject. One 'hush' from his mother was enough to commit him to it. He touched on the idea of Charlie's [the dog] death quite cheerfully, and, then, with his sideways glance through sandy lashes, on Hilda's.
'We all come to it,' she said.
'And go to God.'
'That's as may be.'
'Do you mind dying?'
'It looks as if we haven't much choice.'
She poked with her stick at a bit of new spring groundsel. 'Pull it up, like a good boy.'
He snapped it off and left the root.
'Oh dear, now I shall have to ask Mr Bonchurch to do it.'
'Why can't you do it?' Again that steady, sideways look.
'I become giddy if I bend down.'
'You might die of being giddy.'
'I might. What a bore you are with your small talk.'
'What's that?'
She sighed and turned impatiently back towards the house. By now, she was waiting impatiently for Tom's return...
As Tom was gossiping and unpacking the basket, Hilda came to the kitchen door. 'Mrs Clarebut won't mind doing that,' she said. 'I wondered if you could give me a hand with something in the garden.'
She was dogged by her ginger-haired familiar, who said, 'If she bent down she might die.'
Like lightning Mrs Clarebut streaked across the kitchen, seized him in a frightful grip above his thin elbow, shook him, hissed at him, making matters a hundred times worse.
'Groundsel,' Hilda said to Tom as if nothing else were happening. 'Will you come and see?'
They went into the garden, soon to be followed by a snivelling Rupe.
As they walked down a grass path, Hilda said, taking a pencil and pad from her apron pocket, 'I'd like those delphiniums out when they're finished: they're too much on top of the phloxes. Perhaps it's a good thing poor old Stack [the gardener] died. He can't be faced with all these weeds. Although, of course, if he were here, they wouldn't be. All the same, I sometimes feel that I've betrayed him. Can't seem to help doing that. No doubt he'll understand.' And, belying the doubts she had earlier implied to Rupe of the existence of an afterlife, she sent a rueful smile heavenwards.
In spite of the soft earth, plaintains broke off at roots, groundsel snapped, as Tom cursed them. 'All right,' Hilda said. 'If you fetch me my kneeling mat, my little fork, and help me down, I'll manage. I'm sorry that I bothered you.'
The future of the garden -- her realm -- was threatened with incompetence and indifference.
'Do they have gardens in heaven?' Rupe inquired.
'How the hell do I know?' Hilda asked.
'When Charlie goes to heaven, Jesus might mistake him for a sheep.'
'He may well do that.'
'But I know a sheep when I see one.'
'So you're one up on Jesus.'
'You're not allowed to say that.'
Tom returned with a small garden fork, and a trug, but no kneeling mat, and he applied himself to the weeds.
'Because it's rude,' said Rupe.
