Charles Snow - Time of Hope

‘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.