Memoirs of a Private Man Read Free Page A

all had a strong influence on me, and although my passionate preoccupation with books from the age of eight soon helped me to throw off the last of the three blights, the former two – or at least the pessimism – have stayed with me in milder form all my life. Of course it would be very unfair to put all the blame on him for what I suspect may be a family predisposition.
    Among the maids we had, the one I remember most was called Evelyn – a bouncy, jolly, generous-minded girl from Northumberland, who came when she was seventeen (she told my mother she was eighteen in order to get the job) and stayed with us about five years, seeing us through all the traumas of those sickly years of the Twenties, when my father had his severe stroke, my mother had double pneumonia, and I followed with lobar pneumonia.
    Evelyn had had a bitterly hard life. Her father and mother had had to get married when she was on the way, and her father’s parents had taken against their new daughter-in-law. Her father, a miner, had a brother who worked on the roads, and one Sunday was called out to clear a blocked drain. Because this brother was drunk, Evelyn’s father went instead, climbed down the manhole and was overcome by poisonous fumes and died. Evelyn and her mother and sister lived in direst poverty, receiving the barest help from their relatives until her mother married another miner, who heard there were better prospects of work in Lancashire and so moved. When war came he volunteered, and his family had to try to live on the 10/6 a week allowed them by the government. Towards the end of the war Evelyn’s mother died of peritonitis and malnutrition, and Evelyn and her sister were about to be taken to an institution when the war ended and her stepfather came home. But he quickly married again, another child came along, and the new stepmother said there was simply not room in their cottage for them all. Evelyn’s grandparents said they would take the younger sister only, and Evelyn was on her own. She found work at a button factory and boarded out. Her wages were 10/- a week and she paid 9/6 a week for her bed and board.
    When a friend told her there was a lady in Victoria Park looking for a living-in maid to whom she would pay 10/- a week including food and a bedroom to herself she borrowed money from her landlady to buy a new dress, called to see her new mistress and was engaged. Every Wednesday afternoon off thereafter she would take the long tram ride and walk to her old landlady’s and pay her back sixpence of the money she had borrowed. Later she was to take me in the afternoons to the local cinema – a fleapit indeed – where we were thrilled together by films like Intolerance and The Exploits of Elaine and Way Down East . I imagine my mother must have connived at these secretive ventures, for Evelyn could not have afforded the price out of her own pocket.
    Inevitably, of course, a young man, Arthur, came along, a sober, frail young man who wanted to marry her. My mother, naturally, was against it – they were far too young – hadn’t she been twentyeight herself when she married? – but inevitably the young man got his way. Poor Evelyn. She was dogged by ill-luck and her own warm, overflowingly generous nature. Perhaps she was plunged into marriage prematurely because by then my family was sick to death – almost literally – of the illnesses of Victoria Park – my father crippled and prematurely old at fifty-six, my mother saddled with bronchitis every winter, and I apparently threatened with further attacks of pneumonia – a lethal disease then, before the dawn of antibiotics – and my brother, the only healthy one, desperately wanting to get married himself and move to Cornwall, which he had lost his heart to after one visit.
    So Evelyn left us and married, and since they could not afford a house of their own she moved in with Arthur’s widowed father and