She even fought her love for him, and hated him for his charm. At the same time, she had five children by him. And when she was well over forty, and he must have been forty-seven or more, and came back home at last from a convalescent home, after his leg had been smashed in a bad mining accident, she was in love with him like any girl, and he sat ruddy and resplendent on the sofa, being made much of: though this state of things didn’t last, unfortunately. I was about fourteen, and for the first time my eyes were opened a little. I had thought he made her life an agony pure and simple. For years I prayed that he might either be converted into a chapel man, or die. They were not my own prayers. They were a child’s prayers for his mother, who has captured him and in whom he believes implicitly.

My mother fought with deadly hostility against my father, all her life. He was not hostile, till provoked, then he too was a devil. But my mother began it. She seemed to begrudge his very existence. She begrudged and hated her own love for him, she fought against his natural charm, vindictively. And by the time she died, at the age of fifty-five, she neither loved him nor hated him any more. She had got over her feeling for him, and was “free”. So she died of cancer.

Her feeling for us, also, was divided. We were her own, therefore she loved us. But we were “his”, so she despised us a little—I was the most delicate: a pale-faced, dirty-nosed frail boy. So she devoted a great love to me. And she also despised me. I was one of the inferior brats her love for my father—or her disastrous marriage with him—had thrust upon her. She loved me tenderly. And for me, of course, she was the one being on earth: or so I thought, anyhow. But now, in the after-years, I realise that she had decided I was going to die, and that was a great deal to her. Also, from many little things I remember, and from things my sisters tell me she said, I realise that she also despised the delicate brat with a chest catarrh and an abnormal love for her. She looked on us all as her lower class inferiors.

She admired me when I won a scholarship and went to the High school in Nottingham, and knew the swells. I was going to be a little gentleman!—But I made no friends among the little gentlemen, and went on quite amiably, quite pleasantly at school, without making the slightest connection with the middle-class boys. I never felt any connection, so it never occurred to me there might be any. We just lived with different outlooks.