James Hilton: Collected Novels Read Free

didn’t respect him?”
    “Oh, I did that as well, but where there’s fear it doesn’t much matter what goes with it. There was a lot of fear in our house—there always is when folks are poor. Either they’re afraid of the landlord or the policeman or employers or unemployment or having another mouth to feed or a son getting wed and taking his wage with him—birth, marriage, and death—it’s all summat to worry about. Even after death, in my father’s case, because he was what he called God-fearing.”
    Winslow smiled again. “So you didn’t have a very happy childhood?”
    “I suppose it wasn’t, though at the time I took it as natural. There was nothing cruel, mind you—only hardships and stern faces.” George then confessed that during the first six years of his life he was rarely if ever told to do anything without being threatened with what would happen if he didn’t or couldn’t; and the fact that these threats were mostly empty did not prevent the main effect—which was to give him a first impression of the world as a piece of adult property in which children were trespassers. “Only they weren’t prosecuted,” he added, with a laugh. “They were mostly just yelled at…D’you know, one of the biggest shocks of my life was after my parents died and I was sent to live with an uncle I’d never met before—to find out then that grownups could actually talk to me in a cheerful, casual sort of way, even though I was only a boy!”
    “Yes, there must have been a big difference.”
    “Aye, and I’ll tell you what I’ve often thought the difference was,” George went on, growing bolder and smiling his wide smile. “Just a matter of a few quid a week. You see, my father never earned more than two pound ten at the mill, but my uncle had a little business that brought in about twice that. Not a fortune—but enough to keep away some of the fears.”
    “There’s one fear, anyhow, that nobody had in those days,” Winslow commented. “Wars before 1914 were so far off and so far removed from his personal life that the average Englishman had only to read about them in the papers and cheer for his side.”
    “Not even that if he didn’t want to,” George replied. “Take my father and the Boers, for instance. Thoroughly approved of them, he did, especially old Kruger, whom he used to pray for as ‘that great President and the victor of Majuba Hill, which, as Thou knowest, Lord, is situated near the border of Natal and the Transvaal
    Republic.…’ He always liked to make sure the Lord had all the facts.”
    Despite Winslow’s laugh, George checked his flow of reminiscence, for he had begun to feel he had been led into talking too much about himself. Taking advantage, therefore, of a curve in the street that afforded the view of a large derelict weaving shed, he launched into more appropriate chatter about Browdley, its history, geography, trade conditions, and so on, and how, as Councillor, he was seeking to alleviate local unemployment. Winslow began to look preoccupied during all this, so George eventually stopped talking altogether as he neared his house—smiling a little to himself, though. He suspected that Winslow was already on guard against a possible solicitation of favors. “Or else he thinks I’m running after him because he’s a lord,” George thought, scornfully amused at such a plausible error.
    The factor George counted on to reveal the error was the room in which they were both to have tea. It was not a very large room (in the small mid-Victorian house adjoining the printing office in Market Street), but its four walls, even over the door and under the windows, were totally covered with books. One of George’s numerous prides was in having the finest personal library in Browdley, and probably he had; it was a genuine collection, anyhow, not an accumulation of sets for the sake of their binding, as could be seen in the mansions of rich local manufacturers. Moreover, George