My father was a very busy man, an inspector of schools for the Southwark district of London, and we children saw practically nothing of him except during the holidays. Then he was very sweet and playful 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 he was not doing educational work he was doing literary work or being president of literary or temperance societies. My mother was so busy running the household and conscientiously carrying out her social obligations as my father’s wife that we did not see her continuously, unless on Sunday or when we happened to be ill. We had a nurse and we had each other and that was companionship enough. 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. Punishments, such as being sent to bed early or being stood in the corner, were in the hands of my mother. Corporal punishment, never severe and given with a slipper, was my father’s business. We learned to be strong moralists and spent a great deal 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 we were 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 (this frightened us a bit) to beggars. There was one blind beggar at Wimbledon who used to sit on the pavement reading the Bible aloud in Braille; he was not really blind, but able to turn his eyes up 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 that I remember meeting after Swinburne was P. G. Wodehouse, a friend of one of my brothers; he was then in the early twenties, on the staff of the Globe, and was writing school stories in The Captain magazine. He gave me a penny, advising me to get marsh-mallows with it. I was too shy to express my gratitude at the time; and 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. I 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. I never met an unbeliever in all these years. As soon as I did, it was all over with my simple, faith in the literal fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. This was bad luck on my parents, but they were doomed to it. One married couple that I know, belonging to the same generation, decided that the best way in the end to ensure a proper religious attitude in their children, was not to teach them any religion at all until they were able to understand it in some degree of fulness. The children were sent to schools where no religious training was given. At the age of thirteen the eldest boy came indignantly to his father and said: ‘Look here, father, I think you’ve treated me very badly. The other chaps laugh at me because I don’t know anything about God. And who’s this chap Jesus? When I ask them they won’t tell me, they think I am joking.’ So the long-hoped-for moment had arrived. The father told the boy to call his sister, who was a year younger than him, because he had something very important to tell them both. Then very reverently and carefully he told them the Gospel story. He had always planned to tell it to them in this way. The children did not interrupt him. When finally he had finished there was a silence. Then the girl said, rather embarrassed: ‘Really, father, I think that is the silliest story I’ve heard since I was a kid.’ The boy said: ‘Poor chap. But what about it, anyhow?’

I have asked many of my acquaintances at what point in their childhood or adolescence they became class-conscious, but have never been given a satisfactory answer. I remember when it happened to me. When I was four and a half I caught scarlet fever; my younger brother had just been born, and it was impossible for me to have scarlet fever in the house, so I was sent off to a public fever hospital. There was only one other bourgeois child in the ward; the rest were all proletarians. I did not notice particularly that the attitude of the nurses or the other patients to me was different; I accepted the kindness and spoiling easily, because I was accustomed to it. But I was astonished at the respect and even reverence that this other little boy, a clergyman’s child, was given. ‘Oh,’ the nurses would cry after he had gone; ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘he did look a little gentleman in his pretty white pellisse when they came to take him away.’ ‘He was a fair toff,’ echoed the little proletarians. When I came home from hospital, after being there about two months, my accent was commented on and I was told 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 about nine, who had been in the ward and taught me how to play cricket when I was getting better; I was then at my first preparatory school and he was a ragged errand-boy. In hospital we had all worn the same hospital nightgown, and I had not realized that we came off such different shelves. But now I suddenly recognized with my first shudder of gentility that there were two sorts of people—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 realized that these were titles of respect. I had thought of ‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ merely as vocative prefixes used when addressing other people’s children. But now I realized 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 gentility until nearly twenty years later. My mother and father were never of the aggressive, shoot-’em-down type. They were Liberals or, more strictly, Liberal-Unionists. In religious theory, at least, they treated their employees as fellow-creatures. But social distinctions remained clearly defined. That was religion too:

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 was a forced hardness, made almost harsh by embarrassment. My mother was gemütlich by nature. She would, I believe, have given a lot to be able to dispense with servants altogether. They were a foreign body in the house. I remember what the servants’ bedrooms used to look like. By a convention of the times they were the only rooms in the house that had no carpet or linoleum; they were on the top landing on the dullest side of the house. The 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. The type of servant that came was not very good; only those with not particularly good references would apply for a situation where there were ten in the family. And because it was such a large house, and there was hardly a single tidy person in the household, they were constantly giving notice. There was too much work they said. So that the tendency to think of them as only half human was increased; they never had time to get fixed as human beings.

The bridge between the servants and ourselves was our nurse. She gave us her own passport on the first day she came: ‘Emily Dykes is my name; England is my nation; Netheravon is my dwelling-place, and Christ is my salvation.’ Though she called us Miss and Master she spoke it in no servant tone. In a practical way she came to be more to us than our mother. I began to despise her at about the age of twelve—she was then nurse to my younger brothers—when I found that my education was now in advance of hers, and that if I struggled with her I was able to trip her up and bruise her quite easily. Besides, she was a Baptist and went to chapel; I realized by that time that the Baptists were, like the Wesleyans and Methodists, the social inferiors of the members of the Church of England.