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.