Chapter 3

WHAT I SHOULD BE

My mother was a great reader, and with ten minutes to spare before
the starch was ready would begin the 'Decline and Fall' - and
finish it, too, that winter. Foreign words in the text annoyed her
and made her bemoan her want of a classical education - she had
only attended a Dame's school during some easy months - but she
never passed the foreign words by until their meaning was explained
to her, and when next she and they met it was as acquaintances,
which I think was clever of her. One of her delights was to learn
from me scraps of Horace, and then bring them into her conversation
with 'colleged men.' I have come upon her in lonely places, such
as the stair-head or the east room, muttering these quotations
aloud to herself, and I well remember how she would say to the
visitors, 'Ay, ay, it's very true, Doctor, but as you know, "Eheu
fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni,"' or 'Sal, Mr. So-and-so,
my lassie is thriving well, but would it no' be more to the point
to say, "O matra pulchra filia pulchrior"?' which astounded them
very much if she managed to reach the end without being flung, but
usually she had a fit of laughing in the middle, and so they found
her out.

Biography and exploration were her favourite reading, for choice
the biography of men who had been good to their mothers, and she
liked the explorers to be alive so that she could shudder at the
thought of their venturing forth again; but though she expressed a
hope that they would have the sense to stay at home henceforth, she
gleamed with admiration when they disappointed her. In later days
I had a friend who was an African explorer, and she was in two
minds about him; he was one of the most engrossing of mortals to
her, she admired him prodigiously, pictured him at the head of his
caravan, now attacked by savages, now by wild beasts, and adored
him for the uneasy hours he gave her, but she was also afraid that
he wanted to take me with him, and then she thought he should be
put down by law. Explorers' mothers also interested her very much;
the books might tell her nothing about them, but she could create
them for herself and wring her hands in sympathy with them when
they had got no news of him for six months. Yet there were times
when she grudged him to them - as the day when he returned
victorious. Then what was before her eyes was not the son coming
marching home again but an old woman peering for him round the
window curtain and trying not to look uplifted. The newspaper
reports would be about the son, but my mother's comment was 'She's
a proud woman this night.'

We read many books together when I was a boy, 'Robinson Crusoe'
being the first (and the second), and the