So Well Remembered Read Free

for twenty years after he died I went about
thinking how much I’d respected him myself, but then one day when I was
afraid of something, it suddenly occurred to me it was the same feeling I’d
had for my father.”
    “You mean you 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 grown-ups 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 favours. “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.