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.