Time of Hope

Part One Son and Mother

The midges were dancing over the water. Close to our hands the reeds were high and lush, and on the other side of the stream the bank ran up steeply, so that we seemed alone, alone in the hot, still, endless afternoon. We had been there all day, the whole party of us; the ground was littered with our picnic; now as the sun began to dip we had become quiet, for a party of children. We lay lazily, looking through the reeds at the glassy water. I stretched to pluck a blade of grass, the turf was rough and warm beneath the knees.

It was one of the long afternoons of childhood. I was nearly nine years old, and it was the June of 1914. It was an afternoon I should not have remembered, except for what happened to me on the way home.

It was getting late when we left the stream, climbed the bank, found ourselves back in the suburb, beside the tramlines. Down in the reeds we could make-believe that we were isolated, Camping in the wilds; but in fact, the tramlines ran by, parallel to the stream, for another mile. I went home alone, tired and happy after the day in the sun. I was not in a hurry, and walked along, basking in the warm evening. The scent of the lime trees hung over the suburban street; lights were coming on in some of the houses; the red brick of the new church was roseate in the sunset glow.

At the church the street forked; to the right past the butcher’s, past a row of little houses whose front doors opened on to the pavement; to the left past the public library along the familiar road towards home. There were the houses with ‘entries’ leading to their back doors, and the neat, minute gardens in front. There was my aunt’s house, with the BUILDER AND CONTRACTOR sign over the side gate. Then came ours: one of a pair, older than the rest of this road, three storeys instead of two, red brick like the church, shambling and in need of a coat of paint to cover the sun blisters. Round the bend from the library I could already see the jessamine in the summer twilight. I was in sight of home. Then it happened. Without warning, without any kind of reason, I was seized with a sense of overwhelming dread. I was terrified that some disaster was waiting for me. In an instant, dread had pounced on me out of the dark. I was too young to have any defences. I was a child, and all misery was eternal. I could not believe that this terror would pass.

Tired as I was, I began to run frantically home. I had to find out what the premonition meant. It seemed to have come from nowhere; I could not realize that there might be anxiety in the air at home, that I might have picked it up. Had I heard more than I knew? As I ran; as I left behind ‘good nights’ from neighbours watering their flowers, I felt nothing but terror. I thought that my mother must be dead.

When I arrived, all looked as it always did. From the road I could see there was no light in the front-room window; that was usual, until I got back home. I went in by the back door. The blinds were drawn in the other sitting-room, and a band of light shone into the back garden; in the kitchen there was a faint radiance from the gas mantle, ready for me to turn it up. My supper was waiting on the table. I rushed through the passage in search of my mother. I burst into the lighted sitting-room. There she was. I cried out with perfect relief.

She was embarrassed to see me. Her face was handsome, anxious, vain, and imperious; that night her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright and excited instead of, as I knew them best, keen, bold, and troubled. She was sitting at a table with two women, friends of hers who came often to the house. On the table lay three rows of cards, face upwards, and one of my mother’s friends had her finger pointing to the king of spades. But they were not playing a game — they were telling fortunes.

These séances happened whenever my mother could get her friends together. When these two, Maud and Cissie, came to tea, there would be whispers and glances of understanding. My mother would give me some pennies to buy sweets or a magazine, and they left to find a room by themselves. I was not told what they did there. My mother, proud in all ways, did not like me to know that she was extremely superstitious.

‘Have you had your supper, dear?’ she said that night. ‘It’s all ready for you on the table.’

‘I’m just showing your mother some tricks,’ said Maud, who was portly and good-natured.

‘Never mind,’ said my mother. ‘You go and have your supper. Then it’ll be your bedtime, won’t it?’

But in fact I had no particular ‘bedtime’. My mother was capable but preoccupied, my father took it for granted that she was the stronger character and never made more than a comic pretence of interfering at home; I received nothing but kindness from them: they had large, vague hopes of me, but from a very early age I was left to do much as I wanted. So after I had finished supper I came back along the passage to the empty dark front room; from the other sitting-room came a chink of light beneath the door, and the sound of whispers from my mother and her friends — their fortune-telling was always conducted in the lowest of voices.

I found some matches, climbed on the table, lit the gas lamp, then settled down to read. Since I had arrived at the house, found all serene, seen my mother, I was completely reassured. I was wrapped in the security of childhood. Just as the misery had been eternal, so was this. The dread had vanished. For those moments, which I remembered all my life, had already passed out of mind the day they happened. I curled up on the sofa and lost myself in The Captain.

I read on for some time. I was beginning to blink with sleepiness, the day’s sun had made my forehead burn; perhaps I should soon have gone to bed. But then, through the open window, I heard a well-known voice.

‘Lewis! What are you doing up at this time of night?’

It was my Aunt Milly, who lived two houses down the road. Her voice was always full and assertive; it swelled through any room; in any group, hers was the voice one heard.

‘I never heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Milly from the street.

‘Well, since you are up — instead of being in bed a couple of hours ago,’ she added indignantly, ‘you’d better let me in the front door.’

She followed me into the front room and looked down at me with hot-headed, vigorous reprobation.

‘Boys of your age ought to be in bed by eight,’ she said. ‘No wonder you’re tired in the morning.’ I argued that I was not, but Aunt Milly did not listen.

‘No wonder you’re skinny,’ she said. ‘Boys of your age need to sleep the clock round. It’s another thing that I shall have to speak to your mother about.’

Aunt Milly was my father’s sister. She was a big woman, as tall as my mother and much more heavily built. She had a large, blunt, knobbly nose, and her eyes protruded: they were light blue, staring, and slightly puzzled. She wore her hair in a knob above the back of her head, which gave her a certain resemblance to Britannia. She had strong opinions on all subjects. She believed in speaking the truth, particularly when it was unpleasant. She thought I was both spoilt and neglected, and was the only person who tried to govern my movements. She had no children of her own.

‘Where is your mother?’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I came along to see her. I’m hoping that she might have something to tell me.’

She spoke in an accusing tone that I did not understand. I told her that mother was in the other room, busy with Maud and Cissie — ‘playing cards,’ I fabricated.

‘Playing cards,’ said Aunt Milly indignantly. ‘I’d better see how much longer they think they’re going on.’

Through two closed doors I heard Aunt Milly’s voice, loud in altercation. I even caught some of her words: she was wondering how grown-up people could believe in such nonsense. Then followed a pause of quiet, in which I imagined my mother must be replying, though I could hear nothing. Then Aunt Milly again. Then a clash of doors, and Aunt Milly rejoined me.

‘Playing cards!’ she cried. ‘I don’t think much of cards, but I wouldn’t say a word against it. If that was all it was!’

‘Aunt Milly, you have—’ I said, defending my mother. Aunt Milly had reproved her resonantly for suggesting whist last Boxing Day. I was going to remind her of it.

‘Seeing the future!’ said Aunt Milly with scorn, as though I had not made a sound. ‘It’s a pity she hasn’t something better to do. No wonder things get left in this house. I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but someone ought to be thinking of the future for your father and mother. I’ve said so often enough, but do you think they would listen?’

Outside, in the hall, my mother was saying goodbye to Maud and Cissie. The door swung slowly open and she entered the room. She entered very deliberately, with her head high and her feet turned out at each step; it was a carriage she used when she was calling up all her dignity. She had in fact great dignity, though she invented her own style for expressing it.

She did not speak until she had reached the middle of the room. She faced Aunt Milly, and said: ‘Please to wait till we are alone, Milly. The next time you want to tell me what I ought to do, I’ll thank you to keep quiet in front of visitors.’

They were both tall, they both had presence, they both had strong wills. They were in every other way unlike. My mother’s thin beak of a nose contrasted itself to Aunt Milly’s bulbous one. My mother’s eyes were set deep in well-arched orbits, and were bold, grey, handsome, and shrewd. Aunt Milly’s were opaque and protruding. My mother was romantic, snobbish, perceptive, and intensely proud. Aunt Milly was quite unselfconscious, a busybody, given to causes and good works, impervious to people, surprised and hurt when they resisted her proposals, but still continuing active, indelicate, and undeterred. She had no vestige of humour at all. My mother had a good deal — but she showed none as she confronted Aunt Milly under the drawing-room mantel.

They had been much together since my parents’ marriage. They maddened each other: they lived in a state of sustained mutual misunderstanding; but they never seemed able to keep long apart.

‘Please to let my visitors come here in peace,’ said my mother.

‘Visitors!’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I’ve known Maud Taylor longer than you have. It’s a pity she didn’t get married when we did. No wonder she wants the cards to tell her that she’s going to find a husband.’

‘When she’s in my house, she’s my visitor. I’ll thank you not to thrust your opinions down her throat.’

‘It’s not my opinions,’ said Aunt Milly, loudly even for her. ‘It’s nothing but common sense. Lena, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘I’m not in the least ashamed of myself,’ said my mother. She kept her haughtiness; but she would have liked to choose a different ground.

‘Reading the cards and looking at each other’s silly hands and—’ Aunt Milly paused triumphantly, ‘—and gaping at some dirty tea leaves. I’ve got no patience with you.’

‘No one’s asked you to have patience,’ said my mother stiffly. ‘If ever I ask you to join us, then’s the time for you to grumble. Everyone’s got a right to their own opinions.’

‘Not if they’re against common sense. Tea leaves!’ Aunt Milly snorted. ‘In the twentieth century!’ She brought out those last words like the ace of trumps.

My mother hesitated. She said: ‘There’s plenty we don’t know yet.’

‘We know as much as we want to about tea leaves,’ said Aunt Milly. She roared with laughter. It was her idea of a joke. She went on, ominously: ‘Yes, there’s plenty we don’t know yet. That’s why I can’t understand how you’ve got time for this rubbish. One of the things we don’t know is how you and Bertie and this boy here are going to live. There’s plenty we don’t know yet. I was telling the boy—’

‘What have you told Lewis?’ My mother was fierce and on the offensive again. When Aunt Milly had jostled her away from propriety and etiquette and made her justify her superstitions, she had been secretly abashed. Now she flared out with anxious authority.

‘I told him that you’ve let things slide for long enough. No wonder you’re seeing it all go from bad to worse. You never ought to have let—’

‘Milly, you’re not to talk in front of Lewis.’

‘It won’t hurt him. He’s bound to know sooner or later.’

‘That’s as may be. I won’t have you talk in front of Lewis.’

I knew by now that there was great trouble. I asked my mother: ‘Please, what is the matter?’

‘Don’t you worry,’ said my mother, her face lined with care, defiant, protective, and loving. ‘Perhaps it will blow over.’

‘Your father’s making a mess of things,’ said Aunt Milly.

But my mother said: ‘I tell you, you’re not to talk in front of the child.’

She spoke with such quiet anger, such reserve of will, that even Aunt Milly flinched. Neither of them said another word for some moments, and one could hear the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. I could not imagine what the trouble was, but it frightened me. I knew that I could not ask again. This time it was real; I could not run home and be reassured.

Just then the latch of the front door clicked, and my father came in. There was no mystery why he had been out of the house that night. He was an enthusiastic singer, and organized a local male-voice choir. It was a passion that absorbed many of his nights. He came in, batting short-sighted eyes in the bright room.

‘We were talking about you, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘I expect you were,’ said my father. ‘I expect I’ve done wrong as usual.’

His expression was mock-repentant. It was his manner to pretend to comic guilt, in order to exaggerate his already comic gentleness and lack of assertion. If there was clowning to be done, he could never resist it. He was a very small man, several inches shorter than his wife or sister. His head was disproportionately large, built on the same lines as Aunt Milly’s but with finer features. His eyes popped out like hers, but, when he was not clowning, looked reflective, and usually happy and amused. Like his sister’s his hair was on the light side of brown (my mother’s was very dark), and he had a big, reddish, drooping moustache. His spectacles had a knack of running askew, above the level of one eye and below the other. Habitually he wore a bowler hat, and while grinning at his sister he placed it on the sideboard.

‘I wish you’d show signs of ever doing anything,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘Don’t set on the man as soon as he gets inside the door,’ said my mother.

‘I expect it, Lena. I expect it.’ My father grinned. ‘She always puts the blame on me. I have to bear it. I have to bear it.’

‘I wish you’d stand up for yourself,’ said my mother irritably.

My father looked somewhat pale. He had looked pale all that year, though even now his face was relaxed by the side of my mother’s. And he made his inevitable comment when the clock struck the hour. It was a marble clock, presented to him by the choir when he had scored his twentieth year as secretary. It had miniature Doric columns on each side of the face, and a deep reverberating chime. Each time my father heard it he made the same remark. Now it struck eleven.

‘Solemn-toned clock,’ said my father appreciatively. ‘Solemn-toned clock.’

‘Confound the clock,’ said my mother with strain and bitterness.

As I lay awake in the attic, my face was hot against the pillow, hot with sunburn, hot with frightened thoughts. I had added some codicils to my prayers, but they did not ease me. I could not imagine what the trouble was.

For a fortnight I was told nothing. My mother was absent-minded with worry, but if she and my father were talking when I came in they would fall uncomfortably quiet. Aunt Milly was in the house more often than I had ever seen her; most nights after supper there boomed a vigorous voice from the street outside; whenever she arrived I was sent into the garden. I got used to it. Often I forgot altogether the anxiety in the house. I liked reading in the garden, which was several steps below the level of the yard; there was a patch of longish grass, bordered by a flower bed, a rockery and some raspberry canes; I was specially fond of the trees — three pear trees by the side wall and two apple trees in the middle of the grass. I used to take out a deckchair, sit under one of the apple trees, and read until the summer sky had darkened and I could only just make out the print on the shimmering page.

Then I would look up at the house. The sitting-room window was a square of light. Sometimes I felt anxious about what was being said in there.

Apart from those conferences, I did not see any change in the routine of our days.

I went as usual to school, and found my mother at midday silent and absorbed. My father went, also as usual, to his business. He took to any routine with his habitual mild cheerfulness, and even Aunt Milly could not complain of the hours he worked. We had a servant-girl of about sixteen, and my father got up when she did, in the early morning, and had left for work long before I came down to breakfast, and did not return for his high tea until half past six or seven.

For three years past he had been in business on his own. Previously he had been employed in a small boot factory; he had looked after the hooks, been a kind of utility man and second-in-command, and earned two hundred and fifty pounds a year. On that we had lived comfortably enough, servant-girl and all. But he knew the trade, he knew the profits, he reported that Mr Stapleton, his employer, was drawing twelve hundred a year out of the business. To both my parents, to Aunt Milly, to Aunt Milly’s husband, that income seemed riches, almost unimaginable riches. My father thought vaguely that he would like to run his own factory. My mother urged him on. Aunt Milly prophesied that he would fail and reproached him for not having the enterprise to try.

My mother impelled him to it. She chafed against the limits of her sex. If she had been a man she would have driven ahead, she would have been a success. She lent him her savings, a hundred and fifty pounds or so. She helped borrow some more money. Aunt Milly, whose husband in a quiet inarticulate fashion was a good jobbing builder and appreciably more prosperous than we were, lent the rest. My father found himself in charge of a factory. It was very small. His total staff was never more than a dozen. But there he was, established on his own. There he had spent his long days for the past three years. At night I had often watched my mother look over the accounts, have an idea, ask why something had not been done, say that he ought to get a new traveller. That had not happened recently, in my hearing, but my father was still spending his long days at the factory. He never referred to it as ‘my business’ or ‘my factory’ — always by a neutral, geographical term, ‘Myrtle Road’.

One Friday night early in July my mother and father talked for a long time alone. When I came in from the garden I noticed that he was upset. ‘Lena’s got a headache. She’s gone to bed,’ he said. He gazed miserably at me, and I did not know what to say. Then, to my astonishment, he asked me to go with him to the county cricket match next day. I thought he had been going to tell me something painful: I did not understand it at all.

Myself, I went regularly to the ‘county’ whenever I could beg sixpence, but my father had not been to a cricket match in his life. And he said also that he would meet me outside the ground at half past eleven. He was going to leave Myrtle Road early. That was also astonishing. Even for a singing practice, even to get back to an evening with a travel book, he had never left the factory before his fixed time. On Saturdays he always reached home at half past one.

‘We’ll have the whole day at the match, shall we?’ he said. ‘We’ll get our money’s worth, shall we?’

His voice was flat, he could not even begin to clown.

Next morning, however, he was more himself. He liked going to new places; he never minded being innocent, not knowing his way about. ‘Fancy!’ he said, as he paid for us both and we pushed through the turnstiles. ‘So that’s where they play, is it?’ But he was looking at the practice nets. He was quite unembarrassed as I led him to seats on the popular side, just by the edge of the sight-screen.

Soon I had no time to attend to my father. I was immersed, tense with the breathtaking freshness of the first minutes of play. The wickets gleamed in the sun, the bail flashed, the batsmen played cautious strokes; I swallowed with excitement at each ball. I was a passionate partisan. Leicestershire were playing Sussex. For years I thought I remembered each detail of that day; I should have said that my father and I had watched the first balls of the Leicestershire innings. But my memory happened to have tricked me. Long afterwards I looked up the score. The match had begun on the Thursday, and Sussex had made over two hundred, and got two of our wickets for a few that night. Friday was washed out by rain, and we actually saw (despite my false remembrance) Leicestershire continue their innings.

All my heart was set on their getting a big score. And I was passionately partisan among the Leicestershire side itself. I had to find a hero. I had not so much choice as I should have had, if I had been luckier in my county; and I did not glow with many dashing vicarious triumphs. My hero was C J B Wood. Even I, in disloyal moments, admitted that he was not so spectacular as Jessop or Tyldesley. But, I told myself, he was much sounder. In actual fact, my hero did not often let me down. On the occasions when he failed completely, I wanted to cry.

That morning he cost me a gasp of fright. He kept playing — I think it must have been Relf — with an awkward-looking, clumsy, stumbling shot that usually patted the ball safely to mid-off. But once, as he did so, the ball found the edge of the bat and flew knee-high between first and second slip. It was four all the way. People round me clapped and said fatuously: ‘Pretty shot.’ I was contemptuous of them and concerned for my hero, who was thoughtfully slapping the pitch with the back of his bat.

After a quarter of an hour I could relax a little. My father was watching with mild blue-eyed interest. Seeing that I was not leaning forward with such desperate concentration, he began asking questions.

‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘do they have to be very strong to play this game?’

‘Some batsmen’, I said confidently, having read a lot of misleading books, ‘score all their runs by wristwork.’ I demonstrated the principle of the leg-glance.

‘Just turn their wrists, do they?’ said my father. He studied the players in the field. ‘But they seem to be pretty big chaps, most of these? Do they have to be big chaps?’

‘Quaife is ever such a little man. Quaife of Warwickshire.’

‘How little is he? Is he shorter than me?’

‘Oh yes.’

I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father. He received it with obvious satisfaction.

He pursued his chain of thought.

‘How old do they go on playing?’

‘Very old,’ I said.

‘Older than me?’

My father was forty-five. I assured him that W G Grace went on playing till he was fifty-eight. My father smiled reflectively.

‘How old can they be when they play for the first time? Who is the oldest man to play here for the first time?’

For all my Wisden, it was beyond me to tell him the record age of a first appearance in first-class cricket. I could only give my father general encouragement.

He was given to romantic daydreams, and that morning he was indulging one of them. He was dreaming that all of a sudden he had become miraculously skilled at cricket; he was brought into the middle, everyone acclaimed him, he won instantaneous fame. It would not have done for the dream to be absolutely fantastic. It had to take him as he was, forty-five years old and five feet four in height. He would not imagine himself taken back to youth and transformed into a man strong, tall and glorious. No, he accepted himself in the flesh, He grinned at himself — and then dreamed about all that could happen.

For the same reason he read all the travel books he could lay his hands on. He went down the road to the library and came home with a new book about the headwaters of the Amazon. In his imagination he was still middle-aged, still uncomfortably short in the leg, but he was also paddling up the rainforests where no white man had ever been.

I used, both at that age and when I was a little older, to pretend to myself that he read these books for the sake of knowledge. I liked to pretend that he was very learned about the tropics. But I knew it was not true. It hurt me, it hurt me with bitter twisted indignation, to hear Aunt Milly accuse him of being ineffectual, or my mother of being superstitious and a snob. It roused me to blind, savage, tearful love. It was a long time before I could harden myself to hear such things from her. Yet I could think them to myself and not be hurt at all.

My father treated me to gingerbeer and a pork pie in the lunch interval, and later we had some tea. Otherwise there was nothing to occupy him, after his romantic speculations had died down. He sat there patiently, peering at the game, not understanding it, not seeing the ball. I was not to know that he had a duty to perform.

After the last over the crowd round us drifted over the ground.

‘Let’s wait until they’ve gone,’ said my father.

So we sat on the emptying ground. The pavilion windows glinted in the evening sun, and the scoreboard threw a shadow halfway to the wicket.

‘Lena thinks there’s something I ought to tell you,’ said my father.

I stared at him.

‘I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid it might spoil your day.’

He looked at me, and added: ‘You see, Lewis, it isn’t very good news.’

‘Oh!’ I cried.

My father pushed up his spectacles.

‘Things aren’t going very well at Myrtle Road. That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t say things are going as we should like.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Milly says that it’s my fault,’ said my father uncomplainingly. ‘But I don’t know about that.’

He began to talk about ‘bigger people turning out a cheaper line’. Then he saw that he was puzzling me. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we may be done for. I may have to file my petition.’

The phrase sounded ominous, deadly ominous, to me, but I did not understand.

‘That means’, said my father, ‘that I’m afraid we shan’t have much money to spare. I don’t like to think that I can’t find you a sovereign now and then, Lewis. I should like to give you a few sovereigns when you get a bit older.’

For a time, that explanation took the edge off my fears. But my father sat there without speaking again. The seats round us were all empty, we were alone on that side of the ground; scraps of paper blew along the grass. My father pulled his bowler hat down over his ears. At last he said, unwillingly: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go home sometime.’

The gates of the ground stood wide open, and we walked along the road, under the chestnut trees. Trains kept passing us, but my father was not inclined to take one. He was quiet, except that once he remarked: ‘The trouble is, Lena takes it all to heart.’

He said it as though he was asking me for support.

As soon as he got inside the house and saw my mother, he said: ‘Well, I’ve seen my first match! There can’t be many people who haven’t seen a cricket match until they’re forty-five—’

‘Bertie,’ said my mother in a cold angry voice. Usually she let him display his simplicity, pretend to be simpler than he was. That night she could not bear it.

‘You’d better have your supper,’ she said. ‘I expect Lewis can do with it.’

‘I expect he can,’ said my father. Nine times out of ten, for he never got tired of the same repartee, he would have said, ‘I expect I can too.’ But he felt the weight of my mother’s suffering.

We sat round the table in the kitchen. There was cold meat, cheese, a bowl of tinned pears, jam tarts, and a jug of cream.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much to eat all day,’ said my mother. ‘You’ll want something now.’

My father munched away. I was ashamed to be so hungry, in sight of my mother’s face that night, but I was famished. My mother said she had eaten, but it was more likely that she had no appetite for food. From the back kitchen (the house sprawled about without any plan) came the singing of a kettle on the stove.

‘I’ll have a cup of tea with you,’ said my mother. Neither of them had spoken since we began the meal.

As my father pushed up his moustache and took his first sip of tea, he remarked, as though casually: ‘I did what you told me, Lena.’

‘What, Bertie?’

‘I told Lewis that we’re worried about Myrtle Road.’

‘Worried,’ said my mother. ‘I hope you told him more than that.’

‘I did what you told me.’

‘I’d have kept it from you if I could,’ my mother said to me. ‘But I wasn’t going to have you hear it first from Aunt Milly or someone else. If you’ve got to hear it, I couldn’t abide it coming from anybody else. It had to be from us.’

She had spoken with affection, but most of all with shame and bitter pride.

Yet she had not given up all hope. She was too active for that. The late sun streamed across the kitchen, and a patch of light, reflected from my mother’s cup of tea, danced on the wall. She was sitting half-in, half-out of the shadow, and she seldom looked at my father as she spoke. She spoke in a tight voice, higher than usual but unbroken,

Most of it swept round me. All I gathered was the sound of calamity, pain, disgrace, threats to the three of us. The word ‘petition’ kept hissing in the room, and she spoke of someone called the ‘receiver’. ‘How long can we leave it before he’s called in?’ asked my mother urgently. My father did not know; he was not struggling as she was, he could not take her lead.

She still had plans for raising money. She was ready to borrow from the doctor, to sell her ‘bits of jewellery’, to go to a moneylender. But she did not know enough. She had the spirit and the wits, but she had never had the chance to pick up the knowledge. Despite her courage, she was helpless and tied.

It seemed that Aunt Milly had offered help, had been the only relative to offer practical help. ‘We’re always being beholden to her,’ said my mother. I was baffled, since I was used to taking it for granted that Aunt Milly was a natural enemy.

My father shook his head, He looked cowed, miserable, but calm.

‘It’s no good, Lena. It’ll only make things worse.’

‘You always give up,’ cried my mother. ‘You always have.’

‘It’s no good going on,’ he said with a kind of obstinacy.

‘You can say that,’ she said with contempt. ‘How do you think I’m going to live?’

‘You needn’t worry about that, Lena,’ said my father, in a furtive attempt to console her. ‘I ought to be able to find a job if you give me a bit of time. I’ll bring home enough to keep you and Lewis.’

‘Do you think that is worrying me?’ my mother cried out.

‘It’s been worrying me,’ said my father.

‘We shall make do somehow. I’m not afraid of that,’ said my mother. ‘But I shall be ashamed to let people see me in the streets. I shan’t be able to hold up my head.’

She spoke with an anguish that overawed my father. He sat humbly by, not daring to console her.

Watching their faces in the darkening kitchen, I craved for a distress that would equal my mother’s. I was on the point of acting one, of imitating her suffering, so that she would forget it all and speak to me.

That night, when I went to bed, I took the family dictionary with me. It was not long since I had discovered it, and already I liked not having to be importunate. Now I had a serious use for the dictionary. It was a time not to worry my mother: I had to be independent of her. Through the tiny window of the attic a stretch of sky shone faintly as I entered the room. I could see a few faint stars in the clear night. There was no other light in the attic, except a candle by my bed. I lit it, and before I undressed held the dictionary a foot away, found the word ‘petition’, tried to make sense of what the book said.

The breeze blew the candle wax into a runnel down one side, and I moulded it between my fingers. I repeated the definitions to myself, and compared them with what I remembered my father saying, but I was left more perplexed.

It was still the month of July when I knew that the trouble had swept upon us. My father’s hours became more irregular; sometimes he stayed in the house in the morning and sometimes both he and my mother were out all day. It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Milly found me alone in the garden.

‘I came to see what they were doing with you,’ she said.

I had been playing French cricket with some of the neighbouring children. Now I was sitting in the deckchair under my favourite apple tree. My aunt looked down at me critically.

‘I hope they leave you something to eat,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, resenting her kindness. Then I offered her my chair: my mother had strong views on etiquette, some of them invented by herself. Aunt Milly rebuffed me.

‘I’m old enough to stand,’ she said. She stared at me with an expression that made me uncomfortable.

‘Have they told you the news?’ she asked.

I prevaricated. She cross-questioned me. I said, feeling wretched, that I knew there was trouble with my father’s business.

‘I don’t believe you know. No wonder everything goes wrong in this house,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but it’s better for you to hear it straight out.’

I wanted to beg her not to tell me; I looked up at her with fear and hatred.

Aunt Milly said firmly: ‘Your father has gone bankrupt.’

I was silent. Aunt Milly stood, large, formidable, noisy, in the middle of the garden. In the sunlight her hair took on a sandy sheen. A bee buzzed among the flowers.

‘Yes, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard about his — petition.’

Inexorably Aunt Milly went on: ‘It means that he isn’t able to pay his debts. He owes six hundred pounds — and I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but he won’t be able to pay more than two hundred.’

Those sounded great sums.

‘When you grow up,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘you ought to feel obliged to pay every penny he owes. You ought to make a resolution now. You oughtn’t to rest until you’ve got him discharged and your family can be honest and above board again. Your father will never be able to do it. He’ll have his work cut out to earn your bread and butter.’

As a rule at that age I should have promised anything that was expected of me. But then I did not speak.

‘There won’t be any money to send you to the secondary school,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘Your father wouldn’t be able to manage the fees. But I’ve told your mother that we can see after that.’

I scarcely realized that Aunt Milly was being kind. I had no idea that she was being imaginative in thinking three years ahead. I hated her and I was hurt. Somewhere deep within the pain there was anger growing inside me. Yet, obeying my mother’s regard for style, I produced a word or two of thanks.

‘Mind you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘you mustn’t expect to run away with things at the secondary school. After all, it doesn’t take much to be top of that old-fashioned place your mother sends you to. No wonder you seem bright among that lot. But you’ll find it a different kettle of fish at a big school. I shouldn’t wonder if you’re no better than the average. Still, you’ll have to do as well as you can.’

‘I shall do well, Aunt Milly,’ I said, bursting out from wretchedness. I said it politely, boastingly, confidently and also with fury and extreme rudeness.

Just then my mother came down to join us. ‘So you’ve got back, Lena,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘Yes, I’ve got back,’ said my mother, in a brittle tone. She was pale and exhausted, and for once seemed spiritless. She asked Aunt Milly if she would like a cup of tea in the open air.

Aunt Milly said that she had been telling me that she would help with my education.

‘It’s very good of you, I’m sure, Milly,’ said my mother, without a flicker of her usual pride. ‘I shouldn’t like Lewis not to have his chance.’

‘Aunt Milly doesn’t think I shall do well at the secondary school,’ I broke in. ‘I’ve told her that I shall.’

My mother gave a faint grin, wan but amused. She must have been able to imagine the conversation; and, that afternoon of all afternoons, it heartened her to hear me brag.

Aunt Milly did not exhort my mother, and did not find it necessary to tell her any home truths. Aunt Milly, in fact, made a galumphing attempt to distract my mother’s mind by saying that the news looked bad but that she did not believe for a single instant in the possibility of war.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘it’s the twentieth century.’

My mother sipped her tea. She was too tired to be drawn. Often they quarrelled on these subjects, as on all others: Aunt Milly was an enthusiastic liberal, my mother a patriotic, jingoish, true-blue conservative.

Aunt Milly tried to cheer her up. Many people were asking after her, said Aunt Milly.

‘I’m sure they are,’ said my mother, with bitter self-consciousness.

Some of her women friends at the church were anxious to call on her, Aunt Milly continued.

‘I don’t want to see any of them,’ said my mother. ‘I want to be left alone, Milly. Please to keep them away.’

For several days my mother did not go outside the house. She had collapsed in a helpless, petrified, silent gloom. She could not bear the sight of her neighbours’ eyes. She could guess only too acutely what they were saying, and she was seared by each turn of her imagination. She knew they thought that she was vain and haughty, and that she put on airs. Now they had her at their mercy. She even put off her fortune-telling friends from their weekly conclave. She was too far gone to seek such hope.

I went about quietly, as though she were ill. In fact she was often ill; for, despite her vigour and strength of will, her zest in anything she did, her dignified confidence that, through the grand scale of her nature, she could expect always to take the lead — despite all the power of her personality, she could never trust her nerves. She had much stamina — in the long run she was tough in body as well as in spirit — but some of my earliest recollections were of her darkened bedroom, a brittle voice, a cup of tea on a little table in the twilight, a faint aroma of brandy in the air.

She never drank, except in those periods of nervous exhaustion, but in my childish memory that smell lingered, partly because of the heights of denunciation to which it raised Aunt Milly.

After the bankruptcy, my mother hid away from anything they were saying about us. She was not ill so much as limp and heartbrokenly despondent. It was a week before she took herself in hand.

She came down to breakfast on the first Sunday in August (it was actually Sunday, 2nd August, 1914). She carried her head high, and her eyes were bold.

‘Bertie,’ she said to my father, ‘I shall go to church this morning.’

‘Well, I declare,’ said my father.

‘I want you to come with me, dear,’ my mother said to me. She took it for granted that my father did not attend church.

It was a blazing hot August morning, and I tried to beg myself off.

‘No, Lewis,’ she said in her most masterful tone. ‘I want you to come with me. I intend to show them that they can say what they like. I’m not going to demean myself by taking any notice.’

‘You might leave it a week or two, Lena,’ suggested my father mildly.

‘If I don’t go today, people might think we had something to be ashamed of,’ said my mother, without logic but with some magnificence.

She had made her decision on her way down to breakfast, and, buoyed up by defiance and the thought of action, she looked a different woman. Almost with exhilaration, she went back to the bedroom to put on her best dress, and when she came down again she wheeled round before me in a movement that was, at the same time, stately and coquettishly vain,

‘Does mother look nice?’ she said. ‘Will you be proud of me? Shall I do?’

Her dress was cream-coloured, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and an hourglass waist. She picked up the skirt now and then, for she took pleasure in her ankles, She was putting on a large straw hat and admiring herself in the mirror over the sideboard, when the church bell began to ring. ‘We’re coming,’ said my mother, as the bell clanged on insistently. ‘There’s no need to ring. We’re coming.’

She was excited, flushed and handsome. She gave me the prayer books to carry, opened a white parasol, stepped out into the brilliant street. She walked with the slow, stylised step that had become second nature to her in moments of extreme dignity. She took my hand: her fingers were trembling.

Outside the church we met several neighbours, who said ‘Good morning, Mrs Eliot’. My mother replied in a full, an almost patronizing tone, ‘Good morning Mrs—’ (Corby or Berry or Goodman, the familiar names of the suburb). There was not time to stop and talk, for the bell was ringing twice as fast, in its final agitated minute.

My mother swept down the aisle, me behind her, to her usual seat. The church, as I have said, was quite new. It was panelled in pitch-pine, and had chairs, painted a startling yellow, instead of pews; but already the more important members of the parish, led by the doctor and his sister, had staked out their places, which were left empty at any service to which they did not come. My mother had not been far behind. She had established her right to three seats, just behind the churchwardens’. One was always empty, since my father was obstinately determined never to enter the church.

To the right of the altar stood a small organ with very bright blue pipes. They were vibrating with the last notes of the ‘voluntary’ as my mother knelt on the hassock before her chair. The windows were polychromatic with new stained glass, and the bright morning light was diffused and curiously coloured before it got inside.

The service began. Usually it was a source of interest, of slightly shocking interest, to my mother, for the vicar was an earnest ritualist, and she was constantly on edge to see how ‘high’ he would dare to go. ‘He’s higher than I ever thought,’ she would say, and the word ‘higher’ was isolated in a hushed, shocked, thrilling voice. My mother was religious as well as superstitious, romantic and nostalgic as well as a snob; and she had a pious tenderness and veneration for the old church where she had worshipped as a child, the grey gothic, the comely, even ritual of the broad church. She was disappointed in this new edifice, and somehow expressed her piety in this Sunday-by-Sunday scrutiny of the vicar’s progress away from all she loved.

At that morning service, however, she was too much occupied to notice the vicar’s vestments. She believed that everyone was watching her. She could not forget herself, and, if she prayed at all, it was for the effrontery to carry it off. She had still to meet the congregation coming out after service. That was the time, each Sunday, when my mother and her acquaintances exchanged gossip. In the churchyard they met and lingered before going off to their Sunday meals, and they created there a kind of village centre. It was that assembly my mother had come out to face.

She chanted the responses and psalms, sang the hymns, so that all those round could hear her. She sat with her head back through the sermon, in which the vicar warned us in an aside that we ought to be prepared for grave events. But it was no more than an aside; to most people there, not only to my mother, the ‘failure’ of Mr Eliot was something more interesting to talk about than the prospect of a war. Their country had been at peace so long: even when they thought, they could not imagine what a war might mean, or that their lives would change.

The vicar made his dedication to the Trinity, the after-sermon hymn blared out, my mother sang clearly, the sidesmen went round with the collection bags. When the sidesman came to our row, my mother slipped me sixpence, and herself put in half a crown, holding the bag for several instants and dropping the coin from on high. Those near us could see what she had done. It was a gesture of sheer extravagance. In the ordinary way she gave a shilling night and morning, and Aunt Milly told her that that was more than she could afford.

At last came the benediction. My mother rose from her knees, pulled on her long white gloves, and took my hand in a tight grip. Then she went deliberately past the font towards the door. Outside, in the churchyard, the sunlight was dazzling. People were standing about on the gravel paths. There was not a cloud in the sky.

The first person to speak to my mother was very kind. She was the wife of one of the local tradesmen.

‘I’m sorry you’ve had a bit of trouble,’ she said. ‘Never mind, my dear. Worse things happen at sea.’

I knew that her voice was kind. Yet my mother’s mouth was working — she was, in fact, at once disarmed by kindness. She only managed to mutter a word or two of thanks.

Another woman was coming our way. At the sight of her my mother’s neck stiffened. She called on all her will and pride, and her mouth became firm. Indeed, she put on a smile of greeting, a distinctly sarcastic smile.

‘Mrs Eliot, I was wondering whether you will be able to take your meeting this year.’

‘I hope I shall, Mrs Lewin,’ said my mother with condescension. ‘I shouldn’t like to upset your arrangements.’

‘I know you’re having your difficulties—’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with it, Mrs Lewin. I’ve promised to take a meeting as usual, I think. Please to tell Mrs Hughes’ (the vicar’s wife) ‘that you needn’t worry to find anyone else.’

My mother’s eyes were bright and bold. Now she had got over the first round, she was keyed up by the ordeal. She walked about the churchyard, pointing her toes, pointing also her parasol; she took the initiative, and herself spoke to everyone she knew. She had specially elaborate manners for use on state occasions, and she used them now.

Her hand was still quivering and had become very hot against mine, but she outfaced them all. No one dared to confront her with a direct reference to the bankruptcy, though one woman, apparently more in curiosity than malice, asked how my father was.

‘Mr Eliot has never had much wrong with his health, I’m glad to say,’ my mother replied.

‘Is he at home?’

‘Certainly,’ my mother said. ‘He’s spending a nice quiet morning with his books.’

‘What will he do now — in the way of work, Mrs Eliot?’

My mother stared down at her questioner.

‘He’s considering,’ said my mother, with such authority that the other woman could not meet her glance. ‘He’s weighing up the pros and cons. He’s going to do the best for himself.’

At home my mother could not rest until my father got a job. She pored with anxious concentration through the advertisement columns of the local papers; she humbled herself and went to ask the advice of the vicar and the doctor. But my father was out of work for several weeks. His acquaintances in the boot and shoe trade were drawing in their horns because of the war. The hours of that sunlit August were burning away; somehow my mother spared me sixpence on Saturdays to go to the county; the matches went on, the crowds sat there, though outside the ground flared great placards that often I did not understand. The one word MOBILIZATION stood blackly out, on a morning just after my father’s bankruptcy; it puzzled me as ‘petition’ had done, and carried a heavier threat than to my elders.

It was not till the end of August that my father’s case was published. He had gone bankrupt to the tune of six hundred pounds; his chief creditors were various leather merchants and Aunt Milly’s husband; he was paying eight shillings in the pound. That news was tucked away in the local papers on a night when the British Army was still going back from Mons. For all her patriotism, my mother wished in an agony of pride and passion that a catastrophe might devour us all — her neighbours, the town, the whole country — so that in wreckage, ruin and disaster her disgrace would just be swept away.

October came, the flag-pins on my mother’s newspaper map were ceasing to move much day by day, before my father got a job. He returned home one evening and whispered to my mother. He was looking subdued; and, for the first time, I saw her shed a tear. It was not in gratitude or relief; it was a tear so bitterly forced out that I was terrified of some new and paralysing danger. All this time I had had a fear, acute but never mentioned, that my father might have to go to prison. Perhaps this infected me because my mother had warned me, one evening when we were having tea alone, that he must never contract a debt, and that we had from now on always to take care that we paid in the shop for every single article we bought. As I saw the tears in my mother’s eyes, the harsh grimace that she made, I was terrified that he might have forgotten. I was surprised to hear my mother say, in a dull and toneless voice: ‘Father will be going to work next week, dear.’

I heard the details from Aunt Milly, when she next came into our house.

‘Well, your father’s got a job,’ she said.

‘Yes, Aunt Milly.’

‘I can’t see him doing much good as a traveller. If they say no, he’ll just grin and go away. No wonder they’re only paying him enough to keep body and soul together.’

My father’s former employer, always known as ‘Mr Stapleton’, had persuaded a leather merchant to take him on as traveller, so that he could go the rounds of his old competitors.

‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but they’re giving him three pounds a week. I don’t know how you’re going to manage. Of course, it’s better than nothing. I suppose he wouldn’t get more anywhere else.’

It must have been almost exactly that time when my mother realized that she was pregnant again. I knew nothing of it; I saw that she was ill, and moved slowly, but I was used to her being ill; I knew nothing of it, all through that winter and spring, but I knew that she was constantly needing to talk to me.

I used to arrive back from school on an autumn afternoon and find her sitting by the fire in the front room. Outside, the rain fell gently in the wistful dusk, and the flames of the blazing coal began to be reflected in the window panes. My tea was ready, a good tea, for our standard of eating had not been much reduced; we did not have so much meat, we had to go without the occasional ‘bird’ which had once given my mother a lively social pleasure, but she would have still felt it beneath her to provide me with margarine instead of butter. So I tucked into my boiled egg, had some rounds of bread and butter and jam, finished off with a piece of home-made cake. There was no Vera to take away the tea things, but we left them on the table, for Aunt Milly used to send her own maid round for an hour in the morning and an hour at night.

My mother liked to wait until it was quite dark before we lit the gas and drew the blinds, so that we sat and watched the lavish, glowing fire. In one of the lumps of coal, remote from the red-hot centre, a jet of gas would catch alight and make my mother exclaim with pleasure; she used to want me to imagine the same pictures in the fire.

On those afternoons, as we sat in the dark, the fire casting a flickering glow upon the ceiling, my mother talked to me about the hopes of her youth, her family, her snobbish ambitions, her feeling for my father, her need that I should rectify all that had gone wrong in her life.

The child she was carrying — of which I was innocently ignorant, although she turned to me with an insistence I had never seen before — was to her a mistake, unwanted, conceived after a nine years’ interval in defeat and bitterness of heart. Possibly she had never loved my father, though for a long time she must have felt an indulgent half-amused affection for his good nature, his amiable mildness, his singular lack of self-regard. Although she was realistic in her fashion, she may have had her surprises; for he was one of those little men who, unassertive in everything else, are anything but unassertive in their hunger for women. That would have made her love him more, if she had loved him at all. But, without love, with only a shaky affection to rest on, it meant that she was always on the fringe of feeling something like contempt. After failing, after exposing her to a humiliation which she could not forgive, he had lost nothing of his ardour — he had given her another child. She told me, much later, that it was done against her will. It rankled to the depth of her proud soul.

‘I married the wrong man,’ said my mother as we sat by the fire. She said it with naked intensity. She was nearly forty; and she could scarcely believe that all she longed for as a girl should have come to this.

Her hopes had been brilliant. She had a romantic, surging, passionate imagination, even then, when a middle-aged woman beaten down by misfortune. As a girl she had expected — expected as of right — a husband who would give her love and luxury and state. She thought of herself in her girlhood, and as she spoke to me she magnified the past, enhanced all that she could glory in, cherished her life with her own family now that she looked back with an experienced and a disappointed heart.

Her family had been different in a good many ways from my father’s. The Eliots, apart from my father, who was unlike the rest, were an intelligent, capable lot without much sensitivity or intuition, whose intelligence was usually higher than their worldly sense; they were a typical artisan, lower-middle-class family thrown up in their present form by the industrial revolution, who should, but for a certain obtuseness, have done much better for themselves. My grandfather Eliot, my father’s and Aunt Milly’s father, was a man of force and intellect, who had mastered the nineteenth-century artisan culture, who knew his ‘penny magazines’ backwards, read Bradlaugh and William Morris, picked up some mathematics at a mechanics’ institution. He had died early in the year of my father’s bankruptcy. He had never climbed farther than maintenance foreman at the local tram depot.

He had quarrelled with my mother whenever they argued, for he was a serious nineteenth-century agnostic, she devout; he voted radical and she was a vehement Tory; and they were both strong characters. Their temperaments clashed, my mother had no more in common with him than with his daughter Milly; and my mother’s family, and all the background of her childhood, had roots quite different from theirs.

Her family, unlike the Eliots, had never lived in the little industrial towns that proliferated in the nineteenth century, the Redditches and Walsalls where my grandfather had spent his early years. My mother’s family had had nothing to do with factories and machines; they were still living, those that were left, in an older, agricultural, more feudal England, in the market towns of Lincolnshire or, as gamekeepers and superior servants and the like, on the big estates. They were not more prosperous than the Eliots, as my mother admitted. She was entirely truthful and had a penetrating regard for fact, despite her nostalgia and imagination. She did not even allow herself to pretend, although she would have dearly loved to, that they were noticeably more genteel. No, she told me the truth, though she had a knack of making it shimmer a little at the edges. Her father’s name was Sercombe, and he had been employed, like his father and grandfather before him, in the grounds of Burghley Park: to my mother, for ever after, that mansion signified the height of all worldly ambition. The Sercombe men often ran true to a physical type. Like my mother, they were dark as gypsies; they were dashing, physically active, fond of the open air, naturally good at games but too careless to learn them properly, gay, completely unbookish — men who loved all the hours of young manhood and were lost when youth ended. Almost all were born with an air of command, and stood out in a crowd. They won much love from women, but had not as a rule the steadiness or warmth of nature to make them good friends to other men. Sometimes they used their boldness, dash, and charm to marry above themselves.

It was these marriages that gave my mother her best chance to stick to the truth, and yet to glorify it. Her own father had married as his second wife someone from a Stamford family which had known better days. My mother was a child of that second marriage; and down to her girlhood, there were Wigmore cousins, who lived in solid middle-class comfort, who had a ‘position’ in the town and with whom occasionally she was invited to stay. Those visits stayed in her mind with a miraculous radiance. To me, to herself, she could not help embellishing the wonder. She did not know that she was romanticizing — for to her nothing could be more romantic than those visits in girlhood, when she felt transported to her own proper place, when she dreamed of love and marriage, when she dreamed that one day she would find her way to her proper place again.

She could never quite convey the marvel of those Wigmore households. The skating in the bitter winter of 1894, when she was nineteen! The braziers on the ice, a handsome cousin teaching her to cut figures (my mother, like her Sercombe brothers, was adept at dancing and games), music afterwards in the drawing-room! The gigs clattering up the street to her cousin’s office — he was a solicitor — and the clients having a glass of sherry at eleven in the morning! How he drove out to ‘late dinner’ with one or two of the minor gentry! The young officers at a new year’s ball! The hushed confidences afterwards with the other girls!

‘You never know what’s going to happen to you,’ said my mother, with the curious realistic humour that came out when one least expected it. ‘I didn’t bargain on finding myself here.’

Often she felt that she had been deprived of her birthright. She did not ask for pity, she was sarcastic and angry in her frustration, and would have answered with pride if anyone condoled too facilely. She wanted it taken for granted that life had not dealt with her in a fitting fashion; that she was cut out to remain in the houses of those Elysian visits; that she was not designed to stay among the humble of the world. And, with her romantic, surging, passionate spirit she believed — in the midst of heartbreak and disgrace — that there was still time for her luck to change.

I was marked out as the instrument of fortune. Since the bankruptcy, she had invested all her hopes in me. She thought that I was clever; she believed that I was bone of her bone, with the same will and the same pride.

‘I want you to remember’, said my mother, as the flames danced on the ceiling, ‘that you haven’t got to stay in this road, I want you not to be content with anything you can find round here. I expect big things from you, dear.’

She looked at me with her keen, luminous eyes.

‘You’re not the sort of boy to be satisfied, are you, Lewis? You’re like me in that. Remember, I’ve seen the things that would just suit your lordship. Please to remember that. I don’t want you to be satisfied until you’ve got there.’

My mother was thinking still of a solicitor’s house in Stamford, with the carriages outside, snug and prosperous at the turn of the century — but all seen through the lens of her brilliant imagination.

‘You’re not going to sit down and let them do what they like with you, are you, dear? I know you. You’re going to have your own way. You needn’t look as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Your eyes are a lot too sharp. You’ve just come out of the knife-box, haven’t you?’

She grinned. I always enjoyed her mocking, observant grin. Then she spoke with passion again: ‘I want to live long enough to see you get there, Lewis. You’ll take me with you, won’t you? You’ll want me to share it, won’t you? Remember, I know all about you. I know just what you want. You’re not going to be satisfied until you’ve done everything I’ve told you, are you, my son?’

I was quick to say yes, to weave fantasies with her, to build houses and furnish them and give her motor cars and furs. Already I loved to compete, I revelled in her pictures of success. Yet I was not easy with her that evening. I was not often easy with my mother.

She meant much to me, much more than any other human being. It was her anxiety and pain that I most dreaded. I always felt threatened by her illnesses. I waited on her, I asked many times a day how she was; and, when in the dark room I heard her answer ‘not very well, dear’, I wanted to reproach her for being ill, for making the days heavy, for worrying me so much. It was her death that I feared as the ultimate gulf of disaster. She meant far more to me than my father; yet with him I never felt a minute’s awkwardness. He was amiable, absorbed in his own daydreams; he was dependent on me, even as a child, for a kind of comic reassurance, and otherwise made no claims. He did not invade my feelings, and only wished for a response that it was innate in me to give, to him and to others, and which I began giving almost as soon as I could talk.

For I was not shy with people. Apart from Aunt Milly, whom at times I hated, I liked those I came into contact with; I liked pleasing them and seeing them pleased. And I liked being praised, and at that age I was eager to have my own say, show off, cut a dash. I had nothing to check my spontaneity, and, despite the calamities of my parents, I was very happy.

I could make the response that others wished for, except to my mother. I was less spontaneous with her than with anyone else, either at this time or later in my boyhood. It was long before I tried to understand it. She needed me more than any of the others needed me. She needed me with all the power of her nature — and she was built to a larger scale than the other figures of my childhood., Built to a larger scale, for all her frailties; most of those frailties I did not see when I was a child; when I did see them, I knew that I too was frail. She needed me. She needed me as an adult man, her son, her like, her equal. She made her demands: without knowing it, I resisted. All I knew was that, sitting with her by the fire or at her bedside when she was ill, my quick light speech fled from me. I was often curt, as I should never have been to a stranger. I was often hard. Yet, away from her presence, I used to pray elaborately and passionately that she might become well, be happy, and gain all her desires. Of all the prayers of my childhood, those were the ones that I urged most desperately to God.

When I was eleven, it was time that I was sent to the secondary school, if ever I were to go. There was no free place open for me, since my mother had not budged from her determination not to let me enter a council school. The fees at the secondary school were three guineas a term. My mother sat at the table, moistening a pencil against her lip, writing down the household expenses in a bold heavy hand; she kept the bills on a skewer, and none of the shopkeepers was allowed to wait an hour for his money; she had developed an obsession, almost an obsession in the technical sense, about debt. My father’s salary had only gone up by ten shillings a week since the war began. It was now 1917, the cost of living was climbing, and my mother was poor to an extent she had never known. Later I believed that she welcomed rationing and all the privations of war, because they helped to conceal what we had really come to.

She could invent no way of squeezing another nine guineas out of her budget. She had to turn it into shillings a week, for those were the terms in which she was continually thinking. ‘Three and eightpence about, it comes out to,’ she said. ‘I can’t manage it, Lewis. It means cutting out the Hearts of Oak, and then I don’t know what would happen to us if Bertie goes. And there will be other things to pay for beside your fees, There’ll be your cap, and you’ll want a school bag and — I don’t know. I’m not going to have you suffer by the side of the other boys.’

My mother swallowed her pride, as she could just bring herself to do for my sake, and went to remind Aunt Milly of her promise to pay for my schooling. Aunt Milly promptly redeemed it. Her husband was doing modestly well out of the war, and with the obscure comradeship that linked her to my mother she was concerned about each new sign of penury. But Aunt Milly found it hard to understand the etiquette my mother had elaborated for herself or borrowed from the shabby genteel. My mother would accept the loan of the maid, or ‘presents’, or ‘treats’ at my aunt’s house; she would have accepted more if Aunt Milly had been careful, but she could not take blunt outright undisguised charity. This ‘bit of begging’ — as she called it — for my fees was the first she had descended to since she was faced with the expenses of my brother Martin’s birth and her illness afterwards. Those would have crippled us entirely, and she let Aunt Milly pay.

Aunt Milly even spared my mother any exhortation when she agreed to find my fees. She saved that for me an hour or two later. She was never worried about repeating herself, and so she gave me the same warning as on the afternoon of my father’s bankruptcy, three years before. I was not to expect success. It was likely that I should have a most undistinguished career at this new school.

‘You’ve got too good an opinion of yourself,’ said Aunt Milly firmly and enthusiastically, with her usual lack of facial expression. ‘I don’t blame you for it altogether. It’s your mother’s fault for letting you think you’re something out of the ordinary. No wonder you’re getting too big for your boots.’

To the best of Aunt Milly’s belief, I should find myself behind all other boys of my age. I should, in all probability, find it impossible to catch up. Aunt Milly would consider that her money had been well invested if I contrived to scrape through my years at school without drawing unfavourable attention to myself. And once more I was to listen to her message. My first duty, if ever my education provided me with a livelihood, was to save enough money to pay twenty shillings in the pound on my father’s liabilities, and so get him discharged from bankruptcy.

I was practised in listening silently to Aunt Milly. Sometimes she discouraged me, but for most purposes I had toughened my skin. My skin was not, however, tough enough for an incident which took place in my first term at the new school.

Several of the boys there knew that my father had ‘failed in business’. They came from the same part of the town, they had heard it gossiped about; my father might have passed unnoticed, but my mother was a conspicuous figure in the parish. One of them twitted me with it, saying each time he saw me, ‘Why did your dad go bust?’ in the nagging, indefatigable, imbecile, repetitious fashion of very small boys. I flushed at first, but soon got used to him, and it did not hurt me much.

Curiously enough, until the incident of the subscription list, I was more embarrassed by the notoriety of no less a person than Aunt Milly. Her vigour in the cause of temperance was well known all over the town. During the summer she had organized a vast teetotal procession through the streets: it consisted of carts in which each of the Rechabite tents staged its own tableau, usually of an historical nature and in fancy dress, followed by the Templar lodges on foot and carrying banners. My aunt, and the other high officers, made up the end of the procession; wearing their ‘regalia’ of red, blue, or green, according to the order, with various signs of rank, something like horses’ halters round their necks, they sat on small chairs on a very large cart.

Like all Aunt Milly’s activities, the procession had been organized with extraordinary thoroughness and clockwork precision. But some of my form-mates who had seen it — perhaps some had even taken part — discovered that she was my aunt and decided that to have such an aunt was preposterously funny. I then found out that shame is an unpredictable thing. For I should have said that I could take any conceivable joke against Aunt Milly without a pang: in fact, I was painfully ashamed.

The incident of the subscription list took place in November, a couple of months after I first attended the school. Each boy in each form had been asked to make a donation to the school munitions fund. The headmaster had explained how, if we could only give sixpence, we should be doing our bit; all the money would go straight to buy shells for what the headmaster called ‘the 1918 offensive — the next big push’.

I reported it all to my mother. I asked her what we could afford to give.

‘We can’t afford much really, dear,’ said my mother, looking upset, preoccupied, wounded. ‘We haven’t got much to spare at the end of the week. I know that you’ve got to give something.’

It added to her worries. As she had said before, she was not going ‘to have me suffer by the side of the other boys’.

‘How much do you think they’ll give, Lewis?’ she inquired. ‘I mean, the boys from nice homes.’

I made some discreet investigations, and told her that most of my form would be giving half a crown or five shillings.

She pursed her lips.

‘You needn’t bother yourself, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to have you feel out of it. We can do as well as other people.’

She was not content with doing ‘as well as other people’. Her imagination had been fired. She wanted me to give more than anyone in the form. She told herself that it would establish a position for me, it would give me a good start. She liked to feel that we could ‘still show we were someone’. And she was patriotic and warlike, and had a strong sense of wartime duty; though most of all she wanted me to win favour and notice, she also got satisfaction from ‘buying shells’, from taking part in the war at second hand.

She skimped my father’s food and her own, particularly hers, for several weeks. After a day or two my father noticed, and mildly grumbled. He asked if the rations were reduced so low as this. No, said my mother, she was saving up for the subscription list at school.

‘I hope you don’t have many subscriptions,’ said my father to me. ‘Or I expect she’ll starve me to death.’

He clowned away, pretending that his trousers had inches to spare round his middle.

‘Don’t be such a donkey, Bertie,’ said my mother irritably.

She kept to her intention. They went without the small luxuries that she had managed to preserve, through war, through the slow grind of growing poverty — the glass of stout on Saturday night, the supper of fish and chips (fetched, for propriety’s sake, by Aunt Milly’s maid), the jam at breakfast. On the morning when we had to deliver our subscriptions, my mother handed me a new ten-shilling note. I exclaimed with delight and pressed the crisp paper against the tablecloth. I had never had one in my possession before.

‘Not many of them will do better than that,’ said my mother contentedly. ‘Remember that before the war I should have given you a sovereign. I want you to show them that we’ve still got our heads above water.’

Under the gaslight, in the early morning, the shadow of my cup was blue on the white cloth. I admired the ten-shilling note, I admired the blue shadows, I watched the shadows of my own hands. I was thanking my mother: I was flooded with happiness and triumph.

‘I shall want to hear everything they say,’ said my mother. ‘They’ll be a bit flabbergasted, won’t they? They won’t expect anyone to give what you’re giving. Please to remember everything they say.’

I was lit up with anticipation as the tramcar clanged and swayed into the town. Mist hung over the county ground, softened the red brick of the little houses by the jail: in the mist — not fog, but the clean autumnal mist — the red brick, though softened, seemed at moments to leap freshly on the eye. It was a morning nostalgic, tangy, and full of well-being.

In the playground, when we went out for the eleven-o’clock break, the sun was shining. Our subscriptions were to be collected immediately afterwards: as the bell jangled, my companions and I made our way chattering through the press of boys to the room where we spent most of our lessons.

Mr Peck came in. He taught us algebra and geometry; he was a man about fifty-five who had spent his whole life at the school; he was bald, fresh-skinned, small-featured, constantly smiling. He lived in the next suburb beyond ours, and occasionally he was sitting in the tramcar when I got on.

Some boy had written a facetious word on the blackboard. Peck smiled deprecatingly, a little threateningly, and rubbed out the chalk marks. He turned to us, still smiling.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the first item on the programme is to see how much this form is going to contribute to make the world safe for democracy.’ There was a titter; he had won his place long ago as a humorist.

‘If any lad gives enough,’ he said, ‘I dare say we shall be prepared to let him off all penalties for the rest of the term. That is known as saving your bacon.’

Another titter.

‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that you want to turn what you are pleased to call your minds to the problems of elementary geometry. However, it is my unfortunate duty to make you do so without unnecessary delay. So we will dispose of this financial tribute as soon as we decently can. I will call out your names from the register. Each lad will stand up to answer his name, announce his widow’s mite, and bring the cash up here for me to receive. Then the last on the list can add up the total and sign it, so as to certify that I haven’t run away with the money.’

Peck smiled more broadly, and we all grinned in return. He began to read out the names. The new boys were divided into forms by alphabetical order, and ours ran from A to H.

‘Adnitt.’ ‘Two shillings, sir.’ The routine began, Adnitt walked to the front of the class and put his money on the desk. I was cherishing my note under the lid of the desk; my heart thudded with joyful excitement. ‘Aldwinckle.’ ‘Two and sixpence.’ ‘Brookman.’ ‘Nothing.’

Brookman was a surly, untidy boy, who lived in the town’s one genuine slum. Peck stared at him, still smiling. ‘You’re not interested in our little efforts, my friend?’ said Peck.

Brookman did not reply. Peck stared at him, began another question, then shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

‘Buckley.’ ‘A shilling.’ ‘Cann.’ ‘Five shillings.’ The form cheerfully applauded. ‘Coe.’ ‘A shilling.’ ‘Cotery.’ ‘Three shillings and twopence.’ There was laughter; Jack Cotery was an original; one could trust him not to behave like anyone else. ‘Dawson.’ ‘Half a crown.’ There were several other D’s, all giving between a shilling and three shillings. ‘Eames.’ ‘Five shillings.’ Applause. ‘Edridge.’ ‘Five shillings.’ Applause. My name came next. As soon as Peck called it out, I was on my feet. ‘Ten shillings, sir.’ I could not damp a little stress upon the ten. The class stamped their feet, as I went between the desks and laid the note among the coins in front of Peck.

I had just laid the note down, when Peck said: ‘That’s quite a lot of money, friend Eliot.’ I smiled at him, full of pleasure, utterly unguarded; but at his next remark the smile froze behind my lips and eyes.

‘I wonder you can afford it,’ said Peck. ‘I wonder you don’t feel obliged to put it by towards your father’s debts.’

It was cruel, casual, and motiveless. It was a motiveless malice as terrifying for a child to know as his first knowledge of adult lust. It ravaged me with sickening shameful agony — and, more violently, I was shaken with anger, so that I was on the point of seizing the note and tearing it in pieces before his eyes.

‘Let me give you a piece of advice, my friend,’ said Peck, complacently. ‘It will be to your own advantage in the long run. You’re a bright lad, aren’t you? I’m thinking of your future, you know. That’s why I’m giving you a piece of advice. It isn’t the showy things that are most difficult to do, Eliot. It’s just plodding away and doing your duty and never getting thanked for it — that’s the test for bright lads like you. You just bear my words in mind.’

Somewhere in the back of consciousness I knew that the class had been joining in with sycophantic giggles. As I turned and met their eyes on my way back, they were a little quieter. But they giggled again when Peck said: ‘Well, I shall soon have to follow my own advice and plod away and do my duty and never get thanked for it — by teaching a class of dolts some geometrical propositions they won’t manage to get into their thick heads as long as they live, But I must finish the collection first. All contributions thankfully received. Fingleton.’ ‘Two shillings, sir.’ ‘Frere.’ ‘A shilling.’

I watched and listened through a sheen of rage and misery.

At the end of the morning, Jack Cotery spoke to me in the playground. He was a lively, active boy, short but muscular, with the eyes of a comedian, large, humorous, and sad.

‘Don’t mind about Pecky,’ he said with good nature and a light heart.

‘I don’t mind a scrap.’

‘You were as white as a sheet. I thought you were going to howl.’

I did not swear as some of the boys in the form habitually did; I had been too finically brought up. But at that moment all my pain, anger, and temper exploded in a screaming oath.

Jack Cotery was taken aback. ‘Keep your shirt on,’ he said.

On the way to the tram stop, where we travelled in different directions, he could not resist asking me: ‘Is your old man in debt, really?’

‘In a way,’ I said, trying to shield the facts, not to tell an actual lie — wanting both to mystify and to hide my own misery. ‘In a way. It’s all very complicated, it’s a matter of — petitions.’ I added, as impressively as I could, ‘It’s been in the solicitor’s hands.’

‘I’m glad mine’s all right,’ said Jack Cotery, impressive in his turn. ‘Of course, I could have brought a lot more money this morning. My old man is making plenty, though he doesn’t always let on. He’d have given me a pound if I’d asked him. But’ — Jack Cotery whispered and his eyes glowed — ‘I’m keeping it in reserve for something else.’

When I arrived home, my mother was waiting for me with an eager question.

‘What did they think of your subscription, dear?’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘Did anyone give more than ten shillings?’

‘No. Not in our form.’

My mother drew herself up and nodded her head: ‘Was ours the highest?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What was the next highest?’

‘Five shillings,’ I said.

‘Twice as much,’ said my mother, smiling and gratified. But she was perceptive; she had an inkling of something wrong.

‘What did they say, though, dear?’

‘They thanked me, of course.’

‘Who was the master who took it?’ she asked.

‘Mr Peck.’

‘Was he pleased with you?’

‘Of course he was,’ I said flatly.

‘I want to hear everything he said,’ said my mother, half in vanity, half trying to reach my trouble.

‘I can’t now, Mother. I want to get back early. I’ll tell you everything tonight.’

‘I don’t think that’s very grateful of you,’ said my mother. ‘Considering what I did to find you all that money. Don’t you think I deserve to be told all about it now?’

‘I’ll tell you everything tonight.’

‘Please not to worry yourself if it’s too much trouble,’ she said haughtily, feeling that I was denying her love.

‘It’s not too much trouble, Mother. I’ll tell you tonight,’ I said, not knowing which way to turn.

I did not go straight home from school that evening. Instead, I walked by myself a long way round by the canal; the mist was rising, as fresh and clean as that morning’s mist; but as it swirled round the bridges and warehouses and the trees by the waterside, it no longer exalted me. I was inventing a story, walking that long way home through the mist, which would content my mother. Of how Mr Peck had said my contribution was an example to the form, of how he had told other masters, of how someone said that my parents were public-spirited. I composed suitable speeches. I had enough sense of reality to make them sound plausible, and to add one or two disparaging remarks from envious form-mates.

I duly repeated that fiction to my mother. Nothing could remove her disappointment. She had thought me inconsiderate and heartless, and now, if she believed at all, she felt puzzled, cast-off, and only a little flattered. I thought that I was romancing simply to save her from a bitter degradation. Yet I should have brought her more love if I had told her the truth. It would have been more loving to let her take an equal share in that day’s suffering. That lie showed the flaw between us.

There were nights that autumn, however, when my mother and I were closer than we had ever been. They were the nights when she tried to learn French. She saw me with my first French grammar, and she was seized with a desire to follow my lessons. French to her was romantic, genteel, emblem and symbol of the existence she had so much coveted. Her bold, handsome eyes were bright each time we spread the books on the front-room table. Her health was getting worse, she was having frightening fits of giddiness, but her interest and nervous gusto and hope pressed her on as when she was a girl.

‘Time for my French lesson,’ she said eagerly when Saturday evening came round. We started after tea and she was downcast if I would not persevere for a couple of hours. Often on those Saturday nights the autumn gales lashed rain against the windows; to that accompaniment, my mother tried to repeat my secondary-school phonetics.

Actually, she found my attempts to retail the phonetic lessons quite impossible to imitate. She learned entirely by eye, and was comfortable when she could pronounce the words exactly as in English. But she learned quickly and accurately by eye, as I did myself. Soon she could translate the simple sentences in my reader. It gave her a transfiguring pleasure; she held my hand, and translated one sentence after another. ‘Is that right? Is that right?’ she cried wildly and happily, and laughed at me. ‘You’re not ashamed of your pupil, are you, dear?’

I buried deep the claims my mother made on me and which I could not meet. I could forget them more easily because, in my successes at school, I provided her, for the only time for years, with something actual for her hopes to feed on. She still read the cards and teacups, she had taken to entering for several competitions a week in Answers and John Bull, but when she studied my terminal reports, she felt this was her solitary promise for the future. As soon as she had received one and read it through, she put it in her bag, changed into her best dress, and, pointing her toes, set off in dignity for Aunt Milly, the doctor, and the vicar.

When I took the Senior Oxford, I gave her something more to flaunt. My last term at school was over and I waited for the result. It was the brilliant summer of 1921, and one night I came home after baking all day at the county ground. As I came up our street in the hot and thundery evenings I saw my mother and brother waving to me from the window.

My mother opened the door herself. She was displaying the evening paper. She looked flushed and well, her eyes were flashing, although she had had a heart attack that summer.

‘Do you know, dear?’ she cried.

‘No. Is it—?’

‘Then let me be the first to congratulate you,’ she said with a grand gesture. ‘You couldn’t have done better. It’s impossible for you to have done better!’

It was her way, her romantic and superb way, of saying that my name appeared in the first class. She was exultant. My name was alone! — she was light-headed with triumph. I was recklessly joyful, but each time I caught my mother’s eye I felt I had never seen such triumph. She had none of the depression of anticlimax that chases after a success; she had looked forward to this moment, one of many moments to come, and her spirit was strong enough to exult without a single qualm.

My mother at once sent my young brother out for foods that we could not usually afford. She intended to have a glorious supper — not that she could eat much nowadays, but for the sake of style and for my sake. My father had, a year past, ceased to be a traveller and had moved back to ‘Mr Stapleton’s’ as a cashier at four pounds a week. He was competent at paperwork, but my mother ground the aching tooth and told herself that it was shameful to return to such a job when he had been second-in-command, that the job was just a bone thrown in contemptuous friendliness and charity. Thus, with the fall in the value of money, our meals were not as lavish as they had been even immediately after my father’s bankruptcy. Even so, my mother never lost her taste for the extravagant. She still paid each bill on Saturday morning; but if luxuries were required for a state occasion, such as that night, luxuries were bought, though it meant going hungry for the rest of the week.

That night we ate a melon and some boiled salmon and éclairs and meringues and millefeuilles. My mother’s triumph would have been increased if she could have had Aunt Milly there to gloat over; but she could not have Aunt Milly as well as a glass of wine, and my mother’s sense of fitness would not be satisfied without wine on the table; she wanted to fill the wine glasses which she had received as a wedding present and which were not used more than once a year. So young Martin had been sent on another errand to the grocer, and the glasses were filled with tawny port.

My father, who had changed not at all in the last seven years, kept saying, ‘Well, I didn’t pass the examination. But I can dispose of the supper as well as anyone,’ and ate away with his usual mild but hearty content. My mother was too borne up to say more than, ‘Bertie, don’t be such a donkey’. She took her share of the meal, which nowadays she rarely did, and several glasses of wine. More than once she put up her spectacles to her long-sighted eyes and read the announcement again. ‘No one in the same division!’ she cried. ‘It will give them all something to think about!’ She decided that she must have two dozen copies of the paper to send to friends and relatives, and ordered Martin to make sure and go to the newsagents first thing next morning.

My mother talked to me across the supper table.

‘I always told you to make your way,’ she said. The room was gilded in the sunset, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes. ‘I want you to remember that, No one else told you that, did they?’

She was illuminated with triumph and her glasses of wine, but she asked insistently.

‘No,’ I said.

‘No one else at all did they?’

‘Of course not, Mother,’ I said.

‘I don’t expect you to be satisfied now,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do. You’ve got a long way to go. You remember all you’ve promised me, don’t you?’

It turned out, almost at once, very easy not to be satisfied. For I was faced with the choice of my first job. When the examination result came out, I had actually left school, although we had put off the question of my job. And now my mother and I conferred. What was I to do? We had no one to give us accurate information, let alone advice. No boy at the school had ever taken a scholarship to the university; those masters who had degrees had taken them externally through London and Dublin. None of them knew his way about. One or two, wanting to help me, suggested that I might stay at school and then go to a teacher’s training college. It meant real hardship to my mother unless I earned some money at once; not that she would have minded such hardship — she would have cherished it, if her imagination had been caught — but she resented stinting us all for years so that I might in the end become an elementary school teacher.

My mother found no more help in the parish. This was the vie de province, the life of a submerged and suburban province. The new vicar, though even ‘higher’, was less cultivated than the old one. The doctor had lived in the district all his life, except when he was struggling his way through a London hospital and the conjoint; from his excessive awe at my passing an examination, I suspected that he had had trouble with his own. He knew the parish like the palm of his hand, but he was quite ignorant of the world outside. He could suggest nothing for me. Perhaps he was anxious to take no responsibility, for my mother, given the slightest lead, would not have refused to let him set me going. My mother had always believed that if I showed promise Dr Francis would interest himself practically in my career. But Dr Francis was a wary old bird.

Aunt Milly took it into her head that I ought to become an engineer. She first of all pointed out that, though I might have done better than anyone from the local schools, no doubt plenty of boys in other places had achieved the same result. Then, in her energetic fashion, she went off, without getting my mother’s agreement or mine, and plunged into discussions with some of her father’s acquaintances at the tram depot. She obtained some opinions which later I realized were entirely sensible, It would be necessary for me to become a trade apprentice: that meant five years in the works, and working at the technical college at night; it would be easy to get taken as an apprentice by one of the town’s big engineering firms. Aunt Milly produced these views with vigorous satisfaction. She felt, as usual, confident that she had done the right thing and that this was the only conceivable course for me. She overlooked two factors. One, that my mother was shocked to the marrow of her bones by the thought that I should become for years what seemed to her nothing but a manual worker. Two, that there was almost no occupation which I should have liked less or been more completely unfitted for. Aunt Milly left the house in a huff, and it was apparent that we could expect no further aid from her.

That aggravated our distress, for up to now my mother had always known that she had Aunt Milly as an ultimate reserve, in the very long run. It was only a few days afterwards, when I had begun answering advertisements in the local paper, that I received a letter from my headmaster. If I was not fitted with what he called a ‘post’, would I go to see him? At once my mother’s romantic hope surged up. Perhaps the school had some funds to give me a grant, perhaps after all they would manage to send me to a university — for, learning from the handbooks on careers that I had discovered, my mother now saw a university as our Promised Land.

In brutal fact, the offer was a different one. The education office in the town hall had asked the school to recommend someone as a junior clerk. It was the kind of job much coveted among my companions — the headmaster was giving the first refusal, as a kind of prize. The pay was a pound a week until seventeen and then went up by five shillings a week each year, until one reached three pounds, the top of the scale. It was a perfectly safe job; there were prospects of going reasonably high in the local government offices, perhaps to a divisional chief at four hundred and fifty pounds a year. There was, of course, a pension. The headmaster strongly advised me to take it. He had himself begun as an elementary schoolteacher in the town, had acquired a Dublin degree, and when our school had been promoted to secondary status he had had his one great piece of luck. He was a full-blooded and virile man, but he was hardened to his pupils having to scrape their way.

I thanked him, and took the job. There seemed nothing else to do.

When I told my mother her face on the instant was open with disappointment.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then she added, trying to make her voice come full and unconcerned: ‘Well, dear, it’s better than nothing.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

‘It’s better than nothing,’ said my mother. She was recovering herself. It was only another of her many disappointments. They had taught her to be stoical. And she still kept, which was part of her stoicism, her unquenched appetite for the future; for an appetite for the future was, with her, another name for hope.

She inquired about the job, the work, where it would lead. She liked the phrase ‘local government’; she would use that to the doctor and the vicar, for it took the edge off the comedown, it made my doings seem much grander.

‘How do you feel about it, dear?’ she asked, after she had been imagining how I could turn it all to profit.

‘It’s better than nothing.’ With a sarcastic flick, I returned her phrase.

‘You know I only want the best for you,’ she said.

‘Of course I know.’

‘We can’t have everything. I haven’t had everything I should like, have I? You’ll manage as well as you can, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

She looked at me with trouble in her eyes, with guilt and with reproach.

‘There’s still time if you can see anything else to do, dear. Please to tell me. Please — if there’s any mortal person I can talk to for you—’

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ I said, and let it stop at that.

My feelings were mixed. I was, in part, relieved and glad, absurd though it seemed only a few months later; but I was glad to be earning a living, and to know that next week I should have a little money in my pocket. I was nearly sixteen, it was irksome to be so often without a shilling, and that trivial relief lightened me more than I could believe.

I disliked the sound of the job — I felt it was nothing like good enough. Yet I was interested, just as I was in any new prospect or change. I had spasms of rancour that I had been so helpless. If I had known more, if I had moved among different people, I could have looked after myself and this would never have happened. But that rancour was not going to cripple me. I was not a good son to my mother, but I was very much her son: I had the same surgent hope. Other disasters might wound me beyond repair, but not anything like this, not anything outside myself that I could learn to master, I knew, with the certainty that comes when one is in touch with a deep part of one’s nature, that this setback was not going to matter much. My hope was like my mother’s, but more stubborn and untiring. I believed I could find a way out.

Aunt Milly was violently opposed to my ‘white-collar job’. ‘That’s all it is,’ said Aunt Milly in her loudest voice to my mother. ‘He’s just going off to be a wretched little clerk in a white-collar job. I never did believe all that people told me about your son, but he seems to have more brains than some of them. Now he’s content to go off to the first white-collar job he sees. Don’t complain to me when he finds himself in the same office when he’s forty. No wonder they say that the present generation hasn’t got a scrap of enterprise.’

My mother recounted the scene, and her own dignified retort, with the humorous haughty expression that she wore when she had been most upset. For, particularly as the months went on, and I had been catching the eight-forty tram for a year, for a year and a half, she wondered painfully if we had made a mistake. She was a little better off, since I paid her ten shillings a week for my keep — but she could not see any sign of the dramatic transformation scene she had always longed for, always in her heart expected, as I came to manhood. She would have been content with the slightest tangible sign for her indomitable spirit to fasten on. If, for example, I had been working for a university scholarship, she would have foreseen fantastic, visible, miraculous success at the university, herself joining me there, all her expectations realized at a stroke. She did not mind how many years ahead the transformation scene took place, so long as there was just one real sign for her imagination to refresh itself upon. As she saw me go to the office, day following day, the months lengthening into a year, she could not find that one real sign.

She had to come to earth now and again, if her excursions into the future were to keep her going. In her fashion, she was both shrewd and realistic, though with a minimum of encouragement she could draw wonderful pictures of how her life might yet be changed. She was too shrewd and realistic to derive any encouragement from my days at the office. She took to filling in more of her competition coupons. Her health became worse, and one heart attack made her spend a whole spring as an invalid, lying all day on a sofa. She stood it all, hope deferred, illness, pride once more wounded, with the fierce steady endurance that did not seem in any way affected by her own quivering nerves.

I used to work through the long, tedious hours in a room which overlooked the tramlines. The trams ran past the office windows in Bowling Green Street; our room, three storeys up, looked down on the tram tops and the solicitors’ and insurance offices on the other side of the street. I shared the room with six other clerks and one more senior man, Mr Vesey, who was called a departmental head and paid two hundred and fifty pounds a year. The work was one long monotony for me, interspersed by Mr Vesey’s slowly growing enmity. He was in charge of the branch, which was part of the secondary school department; I made lists of the children from elementary schools who won ‘free places’, and passed the names on to the accountant’s room. I also made lists of pupils at each secondary school who left before taking the General Schools or Senior Oxford examinations. I compiled a good deal of miscellaneous statistical information of that kind, which Mr Vesey signed and sent up to the director. Our room did little but accumulate such facts, pass records of names to other departments, and occasionally draw up a chart. Very few decisions were ever taken there. The most onerous decision with which Mr Vesey was faced was whether to allow a child to leave school before the age of fifteen without paying a penalty of five pounds. He was allowed the responsibility of omitting the penalty; if he wished it imposed, the case had to go before the director.

That suited Mr Vesey very well. He had no desire to take decisions, but an insatiable passion for attracting the notice of his superiors. When I first went into the office, I rather liked the look of him. He was a spruce, small man of about forty, who must have spent a large fraction of his income on clothes. His shirts were always spotless, he had a great variety of ties, all quiet and carefully selected. His eyes, which were full and exophthalmic, were magnified still further because of the convex lenses that he wore, so that one’s first impression, after seeing his trim suit, was of enormous and somewhat baffled and sorrowful eyes. He told me my duties in a manner that was friendly, if a little fussed, and I was young enough, and enough of a stranger, to be grateful for any kindness and not overcritical of its origin.

It took me some time to realize that Mr Vesey spent fifty-nine minutes in the hour tormenting himself about his prospects of promotion. He was a departmental officer grade one, salary scale two hundred and twenty-five pounds to three hundred and fifteen pounds; his entire activity was spent in mounting to the next grade. As I came to know him, I heard of nothing else. A contemporary of his in another office got promoted. ‘Why don’t they do something about me?’ sounded Mr Vesey’s cri de coeur. His technique for achieving his aim was, in principle, very simple. It consisted of keeping in the public eye. If ever he could invent an excuse for calling on the director, he did so. So that every child who left school before the age of fifteen secured a visit to the director’s room; a trim, spectacled figure, holding a file, knocked briskly on the door, the director was entangled in an earnest consultation, found himself faced with enormous exophthalmic eyes. The director soon became maddened, and sent down minutes about types of case which it was unnecessary for him to see. Mr Vesey went to see him to discuss each minute.

When any senior person came into our room to inspect the work, a trim spectacled figure stood beside him, on the alert, agog and on tenterhooks to seize the chance. The visitor asked one of the clerks a question. Mr Vesey leapt in to answer it. The visitor asked me to describe some of the statistics. Mr Vesey was quicker than ever off the mark.

All lists, charts, notes of any kind going out from our room had to be initialled NCWV. For a time he experimented with hyphenating the W and V, possibly in the hope that it would make the initials impossible to miss. There were rumours that his wife wanted to be called Mrs Wilson-Vesey. However, the assistant director asked him brusquely what the hyphen was put in for. All superiors were important to Mr Vesey, though some were more important than others. The hyphen disappeared overnight.

His worst moments were when, as occasionally happened, the assistant director — instead of asking for information through Mr Vesey as head of the branch — demanded a clerk by name. Mr Vesey’s enmity towards me first showed itself after a few such calls. The assistant director found I knew my lists inside out (which was child’s play to anyone with a good memory), took a fancy to me, said maddeningly once that if I were still at school the department would make a grant to help me go to a university. Meanwhile, Mr Vesey was raising cries to heaven: how could he organize his branch if people did not go through the proper channels? How could he secure discipline and smooth working if people went over his head? Junior clerks did not understand the whole scope of his responsibilities — they might give a wrong impression and that meant his promotion would never come. There was such a thing, said Mr Vesey in a tone full of meaning, as junior clerks trying to draw attention to themselves.

So it went on, a blend of monotony and Mr Vesey. So it went on, from nine to one, from two to five-thirty, from my sixteenth birthday to my seventeenth and beyond. Often, during those tedious days, I dreamed the ambitious dreams of very young men. Walking past the lighted shops in the lunch hour of a winter’s day, I dreamed of fame — any kind of fame that would put my name in men’s mouths, in the newspapers, make people recognize me in the streets. Sometimes I was a great politician, eloquent, powerful, venerated. Sometimes I was a writer as well known as Shaw. Sometimes I was extraordinarily rich. Always I had the power to make my own terms, to move through the world as one who owned it, to be waited on and give largesse.

The harsh streets were lit by my fancies, and I was drunk with them — and yet they were altogether vague. There was a good deal of ambition, I knew later, innate within me; and I had listened since I was a child to my mother’s prompting. But those dreams of mine had not much in common with the ambition that drives a man, that in time drove me, to action. These were just the lazy and grandiose dreams of youth. They were far more like the times when, lying awake on windy autumn nights or sitting under the apple tree in the garden after my parents had gone to bed, I first luxuriously longed, through a veil of innocence, for women’s love.

Even at sixteen, however, I felt sometimes guilty, because I was only dreaming. The pictures in my mind were so heady, so magnificent — they made all practical steps that I could take seem puny. Puny they seemed, as I took the opportunity one day to talk to my acquaintance, the assistant director. He had sent for me again, inflaming Mr Vesey to transports of injured dignity. Darby was a decent pale man with a furrowed forehead, sitting in his small, plain office. He gave me prosaic but sensible advice. It might be worth while thinking of the possibility of an external London degree. It might be worth while picking up some law, which would be useful if I stayed in the office. I ought to consult the people at the College of Art and Technology.

I did so, and enrolled in the law class at the college — which everyone called ‘the School’, and which was at that time the only place of higher education in the town — in the summer of 1922, when I was not yet seventeen. The School was the lineal descendant of the mechanics’ institution, where my grandfather had learned his mathematics; it was housed in a red-brick building, a building of remarkable Victorian baroque. There was a principal and a small permanent staff, but most of the lecturers had other jobs in the town, were secondary schoolmasters and the like, and gave their school lectures in the evening. The first law class I attended was given by a solicitor from the town clerk’s department. It was a course on a dull subject, dully taught. It lasted through the autumn: I used to walk down the Newarke on Tuesday and Friday evenings after the office, wondering whether I was not wasting my time.

I was still wondering, towards the end of the year, whether to give up the law courses, when I happened to see a notice in the School, announcing a new course in the spring term — ‘Fundamentals of Law, 1. Criminal, by G Passant’. I thought I would give him a trial. Before I had listened for ten minutes to the first lecture, I knew this was something of a different class, in sheer force, in intellectual competence and power, from anything I had ever heard.

George Passant’s voice was loud, strained, irascible, and passionate. He gave the entire lecture at a breakneck speed, as though he were irritated with the stupidity of his class and wanted to get it over. His voice and manner, I thought, were in curious contrast to his face, which wore an amiable, an almost diffident smile. His head was large and powerful, set on thick, heavy shoulders; and under the amiable smile, the full amiable flesh, the bones of his forehead, cheekbones and chin were made on the same big scale. He was not much over middle height, but he was obviously built to put on weight. His hair was fair: he was a full blond, with light blue eyes, which had a knack of looking past the class, past the far wall, focusing on infinity.

After that night, I made inquiries about George Passant. No one could tell me much: he had only come to the town in the previous autumn, was a qualified solicitor, was working as managing clerk in the solid, respectable firm of Eden and Martineau. He was very young, not more than twenty-three or four, as indeed one could see at a glance. Someone had heard a rumour that he led a ‘wild’ life.

Meeting George Passant was the first piece of pure chance that affected all that I did later. The second piece of chance in my youth happened, oddly enough, within a fortnight.

My mother was one of a very large family — or rather of two families, for, as I mentioned previously, her father had married twice, having four children by his first wife, and seven, of whom my mother was one of the youngest, by his second. For many years she had been on bad terms with her half-brothers and sisters: within her own mother’s family there was great affection, and they saw and wrote to each other frequently their whole lives long, but none of them visited their seniors or spoke of them without a note of anger and injury.

I had first heard the story in those talks by the fireside, when my mother let her romantic imagination return to the winter of 1894. It was then that she told me of the intrigues of Will and Za. For a long time I thought she had exaggerated in order to paint the wonder of the Wigmores. In her version, the villain of the piece was my Uncle Will. He was the eldest son of the first family, and my mother described him with hushed indignation and respect. His villainy had consisted of diverting money intended for the younger family to himself and his sisters. My mother had never succeeded in making the details dear, but she believed something like this: her mother had brought some money with her when she married (was she not a Wigmore?). How much it was my mother could not be sure, but she said in a fierce whisper that it might have been over fifteen hundred pounds. This money her mother had ‘intended’ to be divided among the younger family at her death. But Uncle Will had intervened with their father, to whom the money was left and who was then a very old man. Through Uncle Will’s influence, every penny had gone to himself and his two sisters (the fourth of the first family had died young).

I never knew the truth of it. My mother believed her story implicitly, and she was an honest woman, honest in the midst of her temptation to glorify all that happened to her. It was certainly true that Aunt Za, the oldest sister of all, Uncle Will and Aunt Florrie all had a little money, while none of the other family had inherited so much as a pound. It was also true that all my mother’s brothers and sisters bore the same grievance.

After twenty years of the quarrel, my mother tried to make peace. She did it partly for my sake, since Aunt Za was the widow of an auctioneer and thought to ‘have more than she needed for herself’. She had, since her husband died, gone to live near her brother Will, who ran a small estate agency in Market Harborough. My mother wanted also to repair the breach in order to show me off; but the chief reason was that she had deep instinctive loyalties, and though she told herself that she was making an approach purely for my sake, as a piece of calculation, it was really that she did not want any of them to die unreconciled.

Her move went about halfway to success. She visited Market Harborough and was welcomed by Za and Will. After that visit, birthday and Christmas correspondence was resumed. But neither Za nor Will returned her visit, nor would they, as she tried to persuade them, write a word to any others of the younger family. My mother, however, secured one positive point. She talked about me; it was easy to imagine her magnifying my promise, and being met in kind, for Za and Will had exactly her sort of stately, haughty manner. I was about fourteen at the time, and was invited over to Will’s for a week in the summer holidays. Since then I had gone to Harborough often, as an emissary between the two families, as a sign that the quarrel was at least formally healed.

On these visits to Harborough, I did not see much of Aunt Za (her name, an abbreviation of Thirza, was pronounced Zay). Her whole life, since her husband died, was lived in and round the church. She taught a Sunday-school class, helped with mothers’ meetings, attended the sick in the parish, but most of all she lived for her devotions, going to church morning and night each day of the year. I used to have tea with her, once and only once, each time I stayed with Uncle Will. She was an ageing woman, stately and sombre, with a prowlike nose and sunken mouth. She had little to say to me, except to ask after my mother’s health and to tell me to go regularly to church. She always gave me seed cake with the tea, so that the taste of caraway years later brought back, like a Proustian moment, the narrow street, the dark house, the taciturn and stiff old woman burdened with piety and the dreadful prospect of the grave.

I did not entertain her, as sometimes I managed to entertain Uncle Will. Yet apparently she liked me well enough — or else there was justice in my mother’s story, and Aunt Za felt a wound of conscience throbbing as she became old. Whatever her motive, she wrote to my mother in the autumn I entered the office, said that she was making a new will, and proposed in doing so to leave me ‘a small remembrance’.

My mother was resplendent with pleasure. It gratified her that she had brought off something for me, that her schemes had for once not been blocked. It gratified her specially that it should come through her family, and so prove something of past glories. As she thought of it, however, she was filled with anxiety. ‘I hope Za doesn’t tell Will what she intends to do,’ said my mother. ‘He’ll find a way to put it in his own pocket, you can bet your boots. You’re not going to tell me that Will has stopped looking after himself.’

My mother’s suspicion of Uncle Will flared up acutely eighteen months afterwards — in the spring of 1923, when I was seventeen and a half. My mother had been ill, and was only just coming down again to breakfast. There was a letter for her, addressed in a hand that could belong to no one but Uncle Will, a fine affected flowing Italian hand, developed as an outward mark of superiority, with dashes everywhere instead of full stops. As she read it, my mother’s face was pallid with anger.

‘He didn’t mean us to get near her,’ she said. ‘Za’s gone. She went yesterday morning. He says that it was very sudden. Of course, he was too upset to send us a wire,’ she added with savage sarcasm.

However, this hope of hers was not snatched away. My father and I attended the funeral, and afterwards heard the will read in Uncle Will’s house. I received three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds. It was much more than I expected, or my mother in her warmest flush of optimism. Cheerfully, my heart thumped.

My father ruminated with content as we walked to the station: ‘Three hundred of the best, Lewis. Think of that! Three hundred of the best. Why, there’s no knowing what you’ll be able to do with it. Three blooming hundred.’

Almost for the first time in my experience, he was impelled to assert himself. ‘I hope you won’t think of spending it without consulting me,’ he said. ‘I know what money is, you realize. Why, every week at Mr Stapleton’s I pay out twice as much as your three hundred pounds. I can keep you on the right track, providing you never commit yourself without consulting me.’

I assured him — in the light, familiar, companionable tone that had always existed naturally between us — that we would have long and exacting conferences. My father chuckled. A trifle puffed out by his success, he produced a singular piece of practical advice.

‘I always tell people’, he said, as though he were in the habit of being deferred to on every kind of financial business, ‘never to go about without five pounds sewn in a place where no one can find it. You never know when you’ll need it badly, Lewis. It’s a reserve. Think of that! If I were you, I should get Lena to sew five of your pound notes into the seat of your trousers. You never know when you’ll want them. One of these days you’ll thank me for the idea, you mark my words.’

In the train, we found an empty third-class carriage. My father stretched his short legs, I my long ones, and we looked out of the window at the sodden fields, sepia and emerald in the drizzle of the March afternoon.

‘I don’t like funerals, Lewis,’ said my father meditatively in the dark carriage. ‘When they put me away, I wish they wouldn’t make all this fuss about it. Lena would insist on it, though, wouldn’t she?’

His thoughts turned to more cheerful themes.

‘I’ve got to say this for Will, they did give us some nice things to eat,’ said my father, as naturally and simply as ever. ‘Did you try the cheesecakes?’

‘No,’ I said with a smile.

‘You made a mistake there, Lewis,’ said my father. ‘They were the best I’ve tasted for a very long time.’

We did not go straight home, but instead crossed the road from the station and called at the old Victoria, which later became, for George Passant and me and the circle of friends we called the ‘group’, our habitual public house. My father suggested, feeling a very gay dog, that we should celebrate the legacy. I drank two or three pints of beer; my father did not like beer, but put away several glasses of port and lemon. He became gay without making any effort to control himself. Once he lifted his voice in a song, his surprisingly loud and tuneful voice. ‘No singing, please,’ called the barmaid sourly. ‘Don’t be such a donkey, Bertie,’ my father muttered to himself, mildly and cheerfully, imitating my mother’s constant reproof.

Their relation, I knew, had deteriorated with the years. It was held together now only by habit, law, the acquiescence of his temperament, the pride of hers, and most of all the difficulty of keeping two ménages for those as poor as they were. He did not mind very much. So much of his life was lived inside himself; in his own comical fashion he was far better protected than most men; his inner life went on, whatever events took place outside — failure, humiliation, the disharmony of his marriage. That day, for example, he had experienced happy moments as the accomplished financier and, later in the Victoria, as the hard-bitten man of the world. He was simple, he did not mind being laughed at, he was quite happy, the happiest member of the family, all the years of his life.

I got on with him as I had always done, on the same level, with little change since my childhood. He asked for nothing. He was grateful for a little banter and just a little flattery. It would not have occurred to him, now that I was in his eyes grown-up, to ask me to spend a day with him. If one came by accident, such as this outing to Market Harborough, he placidly enjoyed it, and so did I.

At last we went home. We got off at the tram stop and walked by the elementary school, the library, Aunt Milly’s house, just the same way as I had run in sudden trepidation that night before the war, when I was a child of eight. Returning from Za’s funeral, however, I was, like my father, comfortable with a little drink inside me. A cold drizzle was falling, but we scarcely noticed it. My father was humming to himself, then talking, as I teased him. He hummed away, zum, zoo, zum, zoo, zoo, zoo, pleased because I was inventing reasons for his choice of tune.

We were almost outside our house before I took in that something was not right. The gas in the front room was alight, but the blinds were not drawn. That was strange, different from all the times I had walked that road and seen the light behind the blinds.

I looked straight into the empty, familiar room. Above, in my mother’s bedroom, the light was also burning, but there the blinds were drawn.

Aunt Milly let us in. In her flat energetic way she said that my mother had had another attack that afternoon, and was gravely ill.

I went to see my mother late that night. Her voice was faint and thick, the lids fell heavy over her eyes, but she was quite lucid. I only stayed a moment, and left the bedroom with the weight of anxiety lightened. She seemed no worse than I had often seen her. None of us knew how ill she was, that night or the next day. We were so much in ignorance that, on the next evening, Aunt Milly set about attacking me on how I should dispose of my legacy.

I was sitting in the front room, below my mother’s bedroom, when Aunt Milly came downstairs.

‘How is she?’ I said. I had not been inside my mother’s room since early that morning, before I departed for the office.

‘About the same,’ said Aunt Milly. With no change of expression at all, she went on, her voice loud and vigorous: ‘Now you’ll be able to start making an honest man of your father. It’s high time.’

‘What do you mean, Aunt Milly?’

‘You know very well what I mean.’ Which, though she had momentarily startled me, was true. ‘You can pay off another ten shillings in the pound.’

I met her stare.

‘It’s the honest thing to do,’ she said. ‘You needn’t pay Tom’s share yet awhile. You can keep that in the bank for yourself. But you’ll be able to pay the other creditors.’

An obstinate resolve had formed, when she bullied me as a child, that I would never pay those debts, however much money I made and however long I lived. Now I liked her better, saw her as a woman by herself not just as a big impassive intruding face, an angry threatening voice, that filled the space round and wounded me. I liked her better; but the resolve had stayed intact since I was eight. However much Za had left me, I should not have used a penny as Aunt Milly wanted.

But I could deal with Aunt Milly by now. Once she used to hurt me, then I had toughened my skin and listened in silence; now that I was growing up, I had become comfortable with her.

‘Do you want to ruin me, Aunt Milly? I might take to drink, you know.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyone who doesn’t pay his debts’, said Aunt Milly unrelentingly, ‘is weak enough for anything.’

‘I might be able to get qualified in something with this money. You tried hard enough to get me qualified as an engineer, didn’t you? You ought to approve if I tag some letters after my name.’

I said it frivolously, but it was a thought that was going through my mind. That too made me hang on to the money, perhaps it determined me more than the resolution of years past.

Aunt Milly had no humour at all, but she could vaguely detect when she was being teased, and she did not dislike it. But she was obdurate.

‘You can always invent reasons for not doing the right thing,’ she said at the top of her voice.

Soon I went upstairs to my mother. I expected to find her asleep, for the room was dark except for a nightlight; but, in the shadowy bedroom, redolent with eau-de-Cologne, brandy, the warm smell of an invalid’s bedroom, my mother’s voice came, slurred but distinct: ‘Is that you, dear?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was Milly shouting about?’

‘Could you hear?’

‘I’m not quite deaf yet,’ said my mother, stuffing in the flickering light, smiling with affronted humour, as she did when, at nearly fifty, she heard herself described as middle-aged. Her physical vanity and her instinctive hold on youth had not abandoned her. ‘What was she shouting about?’

‘Nothing to worry you,’ I said.

‘Please to tell me,’ said my mother. She sounded exhausted, but she was still imperious.

‘Really, it’s nothing, Mother.’

‘Was it about Za’s money?’ Her intuition stayed quick, realistic, suspicious. She knew she had guessed right. ‘Please to tell me, dear.’

I told her, as lightly as I could. My mother smiled, angry but half-amused.

‘Milly is a donkey,’ she said. ‘You’re to do nothing of the sort.’

‘Of course, I shouldn’t think of it.’

‘Remember, it’s some of the money I ought to have had. Please think of it as money I’ve given you. You’re to use it to make your way. I hope I see you do it.’ Her tone was firm, quiet, unshaken, and yet worried, I noticed, with discomfort, how easily she became out of breath. After saying those words to me, she had to breathe hard.

‘It’s a great comfort to me’, she went on, ‘to see the money come to you, dear. It’s your chance. We shall have to think how you’re going to take it. You mustn’t waste it. Remember that you’re not to waste it.’

‘We won’t do anything till you get better,’ I said.

‘I hope it won’t be too long,’ said my mother, and I caught the tone again, unshaken but apprehensive.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

‘I’m not getting on as fast as I should like,’ said my mother.

As I said good night, she told me: ‘I’m angry with myself. I don’t like lying here. It’s time I made myself get well.’

She was undaunted enough to tell Aunt Milly, on each of the next two days, that I was on no account to spend any of the legacy in getting my father’s discharge. My mother stated haughtily that it was not to happen. She explained to Aunt Milly that it was only right and just for her son to possess ‘her money’, and that money must be used to give him a start. In a few years, Lewis would be able to settle Bertie’s affairs without thinking twice.

Aunt Milly had to restrain herself, and listen without protest. For by this time she, like all of us, realized that my mother might not live.

She seemed to have, Dr Francis explained to me, the kind of heart failure that comes to much older people. If she recovered, she would have to spend much of her time lying down, so as to rest the heart. At present it was only working strongly enough just to keep her going without any drain of energy whatever.

From our expressions, from the very air in the house, my mother knew that she was in danger. Her hope was still fierce and courageous. She insisted that she was ‘better in herself’. Impatiently she dismissed what she called ‘minor symptoms’, such as the swelling of her ankles; her ankles had swollen even though she lay in bed and had not set foot on the floor for three weeks.

One Sunday morning Dr Francis spent a long time upstairs. Aunt Milly, my father and I sat silently in the front room.

Dr Francis had come early that morning, so as not to miss the service. The church bell was already ringing when he joined us in the front room. He had left his hat on the table, the tall hat in which he always went to church, the only one in the congregation. I thought he had come to take it, and would not stay with us. Instead, he sat down by the table and ran his white, plump fingers over the cloth. The skin of his face was pink, and the pink flush seemed to shade up to the top of his bald dome. His expression was stern, resentful, and commanding.

‘Mr Eliot, I must tell you now,’ he said. His voice was hoarse as well as high.

‘Yes, doctor?’ said my father.

‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to get over it,’ said Dr Francis.

The church bell had just stopped and the room was so quiet that it seemed to have gone darker.

‘Isn’t she, doctor?’ said my father helplessly. Dr Francis shook his head with a heavy frown.

‘How long has she got?’ said Aunt Milly, in a tone subdued for her but still instinct with action.

‘I can’t tell you, Mrs Riddington,’ said Dr Francis. ‘She won’t let herself go easily. Yes, she’ll fight to the last.’

‘How long do you think?’ Aunt Milly insisted.

‘I don’t think it can be many weeks,’ said Dr Francis slowly. ‘I don’t think any of us ought to wish it to be long, for her sake.’

‘Does she know?’ I cried.

‘Yes, Lewis, she knows.’ He was gentler to me than to Aunt Milly; his resentment, his almost sulky sense of defeat, he put away.

‘You’ve told her this morning?’

‘Yes. She asked me to tell her the truth. She’s a brave soul. I don’t tell some people, but I thought I had to, with your mother.’

‘How did she take it?’ I said, trying to seem controlled.

‘I hope I do as well,’ said Dr Francis. ‘If it happens to me like this.’

Dr Francis had deposited his gloves within his tall hat, Now he took them out, and gradually pulled on the left-hand one, concentrating on each fold in the leather.

‘She asked me to give you a message,’ he said as though casually to my father. ‘She would like to see Lewis before anyone else.’

My father nodded, submissively.

‘I should give her a few minutes, if I were you,’ said Dr Francis to me. ‘I expect she’ll want to get ready for you. She doesn’t like being seen when she’s upset, does she?’

He was thinking of me too. I could not reply. He gazed at me sharply, and clicked his tongue against his teeth in baffled sympathy. He pulled on the other glove and said that, though it was late, he would run along to church. He would get in before the first lesson. He said good morning to Aunt Milly, good morning to my father, put his hand on my arm. We saw him pass the window in short, quick, precise steps, his top hat gleaming, his plump cushioned body braced and erect.

‘Well,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘when the time comes, you will have to leave this house.’

‘I suppose we shall, Milly,’ my father said.

‘You’ll have to come to me. I can manage the three of you.’

‘It’s very good of you, Milly, I’m sure.’

‘You two might have to share a room. I’ll set about moving things,’ said my aunt, satisfied that there was a practical step to take.

Then the clock struck the half-hour. My father did not repeat his ritual phrase. Instead he said: ‘Lena didn’t use to like the clock, did she? She used to say “Confound the clock. Confound the clock, Bertie.” That’s what she used to say. “Confound the clock.” I’ve always liked it myself, but she never did.’

My mother’s head and shoulders had been propped up by pillows, in order to make her breathing easier — so that, asleep or awake, she was half-sitting, and when I drew up a chair that Sunday morning, her eyes looked down into mine.

They were very bright, her eyes, and the whites clear. The skin of her face was a waxy ochreous cream, and the small veins were visible upon her cheeks, as they sometimes are on the tough and weather-beaten. She gave me the haughty humorous smile which she used so often to pass off a remark which had upset her.

Outside, it was a windy April day, changing often from sunlight to shade. When I went in the room was dark; but, before my mother spoke, the houses opposite the window, the patch of ground between them, stood brilliant in the spring sunshine, and the light was reflected on to my mother’s face.

‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ said my mother. She was speaking with difficulty, as though she had to think hard about each word, and then could not trust her lips and tongue to frame it. I knew — with the tight, constrained, dreadful feeling that overcame me when she called out for my love, for in her presence I could not let the tears start, unbidden, spontaneously, as they did when Dr Francis spoke of her courage — that she had rehearsed the remark to greet me with.

‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ she repeated. But she could not maintain her resignation. Her real feeling was anger, grievance, and astonishment. ‘It’s all happened through a completely unexpected symptom,’ said my mother. ‘Completely unexpected. No one could have expected it. Dr Francis says he didn’t. It’s a completely unexpected symptom,’ she kept saying with amazement and anger. Then she said, heavily: ‘I don’t want to stay like this. Just like an old sack. It wouldn’t do for me, would it?’

For once, I found my tongue. I told her that she was looking handsome.

She was delighted. She preened herself like a girl, and said: ‘I’m glad of that, dear.’

She glanced round the bedroom, which was covered with photographs on all the walls — photographs of all the family, Martin, me, but most of all herself. She had always had a passion for photographic records: she had always been majestically vain.

‘But I shouldn’t like you to think of me like this,’ she said. ‘Think of me as I am in the garden photograph, will you, dear?’

‘If you want, Mother,’ I said. The ‘garden’ photograph was her favourite, taken when she was thirty, in the more prosperous days just after I was born. She was in one of the long dresses that I remembered from my earliest childhood. She had made the photographer pose her under the apple tree, and she was dressed for an Edwardian afternoon.

She saw herself as she had been that day. She rejected pity, she would have rejected it even if she had found what she had sought in me, one to whose heart her heart could speak. She would have thrown pity back even now, even if I could have given it with spontaneous love. But she saw herself as she had been in her pride; and she wished me eternally to see her so.

We were silent; the room was dark, then sunny, then dark again.

‘I’ve been wondering what you’ll do with Za’s money,’ said my mother.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.

‘If it had come to me as it ought to have done,’ she said, ‘you should have had it before this. Then I should have seen you started, anyway.’

‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do something with it.’

‘I know you will. You’ll do the things I hoped for you.’ She raised her voice. ‘ I shan’t be there to see.’

I gasped, said something without meaning.

‘I didn’t want just the pleasure of it,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘I didn’t want you to buy me presents. You know I didn’t want that.’

‘I know,’ I said, but she did not hear me.

‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she cried, ‘I wanted to be part of you. That’s all I wanted.’

I tried to console her. I told her that, whatever I did, I should carry my childhood with me: always I should hear her speaking, I should remember the evenings by the front-room fire, when she urged me on as a little boy. Yet afterwards I never believed that I brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women, and she was vain, but in the end she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I, that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it — and if one repels it, even though one may long, as I did with my mother, that one might do otherwise, even though one admires and cherishes and assumes the attitude of love, yet still, if one repels it, no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are very many — some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.

My mother was exhausted by her outburst. She found it harder to keep her speech clear; and once or twice her attention did not stay steady, she began talking of something else. She was acutely ashamed to be ‘muddle-headed’, as she called it; she screwed up all her will.

‘Don’t forget’, she said, sounding stern with her effort of will, ‘that Za’s money ought to have been mine. I should like to have given it to you. It was Wigmore money to start with. Don’t forget that.’

Her lips took on the grand smile which I used to see when she told me of her girlhood. She lay there, the room in a bright phase of light, with her grand haughty smile.

I noticed that a Sunday paper rested on the bed, unopened. It was strange to see, for she had always had the greatest zest for printed news. After a time, I said: ‘Are you going to read it later on today?’

‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said, and the anger and astonishment had returned to her voice. ‘What’s the use of me reading the paper? I shall give it up now. What’s the use? I shall never know what happens.’

For her, more than for most people, everything in the future had been interesting. Now it could interest her no longer. She would never know the answers.

‘Perhaps I shall learn about what’s going on here,’ she said, but in a formal, hesitating tone, ‘in another place.’

That morning, such was the only flicker of comfort from her faith.

We were quiet; I could hear her breathing; it was not laboured, but just heavy enough to hear.

‘Look!’ said my mother suddenly, with a genuine, happy laugh. ‘Look at the ducks, dear!’

For a second I thought it was an hallucination. But I followed her glance; her long-sighted eyes had seen something real, and she was enjoying what she saw. I went to the window, for at a distance her sight was still much better than mine.

Between the houses opposite, there was a space not yet built over. It had been left as rough hillocky grass, with a couple of small ponds; on it one of our neighbours kept a few chickens and ducks. It was a duck and her brood of seven or eight ducklings that had made my mother laugh. They had been paddling in the fringe of one pond. All of a sudden they fled, as though in panic, to the other, in precise Indian file, the duck in the lead. Then, as though they had met an invisible obstacle, they wheeled round, and, again in file, raced back to their starting point.

‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, wiping her eyes. ‘They are silly. I’ve always got something to watch.’

She was calmed, invigorated, made joyful by the sight. She had been so ambitious, she had hoped so fiercely, she had never found what she needed to make her happy — yet she had had abounding capacity for happiness. Now, when her days were numbered, when her vision was foreshortened, she showed it still. Perhaps it was purer, now her hopes were gone. She was simple with laughter, just as I remembered her when I was five years old, when she took me for a walk and a squirrel came quarrelling down a tree.

I came back to the bedside and took her hand. It occurred to her at that moment to tell me not to underestimate my brother Martin. She insisted on his merits. In fact, it was an exhortation I did not need, for I was extremely fond of him. My mother was arguing with her own injustice, for she had never forgiven his birth, she had never wanted to find her match and fulfilment in him, as she had in me.

There was a flash of irony here — for he was less at ease with others than I was, but more so with her.

Then she got tired. She tried to hide it, she did not choose to admit it. Her thoughts rambled; her speech was thicker and hard to follow; Martin Francis (my brother’s names) took her by free association to Dr Francis, and how he had come specially to see her that morning, which he would not do for his ordinary patients. She was tired to death. With perfect lucidity, she broke out once: ‘I should like to go in my sleep.’

Her thoughts rambled again. With a last effort of will, she said in a clear, dignified manner: ‘I didn’t have a very good night. That’s what it is. Perhaps I’d better have a nap now. Please to come and see me after tea, dear. I shan’t be a bother to you then. I like to talk to you properly, you know.’

My mother died in May. From the cemetery, my father and I returned to the empty house. I drew up the blind, in the front room; after three days of darkness, the pictures, the china on the sideboard, leaped out, desolatingly bright.

‘Milly keeps on at me about living with her,’ said my father.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘I suppose we shall have to,’ said my father.

‘I’m not sure what I shall do,’ I said.

My father looked taken aback, mournfully dazed, with his black tie and the armlet round his sleeve.

I had been thinking what I should do, when I sat in the house and my mother lay dying. I had been making up my mind while in the familiar bedroom her body rested dead. I was too near her dying and her death to acknowledge my own bereavement. I did not know the wound of my own loss. I did not know that I should feel remorse, because I had not given her what she asked of me. I was utterly ignorant of the flaw within, which crept to the open in the way I failed my mother.

At the time of my mother’s death I was as absorbed in the future, as bent upon my plans, as she might have been. My first decision, in fact, was more in my mother’s line than my own of later years. For it was a bit of a gesture. I had decided that I would not go to live with Aunt Milly.

When I told my father that I was ‘not sure’ of my intentions, that was not true. The decision was already made, embedded in a core of obstinacy. What I said about it, however much I prevaricated or delayed, did not matter. On this occasion, I had already, in the days between my mother’s death and the funeral, been looking for lodgings. I had found a room in Lower Hastings Street, and told the landlady that I would let her know definitely by the end of the week.

I should have to pay twelve and six a week for that room and breakfast. I was getting twenty-five shillings from the education office. I calculated that I could just live, though it would mean one sandwich at lunchtime and not much of a meal at night. Clothes would have to come out of Za’s money; that was my standby, that made this manoeuvre possible; but I resolved not to take more than ten pounds out of the pool within the next year. In due time I should have made another choice — and then that money meant my way out.

I knew clearly why I was making the gesture. I had suffered some shame through my father’s bankruptcy. This was an atonement, a device for setting myself free. It meant I was not counting every penny — and to smile off the last winces of shame, I had to throw away a little money too. I had to act as though I did not care too much about money. And this gesture meant also that I was defying Aunt Milly, the voice of conscience from my childhood, the voice that had driven the shame into me and had, at moments since, trumpeted it awake. If it had been anyone else but Aunt Milly who had offered to take us in, I believed that I should have said yes gratefully and saved my money.

I was fairly adroit, however, in explaining myself to her — more adroit, I thought later with remorse, than I had often been with my mother, and then I thought once more that adroitness would have been no good, neither adroitness nor the tenderest consideration. With Aunt Milly, it was not so difficult. I did not want to hurt her; I had become fond enough of her to be considerate. It would hurt her a little, I knew. For, in her staring blank-faced dynamic fashion, Aunt Milly had always been starved of children. She had felt maternally towards me and my brother, though it sometimes struck me that she used a curious method for expressing it. And she could not understand that she put people off, most of all young children, whom she desired most for her own.

She left my father alone with me after we came back from the cemetery; Martin had stayed at her house since before my mother’s death. Aunt Milly did not let us alone all day, however; she came in that night, and discovered us in the kitchen eating bread and cheese. She examined the shelves, notebook in hand. She was marking down the crockery which was to be transferred. It was then that I put in a word.

‘I don’t know, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘but it might be better if I went off by myself.’

‘I never heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘I don’t want to be in the way,’ I said.

‘That’s for me to settle,’ she said.

She had turned round, her face impassive and pop-eyed, but tinged with indignation. My father was watching with mild interest.

‘I know you’ll put yourself out and never tell us.’ I laughed at her. ‘And take it out of us because you’ve done so.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I should like to come—’

‘Of course you would. Anyone in his sense would,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘You don’t get your board and lodging free everywhere.’

‘As well as a few home truths now and again. It would be very good for us both, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would be very good for you.’

‘I’ve looked forward to it.’

‘I expect you have. Well, I’m ready to have you. I don’t know what all the palaver is about.’

Aunt Milly took words at their face value; to cheek and compliments she returned the same flat, uncompromising rebuff; but sometimes they had just a little effect.

‘Listen, Aunt Milly, I’ll tell you. I expect I shall want to study—’

‘I should think you will,’ she said.

‘That does mean I ought to be on my own, you know.’

‘You can study in my house.’

‘Could you study,’ I said, ‘if you had to share a room with my father — or your brother?’

Aunt Milly was the least humorous of women, and rarely smiled. But she was capable of an enormous hooting laugh. She had also been conditioned to think, all her life, that my father ought to evoke laughter. So she burst into a humourless roar that echoed round the kitchen. My father obligingly burst into a snatch of song, then pretended to snore.

‘One of the two,’ he said with his clowning grin. ‘One of the two. That’s me, that is.’

‘Stop it, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly implacably.

My father, still clowning, shrank into a corner.

The argument went on. I was ready to stick it out all night. I was as obstinate as she was, but that she did not know. I played all the tricks I could: I flattered her, I was impertinent, I stood up to denunciation, I gave vague hints of how I thought of living.

Those hints made her voice grow louder, her eyes more staring and glazed. I proposed to go into lodgings, did I — and how was I going to pay for them out of a clerk’s earnings? I described what I thought my budget would be.

‘You’re not leaving yourself any margin,’ she retorted.

‘I’ve got a little money in the bank now, you know,’ I said. I had been careless to speak so. It might have provoked a storm, about bankruptcy, my father’s debts, my duty. She would not have been restrained because my father was present. But it happened that my mother, before she died, had made her promise not to deter me from ‘taking my chance’. Aunt Milly prided herself on having dispensed with ‘superstitious nonsense’ — for after all this was the twentieth century, as she asserted in every quarrel with my mother. She would have said that she paid no special reverence to deathbed promises. If she kept this one, she would have said, it was because she always kept her word.

‘I won’t say what I think of that,’ said Aunt Milly, with a thunderous exertion of self-control. Then she indulged in one, but only one, loud cry of rage: ‘No wonder this family will come to a bad end.’

The evening became night. To say that she gave in would not be true; but she acknowledged my intention, though with a very bad grace. To say that I had got so far without hurting her would be nonsense. We were set on aims that contradicted each other; they could not be reconciled, and no gloss on earth could make them so. But at least in Aunt Milly’s understanding we had not split or parted. She did not consider it a break. I had promised to go and have tea at her house each Sunday afternoon.

It was a warm, wet evening late in May when I first went as a lodger to my room in Lower Hastings Street. The room was at the top of the house, and was no larger than my attic at home. From the window I looked over slate roofs, the roofs of outhouses and sheds, glistening in the rain. Beyond, there was a cloud of sulphurous smoke, where a train was disappearing through a tunnel into the station yard.

I had brought all my possessions in two old suitcases — another suit, two pairs of flannels, some underclothes, a few books and school photographs. I left them on the floor, and stood by the window, looking over the roofs, my heart quickening with a tumult of emotions. I felt despondent in the strange, cheerless room, and yet hopeful with the hope that I saw so often in my mother; anxious, desperately anxious that I might have chosen wrong, and at the same time ultimately confident; lonely and also free.

There was everything in the world to do. There was everything in front of me, everything to do — yet what was I to do that moment, with an evening stretching emptily ahead? Should I lie on my bed and read? Or should I walk the streets of the town, alone, in the warm wet night?