They talk about home, but what is home· I went this autumn once more to the place of my birth, a little mining town eight miles out of Nottingham. And once more I was on hot bricks, to get away. I find I can be at home anywhere, except at home. I feel perfectly calm in London or Paris or Rome or Munich or Sydney or San Francisco. The one place where I feel absolutely not at home, is my home place, where I lived for the first twenty-one years of my life.

“I remember, I remember

The house where I was born—”very vaguely that is, because we left it when I was a year old. It was at a corner of the ugly streets of miners dwellings known as The Buildings, and it was stuck on to Henry Saxton’s shop. Henry Saxton was a burly bullying fellow with fair curly hair, and though he never pronounced an “h” in the right place, he had a great opinion of Henry. I knew him well enough, because he was the afternoon Sunday-school superintendent for many years, and he kept us in order. And without knowing him, I disliked him, the loud and vulgar way he spoke.

My mother seemed, however, to have a respect for him. She, after all, was only a collier’s wife, and at that, wife of a collier who drank, who never went to church, who spoke broad dialect, and was altogether one of the common colliers. My mother, of course, spoke good English and was not of the colliery class. She came from Nottingham, was a city girl, had been a sort of clerk to a lace manufacturer whom she probably adored.

A queer woman, my mother. Why, in heaven’s name, did she have such a respect for a man like Henry Saxton· She was far more intelligent than he, better educated, in that he wasn’t educated at all, and infinitely better bred. Yet she spoke of him with an absolute, almost a tender, respect. And this puzzled my earliest childhood. As a tiny child, I had no instinctive respect for him, and no liking. He was loud-mouthed, aggressive, a pusher, a man who wore his gold watch and chain on his full stomach as if it gave off royal rays. My mother was a shrewd and ironical woman. Yet she looked up to Henry Saxton with tender respect. And, since I was foreordained to accept all her values, I had to look up to Henry Saxton too.

He was, of course, terribly respectable. He was Sunday School Superintendent, he was a deacon at the Congregational Chapel, where he managed to make the life of each succeeding minister a misery, with his hectoring impudence. He criticised the sermons, he who hardly knew A from B: and if the congregation fell off a little, so that the collection on Sundays went down a few shillings, then he sacked the clergyman. The Chapel was another sort of shop to Henry, and the minister was his hired shopman. I remember only two ministers, both good, honest men, whose memory I respect. And each of them was humiliated to the quick by Henry.