Memoirs of a Private Man Read Online Free

At the annual school concert the school song ended on a very high note, and each year someone screamed his way well above the others. It was darkly whispered among small boys that Old Fryer was responsible.
    Teaching at the school was chaotic but moderately sound – the bright sparks came to the surface, the dullards sank without trace. I was a bright spark and floated upwards easily enough without having to exert myself. I won prizes every year – not because of any supreme cleverness on my part, but because the competition was so mediocre. The only reason I can imagine people sent their children to Longsight Grammar was because it was fee-paying and because it carried some small cachet by being both a grammar school and ‘ within the Park’. Or because of proximity – as in my case.
    I was taken to meet the high master of the Manchester Grammar School – a man called Paton – and was accepted for the school, but then pneumonia arrived, the doctor told my parents I would not live the night, and, when I did, they decided to play safe and not commit me to a three-mile trip in all weathers, half of it walking, twice a day. So I stayed where I was.
    The fact that I hated school need not be taken in itself as a criticism of the school I went to. I would have hated any school. Many years later it dawned on me, looking back over the evidence, that my mother badly wanted a girl when I was born, and although she mostly disguised her feelings she would dearly have loved to dress me up in buttons and bows. When it turned out that I was ‘ delicate’ – unlike my brother, who ailed nothing – she was able to sublimate her mixed feelings on my mistaken gender by lavishing every care and attention on me, guarding me against every chill or ill, ministering to my every want. So I was a spoiled brat. She even somehow delayed sending me to school until I was seven; but when I did go I did not at all care for the new and abrasive life it offered me.
    My mother was a very strong character. Even when I criticize her I never forget her many sterling qualities. She was a faithful and loyal wife, a devoted mother, generous and guardedly warmhearted, struggling always with debility rather than real ill-health, a singularly pure woman – as indeed my father was pure. (I have written a little about them in a short story called ‘ The Island’.) It was not so much that they didn’t see the evils of life as that they chose to ignore them. Both born and brought up in Victorian times, they seem to exemplify so much that was best in that age. They believed in English liberal democracy, and in the perfectibility of man. My home was always warm and sheltering.
    Loving too, but in a very undemonstrative way. Kissing was almost unknown – as indeed was praise. Praise might make you get above yourself, and that would never do. Self-esteem was the cardinal sin. ‘ Side ’, as we called it. It’s ingrained in me even today.
    I remember when I was about nine finding my mother in tears because of the racking uncertainty of having her eldest son in the trenches and liable to be killed or maimed at any time. My father said: ‘Go and comfort your mother.’ I went across and perched on the arm of her chair, and kissed her and stroked her face. I did this willingly and sympathetically, but I was horribly embarrassed in the act. It wasn’t quite the sort of thing that happened in our family. We loved, but we didn’t demonstrate our love.
    Despite her virtues, my mother, as the custodian of a highly strung, oversensitive and over-imaginative child, had a number of signal disadvantages. She loved to make your flesh creep – and God, did she not make mine! It was not of ghosts of which she spoke but of ill-health . Her brilliant china-blue eyes would focus on you when she told you for the tenth time about her cousin Ernest, who went to a danceand, coming home in the train, when