Time to Be in Earnest by P. D. James Read Free Book Online

that I came to see them as a series of vivid pictures. Alfred brooding by the fire as the cakes blackened, a white pall of snow falling on the coffin of Charles I, Hannibal urging his elephants across the Alps, Julius Caesar falling in a welter of blood, Wolfe storming the heights of Quebec. There must have been some attempt at chronology since I clearly recall the Blue River of History which stretched along one wall on which we would stick cut-out figures of kings and queens, insert dates and draw pictures of the main events.
    I was happy at the British School. The Headmaster, Mr. Wynn (I think that is how the name was spelt), seems in retrospect to have been a remarkable teacher. He loved poetry and his choice was eclectic. We learned the poems by heart and I can still remember the poems of the Shropshire countryside, particularly A. E. Housman. We enjoyed the vigour and patriotic fervour of poems which today would, I fear, be regarded as politically incorrect: “Horatio Keeping the Bridge,” “Vitae Lampada,” “Drake’s Drum.” The first poem I was asked to read aloud to the class—I must have been about eight at the time—was “The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.” I was torn between pride and embarrassment caused by my awareness when scanning the verses that the word “bayonet” was new to me and I could neither understand nor pronounce it.
    All the poems have remained favourites and I am sorry that children, no longer required to learn poetry by heart, are denied this storehouse of pleasure. The day began always with an act of worship and a hymn, although I have no memory of hymn books. I think the hymns were those we frequently sang in church so that the same ones recurred with somewhat monotonous frequency, sung in the sing-song childish voicesof the Welsh border. Every morning throughout my school life I heard a reading from the King James Bible. There was, thank God, no
Good News Bible, a
version which is very bad news for anyone who cares for either religion or literature.
    My parents, ever restless, moved house four times during the few years we lived in Ludlow. The third house, well outside the town, was too large and expensive for my father’s income and we didn’t stay very long. It was called The Woodlands and stood alone in a beautiful garden which ran down to the River Teme. My sister and I walked to school each day carrying our lunch between us in a wicker basket. It was a long walk and I can remember one winter day when we both trudged, weeping rather desolately with the cold.
    I saw great poverty when I was a young child; poverty is not ameliorated by the beauty of its surroundings. There seems to be a belief that urban poverty is worse than rural poverty; I believe the reverse may be true. In cities there are more public places, more libraries, more refuges from the cold. A few of the children I went to school with were almost in rags. I can remember clearly one small boy—his name was George—with the pinched face of an adult, a similarity enhanced by a blob of white foam near his ear which reminded me of my father’s shaving soap. Little else but the child’s face was washed, and he came to school ill-shod and, I suspect, hungry. At one lesson he was very severely caned (the use of the cane, brought sharply across the palm of the hand, was fairly common) and howled with pain and perhaps a less focused misery. For the remainder of the lesson the male teacher was particularly kind to him, colluding with him in small jokes against the rest of us. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was because he was ashamed of his severity. From an early age I had this insight into adult motives and sometimes spoke uncomfortable truths aloud, a habit which caused my mother to describe me as a cynical child. I can’t have been an easy one, perhaps, nor a pleasant one. I sometimes regret that my insight into my own motives has been less acute.
    Despite deprivation we never saw a policeman at