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.