Time to Be in Earnest Read Free Page A

he must have had a job at Winchester, either in the Patents Office, which seems unlikely, or in the local office of the Inland Revenue. It was inWinchester that he met my mother. This isn’t surprising as he was exceptionally fond of music and would naturally have attended the Cathedral services. They became engaged during the war and married, I think in 1917 when he was a young officer in the Machine-gun Corps. Mother was twenty-five, an age at which, in those days, a girl was beginning to feel that she might miss her chance of marriage.
    I think the days of the engagement must have been some of their happiest. A few years ago I found a photograph of my father sitting with his troop, a slight, good-looking young man with his hair parted down the middle as was then customary, the three stripes of a sergeant on his sleeve. On the back is written, “To my darling girl, a better one next time.” There must at one time have been love, or what both of them believed to be love; but they were ill-suited. My mother was sentimental, warm-hearted, vivacious, impulsive and not intelligent and, although she had a rich contralto voice and loved the church music which had been part of her childhood, she neither understood nor loved music as deeply as did my father. He was intelligent, reserved, sarcastic, deeply distrustful of sentimentality, fastidious and with little ability to show affection. I don’t think he had known much demonstrative love in his childhood and what a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give. I think the first years were happy and became more so when I arrived, the first longed-for child. I was followed eighteen months later by my sister Monica and, eighteen months after her birth, the hoped-for son arrived. He was christened Edward, after Edward Hone.
    Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
    I think that all three of us realized quite early in life that we were the children of an unhappy marriage. Of course it lasted; marriages, however unhappy, did last in those days. Divorce was still regarded not only as a disgrace, but as a social failure, and for my mother, deeply religious, it would have been a sin. But there were more material considerations. It was just not possible for my father to support two households, and my mother—untrained except for her nursing experience in the First World War which was, of course, voluntary—had absolutely no means of earning a living for herself and three children. These were inhibitions which applied to all except the rich and those powerful enough to defy convention.
    For the whole of my schooldays, both in primary school and at the High School in Cambridge, I never knew a child whose parents were either separated or divorced. No doubt this fact hid many wretchedly unhappy marriages and some that for the wife were little more than institutionalized slavery. But for the stoically enduring there were compensations. Couples, knowing that they were yoked together for life, frequently made the best of what they had. Those who were able to survive the more turbulent years of youth and middle age often found in each other a reassuring and comforting companionship in old age. They had a far smaller expectation of happiness, admittedly, and a far lesser tendency to regard happiness as a right. All our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy, have had their shadow side. Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it is not the adults who have paid it.

MONDAY, 4TH AUGUST
    The beginning of a new year,