Past Caring by Robert Goddard Read Free Book Online

recreation of the Greek demos and looked towards Westminster in the same way. My naïvety now astounds me, but, at the time, it ensured that my energies in that direction were undimmed by caution or reservation.
    During my second summer vacation , I intimated my sense of vocation to my family, who supported my endeavours with all the wholeheartedness I had come to expect. My brother Robert was now effectively head of the household by reason of my father’s age and infirmity and was fast establishing a reputation of his own as a breeder of cattle. My father had been for some years an alderman
     

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    of Okehampton and these factors facilitated my early introduction to Sir William Oliphant, the sitting Member for Mid-Devon. He had been in Parliament at this time for more than forty years and had already indicated that he did not propose to stand for re-election. It was my great good fortune that Sir William’s recommendation, the standing of our family in the county and whatever fame I won as President of the Union in my last year at Cambridge sufficed to secure my selection as prospective Liberal candidate in the constituency. With the next general election due in 1902, I felt that I had a good chance of so nurturing my prospects that I might then join the august assembly at Westminster as Mid-Devon’s representative.
    I came down from Cambridge in 1897 with a good degree and accompanied my mother on a six-month tour of France and the Mediterranean. It was, I think, a great joy for her to be shown the historical and artistic treasures of Italy and Greece by her favoured son. It was in Rome that we encountered a college friend of mine: Gerald Couchman , who had been rusticated during our last year for pauperizing a fellow-student in a card game. Couch (as we called him) was one of those fine, rumbustious high-livers whose morals bore no close inspection but whose spirit and company were alike irresistible. I paid no heed to his somewhat ruthless style of gambling—his own finances being precarious and his victims generally better endowed with wealth than good sense, it struck me as no great crime—but our tutor, the narrow-minded Threlfall, conceived a great personal dislike for Couch, who obliged him by sailing rather close to the wind. In the incident for which he was punished, Couch had no idea how ill could his opponent afford to lose. I believe that, when this finally became known to him, he waived the debt, too late to appease the wrath of Threlfall. So Couch’s studies stood suspended for a year, during which time we met him whiling away his days in Rome, where he had secured an obscure teaching appointment and where his gambling adventures went unmonitored.
    If like attracts unlike, I suppose my friendship with Couch could be said to exemplify that tendency. In indulging and secretly applauding his scapegrace ways, I perhaps compensated for that probity and respectability which, as a budding politician , I had to 34

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    be seen to embrace but which occasionally sat ill with my youthful exuberance. Even my mother confessed to enjoying Couch’s company in Rome and tolerated in him greater laxity than she would condone in others.
    Couch went back to Cambridge and I went back to Devon , to be seen at shows and sales with my brother, meeting local residents in the company of my father (who appeared to see my election as his last great military campaign) and speaking at meetings with Sir William. The Liberal Party was then , in all conscience, at sixes and sevens, still striving to adjust to the retirement of Mr. Gladstone.
    Indeed, in three short years we had three different leaders—
    Rosebery, Harcourt and Campbell-Bannerman—a helter-skelter progression which convinced Sir William that he had left his own retirement too late and which infused me with no very great confidence in the leadership of the party to which I was now committed.
    Not that there had ever been any