MY mother married my father largely, it seems, to help him out with his five motherless children. Having any herself was a secondary consideration. Yet first she had a girl, then she had another girl, and it was very nice, of course, to have them, but slightly disappointing, because she belonged to the generation and tradition that made a son the really important event; then I came, a fine healthy child. She was forty at my birth; and my father forty-nine. Four years later she had another son, and four years later still another son. The desired preponderance of male over female had been established, and twice five made ten. I found the gap of two generations between my parents and me easier, in a way, to bridge than a single generation gap. Children seldom quarrel with their grand-parents, and I have been able to think of my mother and father as grand-parents. Also, a family of ten means a dilution of parental affection; the members tend to become indistinct. I have often been called: ‘Philip, Richard, Charles, I mean Robert’
My father being a very busy man, an inspector of schools for the Southwark district of London, we children saw practically nothing of him except during the holidays. Then he behaved very sweetly, and told us stories with the formal beginning, not ‘once upon a time’, but always: ‘And so the old gardener blew his nose on a red pocket handkerchief….’ He occasionally played games with us, but for the most part, when not busy with educational work, was writing poems, or being president of literary or temperance societies. My mother, kept busy running the household and conscientiously carrying out her social obligations as my father’s wife, did not see so much of us as she would have liked, except on Sundays or when we happened to be ill. We had a nurse, and one another, and found that companionship sufficient. My father’s chief part in our education was to insist on our speaking grammatically, pronouncing words correctly, and using no slang. He left our religious instruction entirely to my mother, though he officiated at family prayers, which the servants were expected to attend, every morning before breakfast. Light punishments, such as being sent to bed early or being stood in a corner, were in the hands of my mother; the infliction of corporal punishment, never severe and given with a slipper, she reserved for my father. We learned to be strong moralists, and spent much of our time on self-examination and good resolutions. My sister Rosaleen put up a printed notice in her corner of the nursery – it might just as well have been put up by me: ‘I must not say “bang bust” or “pig bucket”, for it is rude.’
We were given very little pocket-money – a penny a week with a rise to twopence at the age of twelve or so – and encouraged to give part at least of any odd money that came to us from uncles or other visitors to Dr Barnardo’s Homes, and to beggars. A blind beggar used to sit on the Wimbledon Hill pavement, reading the Bible aloud in Braille; he was not really blind, but could turn up his eyes and keep the pupils concealed for minutes at a time under drooping lids, which were artificially inflamed. We often gave to him. He died a rich man, and had been able to provide his son with a college education.
The first distinguished writer I remember meeting after Swinburne was P. G. Wodehouse, a friend of my brother Perceval. Wodehouse was then in his early twenties, on the staff of The Globe, and writing school-stories for The Captain magazine. He gave me a penny, advising me to get marshmallows with it. Though too shy to express my gratitude at the time, I have never since permitted myself to be critical about his work.
I had great religious fervour, which persisted until shortly after my confirmation at the age of sixteen, and remember the incredulity with which I first heard that there actually were people, people baptized like myself into the Church of England, who did not believe in Jesus’s divinity. I had never met an unbeliever.
Though I have asked many of my acquaintances at what stage in their childhood or adolescence they became class-conscious none has ever given me a satisfactory answer. I remember how it happened to me. At the age of four and a half I caught scarlet fever; my younger brother had just been born, and I could not be nursed at home, so my parents sent me off to a public fever hospital. The ward contained twenty little proletarians, and only one bourgeois child besides myself. I did not notice particularly that the nurses and my fellow-patients had a different attitude towards me; I accepted the kindness and spoiling easily, being accustomed to it. But the respect and even reverence given to this other little boy, a clergyman’s child, astonished me. ‘Oh,’ the nurses would cry after he had gone, ‘oh, he did look a little gentleman in his pretty white pelisse when they took him away!’ ‘That young Matthew was a fair toff,’ echoed the little proletarians. On my return from two months in hospital, my accent was deplored, and I learned that the boys in the ward had been very vulgar. I did not know what ‘vulgar’ meant; it had to be explained to me. About a year later I met Arthur, a boy of nine, who had been in the ward and taught me how to play cricket when we were convalescent together. He turned out to be a ragged errand-boy. In hospital, we had all worn the same institutional night-gowns, and I did not know that we came off such different shelves. But I suddenly realized with my first shudder of gentility that two sorts of Christians existed – ourselves, and the lower classes. The servants were trained to call us children, even when we were tiny, ‘Master Robert’, ‘Miss Rosaleen’, and ‘Miss Clarissa’, but I had not recognized these as titles of respect. I had thought of ‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ merely as vocative prefixes used for addressing other people’s children; but now I found that the servants were the lower classes, and that we were ‘ourselves’.
I accepted this class separation as naturally as I had accepted religious dogma, and did not finally discard it until nearly twenty years later. My parents were never of the aggressive, shoot-’em-down type, but Liberals or, more strictly, Liberal-Unionists. In religious theory, at least, they treated their employees as fellow-creatures; but social distinctions remained clearly defined. The hymn-book sanctioned these:
He made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estates…
I can well recall the tone of my mother’s voice when she informed the maids that they could have what was left of the pudding, or scolded the cook for some carelessness. It had a forced hardness, made almost harsh by embarrassment. My mother, being gemütlich by nature, would, I believe, have loved to dispense with servants altogether. They seemed a foreign body in the house. I remember the servants’ bedrooms. They were on the top landing, at the dullest side of the house, and by a convention of the times, the only rooms without carpets or linoleum. Those gaunt, unfriendly-looking beds and the hanging-cupboards with faded cotton curtains, instead of wardrobes with glass doors as in the other rooms. All this uncouthness made me think of the servants as somehow not quite human. Besides, the servants who came to us were distinctly below the average standard; only those with no particularly good references would apply for a situation in a family of ten. And because we had such a large house, and hardly a single person in the household kept his or her room tidy, they were constantly giving notice. Too much work, they said.
Our nurse made a bridge between the servants and ourselves. She gave us her own passport immediately on arrival: ‘Emily Dykes is my name; England is my nation; Netheravon is my dwelling-place; and Christ is my salvation.’ Though calling us Miss and Master, she used no menial tone. In a practical way Emily came to be more to us than our mother. I did not despise her until about the age of twelve – she was then nurse to my younger brothers – when I found that my education now exceeded hers, and that if I struggled with her I could trip her up and bruise her quite easily. Besides, she went to a Baptist chapel; I had learned by that time that the Baptists were, like the Wesleyans and Congregationalists, the social inferiors of the Church of England.
My mother taught me a horror of Roman Catholicism, which I retained for a very long time. In fact, I discarded Protestantism not because I had outgrown its ethics, but in horror of its Catholic element. My religious training developed in me a great capacity for fear – I was perpetually tortured by the fear of hell – a superstitious conscience, and a sexual embarrassment from which I have found it very difficult to free myself.
The last thing that Protestants lose when they cease to believe is a vision of Christ as the perfect man. That persisted with me, sentimentally, for years. At the age of eighteen I wrote a poem called ‘In the Wilderness’, about Christ greeting the scapegoat as it roamed the desert – which, of course, would have been impossible since the scapegoat always got pushed over a cliff by its Levite attendants. ‘In the Wilderness’ has since appeared in at least seventy anthologies. Strangers are always writing to me to say how much strength it has given them, and would I, etc.?