Read Online Time of Hope by C. P. Snow - Free Book Online

you tonight,’ I said, not knowing which way to turn.
    I did not go straight home from school that evening. Instead, I walked by myself a long way round by the canal; the mist was rising, as fresh and clean as that morning’s mist; but as it swirled round the bridges and warehouses and the trees by the waterside, it no longer exalted me. I was inventing a story, walking that long way home through the mist, which would content my mother. Of how Mr Peck had said my contribution was an example to the form, of how he had told other masters, of how someone said that my parents were public-spirited. I composed suitable speeches. I had enough sense of reality to make them sound plausible, and to add one or two disparaging remarks from envious form-mates.
    I duly repeated that fiction to my mother. Nothing could remove her disappointment. She had thought me inconsiderate and heartless, and now, if she believed at all, she felt puzzled, cast-off, and only a little flattered. I thought that I was romancing simply to save her from a bitter degradation. Yet I should have brought her more love if I had told her the truth. It would have been more loving to let her take an equal share in that day’s suffering. That lie showed the flaw between us.
    There were nights that autumn, however, when my mother and I were closer than we had ever been. They were the nights when she tried to learn French. She saw me with my first French grammar, and she was seized with a desire to follow my lessons. French to her was romantic, genteel, emblem and symbol of the existence she had so much coveted. Her bold, handsome eyes were bright each time we spread the books on the front-room table. Her health was getting worse, she was having frightening fits of giddiness, but her interest and nervous gusto and hope pressed her on as when she was a girl.
    ‘Time for my French lesson,’ she said eagerly when Saturday evening came round. We started after tea and she was downcast if I would not persevere for a couple of hours. Often on those Saturday nights the autumn gales lashed rain against the windows; to that accompaniment, my mother tried to repeat my secondary-school phonetics.
    Actually, she found my attempts to retail the phonetic lessons quite impossible to imitate. She learned entirely by eye, and was comfortable when she could pronounce the words exactly as in English. But she learned quickly and accurately by eye, as I did myself. Soon she could translate the simple sentences in my reader. It gave her a transfiguring pleasure; she held my hand, and translated one sentence after another. ‘Is that right? Is that right?’ she cried wildly and happily, and laughed at me. ‘You’re not ashamed of your pupil, are you, dear?’

 
     
6:   The First Start
     
    I buried deep the claims my mother made on me and which I could not meet. I could forget them more easily because, in my successes at school, I provided her, for the only time for years, with something actual for her hopes to feed on. She still read the cards and teacups, she had taken to entering for several competitions a week in Answers and John Bull , but when she studied my terminal reports, she felt this was her solitary promise for the future. As soon as she had received one and read it through, she put it in her bag, changed into her best dress, and, pointing her toes, set off in dignity for Aunt Milly, the doctor, and the vicar.
    When I took the Senior Oxford, I gave her something more to flaunt. My last term at school was over and I waited for the result. It was the brilliant summer of 1921, and one night I came home after baking all day at the county ground. As I came up our street in the hot and thundery evenings I saw my mother and brother waving to me from the window.
    My mother opened the door herself. She was displaying the evening paper. She looked flushed and well, her eyes were flashing, although she had had a heart attack that summer.
    ‘Do you know, dear?’ she