31st Of February by Julian Symons Read Free Book Online Page B

But somehow Anderson’s grandmother would find her way out to the kitchen, and there could be heard among the rattle of plates, talking altogether too familiarly to Bessie or Mary or Kitty. It was a relief to his mother, Anderson thought years later, that Granny died peacefully in her bed when he was nine years old.
    That was in 1918, just before the end of the war. His father had been upset when he was rejected for service because of his flat feet. A quiet little grey man with an inoffensive moustache, he said little, but after his rejection mowed and trimmed the front and back lawns with fanatical care. His mother was upset also; but his parents’ distress seemed to Anderson, when he looked back on it, to have been more social than patriotic. It was the right thing to go to the war, the thing other people were doing, and it was an unpleasantly individual mark to be separated from service by flat feet. The flatness of his father’s feet had always been a joke, but after his rejection for national service it was treated very seriously. “He suffers from a disability in a manner of speaking,” his mother would say to visitors, adding with a sigh, “It kept him out of the army.”
    The war went on, there were shortages, Bessie was replaced by Elsie, Anderson went to a local high school. And then the war was over, the cost of living was high, and there were thousands of people who kept it high by deliberately refusing to work. Anderson’s father spoke about them with a passionate anger, an anger the more noticeable and impressive because he was usually so quiet. “If they can’t work let them starve,” he would say. “It’s not can’t work, it’s won’t work. There’s work for everybody to do that wants work. Those miners.” And words would fail him to describe the treason of the miners, whose positive refusal to hew coal for the nation he compared with his own readiness to serve his country.
    But the treachery of the miners was not sufficient to wreck the financial stability of Tudor Vista, although Mr Anderson pulled his small moustache upon occasion with more than customary vigour. When Anderson was twelve years old, an event occurred of some importance in his life. He won a scholarship, but did not take it up. Acceptance of the scholarship would have meant attendance at a public school as a boarder, and a certain financial strain upon his parents. It was, therefore, superficially surprising that his father was anxious to take the scholarship, while his mother’s influence was thrown, in the end decisively, against it. Why had she not wanted him to take the scholarship? Anderson wondered afterward, and decided that the incident provided a clear indication of the extent and limits of her snobbery. The limit of her ambition had been reached with occupation of Tudor Vista, dainty teas and people in for auction bridge. She understood the social scale represented by attendance at the local grammar school, and membership of the tennis club; public school and university, however, meant nothing to her but an alien world whose inhabitants had queer aspirations beyond anything she could conceive. Mrs Anderson divided people into three social classes: “Stuck up,” “a nice class of person,” and “rather common.” It is probable that she disliked those who were stuck up even more than those who were rather common.
    It was beside the imitation Tudor fireplace and within the leaded light windows that Anderson grew up, a curly-haired boy with an easy smile, exceptionally intelligent and reasonably good at games. His parents were, it may seem, exceptionally snobbish, exceptionally unimaginative in regard to any way of life except their own. But is such complacency really exceptional? Mr and Mrs Anderson had moved into the lower reaches of the middle class, and were effectively able to conceal their comparatively humble origin; such worldly success may be thought adequate for one lifetime. In the morally ambiguous but